Bonfire Confessions of the Asshole Club

By RC Allen

"Bonfire Confessions" is a tale of loss, friendship, self-forgiveness, and rebirth. Four strangers with buried secrets meet on a long bus trip, and form a bond they cannot break. Three of them interrupt their plans, and join Dan in his quest to fix up his parents' house after they are brutally murdered. They spend their days fixing up the old place, and their nights purging their inner demons over a series of backyard bonfire confessions, through a haze of booze and marijuana. Set against a mid-west town decimated by the collapse of the automobile industry, the foursome create their own support group, and they give Dan the courage to decide whether to start his life anew in the town of his youth, or return to the wife who no longer seems to want him. As the house is rebuilt, so too are the lives of four strangers who become lifelong friends.

• Language: English
• Publisher: RC Allen
• Release date: Dec 5, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370173402

RC Allen

A Muncie, Indiana native, R.C. began writing short stories in the fifth grade, and continued through high school until he joined the Army as an award-winning newspaper reporter, where he spent his full four-year stint in Washington, D.C, writing for the "Pentagram." After continuing as a reporter for the National Guard in Indiana, and in Colorado, he now calls Indianapolis home, where he resides with his wife, Jaime, granddaughter, two dogs and a very challenging puppy. "Bonfire" is his first published novel.

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BONFIRE CONFESSIONS OF THE ASSHOLE CLUB

By

R.C. Allen

Text copyright ©2016 R.c. allen

All rights reserved

DEDICATED TO MY WIFE JAIME, FOR TELLING ME TO SHUT UP, GET OFF MY ASS, AND FINISH IT FOR ONCE AND ALL.

Table of Contents

Prologue

CHAPTER1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

TERCHAP 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

Prologue

In America, there are so many ways to get help with your problems. Countless self-help books abound, written by so-called experts with their version of what you need to heal yourself. In the cities it seems as if every street has a support group facility. Just by standing up and saying Hi, I’m anybody and I’m a drunk, an addict, I lost my wife, or my kids, or my wife’s drunk kids, and there will be a group there of people going through the same thing to help. There are churches, government programs, families, and friends. And now, for every type you can find in the real world, you can also find online.

So many ways. And yet, no matter how many ways there are to get help, some will never look. Some won’t admit they have any problems, and will live in denial. Others will get through issues by just burying them and moving on, never dealing with them, and there are just people who believe that their problems are just that. Theirs. They will never unburden themselves on family or friends. Doctors are people you go to when you break a leg or something. Sharing your problems in front of strangers? You’ve got to be kidding. Reading a book by some idiot who doesn’t know you but thinks he can solve your problems? What a joke.

Grief is an internal thing. You deal with it in whatever fashion you choose to. Those around you won’t understand it, and well-meaning strangers, friends and family will try to convince you to seek help, but they don’t get that you need to do this by yourself. Some things can’t be shared.

And yet, help from without can still come to these people, whether they want it or not. For whatever reason, one stranger catches your ear with what he has to say. You’ll be walking down the street and see someone on the cover of a book that looks like your Aunt Sandy, and you think, what the hell, she always had good advice when I was a kid. Or sometimes, out of the blue, you run into complete strangers who turn your life upside down. Maybe they’re as screwed up as you are, and not part of a group, but about to make one of their own. Maybe, even, a group of assholes.

CHAPTER1

Elaine smiled to herself despite her irritation when the crunch of Fritos under her feet confirmed what she already knew. This was the Sunday Dan’s friends came to her house for their weekly poker game, which would change to football in the autumn, and the absolute quiet in the house showed that once again, all the men had left to go to their nicely clean homes, while she was left to clean up all the mess - all the beer spilled on the carpet, nuts and popcorn everywhere, and all the plastic rings and boxes the beer came in.

She smiled, because during last season what she had stepped in had been a half-eaten, cold and greasy pizza.

Not stopping to clean up the Fritos, she walked through her living room to survey the damage in her kitchen and den, where the TV. set was. There, passed out in his chair, one leg on the end table and Stepford, their cocker spaniel, sacked out across his stomach, was her husband Dan. At 6’3" tall, and 210 pounds, he seemed squeezed into his ugly but favorite chair he found at a yard sale.

The TV was on but was on mute, a habit she never understood, and knowing the remote was probably stuck in a glass of beer somewhere, she reached over her husband and dog and pushed the off button. Stepford looked up and wagged at her, but of course he didn’t make a move to get off Dan.

Stepford and Dan were inseparable. There were few places besides work that Dan went where Stepford didn’t tag along, and occasionally he even took him to work. It had been that way since Stepford was a puppy five years ago. It had been Dan’s idea to name him Stepford based on the movie The Stepford Wives, and he loved to tell her through the years that he named him that to remind you that if you begin to act up, I can have you exchanged for a better model. It was his favorite joke. When he introduced him to people, though, Dan always made a point to tell them the name was based on the original movie and not the tacky Nicole Kidman remake.

Looking at Dan and Stepford laying there, she immediately grew sad. How could a man who loved a dog so much, who spoiled him rotten and spent so much time with him, not want kids? Dan would make such a wonderful father, even though she wasn’t sure he actually believed that or not.

Through his brown, bloodshot eyes Dan looked up at his wife, pulled his leg off the table, and did his usual stretch and yawn. Hi baby, he said, patting Stepford on the back.

Hi yourself, she said, and leaned over and kissed him. How’d you do?

Not bad. I actually came out ahead about $50, he said, as he stood up from the chair and Stepford leaped down to the floor. Another stretch, another yawn, and he turned around to head off to the bathroom.

Are you too drunk to help me with some of this mess? Elaine asked.

Not at all; didn’t have too many beers today. I’ve had heartburn all morning.

Well then, Elaine said as she followed him back towards the bathroom. I guess I’ll always have to make my world famous chili every night before poker. That way you’ll have heartburn the next day, won’t drink that much and then I’ll actually get help cleaning up the mess.

That’s a wife for you. Always trying to figure out a way to ruin the game, and with that he closed the door.

Well at least he’s in a good mood, she thought to herself as she went into the master bedroom to put on housecleaning clothes. Now is as good a time as ever to talk to him. She hoped.

After a few moments, the bathroom door opened and Dan walked by. I’ll get the den, and he turned and walked away, a Frito stuck in the back of his dark brown hair.

Elaine finished dressing, as she pondered on how to bring up the subject. Any talk of having children always resulted in a fight, and she didn’t feel up to one right now. Still, she had spent today shopping with her best friend, Cindy Bartlow, and her two kids - Chris and Breanna, and anytime she was around the three of them, her insides ached to have a child of her own.

As she looked in the mirror, she studied herself, and pushed her stomach out with her hands, and tried to see how she would look pregnant. At 5’2," she figured she’d look like a little brunette butterball – she’d show within weeks on her tiny frame. God it would be gross, she thought, but smiled, and her green eyes sparkled. But she immediately soured, thinking of Dan and what she’d tell him. Cindy told her to just lay it out and stand up for herself. Easy to say when you’re a hurricane married to a blade of grass, but she was no hurricane, and Dan wasn’t a blade of grass, easily blown over. She had to play this just right or she had no chance of getting what she wanted.

Elaine and Cindy had been best friends from within days of Dan and Elaine’s move to Denver. They met at the first apartment Dan and she had gotten in Denver; Cindy lived in the same complex. Within the first year’s lease, Cindy had left to move in with her fiancé, and Dan and Elaine had spent the next several years going from apartment to apartment, to finally renting the house they lived in now. They had talked of trying to buy a house at some point, but Dan never seemed ready. She always thought he really wanted to move back to Indiana, and honestly, there were times she missed home. She still had family there, and the rest of the country wouldn’t understand it, but there is something to that urban myth of Hoosier hospitality.

But in the meantime, she liked their house on Hazel Court. They only saw the owner, Mr. Simmons, twice a year when he came to check on the place, and he didn’t care about Stepford. In fact, he had fished a door out of the garage of one of his rentals that had a built-in doggie door in it. There were bushes galore, and an underground sprinkler system, a huge oak tree in the back yard with a tree swing Dan had put there for her, and it was ten minutes from downtown. Not bad.

Cindy had married Tom Bartlow, a handsome but very quiet man who was an accountant here in Denver. Tom never really appreciated Dan’s biting sense of humor, and he never watched football, so of course the two guys were never really friends, but tolerated each other’s presence because of their wives’ friendship. Dan and Cindy, however, had always had a good relationship. Cindy could appreciate a tasteless joke, and the two were always laughing in each other’s company. And when Dan was depressed, as he was apt to be from time to time, Cindy could usually cheer him up.

But Dan and Cindy’s friendship had been strained over the last six months or so, ever since Elaine had decided she wanted a child. They had even argued at one point over Dan’s total refusal to even discuss having one. And since Dan was aware of how much being around Cindy and her kids made Elaine want one herself, Dan had steadily withdrawn himself from the friendship and even blamed Cindy for Elaine wanting a baby. Needless to say, there were no more couples nights out, or the poker nights the foursome had briefly started, before all this began coming to a head.

Elaine put on her tennies and walked to the kitchen, where she immediately began washing the dishes and placing them in the dishwasher.

Nothing had been said between man and wife for several minutes, and Dan began to sense something was going on in Elaine’s head, and he had a good idea of what it was. Still, as he turned to go to the kitchen to get a trash bag for his pile of beer boxes, he was caught off guard when he saw Elaine standing in the kitchen entryway, staring at him through teary eyes.

We have to talk, Dan.

About what? came the automatic reply.

You know damn well what, as she stared him down. I want to have a baby.

Aw fuck, Elaine. We were getting along really well for a game day. Don’t screw it up now.

Look, honey, she started. No, you look! You knew when we were married that I didn’t want kids. I don’t want them now and I never will. I am not going to bring a life into this world that I’m gonna screw up or he’s gonna screw mine up. Period.

Dan, she began again, trying to shake the tremble out of her voice. I know that you had a lot of shitty things happen to you and your family when you were a kid, but so do most people, and they have kids and love it. Treat the kid half as well as you do Stepford, he or she will be lucky. Good parents make good kids, and a good kid couldn’t possibly fuck anything up!

Oh yeah, what if he’s molested, run over by a car? What if he gets some girl pregnant, or becomes an addict. What if some monster gets a hold of him and cuts his head off? I just can’t take that chance. I just can’t, he said, turning away.

Before he made it back to the den, she told him then you might just lose your wife.

Dan stopped, shook his head, and turned around and said in a snarl that’s your choice, isn’t it? and brushed past her, storming out of the house, slamming the door in the process. Elaine heard the motor of her Datsun spring into life, and she heard the gravel fly as he punched the accelerator, then peeled rubber in front of the house as he took off for what she was sure was a night of drinking at one of the bars Dan frequented every time they got into a fight. His ‘97 Lebaron had thrown a rod, whatever that meant, and the few hundred he got from it went into supplies for the shed he had built in their back yard. He had his eyes sent on a new Jeep, but he wanted to wait until his next raise before buying it, some three months ahead.

Dan was a customer service tech for the local sewer department, a job he got because of his four-year stint as an Army administrative assistant. The security was ok, but the pay was mediocre. He kept waiting for something to open up he could transfer to, but all in all, he seemed content to stay put. Sometimes, he’d say he still hadn’t decided what to do when he grew up, half jokingly. Dan’s mother told her on the phone once that Dan just floated through life and never would be anything or do anything.

Elaine was a medical coding clerk. She had worked at a family practice in the front office, but Dr. Padgett had retired and the business closed. Elaine took a medical coding class and got her certificate. Currently, she worked part-time for a physician’s network, but she hoped it would lead to something full-time, either at an office or at home.

So in the meantime they were sharing her car; a car he had just taken out for drinks. He would come home later drunk, and climb into bed with her. Looking out the window, watching her taillights fade away, she thought I just hope he doesn’t wreck the damn thing. That’s all we need now.

CHAPTER 2

Later that night, Elaine awoke to the sound of Stepford barking out in the back yard. She looked over at her alarm clock on the nightstand. 2:13 a.m. Dan had come home around 11, and as she had thought, climbed into bed with her and was snoring within a couple of minutes.

She reached over to wake him up, then stopped when the barking cut off. She thought she might have heard a high-pitched noise like a cat screeching, but she waited for that familiar shuffling noise of Stepford’s doggie door swaying back and forth until the magnets caught and the door shut.

What she heard next instead sucked the breath out of her. Her heart pounded so hard it physically hurt.

A crunching sound, as if something wooden had just been smashed, resonated throughout the back room on the side of the den where Stepford’s door was. Snapping noises followed as the doggie door was pulled away from the door.

Someone’s coming! her head screamed, but she was totally silent and she began slapping Dan on the back of his arm.

Dan, for his part, was busy staring at this cute little ass he had watched dancing all night at Miranda’s. To be wrenched from that utopia and into consciousness, complete with a pounding headache, reflexively made him angry, and his first reaction was to slap back at Elaine’s flailing arms and yell What the fuck?

There’s someone in the house, she rasped to him. With a mind still hazy from beer and rum, Dan was going to get up calmly from the bed and walk through the house, see that nothing was wrong and come back to bed, go back to sleep and get back to that cute little ass. But with the light coming from the dimmer lights in the hallway, Dan could see well enough to make out her face as he stood up and stretched. What he saw there scared the crap out of him. Headache forgotten, Dan fumbled the lid off the little box on the nightstand on his side of the bed and pulled out the handgun, a 38 caliber given to them by Elaine’s father Charles before he died. Dan preferred his 22 rifle, but he kept it behind his dresser, and in his mad rush he went for the closest one.

As he scooted off the front of the bed, he murmured to Elaine to call 911 on the bedside phone. Then, heart racing, he took the gun off safety, pointed it ahead, and slowly began winding around the corners of the house.

Past the bedroom, through the hallway past the second bedroom and the bathroom; then he stopped at the end of the hallway, and turned toward the living room. There, right arm extended around the wall, gun still pointed ahead, fear held him motionless. Their living room was a large open area at the front of the house - to get to the back of the house where the intruder must be coming from, he would have to walk through the open area, wind around a corner to the right, leading into the dining area. Then an immediate doorway into the kitchen, which had at the other end a doorway into the kitchen, and another going into the oversized den. Between the doorways in the kitchen was the door that headed into the laundry room, where Stepford’s door was.

He slowly made his way from room to room, right shoulder rubbing against the paneling, and crouching low when he came to a doorway and swung the gun around into the room, just like in all the cop shows. He made it through the living room, then the dining room, and stopped when he came to the kitchen. Dan tried to swallow and realized he was sweating. The laundry room, he thought. The best way to get into the house was through the doggie door.

As the doggie door flashed into his cloudy brain, he just began to wonder where Stepford was. He was just taking a breath to yell out for his dog when a shadow eased its way around the corner from the laundry room and stood facing Dan, doorway to doorway.

With no time to think, Dan spun the little gun towards the shadow and fired from his crouched position. Again and again. Though there were only seven bullets in the gun, he fired 19 times, the last 12 that clicking noise like a kid’s cap gun. When he finally stopped, he was sitting on his rump, backed up against the wall next to the doorway. He could vaguely see the guy stretched across the floor. He couldn’t hear any gasping or any other noise. Numbly, he ran his hand up the wall and clicked on the light. There, on the floor was a sandy-haired man, with a bullet hole through the right side of his forehead. He had jeans and a tank top on, and Dan had hit the mark at least a couple of other times. Blood was oozing from everywhere. Dan saw a handgun lying on the floor just 3 or 4 feet away from the body just into the den.

Dan turned back to the body. His head was a bloody mess on the right side, and his face was positioned so he only caught the profile of the man he had just killed. Dan kneeled over the body, not quite believing himself. He blinked his eyes a few times, reached out, and grabbed the guy by the chin and pulled his face around. But as he turned the head upwards, and the still open eyes met his, Dan turned cold as the color washed from his face. Instantly he yanked his hand away from the body, fell backward on his butt and used his legs to kick himself backward, propelling himself until his back slammed up against the cabinets.

Oh my God. he began muttering to himself. After the third time, Elaine, who had been standing in the doorway with a baseball bat in one hand and her cell phone in the other, since he had knelt over the body, looked over to where he was propped against the cabinets.

Dan? she cried, remaining in the doorway, unsure of what to do or say.

It’s Ronnie, Elaine, he squealed. It’s my own god damned brother!

CHAPTER 3

Thirty minutes later, Dan and Lt. Jiminez from Denver sat in the den sipping coffee Elaine had made. Men were still pacing everywhere, inside and out, taking pictures and dusting for prints. Dan’s hands were slightly trembling, and for the third time in two years he was smoking cigarettes again, Elaine observed.

But Jiminez, on the other hand, seemed as calm as if he were trying to sell Dan more insurance coverage. A small built man, no taller than 5'6", she guessed was probably in his late 40s, had the jet black hair and dark eyes of a Hispanic, with the full accent to boot. While he talked and listened, he seemed to be studying Dan; every little move, every answer, every gesture. Elaine went into the den and sat down next to her husband when the lieutenant took over the conversation. When she took his right hand into hers and put in one her lap, he didn’t acknowledge it whatsoever.

At this point it’s pretty easy to see what happened, Jiminez began. Your brother...

Half-brother, Dan cut in. Obviously, we weren’t very close.

I’ll get to that in a moment, the lieutenant continued, as Dan peered up at his wife to see if he could tell what she was thinking. Elaine just sat there, blanched and very tense.

Anyhow, your half-brother climbed over your back fence; we found footprints out back. It looks like he killed your dog by hitting him over the head. There was an axe handle nearby. Then he broke the doggie door insert and just squirmed right through. By the way, he said as he looked from Dan to Elaine. I’m sorry about your dog. I know it must be hard.

Dan just looked at the floor and said nothing. He hadn’t adjusted to the fact that Stepford was dead yet, and to really think about it now would probably result in a breakdown in front of Jiminez. He would have to cope with Stepford’s death later.

Elaine put her other hand on Dan’s shoulder and rubbed his back. Thanks, was all she said. Stepford was much more to us than a family pet.

At this point, the lieutenant set