Beneath the Bonfire (2 page)

“I didn't want to be a father,” he said. “Truth is, I'm scared shitless.”

I shut the chainsaw off and for a moment we were engulfed in its blue smoke, the memory of its whine and roar still in our ears. I sat down beside him, and there was something inside me that hummed of satisfaction too, because in all things Bear's life had been his own without the slightest of concessions. He lived beautifully and effortlessly, and he was one of those people in life that people shake their heads at in wonder and envy. He was the kind of man who could get any woman at a party. Who could sit down at a piano and play so truthfully that his audience might quietly weep. Once I had seen him hit a baseball four hundred feet. The coach had stopped practice so that the team could measure his blast, all of us pacing off the distance past the outfield wall, the almost unfathomable numbers adding up in our heads. And then he quit baseball because he claimed it bored him.

“I think everyone must be,” I said to him banally.

“I don't want it, though,” he said. “That's the thing. I don't want it at all. She puts my hand on her stomach and I feel it move, but it just scares me. Like something is coming to get me.”

I stayed quiet.

“She said it had to happen. That I hadn't married her right or something. That she'd had to sacrifice her life to live the way we do, and she said she deserved the baby and I owed it to her. She was talking about leaving,” he said. “She convinced me that I would like it, but I know I won't because I don't want to. Maybe you could talk to her?”

I looked at him. “What am I supposed to say?”

“Never mind,” he said, shaking his head. “No, look—Christ, you're right. I don't know what the hell is wrong with me.”

We stayed that way a while, until the cold was in our sweaty garments, and then we stood slowly and went back to work, with much less vigor than when we had started. The sun looked silver in the sky, and overhead there was the sound of a crow flying through cold air, its wings like paper. Here and there throughout the woods I could see other pairs of workers laboring, their chainsaws buzzing, yellow dust going into the snow and air from the guts of the downed trees.

“I've never been trapped before,” Bear said as he stacked pieces of cordwood, “not by anything. The other night her belly was against me in bed and I could feel the baby kicking my back. You imagine?”

“You'll be a great father,” I lied.

He looked up at me then, squinting against the reflected sunlight on the snow, and he said, “I got a surprise for you.”

He began moving off deeper into the forest and I followed him, as I always did, the chainsaw heavy in my hand, and I watched as he moved quickly, with the ease and surefootedness of an animal, ducking low under branches or with long strides over fallen logs. We trudged past bur oaks and maples and aspens, through cedars and white pines, to the lip of the bluff where the world fell off into space, and below us was the blue line of a river whose name I did not know.

The tree was gargantuan, a behemoth cottonwood, and its roots seemed to hold the very cliff together, the subterranean fingers of the giant tree holding boulders in order like so many marbles. Bear began to climb the tree, leaving his chainsaw on the yellow rock below. I put my fingers in the gnarled bark of the tree and began working my way up too, racing him, in fact, the two of us winding separate paths up the tree, following different networks of branches into the heights, where a few dead leaves yet hung like strange laundry. We laughed out loud as we climbed, panting. The world beneath us white and forever unfurled. My lungs felt cold and huge.

“Nancy is beautiful,” Bear said from his roost, though he was looking at the river below.

You have everything,
I thought, nodding. “It'll be okay,” I said to him, our comments like two planes passing in the heavens, miles apart.

“I don't think I'm meant to be with just one person,” he said to me, and in his voice was a kind of mock sadness.

“Don't you love her?” I asked.

I had loved her many years ago, Shelly. But then, love was always my easiest emotion.

“Yes,” he said slowly, then, “I don't know. I don't think I can share people. I want them to be all mine.”

The sun was falling already, and the wind in the treetop made us shudder. I waited for Bear to begin his descent before doing the same. The climb down was terrifying, and I hung close to the cottonwood, unable to discern now the path I'd taken up the tree. Still midway up, I could see Bear already on the ground, chainsaw in his hand, already walking away.

“Bear!” I yelled.

He turned to me, “Get down already! Let's find some beer!”

My face was hot, windblown and sunburned despite the cold. “I can't!” I stammered.

He set the chainsaw down and came back to the trunk of the tree, “Move your left foot down into that little hollow there,” he said with a patronizing kind of patience.

“I can't do it, Ben,” I said, using the name he had abandoned long ago.

“Christ, man,” he said, “I can't come up there and pull you down! I got to get back there and help Luna with dinner. You'll figure it out.”

He picked up the chainsaw and moved off into the forest, leaving me up in the air, pressed against the rough trunk of the tree, whose limbs danced with the rising wind swirling up from the river bottom. The sun hovered over the western horizon and the bark of the tree was losing its warmth. I was thirty-odd feet off the ground.

*   *   *

Just before the fall of night, in the last of the gloaming, I slid down the tree in a fit of desperation, falling between branches in places, afraid of losing all my light and finding myself stranded over the cliff. I could hear the chainsaw party already kicking into gear as I moved through the forest, angry, cuts burning on my face and hands from the climb down. The chainsaw felt oddly light in my hands as I approached the light of the bonfire and the sound of thick lubricious laughter.

A small group of men were blowing gasoline out of their mouths into the fire, and the flames were booming up into the soft new night, sparks breaking up into the black and blue evening. A bearded man was sawing against his fiddle, and the music sounded like something carnal and antique. In the shadows I saw the pit where the pig had been roasted, its carcass now a mess of flesh laid bare and people were picking at the rags of meat with their fingers, their faces greasy with work and hunger. I went to the barrel of beer, which sat heavily in a snowbank like a very fat man, and I drank from the spigot until I felt warm with something other than anger. I wanted very badly to leave the chainsaw party, but I could see that my truck was blocked in by other vehicles, and besides, I could not leave without Nancy, wherever she was. I began searching the shadowy faces of the party. In the air hung thick tendrils of marijuana smoke, and I could see that two women were lying in the snow, forming the imprints of angels with their outstretched legs and arms.

It was Luna that found me, wandering the woods, after I interrupted two lovers moving against the night: a woman bent over a pile of firewood and her lover entering her from behind, their asses glowing in the darkness. I had come upon them quietly, not even comprehending at first, and then afraid that it might be Nancy, and at last the man had turned to me and said, “You want a turn?” his dick in his hand like a skeleton key. Then the woman grabbed his narrow hips and moved him back into her, laughing.

I had turned away and begun wandering away from the lights, mumbling Nancy's name, when Luna grabbed my shoulder with one hand, a lantern glowing in the other and swinging, its golden light illuminating the detritus of the forest floor.

“Noah!” she shouted. “Noah!”

I fell down in the snow and sat that way, looking up at her, this woman I had known when we were two fumbling teenagers, kids really, necking on a mattress in the bed of my pickup truck as a drive-in movie lit the summer nights and I remembered the fireflies I sometimes found in her red hair, the paleness of her white skin. “Shelly,” I said. “Shelly, I feel drunk.”

She kneeled in the snow and touched my face with her gloved hands.

“Christ, your face is a mess,” she said, laughing softly, her fingers under my chin. Her eyes were wet.

“I'm so happy for you,” I said. “You'll make a great mother.” I was not lying, and the thought of her holding a baby made me want to weep with happiness and longing and then I did begin to cry, the tears on my face hot and painful on the new cuts and scrapes covering my face.

*   *   *

Since the moment I met Nancy I had wanted very badly to be a father, a dad. It was the night of Thanksgiving Day. I had taken my mother into the hospital. She had cut her hand while carving the turkey. I remember her standing at the sink, running the tap over her bleeding fingers, all the color draining from her face. “It'll be okay,” she said to me, quickly covering the wound with a towel. “No way, Mom,” I said, and we drove to the ER, where we sat for ten minutes in a waiting room watching highlights of the morning's parade in a faraway city. They took her into the ER and I sat leafing through some battered magazines.

After some length of time, I stood up and began wandering the hospital. I found the neonatal wing, the nursery, with its rows of babies lying in small transparent bins, not cribs, but trays, all of their little heads covered in blue or pink hats, bodies tightly swaddled. Some slept and some cried out. Nancy moved from baby to baby, picking them up and holding them to her chest. She swayed with them in her arms, like slow dancing, her lips close to their little heads. I watched her, transfixed, until my own mother was standing beside me, her finger bandaged. She pressed against me warmly and I was not embarrassed. Nancy had not noticed us.

“You were such a beautiful baby,” my mother said. “We loved you even before you were born.”

I didn't say anything, my eyes still on Nancy, my body suddenly loose and relaxed amid the ambient sounds of the hospital everywhere, the relative cool and dimness of the building. The beautiful woman swaying before me, behind a giant pane of glass separating us from all those very small faces. I found myself happily drowsy.

“You'll have your chance,” my mother said.

But I already had the sense even before seeing a doctor about it that I would never conceive a child, that something was broken inside me. There were moments in my life that I might have pointed to by way of explanation—the serrated tip of a figure skate, the cleated foot of a runaway fullback, moments when my anatomy had suffered specific insults. But the more I yearned for fatherhood, the more I understood somehow that any child I might raise into an adult would not be the product of my genetic line. I would be some kind of surrogate. And so, accepting that deficiency within me, I had begun waiting for orphans to enter my life, like figures of golden light.

I came back to the hospital one day later, a bouquet of flowers in my hands, and found Nancy. Her coworkers blushed and then applauded quietly, their eyes dancing uncertainly. I had just gotten my hair cut and even gone to the local men's clothing store, where I bought a navy blue suit coat with shiny brass buttons. She was holding a baby, of course. A new girl named Daphne.

*   *   *

Shelly breathed in deeply. “I want to leave this place. Will you take me?” she asked.

“Why?” I asked.

She erased the wetness of my face with her fingers.

“Let's go,” she said, lifting me up.

“I have to get Nancy,” I insisted.

“Don't. Don't go looking.”

“But I have to. She came with me. I love her.”

The bonfire was out of control, and as we skirted the edge of the party, there was a man juggling three chainsaws in the air, all of the machines rasping and grumbling, and each time one of the chainsaws fell into his hands, he revved up its small engine and the teeth of the saw went round and round, sharp and shining in the grimy light. The violinist was sweating profusely even though he wore no shirt, and the bow he used to make the music that went out into the night moved furiously against the cold strings of the instrument. There was nothing left of the pig when we walked by the pit, just the face of a misbegotten animal and its four still hooves.

Inside the church candles were swaying on the windowsills and many bodies were laid out over the floor. A man was walking between the figures, and in his hands were doses of acid. The supplicants extended their tongues as if in acceptance of a communion wafer. They were listening to an opera screech out of the ornate horn of a hand-cranked Victrola, powered by a man in the darkness, working its crank as needed.

I found them in the loft. Nancy on a bed, sitting on his face, his beard billowed out around her crotch. That was the last time I ever saw her, her hands holding her own head and hair and his fingers in her mouth, her breasts heavy and beautiful inside the church, where the light of the bonfire seeped in through the tall stained-glass windows and made the building a kind of terrible hallucination I will never forget.

Shelly was outside the church, a bag in her hand.

“I could burn the place down,” she said.

“Let's go,” I said, taking her bag and throwing it into the bed of my truck.

“You're parked in,” Shelly said.

“Wait beside the road,” I said.

She went off into the darkness and I climbed into the truck and revved the engine. I yanked the transmission into reverse and stepped down hard on the gas pedal. The big black pipes of the truck went back into the car behind me and pushed it several feet into the next vehicle. There was the sound of breaking glass and broken metal. Then I dropped the truck into drive and plowed forward, slamming the vehicle in front of me ten feet ahead and sending it toward the bonfire, where the music suddenly stopped, all three flying chainsaws landing in the snow. I put the truck in reverse once more, demolishing another vehicle before finally pulling out onto the road and waiting for Shelly. She moved into the truck gingerly, holding her belly, and then I slid the truck into gear and we left the derelict church and all those beaten automobiles and the bonfire and the pig and the secret new lovers and a disembodied Italian soprano, wailing into the night.