Beneath the Bonfire (25 page)

“Nope,” said Lyle, with a sour smile on his face. “Don't have a job anymore.” And with that, he left the cold confines of the station and crawled back into the truck. The four bottles of beer sat on the bench seat beside him, jiggling in their cardboard box, a melancholy quartet.

He drove to the store and parked in the empty lot. Inside, the appliances all sat motionless and brand-new: refrigerators and freezers, washers and dryers, stoves and ranges. He opened another beer and thought,
This is what my life was. Machines
. He felt sorry for himself just then. He looked at the jerry can in the bed of the truck full of gasoline. “What the hell,” he said. And he went out into the rain.

He went behind the building with his full jerry can, to where the Dumpsters were parked, where he felt no one could see him. “I'm gonna burn this mother to the ground,” he slurred. He began lighting matches in the rain, but each one was quickly extinguished. Soon the entire book of matches was soggy and he stood in the rain, still trying to strike the individual matches against the wet book.

“Damnit!” he said.

He grabbed the jerry can and marched back to the truck, sullen and sodden, then drove home.

“There you are,” his wife said. “I called your brothers and they said the game was finished over an hour ago. I was worried about you!” Then “Are you drunk?”

“Maybe a little bit,” he said. “I was going to burn the store down.”

She laughed. “Well, you picked a good night for a fire.” She covered her mouth. Her body was shaking with laughter.

“What's so funny?” he slurred, happily now.

“You are the worst arsonist.” She giggled.

She peeled off his wet clothes and they made love on the dining room floor, where the carpeting he had thought was old now felt newly wonderful and soft. They fell asleep there for a while and woke up with the final passage of the thunderstorm and its ensuing wet calm. The drip of water off their safe, dry house. They retreated to their bed and slept like two warm embers.

*   *   *

Summer passed just as quickly as it always seemed to, and he moved within his life with a kind of nonchalance that reminded him of high school. He missed his job and the customers that forsook the big-box stores to buy their appliances from him. He missed morning coffee with the other salesmen, and he missed their Thursday nights of beer and cheap cigars. But he was easing into this new life, volunteering more at the church and building furniture in the garage in the evenings.

“Well,” his brothers would ask, “are you retired yet?”

“I'm considering becoming a professional golfer,” he would joke with a straight face.

“Yeah, on second thought”—they would laugh—“don't quit your day job.”

*   *   *

One morning at church Lyle was offered a job. A retired professor who owned a large apple orchard had heard that Lyle had lost his job, and he needed someone to pick the last of the apples from the trees. The orchard was the retired professor's hobby. The bulk of the harvest had already been picked, but there were stragglers on the trees that could be sold for deer bait. He could pay cash and Lyle could keep whatever apples he wanted. Shaking the retired professor's hand, Lyle noticed how soft and elegant it was. How different their lives must have been.

“How will I know what to do?” asked Lyle.

“Oh, you'll figure it out,” said the retired professor. “I just need someone I can trust to close the place down before winter. Do whatever you think is right.”

“Fair enough,” Lyle said.

The seasonal buildings were largely closed when Lyle drove to the orchard; no one was around. His truck was alone in the parking lot. He had brought a small breakfast, a thermos of coffee, and a bagged lunch. For a while he sat on the bench inside the cab of the truck and listened as the old engine ticked away the heat like a steadily slowing metronome. He stared out at the trees in their linear order. He tried to see the last of the season's apples clinging to the craggy branches, but his eyesight was poor. He did not know how long this work would last, and for the first time he wondered how important this job really was. Maybe it was enough that apples fell to the earth and gave the deer and bear and turkey something to eat. Then he shrugged his shoulders and walked into the orchard. If there were no directions and there was no urgency, he would simply create a system for himself.

He started at the back of the orchard and began collecting the apples in empty wooden crates, separating them by quality. He looked for the marks of worms or the birds. He looked for rot. He collected the apples that had fallen to earth in potato sacks. As he worked, he ate a few of the more enticing apples, wasting nothing but the very core.

“Free apples,” he said to himself. “All the free apples a man could eat.”

By four in the afternoon he had arranged his apples by quality next to the main building and stopped working. He dragged the potato sacks to the side of the building and wrote on a sheet of cardboard:
DEER FOOD ONLY
. Just then the retired professor pulled into the parking lot in a new black BMW. The foreign automobile was very quiet. Looking over Lyle's work, he smiled.

“You really sorted the hell out of these, didn't you?” he said. “I can probably actually sell some of these crates to the grocery stores. I'll be damned, Lyle!”

Lyle knew the retired professor didn't need any more money. Just the same, he could see that the man was sincerely impressed.

“How long does this work normally last?” Lyle asked.

“I don't know,” the retired professor said as he moved some gravel around with a loafered foot. “Until just after frost, I suppose. Or until all the apples are picked. Pray for warm weather, I guess.” The retired professor shook Lyle's hand and folded himself back into the BMW. The automobile drove away, with only the tiny sound of gravel against the metal underbelly of the vehicle. Lyle wiped sweat off his forehead, climbed into his truck, and took a bite of an apple.

*   *   *

He liked getting to the orchard early, when there was fog in the valleys and fog hanging like gossamer in the boughs of the little trees. He liked walking around the orchard before he began his work, and sometimes he would sit against the trunk of a particularly old tree and watch as deer moved through the orchard eating the fruit that had fallen in the night. He had never hunted deer. He liked the architecture of their fine legs and their large soft eyes. He liked to watch them bound through the open cornfields, their tails white exclamation marks. He had never told anyone, but he thought their bodies were fragile and beautiful as ornate furniture. The moon was visible still in the morning, and he liked to watch its progress through the sky as the sun rose and the night's fog began to disappear like terrestrial ghosts. He wore a heavy old canvas jacket with deep pockets that he filled with apples that he snacked on all day.

“Don't you get sick of eating apples?” his wife would ask as she washed their nightly dishes.

“Well, he has dozens of kinds,” Lyle would reply. “You can eat a different kind of apple every hour all day long.”

“I know that, but still … you never get tired of apples?”

“They are so sweet,” he would reply. “And they're free.”

“Do you eat the whole apple or do you just take bites?”

He looked at her incredulously.

“What?” she asked.

“Well, I eat the whole thing, of course. I'm not going to waste an apple. That would be like stealing.”

She started laughing.

“What?” he would ask, smiling and rubbing his hands.

“Don't you get full?” she asked, still laughing. Her laughs were full and almost like snorts.

“I
like
apples,” he said.

Then they laughed together. They laughed until their stomachs were tight and their faces red.

*   *   *

When he had nearly finished stripping the orchard of its last apples, an old man drove into the parking lot. It was lunchtime and Lyle was sitting in the cab of his truck eating a salami sandwich, listening to the farm report. It was comforting for him to hear the announcer speak the names of different commodities and their prices. Pork bellies. Soybeans. Corn. He liked that these simple things had specific values so important the world needed to be alerted to their constantly fluctuating futures. He wondered what the specific value for a peck of apples was. He watched the old man steadily pull himself from the cab of a very old truck. Lyle left his truck, walked over to shake the man's hand.

“You selling any deer apples?” the old man asked. His voice quivered with age.

“Well, I have about ten tons of deer apples, but I don't own this place,” Lyle said. “I'm just the chief picker and arborist.”

The old man laughed and then coughed into a handkerchief.

“All right,” the old man said. “Show me what one ton of deer apples looks like.”

Lyle walked the old man over to the main building, where dozens of potato sacks full of bruised and damaged apples leaned up against the metal building.

“My
land,
” the old man said, “that
is
about ten tons of apples. What would you charge a fella for about three of those sacks there?”

“Tell you what,” Lyle said, “pull that old rig of yours over here closer and I won't charge you a thing. I just don't want to drag the damn things too far.”

“Sounds like a deal,” the old man said.

Lyle loaded the sacks into the bed of the old man's pickup truck, and when he was done he wiped the sweat from his forehead and leaned against the good machine, which was a faded yellow. The same farm report Lyle had been listening to was playing in the man's truck.

“I used to love eating apples,” the old man offered.

“I eat about twenty a day,” Lyle said. “My wife says I'm going to become an apple.”

“We used to have a little orchard when we were first married,” the old man said as he looked up at the blue, blue sky utterly free of clouds. “It wasn't much, just about ten trees. You know how many apples ten trees makes?”

Lyle laughed. “Do I ever.”

“Ten trees makes about a million apples,” the old man said. “You run out of places to put the damn things. You run out of ways to eat the damn things. Applesauce. Apple chutney. Apple salads. Apple cider. Dried apples. I used to hide apples on my wife's side of the bed before she fell asleep. I'd tuck a few in her pillowcase and some down by her feet. Drive her crazy.

“Thing is, in my head, I almost can't remember parts about her. I can hear her voice now and again inside my head, but it's her voice before she died, not when we were young. Not when we were young and had that orchard. I can see her mouth moving, her young mouth, but she's mute. I can't hear anything. Or maybe now I'm deaf, who knows. Hell, I know I'm deaf.” He motioned to a huge, antiquated device in his ear.

“How did you meet your wife?” asked Lyle.

The old man scratched the liver spots on his tanned head. He smiled and Lyle saw that his teeth were worn down but still white.

“We grew up together,” said the old man. “In the same farming town, near the Mississippi. I always loved her, but I was a coward. I never even spoke to her. We went to the same one-room schoolhouse, the last in the area, two of a student body of twelve, if you can believe it. I sat in the same room as my wife for close to fifteen years and never said a word to her. Just stared at the back of her head and her ankles. I remember that. I remember her ankles now.

“Just before the war started, we were both graduating, and I still hadn't told her how I felt about her, and I probably wouldn't have. I was just going to farm my parents' land, and she was going off to college in Chicago. But then in August, before she was supposed to leave for Chicago, there was the county fair. No one in those days missed the fair, so I met some of my buddies and we bought a bottle and were standing behind a tent getting pretty well soused when I saw her walking through the fair with a younger fellow who had also gone to school with us. And I got so angry! It didn't help that I'd been drinking, but things started to boil inside me. I knew then that I was going to lose her, you see!”

He spat into the dust and gravel and wiped his chin, smiling hugely. Lyle spat too.

“So I followed them. I followed around the fair until they got to that strong man device. That contraption where you hit a plate or what have you with a hammer and it measures your strength. It's a game, you see, and you try to swing that hammer so hard you send a lead weight up into the sky and it sounds a bell for everyone to hear so that people look over and say, ‘Boy, he must be strong!' Well, that younger boy took her over to that game and he handed the operator a nickel and he took his swing.

“
Ding!
The son of a bitch hit the bell! Well, I was furious. The operator of the game handed my wife a stuffed animal, and they were about to walk away when I came out of the crowd, drunk, and said, ‘I challenge you, sir, to hit that bell more times than I can.' Well, the kid didn't know what was going on. We knew each other from school, of course, and he could probably see that I was drunk, so he agreed. We didn't have that much money, so we decided to swing the hammer five times apiece. And the person who hit the bell the most would win.

“Then the kid turned to me, ‘Well, what does the winner get?' he asks. And I looked at my wife and I said, ‘The right to escort that young woman home.' Well, the crowd hushed. And then the crowd got loud. Raucous. We rolled our shirt-sleeves up like we were working on the railroad. We unbuttoned our shirts. And we began swinging. After five swings apiece we were tied! That fair sounded like a churchyard on Sunday. That bell was tolling every minute. We did five more swings. Still a tie. The operator of the game stopped taking our money and just watched. Our hands started to bleed. We were lathered in sweat like horses. Little children from the crowd bringing us lemonade. Finally, at swing number forty-four, I beat the son of a gun. He was a good guy too, came to our wedding years later.”