Bonfire: A Novel Read online

  Putana was probably the only Spanish word Annie Baum ever learned.

  But there was something else—something involving the Game. I never heard exactly. Condor was a slippery kind of person, always sliding through cracks just before you could pin him into place. He wasn’t popular, but he wasn’t unpopular, either. He lived outside the system. Even the stories about him got refracted and rounded off, bounced back to us before they’d had a chance to solidify. Brent O’Connell and his friends supposedly went to Condor’s house and beat the shit out of him. Was it something he did to Kaycee? Or tried to do? It was after Becky Sarinelli died, I know that. And I remember, too, that Condor and Becky Sarinelli were friends.

  That’s the thing I remember most of all: that Condor was always in trouble. Or he was always finding trouble.

  He stands up. “Want something drinkable?”

  He moves out from behind the counter and crosses the room in a few steps. He still has that weird graceful quality, even though he’s built like a farmer, all shoulders and forearms and blunt hands.

  “This one’s decent.” When he reaches for a bottle on the top shelf, his T-shirt rides up, and I see a tattoo wrapped around his torso: a pair of wings. “You like Bordeaux?”

  “I like wine,” I say. “I’ll take it.” I follow him up to the register. I have no cash on me, so I hand him my card. When I see him puzzling over the name, I blurt out, “We actually know each other. I’m Abby Williams. I was a year behind you and we were in the same Spanish class.”

  Unexpectedly, Condor laughs. “I do remember you now,” he says. “So you are from around here.”

  “Originally.”

  “Well, I’m surprised you remember me. I was never in class those days. Skipped out to smoke up in the woods behind the football field, most of the time. Hence, my kingdom.” He opens his arms to indicate the store, the narrow racks filled with cheap liquor, a whole aisle dedicated to the smallest bottles for the alcoholics who can afford only a little at a time. He doesn’t sound bitter, though. “So what are you doing back in this charming little town?”

  “I’m working on a case, I’m a lawyer now. Environmental law.”

  “Big time, huh? Good for you.” I can’t tell if he means it or not.

  “Pretty junior, actually,” I say, not to downplay it, just to clarify.

  “Still, you got out. That’s something. That’s a lot.” This time, I know he means it. “Here.” He hands me the bottle without ringing me up. “On me. A welcome-home present.”

  “You don’t have to.” I reach for the bag, and as my hand makes contact with his, something passes between us, a quick transfer of chemistry and heat.

  That’s the whole problem with instincts: they’re all fucking wrong.

  “I want to.”

  “Thank you. That’s very…nice of you,” I say, taking the bag and walking away, fast.

  “And hey, Abby,” he calls, when I’m already almost out the door. “Don’t be a stranger. I never forget a pretty face twice.” Condor’s smile is wide, and maybe, just maybe, genuine.

  And I know right then that I’m in trouble.

  Chapter Five

  Less than a mile from my father’s house, the road narrows and becomes a gravel path, so familiar it shrinks a decade into no time at all. Tiny rocks ping against the car while birds—turkey vultures, this time—pick over a carcass in the road. I lean on the horn and they look up with those dull hooded eyes before lifting into the air.

  It’s just dinner, I remind myself. Simple. Quick. My father has no power over me. He is just a person, even if he’s a terrible one. There are bad people in the world; sometimes, they are your own parents. But he can’t see into my thoughts. He can’t read my sins, like I once thought he could.

  I can’t avoid him, anyway.

  Like so many around here, my childhood home is a modest split-level dumped on a plot of land in the middle of nowhere. There’s nothing strange about it, no darkness to its gabled roof or clapboard siding, nothing peculiar in the concrete porch or the patch of yard browning in the sun.

  Still, the house seems to rush toward me and not the other way around. Like it’s eager to get me inside. Like it’s been waiting.

  For the first time in nearly a decade, I’m home.

  I kill the engine and fuss with my hair, which is knotted on the top of my head, killing time, buying an extra few seconds. I almost never wear my hair down, and by now it reaches midway down my back. Every few months I take scissors to it myself, trimming away the dead ends. I’ve always wanted to cut it short, always sworn I was going to. Several times I’ve even been in a hairdresser’s chair before panicking at the sight of the scissors. My dad always told me that my hair is my one good quality, and somehow that idea grew into the very hair itself—that, and the memory of my mom running her fingers through it from scalp to end as she braided it so that it would later fall in waves. Somehow I fear that without long hair I’ll be ugly. But even worse, that by cutting my hair I’ll be cutting away this memory, one of my few very good ones. I’ll have to lose her again. But this time, it really will be my fault.

  I climb out of the car and stand for a second, staring out at the line of trees in the forest: acres running down to the reservoir, public land, and my private oasis when I was little. I try and remember the last time I saw my father but I get a composite of images: his hand around my throat, the time he rooted out a thong in my underwear drawer and made me wear it around my neck at dinner for a week. The moments of kindness, strange and startling and almost more painful than the abuse: flowers gathered for me in a cup by the bed, a birthday surprise trip to a carnival in Indianapolis, the time he helped me bury Chestnut after I found him stiff and cold in the woods behind the house, his gums crusted over with vomit.

  When I left town, four days after my eighteenth birthday, and two days after graduation, I drove west to Chicago with my heart in my throat and two suitcases in the trunk, certain for every second past the city that God would strike me dead. You’re only safe in Barrens. For more than half my life I thought I would be sent to hell if I jumped ship. Like leaving was the end-all sin. But then I realized hell was right here in Barrens, and that made leaving worth the risk.

  Gravel crunches under my boots as I make my way up the path. There’s the bird feeder I made when I was eight. There’s a dirt patch where the grass never recovered from the kiddie swimming pool that sat there through many seasons. There’s my mother’s old wind chime clinking softly from the porch—I feel a pang at this—that she made herself out of tin and painted wood. A splintered cross is still tacked to the front door.

  The air smells like charred logs, like summer. But behind the familiar smells of grass and dirt and char that I’ve always loved is another odor, thick and pungent. I know that smell. Reeds. Rot.

  The smell of drought. The reservoir is less than a half mile from here, concealed from view just beyond the trees.

  Inside, I find my father in the squat little living room, washed in bluish TV light that reminds me of being underwater.

  My father looks small. Small, and old. The shock of seeing him nearly causes me to stumble. He was always a big guy, not tall but the kind of person who swallowed a room just by walking into it, and muscled from years of working outside: roofing, carpentry, excavating, work on the local farms. The few times a year we speak on the phone, that’s who I imagine on the other end of the line.

  Now his muscles seem to have melted into folds of skin, which is gray and thin and draped like a sheet over his bones. He looks like a powdered corpse, and when he turns toward me, it takes his eyes a second to focus.

  For a moment, I’m terrified: he doesn’t recognize me, either.

  Then he begins to hoist himself up, gripping the arms of his easy chair.

  “It’s okay, Dad. Sit.” I lean down and let him hug me. I can’t remember the last time we hugged.

  “Sweetheart.” He pats my shoulder and brushes his dry lips against my cheek. His v
oice is faint, and his greeting—sweetheart—is one he hasn’t used since I was a small child. “I hoped you were still coming.”

  “Of course, Dad. I told you I was,” I say.

  “It’s been so long…” He closes his eyes, leaning back in his chair, as if even the small physical effort has exhausted him.

  I resist the urge to apologize. He knows why I haven’t come sooner. Everyone knows—about his temper, about his fits, about his dark moods. For weeks after my mother died, everything I did made him erupt in a fury. And then, just as quickly, he would withdraw into silence, would pretend I didn’t exist at all. But everything he did was okay, because he’d “found the Lord.” In town, he wore his religion like armor, and somehow that kept him untouchable. At home, he wielded it like a weapon.

  Everyone knew, and at the same time, no one saw; no one said a thing. In the city, everyone is anonymous; but in a small town where everyone knows everyone, it takes real skill to look the other way when you’re looking at a face you recognize.

  Nothing has changed in here, aside from the addition of a single photo—one I sent from college graduation—tacked above the mantel. My mother’s china on display in the hutch. The painting of Jesus on the cross in the corner of the dining room. An old box TV with a VCR—God, a VCR—just opposite my dad’s easy chair. A fine layer of dust on everything. And my dad’s slippers—the same slippers he had ten years ago—nearly worn through. It’s as if time stopped when I left.

  I didn’t know what to expect coming here. My aunt Jen—Dad’s sister, older by four years—sent me a note last Christmas after she’d passed through. She was the one who told me about Dad’s decline. Alzheimer’s, she thought, though of course my dad refused to go to the doctor.

  It’s just little things, she’d said. Where his keys are. Mood swings. He falls down a lot. He still knows who we are, though.

  “How was the drive?” His voice sounds old, worn to thinness, and makes an unexpected swell of pity rise inside of me.

  “Fine. Traffic stopped up on 83, but only for a half hour or so.” Ten years and we’re talking about traffic. There’s a long, awkward silence and I fumble for something to say. What did we ever talk about? Did we talk?

  Instinctually, I count the steps to the front door in my head: twenty-three. Thirteen to the door that leads through the kitchen to the backyard. Seventeen to the stairs, in case I need to flee to my room.

  My old room. This isn’t my house anymore. This isn’t my life.

  “I’ve made dinner,” he says, almost proudly. This time he succeeds in pulling himself out of the chair and, leaning heavily on one hand, fumbles for his cane. “I need this thing now.”

  I don’t really know what I’m supposed to say, so I just give him a tight-lipped half smile and follow him into the kitchen. He’s slow, hunched over his cane, and seeing him like this is beyond confusing. That feeling again—sadness, pity, yearning to make it better—flares up in me, unbidden. I’ve prepared, but not for this. Suddenly I feel a new kind of fear—that I will have to learn all over again how to survive in the presence of this man, how to find myself. That he will make me love him again, and then disappoint me, and I will have to learn all over again how to unlove him.

  My dad has made lasagna—“from scratch,” he says, “not the frozen ones”—and I feel another pang when I imagine him stumping around the kitchen on his cane, cutting onions one-handed, layering the sauce and cheese. It’s vegetarian, too. Although the signs of his illness are there—he forgets the word for potholders, and mentions my mother once in the present tense—he hasn’t forgotten that I don’t eat meat.

  I suddenly wonder if he remembers the night we sat at the table and I asked if he knew what happened to Little Bubsy, the pet rabbit I kept as a kid. I was probably five. My mother stared down at her plate, her eyes milky from drugs and illness.

  “You just ate him,” my dad said. I haven’t been able to stomach meat since.

  I wash my hands in water so hot it sends billows of steam toward the ceiling.

  We have our lasagna mostly in silence. It’s only after dinner, when I’m washing the dishes by hand, that I realize we didn’t say grace over our meal.

  Did he forget?

  Sweat gathers under my armpits.

  He falls asleep in front of the TV while I clean. I grab a quilt—a quilt my mother made—and cover him in the chair. He rouses slightly and grabs my arm so hard I nearly gasp, unreasonably—afraid.

  “I’m happy to have you back,” he says. “I’m happy you’re here.”

  Suddenly I want to cry. This is the worst trick of all.

  “Only for a visit, Dad.” I fight to keep my voice from breaking. After so many years. How dare he? Anger was the only thing I had, the only thing I’ve ever been able to depend on.

  How dare he take that from me, too?

  Chapter Six

  Only the second day on the job and the potential civil suit is imploding: in the morning, I find out that two of our half dozen complainants, the Davies and the Ioccos, have now withdrawn their complaints. Rich Iocco is coach of the local Little League team, and funds for new uniforms and a bus to away games mysteriously dried up after Optimal learned he was planning to talk to us.

  Which means that either we might be onto something or we might be running straight toward a brick wall.

  Unfortunately, the two aren’t mutually exclusive.

  I send Portland out to speak to some local GP’s, to swing by the hospitals and befriend the nurses—brutal, often fruitless work, but he’s easy on the eyes and his beard should make people feel at ease. Portland and Flora will head up the door-to-door canvass to try to suss out potential support. A handful of farms top the list of water usage per acre, so I direct them to start there: if anyone should be worried about supply, it’s the people whose livelihoods directly depend on it. Farmers don’t get their subsidies from Optimal, and may be easier to persuade. It will be my job to track down Carolina Dawes, whose kid has been complaining of rashes.

  Joe and Raj get to geek out on data: two years ago Optimal subcontracted IBC Waste to deal with hazardous chemical disposal and environmental protocol.

  In other words, they passed the buck, big time.

  “Even if we prove Optimal is pumping goddamn uranium into the kiddie pools, they will just point the finger at IBC,” Joe says.

  It’s not even nine thirty, and already, my mood is cracking. I take a deep breath. “So we’ll have to show that Optimal had direct knowledge. We’ll have to prove they’re the ones behind the steering wheel.”

  Joe sighs. “Hooray. Two cases for the price of one. I always loved me a twofer.”

  —

  Carolina Dawes lives in a converted hunter’s cabin in what counts for a zoning error: just beyond it lies a now-defunct dump within shouting distance of the shore of the reservoir. The only car in the driveway is mounted on cinderblocks.

  I have to wedge my car in behind a rust-eaten Geo Tracker so filmed with dirt the original color is impossible to measure. Someone has written Wash Me on the rear window with a finger. Real original.

  When I step onto the porch, a Chihuahua starts freaking out, pressing its nose against the screen and yapping incessantly. A woman hushes it sharply.

  “Chucky! Shut it!” she says. A second later she shoves open the door so hard I have to jump back. “Sorry. Damn thing’s all swelled up.” She is enormously fat, wearing teal polka-dot stretch pants and an oversized shirt with a Carhartt logo across the chest. Cigarette smoke rises off her like a mist.

  “Ms. Dawes?” I ask.

  “What do you want?” She says it not rudely, but as if she’s genuinely curious.

  “I’m Abby Williams. I work with the Center for Environmental Advocacy.” This means nothing to her, obviously. “A few days ago, one of our team members was going door to door and you mentioned you’d had some kind of problems with your water…”

  “I didn’t say that.” For a second, my heart drops, until
she adds, “I said my kid Coop has been getting rashes. At first I thought it was ringworm like from one of the other kids but when I went to the clinic the doctor said no that wasn’t it. Then he asked me about what kind of laundry detergent I use and where we get our water from, so I put two and two together.”

  “Does your son ever swim in the reservoir?” I ask her, and she nearly hacks up a lung.

  “He don’t know how.” She pounds her chest, loosening whatever’s rattling around there. “Sorry. I worked over at Optimal for fifteen years. That’s why the cough.” She lights a cigarette.

  “Is that why you left?” I ask.

  “Didn’t leave. I got fired.”

  My heart sinks: any good defense lawyer will blow holes through her story, claim she’s looking for revenge and a payday. Still, I persist. I kind of like Carolina Dawes and her polka-dot stretch pants.

  “You have well water, don’t you?” I ask her, and her expression folds up around her cigarette, like she’s trying to suck herself down it, not the other way around.

  “We should,” she says. “But how things been going…this is the third year straight running with a drought…” She taps her ash angrily onto the porch. “So I figure why not take a little something free?”

  Suddenly I understand. The PVC piping, the hoses rigged like laundry lines in the backyard: she’s been tapping the reservoir.

  “But that’s when Coop started having all those problems, when we decided to try and give the well a rest…”

  “Do you have pictures of his rash?” I ask her, and she grinds the cigarette out into the railing, exhaling a long plume of smoke.

  “I can do you one better,” she says, and then turns her head to shout. “Coop. Coop! I know you hear me, so get your little butt down here. He’s a little shy,” she adds, as someone moves in the darkness behind the screen door. “And all that itching and nonsense ain’t helping none, let me tell you. Come on, Coop. It’s all right. This nice lady’s here to help.”