Beneath the Bonfire (6 page)

“Take it easy, Sven,” I said, clasping his forearm, which fit like a broom handle between my fingers.

“Take it easy, Lily,” he said, slouching down to hug me, his little pit bull.

 

MORELS

The best piece of advice that I ever had

Never go to church with blood on your hands.

—
Charlie Parr

T
HE THREE MEN MOVED OVER
the south-facing slopes above the valleys, their faces low to the ground, eyes sweeping the forest floor like midday searchlights. Their pursed lips clamped joints of marijuana, and over their shoulders their smoke went like the thick white whiskers of a beard in vain neglect. Bathed in the tang of the smoke, they wet their lips occasionally with bottles of beer that they carried through the forest in a heavy backpack, the bottles a set of oddly muted chimes.

“Too early,” said Rimes. “Too goddamn early. Hard frost last night. That's no damn good.”

“They're going to be popping,” said Coffee confidently. “They're gonna start popping and we'll be right on top of 'em when they do.”

“I'd like to see that,” said Deere. “I want to see 'em come out of the earth. You think anyone's ever done that before? Like one of those time-elapsed movies of clouds moving or something?”

Rimes and Coffee ignored Deere, whose eyelids drooped heavily over his dull and dilated pupils.

The elm trees were champagne flutes cracked black against the sky, and they went to those dead trees and hovered around the trunks, where the bark peeled off in great scabs. The apple trees not yet softened with white-pink blossoms were craggy and lichened, stingy with their buds, and the men congregated beneath those trees too. They walked everywhere together, a band of stoned foragers, carrying their mesh bags of morels. When one man stopped to roll a joint, the others stopped too, and he would roll each man a fat cigarette. When one man stopped and dropped his pants to his ankles, the other two would do likewise, and they might be seen, backs to one another, urinating into the forest as if their counterparts were invisible strangers.

Not yet noon the day had grown hot. They removed their sweaters and Deere stripped off all his shirts and went about the forest like an animal clothed only in pants and boots. His body was ethereally white and he seemed to glow as he wobbled clumsily around, dimly observing the world through his own kaleidoscopic perspective.

“I'll take another beer,” said Rimes to Coffee, who reached over his own shoulder into the bag of bottles and produced two, one that he passed to Rimes and the other that he raised to his own lips. They tapped bottles and made a small noise. They watched Deere and shook their heads.

“Stoned out of his dome,” said Rimes.

“Tell you what,” said Coffee. “You get that man out of his suit and tie and he loses his fucking mind.”

Deere worked in electronic security. When he explained to Rimes and Coffee the inner machinations of his workday, he could see their eyes glaze over in confusion and he understood. He lived in a make-believe world of numbers and letters and electronic pulses and at his office he rarely saw women or talked to other men in conversations that were not monosyllabic or socially awkward. So when Deere found himself in the woods with Rimes and Coffee, he let loose and the other two men obliged him, guarded over him, even. Coffee had herbal tea in his truck to hide the traces of Deere's marijuana binges. Deere had the kind of employer who paid well but insisted on quarterly urine samples.

“How much we got?” asked Rimes, mopping his forehead as he marked the progress of the rising sun.

“Maybe a pound and a half,” Coffee said. “Not much considering we been out all morning.”

“Well,” said Rimes, “my vote is we go find a bar, eat some lunch, have some beers, and come back midafternoon when these damn things start popping.”

“I won't argue with that,” said Coffee.

“Hey, Deere!” yelled Rimes.

Deere turned to his friends from the bird's nest he'd been examining with some melancholy in the low-hanging branches of a nearby apple tree.

“Goddamn eggs are blue as the sky,” reported Deere, shaking his head in wonder. “Baby blue.” He walked toward Rimes and Coffee and then past the two men, down the hill and toward their camp and vehicles. “Somebody put some food in my gullet,” he said without turning back to look at his friends. “I'm famished.”

Rimes and Coffee looked at each other and smiled.

*   *   *

They had all grown up in those unglaciated hills; that part of the world left intact by the last glaciers that steamrolled the surrounding land, leaving it utterly flat. The Driftless Area, like a postcard of what had been. It was a place on earth unlike anywhere else, and as children they had merely used it as a playground, a place to swim or hunt or build their secret forts. They built faulty rafts to float the rivers and streams and stalked the forest creatures to test their own stealth. As children they had run together like their own small clan, learning the caves, coulees, draws, hollows, and springs bubbling up out of the planet like a good wound, giving up the coldest, sweetest water.

Deere had left for the city and started into computers at the right time and before almost anyone else. He'd done well for himself, with a big house in the suburbs. He had married, which surprised Rimes and Coffee when it happened and they were called to his side in a great urban cathedral to be his groomsmen. As a child, Deere had been the smallest and skinniest of them all, and he wept when the other two boys outran him or hid from him among the sumac or deep inside a cave. He had failed as an athlete, been terrified of girls. But then one day he was a man, their friend, more successful than anyone they'd ever known, with a beautiful wife who had the look in her eye of a woman deeply in love with a decent man who saw only her and no one else in the whole world. Deere's marriage had stunned Rimes and Coffee, and they had drawn into themselves, into each other, becoming not unlike circus Siamese twins sharing a torso and limbs. With Deere off and married and out of their world, they lived within the hills, two loud coyotes running from bar to bar, chasing women, wrecking trucks, wasting motorcycles. At the end of their evenings they built fires on the banks of the river and stared into the flames, looking for things they didn't know.

Deere was so stoned he passed out in the bed of Coffee's truck before his friends reached the base of the hill. His skin, pale as milk only six hours ago, had darkened to an angry pink.

“Deere!” yelled Rimes as he slapped the side of the truck. “Put on a goddamned shirt, man. We're going to a nice establishment.” He threw his friend a T-shirt and Deere slid it on, wincing, then promptly fell back to sleep.

Rimes and Coffee slid onto the bench seat of the truck and pulled out, winding through the valley bottoms. In the fields, sandhill cranes stabbed at the black earth and the yellow stubble of cornstalks, leftovers of the autumn harvest.

“There was a time people shot those birds,” said Rimes.

Coffee shook his head. “Lucky there's anything left of anything, the way people are.”

The hills had emptied of people like them, and Rimes and Coffee knew it. Old men who'd run general stores for decades were dying, leaving their shelves empty, their doors unlocked. The children of those entrepreneurs taped
FOR SALE
signs in the windows and then left. Those buildings stayed vacant and then other buildings went vacant until whole communities came to a standstill, as if something had come silently through and sucked the breath of life away, leaving only the husks of a former time. In the newspaper stands long ignored, stories now years old moldered into history.

And yet even as the towns themselves hollowed out, the hills and coulees were being resettled. The Amish had found the Driftless, all the farms without farmers, barns without cows, and they had come out on their horse-drawn buggies and bought things up. But they were like a thing apart and unto themselves, moving around the area in a loud silence, all in black, always somber. So the hills were gaining people quietly, mute new inhabitants whose language seemed to be labor and prayer.

Coffee and Rimes had hung on, two outliers, two stones too stubborn to erode away. Rimes the tractor and seed salesman and Coffee the marijuana farmer. Rimes had bought his parents' old home while Coffee lived in a small Airstream at the nape of a lost coulee, a nowhere geography not easily photographed by passing airplanes or satellites.

“Where to then?” asked Coffee.

“Let's hit up the Antlers,” said Rimes. “They got good burgers.”

Coffee nodded his head and peered over his shoulder at their slumbering friend, his lips moving in some secret, nonsensical language.

The Antlers was a low bunker of a bar, dark and festooned everywhere with taxidermy, much of it from a time when animals populated the draws and coulees in greater numbers. The walls were sharp with great baskets of antlers, and below the American ivory were glistening eyes like minor stars that held the light of the pastel glow of the jukebox.

Poachers sat at the bar, bags of mushrooms at the feet of their stools, heavy and fragrant with the earth and the specific rot found beneath a dense carpet of leaves. The three men sat at the bar, Deere unsteady on his stool, Coffee and Rimes seated close beside him, holding Deere to the planet he threatened to spill off of.

“Three beers and three burgers,” said Coffee to the bartender, a woman named Trixie whose son had been lost in Iraq, a contractor who drove jet fuel through the desert. His high school graduation photo in an ornate frame near the cash register.

The beer came first, and Coffee and Rimes downed it lustily, the apples in their throats working like thirsty pumps. Deere bobbed and weaved on his stool, his eyes jacketed behind heavy lids.

“Where are we?” he asked.

“The Antlers,” said Rimes as Trixie deftly delivered their plates onto the counter in front of their resting elbows and dirty hands.

“Looks like a zoo,” slurred Deere. “A zoo full of dead things.”

“Taxidermy.” Rimes laughed. “Eat that burger now, the mushrooms are going to start to pop.”

“Zoos make me sad,” said Deere as he picked the burger off its paper plate and opened his mouth slowly, hugely, before deciding he needed to finish the thought. “Just a damn jail. A jail for animals. No better than going to a jail and poking at the inmates. Throwing food at them. Getcha fuckin' killed.” Suddenly he Frisbeed a hamburger bun at the frozen bust of a sixteen-point buck.

The poachers at the bar were staring down the rail at Deere, and Trixie's arms were folded tightly near the cash register, where behind her the lost son smiled broadly, his haircut already slightly dated.

“Eat that burger,” ordered Coffee. “Eat that burger and sober up and be halfways good, for chrissakes. Maybe we can get out of here before somebody tries to kill you.”

“Fuck 'em,” said Deere, his mouth full of meat and dripping grease. “I'm ready.”

“Check, please,” said Coffee, offering Trixie a tight-lipped, handsome smile.

“Sober him up,” she said as she handed him the bill. “Sober him up 'fore he says something stupid. It's too early for that philosophical shit anyway. Hard to believe he come from here at all.”

Coffee paused. Looked at her hard to let her know that Deere was still his friend. Conveying to her that they were bonded just as brothers are or the strangle molecules that hold the rain together or the particles of a boulder.

“He's as much this place as anyone else and probably a good goddamned deal better than any of us,” said Coffee quietly to Trixie in a tone and volume meant for her only. “And he's my goddamned friend. And we'll sit here all fucking day and drink your beer if we so choose.”

He brought the wad of bills down on the bar inside a knuckled fist, his thick hand making a crack like a walnut detonating into fragments. It stilled the bar, turned the poachers' faces down, where they stared at the bubbles rising in their beer glasses. Trixie's eyes flitted to the crumpled money, twice what their bill had been, and she lowered her head too, pretended to survey her toenails, which needed a new coat of paint. Coffee never took his eyes off her. Trixie acted tough at the Antlers, but Coffee knew her from all around and knew that she was mostly broken by her son's death, and sometimes when she came down his driveway in an ancient Bronco with a younger girlfriend looking to buy pot, he would invite them into his trailer and they would smoke together in a tight circle where he could watch as her sorrow lifted or faded like the early evening sun becoming night. He knew the money he'd just left on the bar would come back to him, but he always wished it wouldn't and that she might just move on to someplace else.

“Come on, Deere,” said Coffee, lifting his friend from the stool. “Let's get us some morels.” He shot a glance at Rimes, who nodded as they lifted Deere's arms over their shoulders and shrugged him out of the bar, carrying their friend, the walking wounded, stoned and drunk, back into the daylight just as the sun found its zenith in an unblemished sky.

“Let's get him to drink some water,” said Rimes. “I got a canteen somewhere.”

“Beer is water!” said Deere loudly to no one in particular. Then, quieter, “Beer is water.”

Rimes found the canteen behind the bench seat and, unscrewing the cap, took a small sip before holding the vessel to his friend's parched lips.

“Artesian water,” said Rimes.

Deere nursed the canteen greedily and finished its contents, burping into his hand and wiping his lips. He seemed instantly more sober.

“I tell you what,” he said, his voice already more steady, “that's a whole lot better'n city water. The stuff back home? Tastes like pool water and cleaning products. I can barely drink it. Even my ice cubes smell funny.” He shook his head. “Artesian water, huh?” He looked at Rimes admiringly.