Beneath the Bonfire (7 page)

“Right out of the earth,” said Rimes. “Best thing in the world. Cold and sweet and free.”

“I'd like to find an artesian beer spring,” said Deere, imagining his Big Rock Candy Mountain. “All the free beer a guy could drink. What do you think of that?”

They laughed and Coffee slapped Deere on the back, causing him to wince, his sunburn now a suit of pain.

“Daniel Deere has risen from the dead,” said Coffee happily.

“All right, then,” said Deere. “Let's go find some fucking morels.”

And so all three men piled onto the bench seat of the truck, their favorite pew, and the truck carried them away from the Antlers full of food and newly revived. On the radio was an old Merle Haggard song, and inside the car they beat their fists against whatever halfway flat surface they could reach, and through the countryside the truck went, a motley kind of percussion section accompanied by a trio of happy voices as the men sang together, butchering the lyrics but always perfectly synchronized on the refrain. Their bellies were full and they felt invincible and high and an unlikely family only occasionally reunited.

The truck pulled to a stop beside a steeply inclined hill that rose into a sharp nipple in the sky, its slopes everywhere studded by dead elms.

“Got the beers?” asked Deere.

“Got 'em,” said Coffee.

“Got the weed?” asked Deere.

Coffee patted his breast pocket. “My man,” he said. “We got enough weed to get a buffalo high. Now, you ready, or you need another fuckin' catnap?”

Deere smiled. “I know those mushrooms are popping now. You can damn near hear 'em if you just try.” Deere did not smoke either cigarettes or marijuana usually, but he did in the company of Rimes and Coffee. “Let's make hay,” he said, lighting a joint and beginning to storm the hill.

The mushrooms were indeed popping now. Everywhere beneath the elms they emerged from the earth, their form a dunce cap textured like brain, just slightly harder than cottage cheese. Beneath the trees the men went on their hands and knees, careful not to disrupt the forest floor too much, knives in hands, cutting the mushrooms free of their bases, stuffing the morels into their bags. They did not shout upon discovering a cache of mushrooms. There were other men in the forests too, and voices carried between the hillsides, through the valleys. So the three friends just whistled low to one another, always careful to stay close, their whistles like the call of a strange new bird, their own flock of three.

At dusk they stopped.

“How much we got?” Deere asked excitedly.

They emptied bag after bag into the trunk of Coffee's truck and surveyed the bounty as they sipped beers.

“Must be twelve, fifteen pounds,” said Rimes, shaking his head in wonder. “A good goddamned day is what I have to say about it all.”

The three men shook hands and grinned widely. They were filled with a kind of glow, warm and big in their chests.

“You ought to take all these mushrooms back for your wife,” Coffee said to Deere. Rimes looked up, mildly aghast.

“The hell are we gonna do with fifteen pounds of morels?” Deere laughed. “Shit. I love Diane too, but mostly we eat out anyway.”

“Still,” continued Coffee, “you could show her what we do together. What it's like to live up here. What you're capable of finding for free just walking around the woods. Shit, you two could walk into any fancy restaurant down there and probably sell these mushrooms for three, four hundred dollars.”

“Well, we're doing just fine,” Deere said casually. “We don't need the money. Maybe you two oughta split the takings. I don't mind. Leave me enough for an omelet or something.”

A look of subdued hurt streaked quickly across Coffee's face, the celebration of only a moment earlier abruptly extinguished. Deere seemed to flinch too, perhaps recognizing in the after-moment just how different their lives were. Here his friend had been trying to give a nearly priceless ephemeral gift, and he had turned it to ash.

Rimes saw their glows fading and spoke up. “You know what I think. I say we go back to my place, fry up a couple pans of these fuckers, grill some steaks, and hit the bars tonight. We can rehydrate, build a little base in our stomachs, maybe chase some tail, what do you think?”

With some relief Deere said, “Sounds good to me. Let me drive, though, huh? I never get to drive a pickup anymore, least of all on these roads. Crack me a beer, Coffee.”

Deere had already moved behind the great loose wheel of Coffee's pickup truck as the man reached into a heavily dented cooler to produce the last three bottles of beer, only now the slightest bit warm. Coffee didn't like money. Didn't like to talk about it, didn't even like the transactions of his business. Some nights in his Airstream, alone with the stars or the static of the radio, he thought about his measure as a man, the stock a stranger might take in him. He was more than what he seemed, but there were times in which he knew no better way of displaying himself than by flashing a fat roll of bills at the bar, yet in those moments he felt dry and shallow too. Deere's success intimidated him, the kind of wealth that opened worlds and people and knowledge that Coffee could not fathom. Deere's life was an unknowable and elegant charade to Coffee.

They all drank as the truck weaved over the road, stitching a jagged path between the painted lines, the headlights illuminating the marble eyes of animals along the way. Coffee let the money talk recede from his consciousness and relaxed against the bench seat, enjoying being chauffeured about the countryside. His eyelids closed and he eased into a light sleep, a faint smile easing across his face.

“Deere!” screamed Rimes suddenly. Coffee's eyes flashed open. He braced his thick arms against the dashboard.

What filled Deere's head in that instant was confusion as he turned his face away from the road to look at the horrified Rimes. He had thought Rimes was trying to say, “Deer!”, but the driver of the drunken pickup saw no deer, and in turning to observe Rimes, he neglected to see the blaze orange reflective triangle affixed to the rear of a horse-drawn buggy. And so Coffee's truck hurtled straight into the buggy and smashed through its wood and metal skeleton until it was driving into and over the terrified horse, the animal letting out the stark, anguished scream of a creature losing its life in the night. The horse was clipped at its legs and its muscular body went flying into the darkness of the passenger-side ditch, limbs contorted sickly, the sheen of sweat on its glossy coat vibrant in the headlights, contours of bulging sinew and skin and bone, a beautiful thing wasted.

Blood on the cracked windshield, and the hood crumpled into a shallow U of steel. Deere hit the brakes and the tires skidded unbearably over the strange fluids now spilled all over the asphalt. And then they were still.

Deere began screaming and soon was hyperventilating, his breaths ragged and phlegmy with shock and confusion. Rimes grabbed Deere by the head and held him, wrapped him in his arms and held him and shushed him as if he were a man reversed into a baby.

Coffee kicked his mangled door free and moved into the night. He could hear the blood in the horse's lungs and the sound of its useless legs quivering in the night and it was almost more than his mind could process. For a moment his resolution was broken and he spun under the stars in a state of disbelief, all his nerves undone and burnt into a circuit of dead sensors.

The headlights were flickering and unreliable, splashed in red, so he moved blind in the night, using his feet to feel the debris and his ears to reach out into the black for anything that moved or spoke or cried. His feet touched the shredded canvas of the buggy's body. His feet tripped on the crippled metal chassis, then were caught in the leg trap of a broken wheel, its spokes gone in places. His feet kicked what he thought was a bag of clothing or food, and he reached down and instead touched the smooth face of a child. He jerked his hand back toward his own mouth, but his breath was gone. He knelt down slowly and touched the child again and knew the body was horribly still. He began moving back toward Deere's sobbing.

“Does it run?” he barked, not even waiting for a response. “Does the motherfucker run!”

“Christ, Coffee,” said Rimes. “I mean, Jesus Christ is anyone out there?”

Coffee put his hand past Deere and touched the keys. The engine inexplicably was still running, ticking now loud against the night. Coffee pushed Deere toward the center of the bench, and though he could not see Rimes, he knew the man's face was etched in sorrow and confusion. Deere continued to babble and sing out bursts of unintelligible madness.

“Shut that door if you can,” ordered Coffee. “Shut that fucking door and help me out here, Rimes. We've got to get him out of here. We've all got to go.”

“What about the Amish?” said Rimes. “Are they out there?”

“It's done,” said Coffee. “Jesus Christ, man, it is done. All I know is we got to get the fuck outta here, right now.”

And then a thin wrecked voice called out, weak against the sound of the engine, and it said, “Help.”

“Goddamn it, Coffee,” said Rimes. “We get 'em and drop 'em in town, for God's sake. We can't leave 'em to die.”

Deere wailed, his face a dripping mask of tears and snot.

“We're letting them be,” said Coffee, and he closed his door and eased the truck limping forward and away from the unseen array of carnage.

*   *   *

In the morning, they pushed the truck into the river that bisected Coffee's land, and it sunk into the brown water and vanished. Rimes built a fire and burned their clothes in a pyre. They stared skittishly at the smudgy smoke that went up out over the coulee. Afterward, Deere just rocked himself back and forth on Coffee's couch. His face was swollen, his eyes red and haunted. Coffee tuned the radio, searching for news of the crash, but when he found it, turned the volume down so that only he could learn the details. The police were searching for the killers of a small boy, criminals who had crippled a family and killed their horse. Coffee turned the radio off and watched the embers of their fire.

“Let me make a call,” he said aloud and to no one in particular. “Get us another vehicle.” Then, “Rimes, call Deere's wife and make some shit up. We all need an alibi. I'll call Trixie and call in a favor.”

Rimes nodded his head and stared at Deere, still rocking back and forth, like a man who had dropped his faculties all the way down a very deep, dark well.

They spent the day on Coffee's land, barely moving at all. They drank tea and artesian water. From time to time Deere went outside to stand beside the smoldering remains of their garments. He threw stones into the water. His friends watched him like a man on suicide watch.

Coffee smoked a cigarette. He looked at Rimes in a hard way and said, “I've been in worse spots than this. We'll get it figured.”

*   *   *

When he came out of it, the first thing Deere asked was “Where's their church?”

“This is real life, Daniel,” Rimes said. “Okay? Coffee'll take you home to your wife, but then … You can never come back here.”

Deere looked into Rimes's eyes. “There has to be a service. Someone got killed.”

Coffee shook his head, looking out at the river where the truck now rested under twelve feet of murky water. “They don't have churches,” he said. “It'll be at a house. The family's house, probably. Christ, Deere, come on.”

“Daniel, just stay away from this,” Rimes said. “They're looking for a long-haul truck driver. We play this smart, it just goes away.” He made a motion with his hand, as if to smooth the air between them.

“No,” said Deere. “I own this thing. I killed someone. I fucking killed someone.”

Coffee shook his head, ran his hands over his unshaven face.

“Goddamnit, Daniel, stay away from this!” snapped Rimes, standing from his chair to loom up over his seated friend.

“I'm not a fucking kid!” said Deere. “Okay, Rimes! And listen, don't you fucking worry. I'm not going to squeal on you.”

*   *   *

The house was a tall, rambling affair, a white building on a hill, and they knew that it was the one from the multitude of horses and buggies outside. Coffee pulled Trixie's Bronco to the margin of the gravel road a quarter mile from the house. He shut off the engine and looked out at the stark structure. Rimes was back to work. It was just Deere and Coffee. Glancing across the vehicle at his friend, Coffee saw that the man had lost weight in just the few days since the accident and that in patches, his hair seemed to have lost its color and gone white.

“I'll tell you again,” Coffee said, “I'll take you to Canada. Shit, I'd drive you to Mexico. Come on, Deere. You don't have to take all of this.”

Deere shook his head.

“Then I'm calling my lawyer for you,” said Coffee. “Christ. Christ, Daniel.”

They parked the Bronco and walked the last hundred yards or so to the house.

Even before they came close to the house, they could hear the singing inside. They neared a bank of rectangular windows, careful not to be seen, pressing their backs to the wood clapboards of the building. The hymn came out of the mourners from a low place and went into the air like a bank of clouds. Deere moved closer to the window, positioning himself so he could see. Their backs were straight and their clothes were a darkness clinging to their skinny bodies. The men wore beards, though their upper lips were freshly shaved and ruddy in the cool air. The words were in another language, and Deere and Coffee stood outside of the house and listened and listened, and by and by Deere began silently crying and Coffee put his arm around his friend, held him. Their breaths were on the window of the house and created a gray fog.

A small body lay in repose at the front of a large room, and the face of the small body belonged to a little boy with blond hair. His hair captured what little light entered the building like fibers of good energy. A coffin was near his body on the floor, and outside the house Coffee thought he smelled freshly cut pine.