The Hearts of Men

by Nickolas Butler

  Two waiters approach their table, dishes in hand, and proceed to settle the meal over the table, all four diners sitting more or less motionless, slowly tilting glasses toward their lips, until finally, the waiters gone again, Nelson reaches for Trevor’s shoulder and, leaning into the boy, says gently, “Come on now, you have to eat something. It’ll make you feel better. Something to sop up that daiquiri sloshing around inside you.”

  Famished and heartbroken, the boy takes up his utensils and begins to devour the meal in front of him, as Jonathan, Deanna, and Nelson look on, astonished at how quickly he vanishes the food. In a corner of the supper club, a jazz trio starts in on a cover of Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five,” even as the volume of the diners’ voices rises to a crescendo, the dining room now truly packed, the bar elbow to elbow and two deep in places, dinner service cranking, and most of the patrons well sauced.

  “Tell you what,” Jonathan says, leaning toward his son, “let’s make a bet.”

  “Oh, come on, Jon,” Deanna says. “Don’t be cruel.”

  “What? The kid is confident. So what? It’ll be easy money for him, then.”

  Nelson crosses his arms.

  “I bet a hundred bucks you and Racquel won’t last through high school.”

  “Her name’s Rachel, Dad. Rachel. You knew that.”

  Jonathan reaches for his back pocket, produces a bulging wallet, licks his fingers, and picks out a single hundred-dollar bill, setting it on the white linen, so close to the candle that the light passes easily through the thin paper. “A hundred bucks.”

  “You’re betting that my heart will be broken, is that it?” Trevor asks. “You’re actually betting that we’re going to break up? God, why does this matter so much to you?”

  Jonathan leans into the center of the table, two spears of asparagus on his fork. “Because I don’t want you to miss out, Trev. All right? I want you to experience everything. I don’t want you committing yourself to something because you’re this goddamn throwback, this paragon of goodness. Right now, you’re just seeing the world in right and wrong, black and white, but you get to be our age, it ain’t that simple, see. Everybody’s fucked up. Everybody’s nailing each other’s wives, stealing from work, cheating on their taxes. It’s like, if you’re not trying to cheat, you’re a moron, a cretin. And what am I supposed to do, send you into that world unarmed? Like we’re waltzing through Disney World, and it’s all cotton candy and Mickey Mouse? All cartoons and Sunday school, and happily ever after? Look at me, Trevor.”

  But Trevor’s eyes will not budge from his empty plate.

  “Look at me, damnit!” Jonathan snaps—loudly enough to still the conversations at four nearby tables, loudly enough that Deanna places her hand on his forearm.

  Trevor looks at his father.

  “You’re a good young man, Trev, but, look, kiddo, the world will eat you up if you don’t open your eyes. Christ, you remind me of Bu— you got a little of Nelson’s spirit in you.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” asks Trevor. “Huh? People look up to Mr. Doughty. He’s a war hero. He gets to live year-round at a Boy Scout camp.”

  “Gets?” laughs Jonathan. “Gets? Trev, most grown men would hardly see . . . Look, it’s great and all that, but . . .”

  “I’m sitting right here, Jonathan,” Nelson says quietly, his voice a low growl beneath the din of the cacophonous room.

  “Oh, I know where you’re at, Nelson,” Jonathan says, cutting loose from any last shreds of propriety. “Care to elaborate on your status as ‘war hero,’ ’cause I’m sure young Trevor here would love to be regaled with tales of your time in ‘The Shit.’”

  Nelson reaches out for the dying votive candle, this tiny light in his hand now, like he’s carrying some small white spark for a bonfire waiting to be ignited.

  “I’m sorry to disappoint you, old friend,” he says, staring at the candle, “but I don’t have any war stories to tell.”

  “Aww, you don’t have any stories?” Jonathan guffaws, hoisting his Scotch glass up in the air for the waiter to see. “I don’t buy that for a second. How many tours did you do, two, three?”

  “Three,” Nelson says quietly.

  “He doesn’t want to talk about it, Dad,” says Trevor. “Geez.”

  “Weren’t you the one asking me questions this morning about Bugler’s Vietnam days? Well—here’s your chance. Come on, Nelson, regale us. Something slightly sanitary, though. Polite war talk, now. No severed ears or, you know, napalmed grandmas.”

  “Jesus, Jonathan,” says Deanna, “easy.”

  “Or, you know what, don’t hold back, Bugler. On second thought, hell, give it to him straight. You don’t want the kid volunteering for another idiotic American war, now do you?”

  “No. No, I don’t.”

  23

  THERE WAS NELSON, TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OLD, STANDING on the crumbling cement stoop of his mother’s postage-stamp Cape Cod in Eau Claire’s East Hill neighborhood. It was May, the air sweet and heavy with the perfume of lilacs and, discordantly, the stench of rubber and fire emanating from the Uniroyal plant across the river, the world positively vibrating with twenty-four-hour industry and labor: forklifts exhausting propane fumes, trains slinking slowly by, eighteen-wheelers idling at loading docks, and the steady hum of hundreds of pairs of hands toiling in that enormous brick building.

  Nelson was slightly drunk. A reddish brown beard covering the lower half of his face, an olive green rucksack balanced on his shoulder. He had hitchhiked all the way back to Wisconsin from Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, a three-day journey fueled in part by some potent hash, cheap American beer, and heavy diner food at every stop along the way: corned beef hash, bacon, biscuits and gravy, fried eggs, toast, cheeseburgers, pork chops, Swiss steak, fried chicken, ice cream, banana cream pie . . . His best ride had come in the form of a busload of softball players making their way north from their homes in Rockford, Illinois, up to a tournament in Duluth, Minnesota. The bus was crammed with coolers of cold Schlitz beer and some of the younger men on the team had even served in Vietnam, too. Noshing cold Oscar Mayer wieners as they sipped their beers, they asked polite yet precise questions about where Nelson had served, for how long, and whether he’d seen casualties.

  The bus dropped him off along Highway 53, near the Catholic high school and a bustling McDonald’s. Just before he shrugged on his bag to disembark, one of the older men on the team handed him a wad of five- and ten-dollar bills held tight with a rubber band.

  “You ever need a place to crash,” the man said, “you got friends in Illinois. We’re the Rockford Redbirds of the Northern Independent Softball League. Sponsored by Rockford Engine and Transmission. You ask around, you’ll find one of us.” Nelson shook his hand, and the older man nodded curtly. The bus passed on north then, but not before all the softball players stood at attention inside the bus, saluting Nelson all the way up the road until they disappeared.

  First the porch light flickered on, and then his mother opened the front door, and stared out at her son, this man she had seen so very little of since his thirteenth birthday, when he had essentially moved out of her house.

  “Hey, Mom,” Nelson said, with more or less the same intonation, the same chagrined happiness that might have colored his voice as a twelve-year-old. “I’m home.”

  In an instant, she’d collapsed in tears, falling to her knees and sobbing, her hands shielding her eyes.

  “Mom,” Nelson said, dropping his rucksack and opening the door, bending down beside this woman, his mother, now more than fifty years old somehow, so much more gray, so much paler than she had been on that morning when Wilbur spirited him away, that first morning his father was no longer a presence in their lives.

  He picked her up in his arms, and it made him happy to do so, after so many years of dragging his maimed and dismembered and deceased friends through rice paddies or clearings of elephant grass. Her body was familiar to him and her smell, that same dull, cheap, drugstore per
fume she’d been wearing for decades, her thin arms and thin legs, the entirety of her body shuddering with the relief of seeing him, at last.

  He carried her into the tiny sunken living room, a ceiling fan turning steadily above them, and laid her down on the couch, still sobbing. She turned away from him, as if ashamed. He sat down in the overstuffed chair his father had once favored, sank into its cushions, rested his arms on those of the chair, and felt his breathing ease.

  “I thought you were never coming home,” she said. “So often, I worried you were dead.”

  His eyelids closed, and instinctively he listened for sounds that might indicate danger. Tried to visualize the entire room—its corners, blind spots, potential sources of cover. He reached one hand toward the floor of the living room for the M16 he knew would not be there, fingers brushing only against that tired old turf of shag carpeting. He felt suddenly that his body was just so much still-wet cement, a bag of skin containing almost a hundred and seventy-five pounds of wet cement. And then, despite himself, he drifted off into sleep, his mother’s voice occasionally there, asking him questions he could not understand, or, from time to time sobbing again and then snoring. At one point he woke to the steady chatter of cicadas outside the house, the wall of sound sifting through the screened windows, and reminding him of the jungle he’d slept in these past three years, never once thinking of it as “home,” but where he nonetheless happened to reside, in a hammock above a forest floor crawling with millions upon millions of unseen insects and snakes, and his platoon arrayed all about him, aslumber, some snoring just as loudly as his mother was right now, others whimpering for girlfriends back home in Marion, Iowa; or Iron River, Michigan; or for some last-second fiancée in Hoboken, New Jersey; or Tempe, Arizona. Nelson had taken to a nightly exercise wherein very softly, in a whisper that was almost not his voice, he recited the Vietnamese alphabet—first forward, then backward, as if stepping in his own footsteps: A, Ă, , B, C, D, Đ, E, Ê, G, H, I, K, L, M, N, O, Ô, Ơ, P, Q, R, S, T, U, Ư, V, X, Y . . . —his voice becoming his own lullaby and sometimes he might overlap this ritual with the memory of lying in bed in a remote Cambodian whorehouse, a prostitute running her short fingers through his oily hair and humming some anonymous song to him while he recited the alphabet. She had one sleepy eye, this woman, and must have delivered a child recently. This would not have been evident save for the fact that when he pressed his mouth to her breasts, they issued forth a sweet milk that he drank, unabashed, throughout the night, until he and his comrades left in the early morning without so much as a word, just a collective gathering of bandoliers, machine guns, and packs shouldered again. Then they disappeared back in the direction of the border, into the certain danger of an endless jungle.

  He woke the next morning with a start, nearly pouncing out of the chair. His mother was in the kitchen, he could hear her, the sound of her orthopedic shoe soles on the linoleum, squeaking at every turn of her heel. Rubbing his eyes, he stood and stretched, then walked in to join her.

  “Good morning,” he said.

  It had been more than ten years since they lived together in the same house, falling asleep and waking under the same roof, sharing breakfast. He had come back, of course, for holidays, but every summer between his thirteenth birthday and his admission to West Point, he had worked as either a cook or counselor at Camp Chippewa, his connection to his mother growing more and more obscure, defined by little more than the infrequent letters they exchanged, or the monthly visits she paid to the camp between June and September, when Wilbur would drive them to a local restaurant or supper club and treat them to dinner, describing Nelson’s accomplishments in the kind of golden adjectives reserved only for adoring grandparents, mentors, or coaches in awe of a person so much younger than themselves.

  “What impresses me about Nelson, ma’am, is not just the boy’s skill with a rope or a compass, or the fact that he’s become the camp’s strongest swimmer and best shot with a twenty-two rifle. To be honest, I expect those kinds of accomplishments from every boy, and to my discredit, find myself disappointed when boys don’t excel at such pursuits. No, the thing that impresses me so much about Nelson is that I’ve seen him become a leader. The other boys, they look to him, almost by default. And there’s a toughness in him, ma’am—a toughness uncommon in boys his age, in most men even. He is righteous; he knows right and wrong and he won’t tolerate bullying or cruelty. I’ve seen it, and heard about his deeds from other counselors and troop leaders. Why, just a week ago, Nelson observed an older boy, a big boy, who thought he’d get some kicks by holding another boy’s head underwater in the lake. I don’t believe he meant the other boy grievous harm, ma’am, but just the same, this was un-Scout-like behavior and entirely unbecoming. In fact, it was torture. The lifeguard on duty couldn’t see what was happening, because the lake water was frothing with activity, boys swimming and splashing, but Nelson saw it right away. Well, ma’am. I’m happy to report that older boy was subdued by Nelson and subsequently dismissed from the camp. And the younger boy’s parents, it won’t surprise you, wrote me a letter commending Nelson’s efforts.”

  He reached into a wool suit pocket and produced an envelope folded once across its middle. “Here is that letter, ma’am. They describe your son as a hero.”

  Nelson watched as his mother reached across to take the warm envelope from Wilbur, her wrist very close to the flame of a candle. She unfolded the letter and began reading, her lips bouncing as her eyes moved left to right and back again. She read slowly, almost as if the act were a struggle for her. Then she folded the letter back into the envelope, slipped it into her purse, and said, “You’ve done a fine job mentoring my son, Mr. Whiteside, and I . . . I’m indebted to you. Truly.”

  “You are the one who should be proud, Mrs. Doughty,” Wilbur said. “You’ve made some difficult decisions to ensure your son’s success, ma’am, his future. That was very brave, indeed.”

  Nelson’s mother’s hand shook as she raised a water glass to her lips, the ice cubes clinking first against her teeth, and the perspiring glass. “Was it?” she mumbled after a moment, reaching into her purse for a handkerchief to blow her nose into.

  “THERE’S COFFEE IN THE THERMOS, if you’d like,” said Dorothy. “I have to go to work.” She was dressed in a uniform of sorts: white stockings, a light gray-blue skirt and blouse, her graying hair tied tightly into a bun, two circles of rouge on her cheeks below bagged eyes and eyebrows etched tight with sadness.

  “Where, uh, where do you work?” Nelson coughed. He realized, quite suddenly, that he knew next to nothing about this aged woman his mother had become.

  “Becker’s Dry Cleaning, on Barstow.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Uh, when do you get done?”

  She held her purse against her chest, stood very straight. “Depends. Five thirty, six.”

  “Maybe I could prepare dinner?” he offered, studying his toes, only then at a loss as to what dish he was even capable of making, after so much time eating out of brown plastic MREs, the cold contents of little tin cans. Suddenly he remembered her chow mein.

  “Do you know how to cook?” she asked.

  “A little,” he lied.

  “Well,” she reached into her purse, producing a five-dollar bill, and set it on the counter to the left of the sink. “Here’s some grocery money, then. If you don’t feel up to it, though, or if you’re exhausted, just buy some steaks and I’ll fix them when . . .” Then, her voice trailing off, she held a hand over her mouth, closed her eyes.

  “Mom,” he began, and thought to go to her, only did not know how.

  She waved a hand, as if indicating it was all so much nothing, a trifle next to everything else. She waved it all away and said, “I’ll see you tonight.”

  “Mom . . .”

  But she was already pushing her way through the front door, the screen door slapping open and then banging shut again. He stood in the doorway, watching her stride purposefully down the sidewalk, away fr
om him, and he could hear her blowing her nose, see her shoulders still shaking slightly.

  Once, he had been her boy, and then something more like a ghost. Now who was he to her? This man, this bearded man, almost twenty-five years old, with the tang of hash perhaps embedded in the fiber of his clothing and in his unkempt whiskers, a permanent glaze over his eyes, and now this history of secrets he could never share with her: the coffin-black tunnels burrowed through, the dozens of killings (how many were there?), the countless ways in which he had witnessed his friends, his comrades, killed? Even the things he was only slightly unashamed of: the opium dens, the whorehouses, the blue-eyed babies he might have left behind—how to explain any of those things? Better left a matter of discretion. Of silence. That, at least, could stand in for some kind of virtue.

  24

  THE CANDLE SPUTTERS OUT FINALLY, DROWNED IN its own whitish wax.

  “I still want to make a wager,” Jonathan says, leaning jauntily back in his chair. “Deanna? You going to bet with me? How ’bout you, Nelson? Or is that against the Scout code? I can’t fucking recollect all those goddamn laws and rules and what have you.”

  “Dad . . . ,” Trevor moans. “You’re drunk. Can we go back to the motel, please?”

  “No,” Jonathan says forcefully. “This night’s just warming up, isn’t that right, Nelson? We’re above the forty-fifth now, Trev. There’s no going to bed early. No school in the morning, no girlfriend to report back to. No, we’re going to have some goddamn fun tonight.” He scooches his chair closer to Deanna, swoops an arm around the shoulder of her chair. She winces at his touch at first, swipes at something in her lap, and then glances up at Trevor, and smiles.