William and the Bonfire

A man and a woman, married, are standing outside in the place they call their front yard. Both of them know it’s really just the space between their own beat-down trailer and the next closest one, but calling it “the front yard” makes it feel less shameful. And shame, mixed with anger, is what has really driven all of this. It’s been the gasoline and the igniting spark.

The man, who is named William but goes by Willy, shakes the small black notebook in his hand. “You sure about this, Tracy?” he asks his wife. “Like, really sure?”

She either doesn’t hear him, or pretends she doesn’t. It’s maybe the fourth or fifth time he’s asked. And while he’s been standing there in his dirty muscle shirt, shaking that book for the last half-an-hour, she’s hunted down a bare patch of ground, heaped nearby wood on to it, and smuggled the gas can off of Willy’s truck. She even threw some of their daughter’s old clothes on there for good measure- she’d grown out of them, anyway.

Satisfied, she raises the little red gas can high over the makeshift pile of kindling, tips it forward… and about three drops come out. Willy laughs. “You’re gonna start a bonfire with that?”

“Oh, shut up,” Tracy finally answers him. “Just ride up to the gas station and fill ‘er back up.”

“We don’t got all night, you know.”

She was going to answer that they would have been done already if he had helped, but decides she’s too tired to fight. She’s been tossing and turning for two nights. “Don’t we?” she asks instead. “It’s not a school night.”

Her husband didn’t have any answer for that, so with a massive shrug, he walks to his truck and yanks the door open. Tracy can see that he still has the black book in his hand. “Wait!” she calls out after him. “I’m coming too.” Another impatient shrug, and he gestures to the passenger seat.

The drive wasn’t long. It was a night-time glide down a cracked, neglected road to an old, neglected gas station a couple of miles away. They had walked it together once, years ago, even through the overgrowth and without a sidewalk.

“You know what we could do with all that money?” Willy starts as they pull up to the station.

“We got twenty-thousand already,” Tracy answers. “We might be able to send Bailey to college now.”

He agreed. “And that’s a blessing right there. But it’s at least nine more years away.” His wife was reaching for the door handle now, but he stopped her with a hand on her knee. “We need the money, Tracy,” he said. “Rent, clothes, we’re two thousand in debt, and look, we all have to eat.”

“We already talked about this. Go fill up the gas can.”

“We need that money.”

“We always survived without it, didn’t we?”

“Bailey needs that money.”

“Stop it,” she demanded, trying to make it sound as final as she could. “Please, just stop it. What we had to do to get that twenty thousand, what we’d have to do to get more- it’s wrong. I’m not doing it again.”

Willy leaned back into his seat, arms crossed and shoulders hunched. A few tense seconds went by in the little pickup. “Look, I’ll fill up the can myself,” Tracy said. “You just go get yourself your cigarettes.”

He went and got himself some cigarettes. The inside of the gas station was just like all the other buildings in this no-man’s-land cramped between Alabama and Georgia. He barely looked at the typical shelves on his way to the counter- strategically placed amidst the junk foods.

“What’s up, bro?” The kid at the register asked with a smile. Some people like Willy would have scowled about being talked to like that, but he really didn’t mind. It reminded him of his friends at that age.

“Nothin’ much. Pack of L&M light shorts.”

The kid turned around, looked at the foreboding wall of tobacco products behind him, and froze up.

“Uh, it’s the little blue ones,” Willy said, trying hard not to slip back into the irritated tone he usually reserved for Tracy.

The cashier kid laughed. “My bad, man. I’m a little new here.”

“Yeah, I can tell,” the older man said, and then caught himself. “Sorry. I know your first job can be rough.”

“Oh,” the cashier laughed again. “It’s actually, like, my third or fourth. I guess it depends on whether cutting people’s lawns ever counted as a job.”

Willy nodded. He had cut lawns as a teenager, too- he’d actually tried to launch it into a full landscaping business, but that crashed and burned, just like every enterprise since. His older sister had been the only one to have any business sense, but when she finally made it big, she left the state and they didn’t hear any news from her until they got the funeral invitations.

“So what happened to the other ones?”

“My other jobs?” The cashier glances to the ground while he pulls the L&Ms down, looking a little embarrassed. “I lost them. I was more than two minutes late more than three times, or something like that. But I couldn’t get there sooner ‘cause I have to walk, and I couldn’t leave the house earlier ‘cause I gotta get my brother ready for school.”

Willy felt a pang of sympathy. “Yeah, that’s B.S. I can’t tell you how many times I got fired over something like that.” He stared into the kid’s eye when he turned around, trying to decide if this boy (unlike his late sister) was a fellow ally against the Boss-Man. “You know,” he continued, lowering his voice a little, “I can’t even tell you how much better my life would be without them bureaucratic, white-collar yuppies in the wa-”

“Woah, woah, man” the cashier kid gently interrupted, surprised at Willy’s vehemence. “It’s not all that bad. They’re just doing their jobs, too.”

The cigarettes changed hands in silence.

“What if I told you,” Willy nearly whispered, while he slid his money across the countertop, “that me and my wife had found a way to get back at them?”

The kid stared at him for a second, not looking totally sure if it was a joke or not; if this customer was crazy or not. “Honestly, man,” he said slowly, “I wouldn’t want to be part of anything that hurts anyone.”

“Even if it made you money?”

He shrugged. “I make my money working.”

“Hey, you can’t be happy working in a places like this your whole life.”

The kid smiled again, too honestly to be fake. “Sure I can. You can be happy wherever you are.”

Willy took his change without saying anything, and left the store feeling odd.

Tracy was holding the full gas can in her arms like a baby while Willy drove them home, so tightly that her knuckles were ash white.

“I wasn’t planning on dumping it out the window, you know,” Willy said.

She readjusted a bit, but didn’t actually relax any. Her husband sighed. “You know they deserved it, right?” he tried. “The people written in the book. They’re there for a reason.”

He didn’t have to hear her say anything to know she disagreed. It took two months for him to convince her to let him send that blackmail letter. It worked, though, didn’t it? Almost no time at all after it left their mailbox, and that money started pouring in.

“These spoiled rich men,” he pronounced the word like they didn’t even qualify as men, “they’d pay anything to keep their secrets hushed up.” An arm lifted off the steering wheel, dug through his pocket and slammed the little black notebook onto the truck’s dashboard.

“Why do you think my sister left us this, huh?” The anger was starting to creep back into him. “Why?”

Tracy stared diligently out of the window.

“In her whole Last Will and Testament, this was the only thing she left me. Her brother. Everybody else just got money.” He laughed quietly. “But nah, not us. But it’s alright. We got something better, didn’t we?”

“Revenge?” Tracy asked.

“Justice!” her husband cried. “These people aren’t innocent. Nobody with that much money ever is.” Still driving with one hand, he flipped through the book with the other, and landed on a random entry.

“Jason Henrietta Mull. CEO of East Georgia Shipping Co. Cheated on his wife while on vacation in February of twenty-fifteen, April of twenty-sixteen, and May of twenty-eighteen.” He turned the book to show it to Tracy; everything was there from dates to names. Even a few pictures were glued on to the page. “Think if we sent him a letter today and got some money to pay our rent, it would be a bad thing? We didn’t make him do it.”

“But it’d still be wrong,” was all she said.

He kept his arms crossed in silent argument, watching while she poured the gas on the heap of wood and clothes, lit a match, and started the bonfire that was going to burn away his opportunity to set things right.

“Hand me it,” she said, holding her hand out.

He looked down at the notebook, the little black notebook that had given him a chance he’d always dreamed of. Is that really why his sister left it for him? If Willy knew her at all, he knew that money-grubber was probably planning on using the blackmail to get her own business ahead. But when she wrote her will, something made her leave it to Willy, instead of her company, or one of her partners, or whoever. Maybe, he thought, it was all some big joke.

“Hand me the book, William,” Tracy said more forcefully. “Or I swear, I’m taking Bailey and you won’t see us again.”

He still hesitated for a moment. Then he thought of Bailey, and Tracy, and oddly enough, even the happy cashier at the gas station.

“Fine,” he said, but he didn’t look while he handed it to her. He only heard it tossed into the fire with a crackling sound, followed by the bitter smell of burning paper. When he dared to raise his eyes again, his wife was looking right back at him.

“It was the right thing,” she said. “We don’t need to blackmail again. That twenty-thousand we made already means we can get Bailey a tutor, and maybe a fancy private school. It’ll get her grades back up. And then,” she smiled for the first time that day, “she’ll have the chance we didn’t. Maybe that money won’t change our life, but it’ll sure change her’s.”

Willy tried, with more effort than maybe it should have taken, to let some of the tension out of his body. “You’re right,” he confessed, “that’s all that matters.”

She wrapped her arms around him in a way she hadn’t since they were teenagers, and as they headed back into the little beat-down trailer, it seemed a little warmer than before.