Beneath the Bonfire (24 page)

The next day the house sold, and weeks later, the bank presented me with a check two digits longer than any I'd ever seen before. The girls and I celebrated by taking a trip to Chicago, to the aquarium, where they were impressed by the sea turtles and sharks and killer whales, though they still talked about my carp and the feel of its leviathan sides against their little fingers, and the awful sound of its giant breathing.

*   *   *

She never came for us, for me, and eventually she became a name that we did not speak, and then, later yet, became like something benign and passing, an epoch of our lives at once sweet and low. The girls sometimes asked about her, but it was with a far-off kind of tone, and I would shrug my shoulders and that was good enough for them. Mom and Dad sold their house in Wisconsin and moved into a nearby trailer court, where they hung Christmas lights shaped like peppers from their Airstream, and in front of the silver bullet of their home was a patch of green turf carpeting, a picnic table, and several chairs, and at nights we would visit them, eat boiled shrimp and drink Budweiser from sweaty aluminum cans.

I bought a blue bedazzled leash for Geronimo, and after dinner we'd walk along the beach with the girls, and they liked the way the cat high-stepped in the sand and fled the very waves he'd just been chasing. My mom would help the girls look for sand dollars while Dad and I loped along behind, swaying sometimes, happy on beer, and occasionally sharing a Cohiba, our pant legs rolled up around our knees, our toes still white from Wisconsin winters, though growing darker every day, and Dad would say, “I think she's still coming, champ. I'm sure of it. Train people, we just move slow.” And he would put a hand on my shoulder and I never looked back after that, the salt air good enough for me, the lean and dance of the palmettos something new and exotic, and my little office heavily air-conditioned and issues of a glossy magazine stacking up inside my empty desk drawers.

 

APPLES

L
YLE WAS DIABETIC,
and the doctors had already lopped off two of his toes. He moved sometimes unsteadily, but he was a strong man with big hands and most people paid attention to his wide chest and knotty arms. He owned a big smile and rubbed his hands together when he was happy and this made other people happy too; in church on Sundays one might observe the people he greeted almost mimicking his movements, with oversize grins on their shining faces.

He sold appliances his whole life until one day his new boss held a meeting and told the sales staff that they no longer had jobs. There was no fanfare, no pep talk. Everyone walked out to the yellow crosshatched parking lot while behind them the door was locked and the
OPEN
sign reversed to
CLOSED
. He went home that day and mowed the lawn. Took greater care with the passes he made using the old red Snapper, the lines in the lawn neat and diagonal. He refilled the birdseed feeders. Cleaned the gutters. When he finished this litany of chores, it was still not even lunch. He stood in the driveway and scratched his head.

Lyle's wife came home that night and he told her the news. It hadn't been a complete surprise. Things had been slow at the store.

“Well,” she said, smiling. “You can do whatever you want to now.”

He gently rapped his knuckles on the dining room table, making two minor knocks.

She smiled at him and reached over to rub his shoulders, all bone and muscle.

“What do you think you might want to do now?” she asked.

“I've never had to think about it,” he replied as he looked at the table. “I've always just had a place to go in the morning.”

She reached for his hand and smiled at him as he studied the carpeting, which at that moment looked old, though he had never taken any notice.

*   *   *

His brothers were farmers who worked the land south of town near a village called Strum, and they had work for him, under the table and in cash. They owned some rental properties on the edge of Strum that needed maintenance, so every morning he drove thirty minutes to their small farming town, his truck loaded to the sideboards with saws and tools and scrap lumber.

All of the farms employed Mexicans who lived in the brothers' rentals. Lyle did not speak Spanish. When he entered their apartments, the tenants smiled at him and some of them sat on the beds or at the kitchen tables and watched as he worked. He had always worked with other people and liked having the Mexicans around, even if he couldn't properly commiserate with them.

Sometimes when he was on his hands and knees measuring a piece of lumber, he might point at the back of the truck and say to a small child, “Hammer, por favor.” He would make the motion for swinging a hammer. The child would run to the truck and return with his hammer.

“Gracias,” he would say to the child.

“You are welcome,” they would say. The mothers always smiled at Lyle and sometimes they made him strong instant coffee. Other times they sat in a kind of happy awkward silence and ate hot tortillas and black beans. He would spend those meals concentrating hard to conjure up any Spanish words. Frequently he would end the meal by smiling, bowing his head, and saying, “Gracias.” His favorite word in Spanish.

*   *   *

He sat at the kitchen table one night with his wife and they listened to the workings of the old grandfather clock. Their children were gone, scattered around America, and now their evenings were predicated around dinner and television. They liked to fall asleep in front of the blue television, under blankets.

“How are things?” she asked.

“There isn't much left to do,” he said. “I'm afraid of being fired by my own brothers.”

“Oh, come on, you were not fired,” she said, smiling.

“Not yet,” he said.

“I mean before. You were just laid off. It happens all the time.”

“I know. Basically the same thing in the end, though, isn't it? Either way you don't have a job anymore.”

They sat in silence for a while, and he gripped his coffee mug and rubbed his feet against the carpeting. He had very little sensation left in his feet, but he had never told anyone that. He was always afraid of losing more toes. He did not want to be in a wheelchair. Sometimes he had dreams like old reel-to-reel movies in which he was back in his teenage body, with a football in the crook of his arm, running. He woke from those dreams smiling and a little melancholy.

“Are you sad?” his wife asked. Her hair was long and mostly white, but her face was young and full of color.

“No,” he said, “I'm not sad. But the thing is, having a job makes you feel important. People need you more. I miss my clients. I miss helping people. I miss feeling important.”

“Oh, Lyle,” she said, “everyone knows how important you are.” She reached for his knobby hand. The doctors said his hands would grow knobbier and lose some of their cartilage and muscle as he grew older; the diabetes. Sometimes he didn't recognize his own hands or feet.

“Am I still important to you?” he asked her quietly, looking down at the floor.

“Oh, Lyle,” she whispered.

She never slept well because she always worried about his diabetic strokes. She did not want to be sleeping if he passed away in the night. He had the episodes about twice a year, and she would awaken to bedsheets soaked in perspiration, her husband delirious, unable to communicate what was wrong. She would run to the telephone to call an ambulance. Then she would run to the refrigerator and pour him a glass of orange juice. She would force him to eat chocolate bars and peanut butter. But she could show no fear, had to be calm for him. They would ride in the ambulance and she would hold his hand as the lights blinked red and blue. He hated that the neighbors might see him being carried away in the ambulance.

She worried almost every day about becoming a widow. They had been married more than thirty years. Sometimes she told the women in her book club that he was like the sun or the moon or the stars to her. It wasn't just that she loved him so much. It was also that he truly seemed to have inhabited her life as long as those celestial bodies had. “How could I get out of bed without him?” she would ask the women of her book club. “How could I fall asleep without Lyle? Why would I eat?” These weren't rhetorical questions. She asked them because she did not have the answers.

His brothers ran out of work for him within three months. He had fixed all the apartments and then moved on to their own houses, where he repaired broken garage doors, window screens, and door locks. He leveled all the refrigerators and checked all of the washing machine hoses and pipes. His brothers' wives pointed at leaking faucets and dead mice. They made him coffee and asked about his retirement.

“Well, I'm not exactly retired,” he would say. “Look, I'm right here working.”

“Don't you
want
to be retired?” everyone would ask.

“I don't know,” he would say. “I've never been.”

*   *   *

During the hottest night of the summer Lyle was watching one of his youngest brothers play softball on a baseball field surrounded by corn just outside of Strum. It was adjacent to a bar that sponsored the softball league, and the neon lights of the establishment glowed red and blue like a promise or a reward. Lyle sat in the bleachers with four of his other brothers and they drank pitcher after pitcher of cold, golden beer. It was a familiar beer, a beer that Lyle had drunk in college by the keg, but that night, sitting on the bleachers with his brothers, watching the softball pop so high into the thick August air, the beer tasted better than ever. It tasted like honey. It tasted like butter. It tasted like dandelions. It tasted like summer. The brothers drank pitchers and pitchers of the beer. They took turns walking into the bar for refills, standing in the cold air conditioning, already lonely and excited to rejoin the crowd. They cracked peanuts and threw the shells into the darkness below the bleachers. They watched their youngest brother rope sharp line drives into the outfield. They laughed at him when he stretched a double into a triple and dove headfirst into third base like he was Pete Rose in a gasoline suit. They stood like a small choir to cheer him on until he stood on third base and bowed deeply like a triumphant matador. The other people in the stands burst out laughing too. Everyone knew the brothers.

“This beer tastes
so
damn good,” said Lyle.

“It's just the heat, Lyle,” said one of his brothers.

“No,” said one of Lyle's brothers dramatically. “This beer tastes amazing because this is a special night in America, and I am with my brothers!”

“Sit down, you damn fool,” they laughed.

The dramatic brother sat down and drank lustily. On the horizon, zippers of far-off lightning opened the blue and black of the sky.

“Heat lightning,” said Lyle.

“No such thing,” said one of his brothers.

“So where's the rain?” asked Lyle.

“It's coming,” said one of the brothers.

“You can smell it,” said another brother.

“Ozone,” said a brother.

“Air blowing in from a fresher place,” said the dramatic brother.

“Minnesota ain't more fresh,” said a brother.

“Air that moves like America,” said the dramatic brother.

“Jesus,” said his drunk brothers in unison.

The game ended just as a wall of rain hit the field, turning the infield dirt from pale brown to black. The minor assemblage of fans dispersed to vehicles, and the brothers said good-bye and ran crooked routes to their pickup trucks. Lyle was drunk and happy but also feisty. He found his truck and popped on the headlights. He wanted more beer. He did not want the evening to end. He felt young tonight, full of piss and vinegar.

He began the drive home, going slowly. His eyesight was terrible after dark, and the rain that bounced off the steaming hot road made it all the more difficult for Lyle to see the margins of the driving lanes. He hunched over the steering wheel and wiped his forehead and the inside of the windshield, which was quickly steaming up.

Suddenly Lyle noticed he was almost out of gas. He pulled off at a gas station that he knew sold cold beer. He filled his gas tank and the jerry can in the bed of his truck and rushed into the gas station, where the air conditioner made his wet skin tight and cold. He went to the refrigerated wall of coolers and pulled out a six-pack of brown bottles. He approached the register with a fistful of wet dollar bills.

“Sure is wet out there,” said the teenage attendant.

Lyle dripped water onto the counter. “And ten dollars of scratch-offs too,” he said.

“Sure thing,” said the boy as he ripped the tickets off a giant glossy spool. “You must feel lucky tonight.”

Lyle paid for the things and, feeling jaunty, opened a bottle of beer right there at the counter as he began scratching off the lottery tickets.

“Ah, mister…,” the boy murmured.

“Oh, I'm sorry,” said Lyle, feeling invincible and full of beer. “Would you like one too? How rude of me.”

The boy blushed, stammered, paused, looked around the abandoned store and surveyed the darkness of the storm outside. “Well, okay,” he said. He drank the beer fast, spilling the first sip on his greasy chin, as if determined to down the evidence before it could be used against him.

Lyle finished scratching the tickets and won nothing.

“Bummer,” said the boy.

“Story of my life,” said Lyle.

“I don't know,” said the boy, “you seem like a happy enough guy. Heck, you gave me a beer.”

“Well,” said Lyle. He looked out at the storm, the water sluicing off the roof and down through the gutters. A single frog hopped across the steaming pavement. Lyle thought: there aren't as many frogs as there once were. “You just never know when your luck is going to run out.”

“Work tomorrow?” asked the boy happily.