Beneath the Bonfire (17 page)

She served him stale cookies and reheated coffee. He pretended to eat, spit the cookies into a napkin, wiped off his tongue. At the kitchen table he let her talk for two hours, the darkness of the house closing in around them. Then he produced a document that he had her sign, his hand on her frail wrist. She fell asleep in the chair later and he carried her up a flight of stairs to her bed. She weighed next to nothing. When he held a pillow over her face, she did not struggle, her hands swatting weakly at his wrists, as if shooing flies. He pressed his ear to her chest and held a mirror before her thin lips, terrified of her bony fingers reanimating.

And then he went outside to his truck, where he let the three dogs out, kissing at them and clapping his hands. They wagged their tails in the darkness and urinated. He reached into the truck and illuminated the headlights. They shone out onto the prairie, its grasses bending with the evening wind. In the distance, one giant oak. He set off across the field, the dogs at his heels. He collected fallen limbs until dawn, stacking the wood behind the house. In the barn he found kerosene and some rotten lumber, which he also assembled behind the house. Exhausted, he went back inside the house, wrapped the old woman in her bedsheets, carried her out to the barn, and then returned to her bedroom, where he fell into her ancient mattress and went instantly to sleep, boots still on, and the dogs staring at him from the floor, where they curled in on themselves, their eyes soft and wet. In the mattress he felt the depressions of where she had slept for so many years, her ghost in bed with him. He considered burning the thing, but did not want to leave behind its ancient metal coils. He would buy a new one. The mattress was loud and lumpy, but he dozed heavily.

The next evening he lighted a huge pyre behind the house on the margins of the prairie. He watched the flames envelop the figure in bedsheets and then returned to the house, where he looked for a television for over an hour before turning on an old record player, the volume of which filled the house and set the dogs to barking. He quickly threw the machine out onto the lawn before retiring to the bedroom, where he pulled the mattress onto the floor. He lay down and the dogs nestled their bodies against his, warming his thighs and belly. Every time he rolled over, the mattress made a sound like dry leaves. He stripped the mattress of its stale sheets, wrapping them around him, and then he fit the mattress into the old woman's closet, shutting the folding doors, the mattress still alive sounding, everywhere the noise of dry papers being rattled. He went back to the dogs on the floor and fell asleep, the flames of the pyre burning wide and high into the night. It would be impossible for anyone to see the black smoke.

In the morning, a pile of hot ash and coals. He kicked the cinders for bone but saw nothing discernible. The dogs sniffed the air and there was the bouquet of prairie grasses and flowers. Fresh dry summer air being pushed across the flatlands from the Dakotas. He threw a baseball across the fields and the dogs chased it endlessly. The leather of the dirty orb almost torn away, the marks of the dogs' teeth everywhere, dimpling the baseball a thousand times over. He hung the bedsheets out on the line and they whipped in the wind like spinnakers, the dogs nipping at the moving fabric.

Months passed and he collected dogs, training them, hardening them. He rescued them from overburdened kennels and from the houses of parents with small children, the houses of the frail and elderly. He had moved around the country like this, fighting dogs and organizing circuits: Detroit, Cody, Corvallis, Tempe, Tulsa, Des Moines. He had always loved dogs. His parents had let the family Rottweiler sleep in his crib with him.

*   *   *

Bethany first met him at the pet store where she cashiered. She was timid around men, afraid she smelled of dog food and cat litter. She rarely made eye contact with customers, often leaning back against the till to read thick paperback books. Thirty-one years old, and she had made love only once, during the night of her junior prom. And now Bret Kruk was placing his fingers underneath her chin and lifting her startled face to look into his. There was a line behind him, but no one complained or even coughed. He was handsome in a dangerous-looking sort of way, the muscles in him coiled up like a rattlesnake. In bars and restaurants he demanded the best service without so much as raising his voice, just by darkening his face. People seemed to respect him without reason.

“We should go for a walk sometime,” he said. “I'm new around here. You could show me around. Meet my dogs. I bet they'd like you.” His voice was warm. His fingertips were warm. He smelled of fresh air.

She smiled, wrote down her telephone number for him, her heart bursting with fire, with an inexhaustible supply of love. Hardly remembered to take his money. He pushed an entire cart of dog food into the parking lot, and she watched from inside as he loaded the heavy bags into a red Ram. She was unaccustomed to seeing new vehicles in the parking lot.

Days later they were walking beside Crawfish Creek, not far from his farm. The fields around the great farmhouse lay fallow and there was no manure smell in the air, nor were there any animals in sight—no cows or sheep or even horses—just his dogs. At that time he had three that he favored. They rushed out to greet her car when she pulled beside the farmhouse, teeth bared, tossing creamy slobber over her windows, claws raking the metal of her small Japanese car. She waited for him to come out of the house. He smiled and waved at her. Said something almost inaudibly and the three dogs sat in rapt attention, panting.

“You can get out,” he said. “They won't bother you now.”

She had brought him a loaf of homemade bread still warm from the oven and steaming its plastic bag like breath. He seemed too tall and skinny, a scarecrow of a man, though well-muscled.

“This is my pack,” he said, “or part of it. This is Oso, Point, and Bick.”

“Part of it?” she asked, confused.

“I'm a breeder,” he said, touching the sinewy muscle of his own biceps where several tattoos had been crudely executed. Cartoon bulldogs.

“Are these pit bulls?” she asked, extending her hand gingerly toward them.

“Don't be afraid,” he said forcefully, “it spooks them.”

Their long tongues lapped at her fingers. She giggled.

“See?” he said, watching her from the corners of his eyes, “my babies.”

“How long have you lived out here?” she asked, rubbing the dogs' ears. There were scars on their heads, some old and some new. She touched the animals lightly, wondering if he had rescued the wounded trio.

“A few months,” he said. “My grandmother passed away and left me the land. I never grew up around here, so I'm still learning the roads, where all the stores are at. It's nice enough. Room for the dogs to roam. And I got the barn.” He motioned toward the hulking red building, set up off the earth on a foundation of fieldstones. She thought she heard barking in that direction.

“So you have other dogs too?” she asked, frowning.

He shook his head, smiled. “You sure have a lot of questions,” he said. “Here. Let's go for a walk.” He reached for her hand. His was warm, hers cold and clammy. She was conscious of her own skin on his.

He had packed a picnic basket and they went past the farmhouse and over a field of chopped cornstalks, a year's worth of weeds just beginning to die off. It was October, the air cool and damp. The sky was gray and they marched through the field, his dogs bounding everywhere, happy. Pheasants fluttered loudly into the sky, exploding off the ground, startling her.

“I've been watching you,” he said, looking at her face, drawing her eyes up to his. “You're gorgeous. You know that?”

She did not know what to say, so she turned her head away but squeezed his hand with hers. She wanted to believe him but didn't entirely. No one had ever called her gorgeous; no one had ever called her anything. At the top of a ridge the field dropped down below them toward the leaden-colored creek. The leaves on the trees had mostly turned and come down, but some still clung on in russets and gold.

They walked until dusk, returning through the field to the farmhouse. She saw a pile of old ashes behind the house, thought she saw something like a bone. Dismissed it as one of the dog's playthings. Went on. Her feet were tired.

“You could come in,” he said. “I'll make you tea.”

He held her hands. In the wind, the sound of more barking. She looked toward the barn. She did not want to be alone. “Come on,” he said, “I won't bite.”

And she followed him inside the farmhouse. Later they made love on an old brass bed. He was gentle at first, then later more rough. Her underwear had remained on one of her legs, like an anklet. Afterward, lying there beside him, she watched as the dogs nosed open the door to the bedroom and stood next to his side of the bed. They looked at him patiently and one of them licked his toes, which were hanging off the bed. She looked across the room at the closet, where a broken mattress stood crookedly, pressing up against the folding doors. Out the window she looked down at the circle of ashes and dead coals. She wondered if someday this might be her own house. She stood up to go to the bathroom and the dogs growled, but she simply shushed them, patted their heads and scratched their bellies. They whined quietly in pleasure.

In the hallway were dozens of black-and-white photographs hanging inside aged wooden frames. Early photographs of farmers, horses, state fairs. Somber faces looking back at a photographer no doubt hidden behind a big box camera, a cape of black wool draped over the man's head and back.
He must feel very connected to this house
, she thought. She touched the glass that protected the photos with her fingers, left her prints on the strangers' faces. She proceeded down the hallway and sat on the toilet. The sound of her own water embarrassed her. The smell of coitus was on her skin, on the smallest of her hairs. She wondered if the dogs understood that fragrance.

*   *   *

Aida had seen Bethany precisely twice before the night she called from the pet store, asking for help. But she remembered only the one occurrence, which even now she could not forget.

Four months shy of her retirement from the highway patrol, the K9 department sent her to the pet store to buy a bag of kibble—a fool's errand, in fact, and she the fool. Her coworkers had simply sent her on a mission to get her away from the station, where they removed her desk from the office, four big officers carrying it into the back recesses of the garage. Following which everyone hurriedly rearranged their own desks to compensate for the empty spot they had left behind. And then they filled her locker with a thousand golf balls, red-faced with laughter and pleasure, while several miles away, she entered the pet store, its smells overwhelming. From the back of the store: the calls and singing of a dozen different exotic birds. She followed the signs, her index finger raised in the air—
DOGS
—then shouldered the fifty-pound bag and walked back up to the registers. She paused to observe the fish in their aquariums. She had never owned any pets, not even in her childhood.

Kruk was there, had not noticed her, despite her red hair and uniform. His face was buried in the young cashier's hair, near her ear. The cashier was shaking, and then Aida saw that she was weeping, that her face had been mutilated, the wounds still fresh and bleeding. He shook her one final time and then with an open hand smacked her face. Instantly Aida set the bag of kibble down and reached for her service weapon.

“Stop it right there,” she said to Kruk's flexed back muscles.

“Mind your fuckin' business,” he said to her, hardly even bothering to turn around. “It's all over anyway. Hard to imagine ever wanting to see
this
face again.”

Then, taking the older woman in more fully, his eyes flickered in recognition and then he cracked a small smile.
The redhead cop
, he thought.
She doesn't even recognize us
.
Beth's face.

“Hands on the back of your head,” said Aida.

He complied, folding them slowly over the back of his skull, his close-cropped black hair. There was blood on his fingers.

“On your knees,” Aida told him.

The cashier wept loudly, blood dripping down her neck. “Hold on, girl,” Aida said. “Call nine-one-one. Call it now.”

But the girl did not respond. He was lowering himself onto his knees and Aida went to him, holstering her pistol as she reached for her handcuffs. Only then he rolled slightly forward and to his right, and, grabbing her outstretched hand, threw her over himself, the pistol clattering on the store's shining tiled floor. The store was empty, just the three of them, the manager out delivering the day's bank deposits, with a side trip home to give his diabetic cat a shot of insulin. Kruk seized the weapon and caught Aida in his sights. She raised her hands in the air, her face unmoving. The macaws and parrots shrieked loudly, pantomimed the foul language of teenage customers like a filthy peanut gallery, at once disturbed and delighted by the ruckus.

“Bad idea,” she told him, “stupid, stupid idea.” She rubbed her head, considered how she had come to lose the pistol. Studied the skinny man in front of her, tattoos on his arms, the aged ink little more than a blur of shapes.

He moved away from the two women, out of the store and into his big shining red truck. Aida was just reaching into her pocket for the keys to her prowler when Bethany caught her arm, the girl's grip surprisingly strong. Her face was bleeding, the scars reopened, and her tears must have burned in those wounds. Aida wanted to shake her off but stopped. Outside, she heard the man's truck burn rubber and disappear.

“Don't,” Bethany said. “Just … don't.”

Aida's mouth opened; she was furious. “He's got my gun!” she shouted. She turned to go, but the bleeding woman held her in place.