• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1346 0

hauled him away from a dying fire, insisting that he join them in a midnight swim in the Merced River, and who could say no to that. Though it was shocking cold water and pitch black to boot, more a good idea than a comfortable reality, swimming with two naked California women in the Yosemite night. But then when they got out and staggered back to the fire, near dead from hypothermia, it had been necessary to pile on wood until it was a leaping yellow blaze and dance before it to catch every pulse of lifesaving heat. Even at the time Frank had understood that he would never see anything more beautiful.

Now he sat with a bunch of red-faced homeless guys bundled in their greasy down jackets, around a fire hidden at the bottom of a trashcan. The contrast with the night at Camp Four was so complete that it made him laugh. It made the two nights part of the same thing somehow.

“We should build a real fire,” he said.

No one moved. Ashes rose on the smoke from the trashcan. Frank reached in with a two-by-four and tried to stir it up enough to give them some flame over the rim. “If you have a fire but you can’t see it,” he said as he jabbed, “then you go out of your mind.”

Fedpage snorted. “Central heating, right?”

“So everyone’s crazy, yarr. Of course they are.”

“We certainly are.”

“Is that what did it hey?”

“Where there’s smoke there’s fire.”

“When did someone first say that, a million years ago? Oooop! Ooop! Oooop!”

“Hey there monkey man, quit that now! You sound like Meg Ryan in that movie.”

“Ha ha haaaa! That was so fucking funny.”

“She was faking it! She was faking it.”

“I’ll take it fake or not.”

“As if you could tell!”

“—greatest human vocalization ever recorded.”

“Yeah right, you obviously don’t know your porn.”

Things that would warm a body: laughter; re-enacting fights; playing air guitar; playing with fire; talking about sex; thinking about climber gals.

Knocking a stone oven apart would definitely warm the body. Frank got up. What he needed was a sledgehammer and a crowbar; what they had were some lengths of two-by-four and an old aluminum baseball bat, already much dented.

One stone in the little opening at the top was loose in its cement. Frank moved to what looked like the right angle and smashed the stone with a two-by-four. The bros were pleased at the diversion, they guffawed and urged him on. He knocked the first stone down into the firepit, reached into the ashes and rolled it out. After that it was a matter of knocking loose one stone at a time. He used the longest two-by-four and pounded away. The cement was old, and stone by stone the firepit came down.

When he had gotten it down to knee height it made a sensible firepit, with a gap in one side where the old doorway had been. He filled the gap with stones. There were enough left over to make another firepit if they wanted one. Or maybe bench supports, if they found some planks.

“Okay, let’s move the trashcan fire into the pit,” he said.

“How you gonna pick it up? That can is red hot down there at the bottom, don’t you pick that up!”

“You’ll burn your fucking hands off man!”

“It’s not red hot,” Frank pointed out. “Let’s a couple of us grab it around the top. Wear gloves and tilt it, and we’ll lift the bottom with the studs here.”

“Roll and burn your fucking leg off!”

“Yeah right!”

But Zeno was willing to do it, and so the rest gathered round. The ones who had gloves grasped the rim, lifted and tilted. Frank and Andy wedged studs under the bottom from opposite sides and lifted it up. With a whoosh the whole fiery mass sparked into the new ring and blasted up into the night. Howls chased the uprush of smoke and sparks.

They sat around the cheery blaze, suddenly much more visible to each other.

“Now we need a pizza!”

“Who’ll get a pizza?”

They all looked at Frank. “Ah shit,” he said. “Where’s Cutter?”

“Get some beer too!” Zeno said, with the same fake laugh as before.

Kicking through piles of fallen leaves, the cold air struck him like a splash of water in the face. It felt good. He had to laugh: all his life he had traveled to