Beneath the Bonfire (20 page)

“We'll go for a walk,” she said. “You can tell me then.”

They walked out of the house, over the field toward the creek. He tripped on the cornstalks, falling down. “Look, lady, I don't know what happened,” he said. “Best bet is, she didn't realize they'd come into the house after a fight. Maybe their muzzles were torn open. Maybe they were raw, angry. I expect she tripped over them in the night, on her way to the bathroom. Honestly, I don't know. I mean, I dropped her off outside the hospital.” He shrugged. “I told her not to be afraid. Where'd she go anyway? Haven't seen her face in a while. Not since I stole your gun. You remember that, don't you?”

Aida whipped him again. They were close to the creek. She heard the sucking and whoosh of the water around tree roots and fallen trunks. He stopped at the bank. In the water she saw a strange pyramid of rocks. “Get in there,” she said.

“The hell I will,” he said. “I'll drown.”

“Get.”

He stumbled into the water but kept his footing. Never broke down, never wept or begged. He stood in the middle of the narrow creek, arms behind him, blood trickling into his mouth.

“Where's the money?” she asked.

He spat into the creek and the blood went away.

“Last chance,” she said, pulling the hammer back.

“In the freezer,” he said. “Some more underneath a floorboard up in my bedroom.”

“How much?”

“I don't know,” he said. “You count it.”

She shot him twice then, and his body spun backward into the creek. She watched him drift away until his body became entangled in an old fence line cutting through the creek along with all the other debris: ragged plastic bags, branches, cornstalks. She watched as the water broke against him, pushing him farther down into the murk. Then she went back to the house.

Inside, she stacked the money from the freezer on the kitchen table. It was rubber-banded into thick wads and wrapped in Saran. Her old service piece was in the freezer too, next to Ziploc bags full of rhubarb, sweet corn, and tomatoes. And a deed to the house, signed over to him by an Ione Miller. She set these things on the table and went upstairs.

She opened the folding doors and the mattress fell down onto the floor. Only the way it fell did not sound right. A single hundred-dollar bill floated through the air, falling to the floor like an expired leaf. She looked at the mattress more closely. There was an incision in the side and she saw that the mattress was stuffed with cash, bonds.
This money wasn't his
, Aida thought. The dates on some of the bills were from the 1920s. She counted the cash as she extracted it from the musty old pad. Ninety thousand dollars. In the closet, beneath a floorboard, fifty thousand more. She went down the stairs with the money heaped in her arms, stuffed into pillowcases. She carried everything out to her truck, looking over her shoulder toward the field and the creek. There was barking inside the barn. She locked the doors to the truck and moved toward the giant red building. Dawn had come.

Inside, one dog yet barely alive, entrails hanging from his belly to the dirty floor, and chained to an old cow stanchion trembling with fear. Aida came to it, her hands on its sides gently. She freed the dog, but it only leaned into her. She carried it back to the truck, its eyes searching. She drove down the driveway, her eyes on the rearview mirror. She looked back at the gravel path before her. An Escalade had just turned into the driveway and was moving toward her. It pulled to the shoulder, and she saw the driver roll down his window. She recognized him as a pharmacist. Saw his breath in the early morning cool.

“Officer Battle,” he said, looking embarrassed. He saw the dog beside her in the truck, the pile of money. “Didn't know you fought dogs.”

“Wilson,” she said, “you have any morphine on you?” His name came effortlessly, from some fathoms deep inside her. She let the words come up.

He startled. “He in bad shape?”

She fingered the pistol beside her, was irate inside. “He's damn near gone,” she said.

“Don't waste the drugs,” he said, waving his hand. “Bullets are cheaper.”

“That right?” she said.

She pulled the pistol out, leveled her wrist on the window frame, and put two bullets in each of his driver-side tires. The dog startled, shook. Wilson stared at her. “Morphine,” she said.

He rode in the bed of the truck to the veterinarian's office. She made him carry the dog in himself.

“You fight another dog,” she told him, “I'll do more than ruin your vehicle.”

He nodded, walking into the back of the building with the wounded animal.

She went back to her house, pulling the F-150 into her driveway. Blood on the bench seat and a bag of money. She folded out of the truck, every nerve inside her body bent and charged. Just then two fawns burst out of her browned garden and she pulled the pistol from the small of her back and aimed at them, but they'd already bounded into the safety of a nearby copse of birch. She tried the front door, but it was locked. The keys in her hands jingled together and it was difficult for her to fit the metal inside the lock. Pushing against the door, she began sobbing. She was breaking and there was no one for her. Finally the door gave way and she allowed herself to lay right down in the doorway. She had the sudden desire to own a dog, a pet, some kind creature to comfort her. She fell asleep that way and lay there until the afternoon sun was hot enough to induce sweat. Then picked herself up and went inside, closing the door. Leaves had collected in the threshold.

The answering machine was blinking on the kitchen counter and she went to it, pressed the button. It was the lieutenant. “Battle. It's LT. Look, got a strange report of Doctor Wilson showing up at the vet's office holding a dead dog. Said you'd dropped him there? Said he had two flats out by that farmhouse you and Lombard visited. You remember…” But the tape had run out, his voice stopping abruptly. The machine said, “Message two.” It was the lieutenant's voice again. “Damn machines. Look, I know you're retired and everything, Battle, but I need you to call me on this one, all right? I sent Lombard out there this morning to check on things and no one was home. That kid Kruk might be mixed up in something and he wasn't around, though his red Dodge truck was. So if…” The machine cut the lieutenant's voice off again and then said, “You have no more messages.”

It was red,
she thought,
how could I have forgotten a red Ram
?
A red Ram. A red goddamn Ram.

She reached into the cupboard for a coffee mug, staring out the window the whole time. The driver-side door of the truck was open. She filled the kettle with water and put it on the stove to boil. She went outside to the truck where the money was still on the seat. She eased into the truck and tried to turn on the radio but did not have her keys. She went into the house and found the keys beside the answering machine, looked out the window. The truck door was still open. She went outside and then sat on the bench seat again, turning the keys in the ignition. The radio warbled on and she sat that way for some time, listening to country music until night set in. Inside the house, a whistle was blowing and the kitchen windows were foggy with steam. The stovetop was everywhere wet with water that had sputtered out of the kettle.
What was I doing? What a mess. What a mess.
On the kitchen table was a bag full of money.

*   *   *

In Duluth, Aida found Bethany beside the great lake, watching freighters go slowly by. It was the first day of November, and Bethany had a cashmere scarf knotted around her face.

“It's the only thing that can touch my face,” she said. “So goddamned expensive, but it's the only thing that feels good.”

They sat on the gray, weathered seat of a park bench. Aida kicked a duffel bag toward Bethany's right shoe.

“I'm not dumb, you know,” Bethany said after a while. “I want you to know that. You probably think I am … but I'm not. I went to college. I was just no good with men. Could never say the right thing, so … I just stopped talking. I thought I'd won the lottery with Bret. You should have seen him with those dogs sometimes.” She wiped her nose with the back of her hand gently. “Especially in the mornings. They'd hop up onto the bed and be licking at his face and I can hear his laughter.” She threw a stone into the lake. She thought about him again and shivered uneasily. He had not been a good man; he had duped her. She unzipped the duffel bag, tilted her head.

“Should be enough for whatever surgery you need,” Aida said. Then “I took fifty already. That number seemed about right. Too bad about that house, though. Who knows if she had any kin. Seemed like a nice enough place there, near the creek and all.”

“No,” Bethany said, “I hope it gets burnt to the ground. All of it.” Then, “You didn't remember me at all, did you?” She moved her fingers lightly over the scars on her face. “Are they that bad? The scars?”

Aida shook her head, her teeth cold in the wind. “I got an appointment at the Mayo hospital down in Rochester, but I don't even know if I can stand to go. Don't know if I care to hear the bad news.” She paused. The air smelled fresh, a suggestion of snow not too far away, but also of other things: diesel, fish, sawdust. “No,” she said, “they aren't that bad. But no. I didn't recognize you. Not even sure I filed a report for that day. If I think back to it, I can't even remember driving back to the station that day. Just … whole days gone. Whole days.”

“I'll go with you,” Bethany said, looking at Aida. But Aida never acknowledged the words and maybe the wind had come across the lake and swooped them up because the redheaded woman sat still, regarding the expanse of water ahead of her. Her lips moving very minutely and Bethany realized that she was talking to herself as if no one else was around.
Whole days, whole days.

They sat together, the wind sweeping their hair into their faces. Out on the lake the freighters moved slowly and whitecaps were building, crashing against the piers and riprap. Above them, abandoned grain elevators rose into the blue sky and pigeons circled. They watched a three-legged dog trot through a field of rusted trucks, its black nose in the air, sniffing the freshwater breezes.

 

TRAIN PEOPLE MOVE SLOW

T
HE PYRAMIDS OF BURNING LEAVES
smoldered into the night, even with the rain, and inside our house and on our clothes the smoke clung like gray cologne, and it was easy to know that it was November. That night, under the porch, Sunny found the cat, emaciated, its fur matted with shit. We had heard a noise all night long, and at first I'd thought it was just mice in the walls, but then both of us got out of bed and started tracking the noise until finally Sunny found it, its meow loud, plaintive, persistent.

Hearing our movements in the night, the girls woke up and tumbled after each other down the stairs. The last rust-colored leaves were being knocked off the black fingers of the trees by the rain. I remember thinking it seemed too early for snow but that maybe it would. It made me cold to see Sunny outside in her old high school volleyball shorts, her legs naked, toenails immaculately painted, her narrow back bent down beneath the porch as she cooed to the bedraggled creature.

“What is it, Mom?” the girls asked nearly in unison. They were under my arms, wrapped around me. I'd never wanted kids, but the girls had come with Sunny and now they were mine. Two little girls with hair blacker than their mother's. We lived near the river, where fishermen caught giant carp and catfish and sometimes even sturgeon below the drainpipes of the paper company, where the river never froze. I looked across the river at the plant, where steam rose up into the falling rain and held the lights of industry, making the entire complex glow like a ghost ship in the night.

“It's a cat,” Sunny said. The girls trilled behind their tiny fingers.

“Baby,” I said, “get back in the house, it's freezing.”

“All the more reason to bring this cat inside,” she responded. Her voice was sharp.

I never argued with Sunny. She'd had a hard life before, and I wanted her life with me to be easy. There were times she pushed me around, times she even gave me black eyes, but it was worth it. Everything was better with Sunny. Even when she was casting flour around the kitchen or accidentally setting the drapes on fire. Being in love with Sunny was like that; it was like a fistfight. She entered every relationship with brass knuckles, and I had a glass jaw for love. I was willing to be beaten down for those evenings when she crawled back into bed after the bars, her face against my chest, her hair all cigarette smoke, her voice raw and throaty.

“I love you,” she always said. “You should leave us, you know? Do yourself a favor and leave us.”

But I never said anything. It was better to just be quiet and to let things mellow, my fingers combing her hair in the red glow of the clock radio. Sunny was the best lover I'd ever had. Some nights we took the mattress off the bed frame and made love on the floor, where it was more quiet, my fingers in her mouth to keep her mute, her teeth digging into me and making marks.

Sunny finally grabbed the cat by its scruff and held it up into the corona of the porch light. The creature could not have weighed five pounds.

“I'll get a bowl of milk,” said Nina.

“Warm it up!” yelled her younger sister, Char. The girls ran off toward the kitchen and there was the sound of dishes crashing to the floor.

“I'm allergic to cats,” I said to Sunny, but she just kissed me, her lips wet with the rain.

“Benadryl,” she said, patting my stomach gently and then letting her hand run down a little lower.

She walked into the house with the cat, and following her, I closed the door on the night. My shift at the paper plant started in less than five hours, and the three women in my life were all screaming with delight as they bathed the putrid feline in the kitchen sink. From the entryway I could see spilled milk and broken china on the kitchen's linoleum floor. I made a mental note to clean it up when I awoke in the morning.