Bull Head Read online

  “Not in this case.”

  “He’ll settle in. Look on the bright side. You’re a shoo-in for mayor again.”

  Sonny lifted his eyes from his magazine. Five large jars crowded the faded red terrycloth tabletop. Above the table, pictures of previous mayors hung in a circle around a closed toilet seat with a caption that read: “Who’s the next Mayor of Bull Head?” Anyone who lifted the seat found themselves staring into a mirror with an inscription, “You Are!” Sonny’s jar was jammed with pennies, though he never put in a cent himself.

  “I wish you’d leave me out of it.”

  “Hell, Sonny, even after you’re long gone, we’ll just stuff you like Barney, prop you up in the corner, and you’ll still win.”

  Sonny shuddered. The annual election was something he used to enjoy, the media attention and film crews, the locals raising their glasses to him. It helped him forget Norma briefly. But when the crews left and the bar emptied, his longing for her returned with a searing vengeance. “Over my dead body.”

  “Precisely.”

  Votes in the form of pennies raised money for the volunteer fire department, established after the great fire of 1908. Anyone could vote as many times as they wanted, including the candidates, but whoever won had to promise that as Mayor of Bull Head, they would do absolutely nothing. The whole event rankled Sonny. It had devolved into a circus that only brought more people to town. Next to his jar sat the other half-empty jars of the other candidates: Ed the fly fisherman from Montana, Betty Ford, The Invisible Candidate, and Casey the Goat.

  “It’s no way to live out my days. Can’t you just let things be?”

  “Just don’t lose to that one.” Lorne gestured toward the Invisible Candidate’s jar.

  In his kitchen, Sonny dragged a match on the tabletop and lit a kerosene lamp. He pictured Norma smiling, handing him a cup of coffee. He blew out the match, dropped it to the floor where thousands of other matchsticks lay, turned down the wick, and placed the glass cover back on.

  The light faded outside, the snags no longer visible on the mountain. Among the thick mossy stumps and thin second-growth, the concrete and brick skeletons of the coke ovens and powerhouse crumbled. Everything Sonny ever cared about was in those hills, and everything good was behind him. He pulled a tattered magazine from the stacks on his bookshelf and sat down in his father’s old armchair to read. He picked up the matchbox and lit a few more matches, watched them burn to his fingertips before blowing them out and dropping them on the floor. Outside the window, snow fluttered down. A shadow passed in Bojan’s garden. Sonny pressed his forehead against the cold pane and peered into the darkness. “I’ll be damned.”

  He sprinted toward Bojan’s yard. Blue light flickered inside the house, but the porch was dark. Bojan sat staring at the TV in his living room. In the garden, Bacon Face dug furiously, dirt flying out behind him.

  “Git. Go. Git now.” Sonny pointed home and the dog bolted, his ears flattened, glancing back over his shoulder. Sonny kicked the dirt back into place and pulled away the loose roots, stuffed them in his coat pocket, and walked backward, careful to cover his tracks by smoothing out the soil and covering it with snow. He leaned against the tall pine to catch his breath and surveyed the garden. A crowded clothesline ran overhead from the tree to the porch. Wool socks, black briefs, nylons, a bra, towels, a pair of panties, a flannel nightie fastened by wooden clips. He heard a faint buzzing in the air. Milica moved past the kitchen window, her long grey hair loose on her neck. She entered the living room and handed a cup to Bojan, kissed the top of his head.

  Something scurried across Sonny’s neck. He swiped it away and placed his palm on the tree. It vibrated faintly. The bark was pockmarked with pitch tubes and frass and boring dust. More frass lay at the base of the tree. He slipped his pocketknife blade into the bark and sliced off a section the size of his fist. It fell away easily. He turned it over. Hundreds of round black beetles crawled over and amongst one another, gnawing into the wood. “Sweet Jesus.”

  There wasn’t much old growth left, but Bojan’s property was chock-full of second-and third-growth lodgepole and jack pine. Sonny checked them anyway, cutting away the bark and listening for the sound of chewing. He worked quickly in the dark, the snow falling thick around him, and checked one more tree. Satisfied there were no other vermin, he made his way to Bojan’s house and knocked on the door.

  Milica answered it, her hair now tied and held in place with a yellow pencil. Sonny fiddled with the doorjamb.

  “Sonny. What a surprise.” She looked past him into the darkness. “It’s snowing. How beautiful.” Her fingers were slender and clean against the grain of the door, the nails trimmed short.

  He removed his cap and nodded.

  “Come in. I’ll get Bojan.”

  Sonny nodded again, wiped the soles of his boots on the mat. He heard Bojan from the living room, his voice moving closer until he stood in front of him.

  “Are you here to bestow upon me an apology?”

  Sonny held up the bark. “You’ve got beetles.”

  Bojan studied the bark, turning it over in his hands. Sonny stamped on a beetle that fell to the floor.

  “If you’re not careful, all the trees on your property will get infected one by one, and then they’ll jump over to my place and spread across the valley.”

  “These little insects?”

  “I’d be happy to fell that tree for you.”

  “Slow down. You are like a house on fire. Do you think I came over on the first boat?” Bojan’s fists hung clenched at his side, the bark dangled from one of his hands. “Milica, can you believe what we are hearing? He wants to cut down our majestic tree.” He pushed the bark toward Sonny.

  Sonny turned it over to prevent the beetles from crawling on his hand.

  “This is a dirty trick of yours to get more firewood,” Bojan said. “Cut down your own trees. There are plenty of big ones left over there.”

  “This is serious—”

  “Serious? Serious is what I was talking about this morning.”

  “That tree—”

  “I have had enough. Now you must go back to your house and leave us alone.” Bojan opened the door and motioned for Sonny to leave.

  The door slammed behind Sonny. He stood in front of it for a moment, then turned and walked down the steps. Milica stood at the kitchen window. He tipped his cap to her but she did not respond.

  At home, he shoved the bark in the woodstove and listened to the wood pop and fizz, the remaining beetles incinerated with a faint hiss before he shut the door and turned the damper tight.

  Sonny slept fitfully and woke bone tired. He started a fire. The day was overcast and moody with bruised clouds, a skiff of snow lay on the ground. Milica’s laundry line hung empty, her footsteps marking the snow below it. He sipped his coffee and tried to read. Each time he flipped the page and came to a picture of a tree, he wondered if it, too, had colonies of pests beneath its bark, eating away at its soul until it was too late and the tree had to be cut down, its long history ending in a heap of flames and ash.

  He tossed the magazine into the fire, got up, and went outside to split wood. Sonny enjoyed the heft of the axe, smashing it down on a log, the fresh smack of wood in the air. It gave him a sense of purpose, the chopping and stacking and bringing in wood for the winter, and then later, during the cold months, the firewood keeping him warm. There was a satisfying self-made value to it that he hadn’t been able to experience since he retired from logging.

  Sonny selected an armful of dry wood and carried it to Bojan’s house. He knocked on the door. There was no answer; he stacked the wood on the porch beside the door, and carried over three more armfuls.

  “I’m saving my best just for you.” Lorne handed Sonny a bowl of beans as he sat down with Terry and Neil. They had empty bowls in front of them and a fresh pitcher of beer. Sonny waved him off.

  “I’ll take it, if it’s okay with you, Sonny.” Terry stroked the ends of
his moustache.

  Sonny nodded.

  “Hell, it wouldn’t matter if it was moose steak and fried onions,” Neil said. “He’s not eating it. Not unless you threw on a dress and cooked like Norma.”

  Sonny glared at Neil.

  “How’s your neighbour?” Lorne said.

  “Beetles.”

  “Christ,” Terry said between mouthfuls of beans.

  “What’s he going to do?” Lorne said.

  “Nothing.”

  “You sure?”

  Sonny kept his head down, drew lines along the glaze on the wooden tabletop. “Too many of them crawling around town.”

  “Beetles?” Terry said.

  “Goddamn strangers.”

  “It’s a bit late to do anything about that, except blow up the ski hill or hope it don’t snow for a few years and chase them all away.”

  “Can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit,” Sonny said, wiping the tabletop. “That tree can’t stay.”

  Sonny lit a few matches, snuffed them out; the smell of sulphur hanging in the air. He laid his palm against the windowpane. Bojan and Milica carried a cooler out of their house together, one at each end, stacks of blankets and pillows and two rolled-up sleeping bags on top of it. In the backseat, Bojan stuffed his shotguns beneath the blankets, walked back to the house, and locked the door. Sonny laughed quietly to himself; his own front door didn’t have a lock. When his father had built the house, he’d declared that installing a lock would make his family prisoners of their own house. Milica climbed into the truck, slid across the seat close to Bojan. He lifted his arm over her shoulder and pulled her in close. She leaned her head against him, and they drove off. Sonny tapped on the window; his reflection stared back at him.

  Terry and Neil stopped by the next morning.

  “When they coming back?” Neil said.

  Sonny set his axe down. “Couple of days. Maybe three.”

  Terry flipped open the tailgate and dragged out an electric chainsaw. He held it up above his head and grinned.

  The men laughed. Sonny went into the shed and carried out his Husky 365, the filed teeth as sharp as the day he bought it, a gleaming twenty-eight-inch bar.

  Neil and Terry unhooked the clothesline. Sonny yanked the choke, lowered his head, and listened for the saw to burp. He reduced the choke by half and pulled the cord twice before the saw started, the sound leaping out as he set it in the run position. He cut out a V-shaped notch near the base of the tree and tossed it aside. The gap gave the tree a grim, toothless smile. Beetles shot out and scattered around the base. He worked along the side toward the back of the tree and made a clean back cut, letting the saw’s weight do its work, slicing through a mess of beetle carcasses that flew out with the woodchips and sawdust, and stopped short of the face cut.

  He paused. After hundreds of years, the towering pine stood with a thin hinge holding it upright. A beetle’s head was jammed inside a pitch tube, its feet wriggling behind it in the air like some grisly cartoon. Sonny pressed his palm against the tree and pushed the trunk lightly, backing away as it began to fall. The tree crashed heavily, a tremendous echo across the property. Beetles ran frantically up and down its broad body. Neil hollered and clapped his hands. The men limbed the tree and bucked it into logs. Their saws whined in the air, and when they were done, they loaded the truck and checked the ground, crushed any stray beetles, and dumped their carcasses in the flatbed.

  They drove the deactivated road looping up the mountain, past the remains of the boiler and tipple ruins, the mountainside around them pitted with holes and greening stumps left behind by miners and loggers, soon to be covered in snow that tourists would be skiing on. They stopped at a slash pile. Neil and Terry unloaded the tree; Sonny leaned against the truck and gazed across the valley toward his home, huddled against the bend of the river. Neil sprayed the pile with lighter fluid and lit it. Flames shot up and the wood began to crack and burn.

  “What a waste,” Terry said.

  Sonny glanced toward the fire. As the lames flickered and swallowed up the great tree, it shrieked like a dying animal. He turned away. His house sat below, small, surrounded by the woods beside a small meadow cleared by his father. Bojan’s red metal roof glistened like a bright puddle of blood. A small gap where the tree they had felled was marked by the white stump. Sonny felt no joy in the aftermath. The pine had been standing long before anyone had first seen it, long before his father or the Kootenai. Sonny didn’t need to count the rings. It took hundreds of years to grow, minutes to fell. Although he had lived here all of his life, the land had not softened; it was as hostile as the day he was born. He felt tired, a deep fatigue that a nap could not fix. He couldn’t sleep most nights and thought if he did, he’d never wake up again. That would be all right with him.

  “We’re going to hell, every one of us.” He climbed in the truck and waited for Neil and Terry to drive him home.

  Sonny sat burning matches at the window when Bojan and Milica pulled up to their house. Sleet slanted in the twilight. They unloaded their truck, giggling with one another. The outline of a monstrous body lay slumped in the back, the head something awful and astonishing, its hulking rack weighed down on the tailgate. Bojan hauled the guns toward the house, stopped, set them down on the porch, turned toward the tree stump. He glanced around the yard, his forehead knitted in lines, and walked from one end of the yard to the other, as if the tree might have somehow been relocated or he had got his bearings wrong. His eyes narrowed into tight slits when he touched the fresh saw cut and smelled his fingertips. Bojan bent over to pick up a handful of sawdust on the ground, examined it in the palm of his hand, and squeezed it tight before flinging it down. He slapped the stump with the heel of his fist and shouted something Sonny could not hear. Milica hurried out of the house, spun around and scanned the property before she saw Bojan pressing his head against both of his fists on the stump.

  She put her hand on Bojan’s shoulder, but he shrugged it away. He struggled to stand and picked up a rifle. Milica took the rifle from him and set it down on the porch. She embraced him, stroking his hair, his shoulders shaking against her. She kissed the side of his head and his cheeks and held him tight. Sonny blew out the lamp and sat in the dark long after Milica helped Bojan into the house.

  In the morning, fresh snow glittered on the ground, covering the axe rammed into the log and the loose chunks of wood scattered around it. Sonny sat inside, back from the window where he couldn’t be seen. He kept his eyes on Bojan’s house, but there was no movement.

  At noon he walked to the Inn, Bacon Face trailing behind him.

  He sat down.

  “Have you heard the—”

  Sonny held up a hand to quiet Lorne. He pushed his coffee aside and studied the tabletop. Lorne glanced up from time to time from his newspaper.

  The door opened; Milica stamped her feet on the mat. She unlatched the woodstove, tossed a log in, closed it. Her arm brushed Sonny’s. She nodded to Lorne, stopped at the election table, and surveyed the jars.

  “I would like to nominate a candidate.”

  “Sorry, the race is already underway.” Lorne shrugged his shoulders. “There’s no more jars left.”

  Milica stared at Lorne and then toward Sonny, but he kept his head down. She looked at the jar of pickled eggs and the one that held a pig’s foot and walked to the bar, unscrewed the lid, stuck her hand in the murky brine to lift out a peeled, glistening egg. She shovelled it into her mouth and chewed. When she was finished, she reached in and grabbed the remaining eggs, ate one more, and wrapped the last two in a napkin.

  “This one is empty,” she said, placing three one-dollar bills on the bar top. “I would appreciate it if you could wash it for me so I can nominate my candidate.”

  Lorne rinsed the jar, dried it with a towel. “Here you go.”

  Milica walked past Sonny again, the scent of freshly baked pie clinging to her. She placed the jar next to Sonny’s, reached into her pocket, an
d dumped the contents of her change purse into the empty jar. She wrote “Bojan” on the back of a cardboard drink coaster and leaned it against the jar.

  “Can I fix you a bowl of my world-renowned beans to help you celebrate?” Lorne said.

  “No. Thank you. That will not be necessary.” She turned to Sonny, her hair neatly tied back with a dark leather barrette. “You are a miserable, old, lonely man who bleeds ice water. You broke our hearts. I hope you are truly satisfied.”

  Sonny hung his head and picked at the table leg with his fingers.

  “Please remove your wood from our porch. We will not accept your charity.” She opened the door and pointed first at Sonny and then Lorne. “You people are all savages.”

  Sonny’s face burned; he kept his head down long after he heard the squeak of the door close.

  Sonny lay in bed unable to sleep, scratching his arms. Out on the porch, Bacon Face yipped in low gasps, half-barks punctuated by sharp breaths. Sonny looked across the room, out the window toward Bojan’s house. He wagered the flannel nightie looked good on her. Bojan probably snored, kept her awake. That tree had to go. Would have destroyed everything around them all. He considered Bojan’s ignorance, made worse by his awkward English. He lay back and closed his eyes, but he couldn’t shake the sight of Bojan slumped against the tree stump, clinging to it, hollering into the night. Bacon Face’s snorts died down until the night stilled. Sonny prayed for sleep to come.

  Lorne asked if Sonny had seen the latest polls.

  Sonny glanced at the election table cluttered with oversized jars, his full of pennies. Most of the candidates had significant amounts, except Bojan. Just the pennies Milica had left the previous day. A sliver of bark lay inside against the glass, and several beetles crawled over one another.

  “Neil and Terry,” Lorne said.

  Sonny tapped the side of the jar. “Has Milica seen this?”