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About That Bonfire By Tim Boisvert At first we were just going to play games. Glenn and I had driven home slowly from Home Depot, thinking of something to do. "Games," he said. "Or a movie," I replied. So we decided to do games or a movie. Glenn started calling. Mavis. Games. Our house. Twenty minutes. Bye. Then he called a few more, same thing. Thirty minutes later, a knock. Brian Mavis has gained a bit of weight since he stopped drinking, thank heavens. He's chubby around the face, maybe it's just his age. I don't know what his parents look like, though, so maybe it's not because he's not drinking anymore. I guess it got pretty bad, though. I didn't ask, he just told me he wasn't drinking anymore. And I saw him at church last time I was home, so it must've been a while now. Angie was assigned to bring the games. She knocked -- very polite. In her arms were Scene It? and some other trivia game. I was ecstatic! Glenn was glum. We wouldn't be playing games after all. "We could do a bonfire," someone offered. "Yeah!" we shouted. Mavis went to his parents' to get wood -- he had wood, he said. He could run home and grab it -- and was back within twenty minutes. Meanwhile, Angie and I went to WalMart to try and get pallets. They keep them there between WalMart and Albertsons, and so many of them are broken. They wouldn't care if we took some. They cared. A man told us no. He snuck out of the shadows with a cigarette in his mouth. He was behind the chain link fence just outside of Garden, and I could've just taken the pallets and thrown them in the back of the truck and sped away, I could've screamed for Angie to get out and help, grab a pallet, throw it in the back, and we could've just fled the scene right there. Who the hell is this guy? Does WalMart have a pallet night watchman? Cameron and Dad both said we could get the broken ones. Cameron works at WalMart! He knows this stuff! The broken pallets can be taken! And the night watchman told us they get credit for the broken ones! I think he lied to me -- Cameron later told me he was lying to me. We left empty-handed. Mavis was there when we got back. So were a few others. Sarah, Ricky, Christy, McKay -- no, McKay wasn't there. He met us up there. Ricky had been there earlier, too, before we left. He had gone home to get graham crackers and marshmallows, though. Angie and I had picked up the chocolate bars -- 8 of them, Hershey's -- and the wire coat hangers. They only had the plastic-coated ones, though. We got them anyway. There's no harm in a little plastic, I had said to her. She hadn't replied. We stood out front and looked at each other for a while, wondering who was going to be the leader of this pack, the head of the committee, the one to tell us to get in the cars and drive. It never happened. Five minutes passed before it finally made sense to everyone, and we were finally on our way. Glenn and Christy had Dad's truck and I was with Ricky. Mavis had a few with him, too. We pulled off at the bottom of the hill and turned into some houses. Dave came running out and got into Dad's truck. He had his dinner in his hands. The parade continued up the hill. In the parking lot of the college, Ricky thought he saw a police officer, so he slowed down. Glenn saw the car a few moments later and slammed on the brakes, not used to driving the heavy truck. We thought for sure the officer was going to follow him and pull him over. It wasn't a police officer, just a Crown Victoria randomly sitting in the college parking lot. What was it doing there? We didn't know. Maybe there were people having sex in there, but we didn't see any movement. So we continued up the hill, turning left after the college and onto a dirt road heading east. Very bumpy, this road. Huge potholes surprising us at every turn. We were in trucks, though, burly vehicles that could face the challenge, these were just little bumps in the road. No need to slow down, no need to brake, no need to suck our air in and hold it when we saw a big dip coming. We were men driving these vehicles. We turned right somewhere near a rocky hill and headed south again, into a small valley from where the city could not be seen. We would build a fire here. We would pull the wood out of the back of Mavis' truck and make a small teepee like we learned in Boy Scouts. We would collect the pieces of kindling left on the ground from the previous bonfire and put them under the teepee. We would go back to Ricky's truck and get the bags of packing paper -- he had just moved, purchased his first home -- and rip the plastic open, the paper pouring out. We would crumple the fallen papers and add them to the teepee. We would go to Mavis' truck and find the bottle of lighter fluid, open it, and squirt too much onto the teepee. And then, when we were sure everyone was ready, when the women were all watching, we would light the teepee and watch it quickly turn into a giant ball of fire. And we would be proud of our creation. Someone got the chocolate bars and graham crackers and we began to roast marshmallows on the coathangers -- some peeled the plastic away. Ricky kept putting his too far into the fire, causing the marshmallows to burst into flames. The rest of us focused on toasting ours from a distance. We waited until they had the right texture, the right consistency, lightly brown on the outside and squishy on the inside. We ate s'mores. Mavis kept looking under his truck. He thought he had broken it somehow on one of the potholes. He recruited McKay to drive up the side of the mountain with him. They left. McKay leaned out the window with the lamp Mavis uses for looking at the stars, pointing the way up the dirt road as it winded up the mountain. We watched them as the lights got further and further away from us, our backs and legs getting too hot because we were standing still for so long. Toward the top of the mountain they fishtailed, then corrected, then disappeared over the top. We turned back to the fire and watched it. We were getting tired, and the heat started to burn our eyes. Mavis and McKay came back and pronounced the truck as healthy. It must've just been a bush or something, we all agreed. Dave sat in a plastic chair we had taken from the backyard. He leaned back on two legs and the plastic exploded, sending him flipping backwards. I think he exagerrated the fall, but we all laughed. The remnants of the chair were thrown into the desert. Mavis had found a hammer on the ground when we first arrived and had put it into the fire. When it died down, we noticed that the hammer was red hot. A makeshift crane was produced and the red hot metal was pulled from the fire. I put a marshmallow on it and watched it sizzle. The aroma was sweet, caramel. Someone left. I think it was Ricky. He had to be up the next morning. Some of the girls went with him. McKay and Dave left. Mavis left. Glenn, Christy, and I stayed to put out the fire. I spit into it, like I always do, even though it makes no difference. We buried the fire with sand, not really doing a good job, but making sure the flames were gone and most of the coals were covered. And then we drove away, through the valley, over the potholes, past the Crown Victoria, down the hill, past Dave's neighborhood, around WalMart, and to my parents house, where I went in, changed, and went to bed. Back to Tim's Short Stories |