Page 4 of Bonfire with the Mountain Man

I drink. It’s good. It’s really good—warm all the way down, apples and oak and something like smoke. I think about my scabbed Jonathans in the keep pile and have to look at the fire instead of at him.

“You made this from seconds,” I say.

“I make everything from seconds.” He lowers himself into the chair beside me, forearms on his knees, watching the flames. “Pretty fruit goes to the grocer. I get what’s left. Always have.” He says it plain, no complaint in it. “The stuff nobody wants is the stuff nobody’s fighting me for. Suits me fine.”

I turn that over. It should make me feel like less, being lumped in with the fruit nobody fought for. Somehow, it doesn’t. Somehow, sitting at a fire I didn’t know existed, drinking something he built out of the exact kind of apples the grocer wouldn’t take, it hits the other way. I don’t understand why, but I don’t trust it.

The locals talk around us. The guitar man finally plays something quietly, and nobody sings, but a few of them hum along. The fire ticks. Above the roofline, the aspens have gone dark gold to near black, and the first real cold of the night comes down off the ridge and settles into the yard.

I should go. I have a check coming, a load half-sorted, and a drive up the pass.

I don’t go.

The last of the locals drift out one by one as the night deepens. Glasses left on the bench, a hand on Boone’s shoulder on the way past. He sees the last of them to the alley. Then it’s just the two of us and the fire and half a ton of apples still waiting in the back.

Boone crouches, banks the fire down to a low burn, and stands. “Still turning. Those apples.”

“I know.”

“Then we’re not done.”

He holds the back door for me. I go in ahead of him, into the oak-smell and the running water and the pile of my own scabbed fruit that a stranger keeps setting in the wrong stack. I roll my sleeves and pick up where I left off.

He follows me in. The door shuts on the cold, and it’s just us and the work. The whole night is still ahead.

3

BOONE

The press has a sound I could pick out in my sleep. A groan when the plate comes down, then the long hiss of juice running the channel, then the drip.

Maggie feeds it, and I work the crank. Somewhere past midnight, we stop needing words for it. She hands, I press, and the amber runs into the carboy at our feet. The back door’s propped, and the cold pours in off the yard and mixes with the smell of crushed apple until the whole room tastes like fall.

She has a smear of pulp along her wrist. She hasn’t noticed. I have.

“This building was condemned when I bought it,” I tell her. I don’t know why I start there. Maybe because she keeps looking around the back room like she’s trying to place it, and I want her to know what it was before it was this. “Nineteen years empty. The roof was half gone. City wanted to tear it down and put in a lot for the resort shuttle.”

“So you saved it.” She sets a crate down and reaches for the next.

“No.” I crank the plate up, clear the cake, start again. “It didn’t need saving. It needed somebody to see it was still standing. Those are different things.”

She goes quiet at that. Feeds the press.

“The still came out of a barn up in Leadville,” I say. “Old fellow’s grandfather ran it during the dry years. Family had it under a tarp for sixty years, embarrassed by it. I paid four hundred dollars and hauled it down here on a trailer with a bad axle.” I nod at the copper column through the doorway, catching the low light. “Now people drive up from the city to watch it run.”

“Because you saw it was still standing.”

“Because it was worth something the whole time. Somebody just had to say so out loud.”

I mean the still. I watch her hear it as something else, watch her decide not to, watch her look down at the apples instead. I let her.

“These aren’t all Jonathans,” she says.

“They’re not?”

“You keep calling them Jonathans.” She turns one to the light, then digs two more out of the crate. “This is a Jonathan. This one’s an Arkansas Black, see how dark, it’ll give you tannin—that’s the one you want in a brandy. And this.” She holds up a squat green one. “This is a Wolf River. Barely any sugar. Good for nothing but a pie the size of a hubcap.”

“Then why’d you bring it?”