The Chair and The Fire
An amber sunset splashed across the fields of dying grass. Shades of light prairie blue broke through the clouds that rested on another day’s tired horizon. Gavyn Aubade’s dark grey car passed the streaking divider lines of the highway. The powerlines on the side of the road rolled in an up-and-down motion as the vehicle accelerated, not a shadow stopping the gold from enveloping it.
Gavyn Aubade had worked as Benjamin Verdigris’ social worker for 3 months. Verdigris generally had a clear enough head, but it would cloud at moments, rendering him helpless enough. And so Gavyn would drive for some hour and a half every weekend to make sure everything was fine: gas was off, car not running in the garage, stuff like that.
The car slowed as it passed a small house several dozen meters off the road. Gavyn’s hands crossed as he pulled the car into a 90 degree turn. The suspension compensated for the gravel road.
Pebbles scattered and made a noise that sounded like a cross between autumn leaves cracking and fire being blown back to life as the car stopped near the house. The door opened and a pale white sneaker swung out, followed by another, followed by a pair of loose-fitting blue jeans, followed by a plain olive t-shirt, followed by Mr. Aubade’s face. He pushed the door shut and cracked on the gravel to the wooden porch. Gavyn knocked on the door, a fading white slowly turning to grey - a silence. He rapped with the sharps of his knuckles - another silence.
Stepping off the porch, Gavyn walked over to the edge of the house dedicated to the garage and peered through a muted window. Benjamin’s pick-up was still inside. Then Benjamin definitely had to be in the house. There wasn’t another place to go for miles. He returned to the porch and tried the handle. The door gave with a squeak.
The sunset illuminated the floating dust and cast shadows haphazardly around the main room of the one-story house. A draft sweeped in from the back room. As he stepped through the room, Gavyn heard a glassy snap at his feet. He looked down to find, in the evening shadow of a couch, a broken wine bottle. A roan liquid was soaked into the carpet around. This surprised him, as Benjamin had always insisted that he hadn’t drunk a drop in 10 years. He crouched and brought his head closer to get a better view of the peeling wine-stained label: Bordeaux-1974. Gavyn did some arithmetic in his head-Benjamin must’ve been in his mid-twenties at the time. He had been saving the bottle for something.
Mr. Aubade looked up from the ruins of the bottle to see the source of the draft at the end of a hallway: the sliding glass door in the back room was completely open. Past the door was nothing but fields as far as the eye could see.
Gavyn stepped through the steel door-frame and looked out at the burning horizon. Something at the bottom of his field of view caught his attention. There, coming straight from the door-frame, were footsteps and two strange, thin, evenly spaced out marks trailing behind the steps. Gavyn followed their progress into the field with his eyes. He decided to follow this trail.
So he walked, and the sun spilled orange light onto the quietly swaying grass.
So he walked some more, and the bottom tip of the sun began to fall through the horizon.
So he walked more still, and the brightest stars of the night sky slowly began to appear.
So his feet began to ache, and a dark blue glow crawled down from the top of the sky to the edge of the earth, leaving behind blackness and evermore stars.
Gavyn checked his watch; he’d been walking for more than an hour. He started to turn to leave and call the police when he saw a hazy yellow glow in the distance. A plume of black smoke withered from the tiny dot. The steps and trail led to the haze. He halted in his turn and instead walked towards the yellow light.
So he walked, and the glow started to increase in size.
So he walked some more, and the light took on a flickering form. It was a small fire.
So he walked more still and could see a human shape wrapped in the fire’s light.
As he finally approached the fire, and the now clearly visible silhouette of a man sitting on a steel chair, he could hear the snapping of the flames.
“I thought,” said Benjamin’s voice, “that you wouldn’t come this far to find me.”
The silhouette gazed down into the fire.
“You never seemed to quite care about me as long as the gas was off. Of course, that is your job, so who am I to complain? At least you made sure I didn’t set myself on fire. So I assumed you’d decide I’d disappeared, and would call the police. And then they would find me in the morning with a bullet through my head.”
Still looking at the flames, he raised a hand in which shone a revolver, the fire’s light reflecting in its cold metal. Gavyn, who had, until this point, been standing startled by Benjamin’s voice, took one large step and plucked the revolver from Benjamin’s hand. Benjamin didn’t protest.
“Jesus, Ben! What the hell were you going to do with this?”
“What, with the gun?”
“Yes, with the gun!”
“I was going to take that gun,” the fire flickered in his ageing eyes, “and I was going to put it to the side of my head. And I was going to shoot myself.
“Why the hell would you do that? Why would you drag a chair out into the middle of nowhere, start a campfire, and shoot yourself?” Gavyn shouted as he pocketed the revolver.
Benjamin stood up and motioned towards the chair.
“Here, sit down.”
“Ben-“
“Sit down,” said Benjamin with a subtle force that Gavyn had not heard before. He thought it wise to sit down, and so he did.
Benjamin stood with his back to Gavyn and the fire, hands in his pockets.
“You’ve seen all those pins and medals on the bookcase beside the T.V. in the house, right?”
Gavyn vaguely remembered having passed his glance over them once.
“Yes. Of course.”
“I got those for killing people. I got those when I served in Vietnam. I was part of one of the few Canadian deployments sent there to enforce the Paris Peace Accords.
“I’ve counted the number of lives I’ve taken. Four when our camp was ambushed by North Vietnamese troops. That’s when I got most of those medals. And then, in the last days that I was in Vietnam, we were performing a search-and-destroy on a small stronghold in a village held by the North. When we got to the centre of the village, there was a small gun nest armed by one man. My squad and I were pinned. I took a risk and peeked out from behind the building separating us from the nest. I got a good look as to where the gun was before the man started pinning us down again. After half a minute the racket stopped, so I stuck my rifle and head out, took one clean shot, and that was the end of it.”
Benjamin made a noise; he was crying. He cupped his face in his hands.
“Except that wasn’t the end of it. When we looked into the gun nest, there was a dead boy on the ground, a bullet through his left eye. I don’t know, or really care, why they left a little boy to man the nest, but they did. And I shot that kid clear through the head… I still see his bloody little face every night. And now, after all these years, I can see that his life was definitely worth ten of mine. So I decided to give at least part of the life he deserved back.
“I tried to drink a good-bye glass of wine, but I couldn’t even see straight. The goddamn thing slipped and fell. Then I dragged the chair here and lit a fire. And I put the gun to my head and tried to pull the trigger.”
Benjamin was sobbing.
“But I couldn’t, because I’m a coward. I’m a fucking coward who shoots babies through their eyes.”
He stood in silence, the tears dropping down his face. They shone in the flames’ gold. Benjamin fell to his knees and let out a single tearful roar. He looked up, breathing heavily, at the star-filled black sky from in-between his fingers.
“I see him every night. Whenever I close my eyes, I see his beautiful, bloody, ruined face.”
Gavyn said nothing. He stared into the fire. His eyes said nothing.
They sat in silence until the sun started to rise through the blades of grass. Still looking into the ashes of the fire, Gavyn took a deep breath.
“Let’s go?”
“Yeah, let’s go,” said Benjamin, standing up.
And so the two men walked through the field of dying grass, Gavyn Aubade dragging a chair, and Benjamin Verdigris looking down, seeing a dead boy’s face.
Feo P-S
November 5, 2011
Photo: Claudia Wilde,
http://lovelyandfree.tumblr.com/
