“You’re always drunk,” Trevor says. “Do you even know that? Do you know the difference anymore?”
Jonathan raises one finger in the air, burps gently, and leans toward the center of the table. “I have to take a leak,” he says very slowly, “and then I’m going to take a step outside to have a cigarette and talk to the stars.” He pushes his chair back and it falls over, slowly, and there is a moment as Jonathan stands, when it seems entirely possible that he, too, may also fall over and become entangled with the chair, like two barroom brawlers embracing awkwardly, but he steadies himself to rise almost regally as a waiter hurries over, righting the chair and then sweeping away the empty glasses. “Just have to powder my nose,” Jonathan says with a wink as he teeters toward the bathroom. With his silver hair, his khaki pants, a baby-blue button-down shirt, and Sperry topsiders, he might be a yachtsman accounting for the pitch and roll of the sea beneath him.
Trevor’s arms are crossed over his chest and he glowers down at the white linen of the table. Nelson seems to be fixing his gaze at the same remarkable point on the tabletop. All around them, the dining room is abuzz with laughter, the promise of romance, the comfortable two-top silence of long-married couples, the low-toned voices of political debate or business negotiations, the optimistic toasts, and one table blearily singing the easy refrain of “Piano Man.”
“I’m just so happy to meet you,” Deanna says at last, clapping her hands together and holding them near her heart, the way, Trevor imagines, a missionary might before raising their face toward God in prayer. “I know this dinner has been, well, a bit of a shit show, but . . . You’re exactly how your father described you.”
“Oh yeah?” Trevor asks sullenly, staring back at her now, unyielding. “How’s that?”
She looks down, lets her hands fall. “Handsome,” she says quietly. “And good.”
“Good?” He snorts with mock amusement. “Good? You heard him. He thinks I’m simple.”
“No, he doesn’t. He thinks you’re incredibly intelligent. I just think . . . I think he’s worried that you’re maybe a little . . . naïve, is all.”
“Naïve? Naïve! Of course I’m naïve! I’m sixteen fucking years old! I don’t understand. Does he want me to be a bad man? Is that what this is about? Soured on life before I even get to college? Is it about finding some kind of coconspirator or something?” The boy places the heels of his palms on his eyes and emits a deep teenage sigh. “Like, I just don’t understand. I don’t think I was raised to disrespect my mother. I mean, what the hell is happening here? What does he even want from me? Some seal of approval?”
“Maybe,” she says, “or maybe—”
“Well screw that!” Trevor snaps. “And screw him!”
The waiter is suddenly stationed at Deanna’s shoulder, standing at attention like any good soldier, an array of menus in his hands, and a look of polite concern on his face.
“Would you all be interested in dessert?” he asks.
“Give us a moment, please,” Nelson says, leaning into the center of the table from the shadows where he’s been biding his time. He coughs into the white flower of his napkin. “Deanna, perhaps you’d kindly give me a few minutes with Trevor, here?” He winks at her, inches his chair closer to Trevor, who could hardly look more uncomfortable.
“Of course,” she says, pushing away from the table and after grabbing her purse, moving toward the bathrooms. When she is out of sight, Nelson places a heavy hand on Trevor’s back, and the boy stares down at the linen of the table, making little indentations in the cloth with his fingernails.
“So, my parents are getting divorced?” Trevor asks. “Is that what this means?”
“I don’t know, bud. But I’m afraid it’s looking that way.”
“I don’t understand,” Trevor says, looking up at Nelson. “I mean, she’s not even that good looking. It’s not like he’s leaving Mom for some twenty-something bikini model. You know? Not that it would make it okay, but, I mean, at least I could understand. Some kind of midlife crisis, or whatever they’re called. But I don’t know, geez . . .” He laces his fingers behind his head. “Why’d he go and organize all this? Do you understand?”
Nelson leans back in his chair, glances out the window. There are Jonathan and Deanna, standing on a narrow walkway in the glow of the restaurant, sharing a cigarette. They look natural together. He’s leaning on a wooden rail and she’s standing to his right, her left hand on his back. In her right hand, she holds their cigarette. They might be standing on the deck of a transatlantic ocean liner, this debonair couple, comfortable in their silence, their little throwaway gestures.
“I don’t know either, bud,” Nelson says, “but, listen, I want you to know something.”
The kid peers intently down at the table.
“Are you listening to me?”
Trevor nods.
“You’re a fine young man.”
Trevor laughs, dismissively. Nelson reaches for the boy’s wrist, holds it, with some pressure, and says, “I mean what I said.”
“Okay—I heard you,” the kid scoffs, “I’m a fine young man. Great. My dad’s banging another woman, he hates my girlfriend, and I’m totally fucking confused, but you think I’m fine. Great.”
“Trevor,” Nelson intones, “I’ve had the great misfortune to watch dozens and dozens of my friends die.” His voice is low now, and it cuts right through the haze of the restaurant. “Many of them were fine young men, too. Many of them, I suppose, weren’t as bright as you are now, maybe, or as sensitive. They really were more like boys. And I watched them be blown to bits. Do you understand?”
Trevor almost shakes his head in the negative.
Nelson places his hand on the boy’s heart. Leaves it there, warm and heavy, and though Trevor’s first impulse is to retreat from this touch, he doesn’t, and the hand feels like a quilt, a comfort. Nelson’s eyes are unflinching, strong, haunted. “I’ve known cowards and I’ve known heroes,” he says. “The heroes were always ruled by their hearts; the cowards, by their brains. Don’t forget that. Heroes don’t calculate or calibrate. They do what is right.”
Jonathan and Deanna weave back through the restaurant now, trailing a bouquet of cigarette smoke and fresh, piney air. Jonathan sits down happily, heavily, places a hand on Trevor’s shoulder.
“You order us some dessert?” he asks.
“No,” says the boy.
“Well, now’s your chance. We’re going to drop Deanna off at the motel and then I’m going to take you someplace real special, but they ain’t gonna have any dessert, I can guarantee you that.”
“Dad, I don’t know . . . Can I go back to the motel, too? I’m kind of bushed.”
Jonathan reaches into his wallet, produces a hundred-dollar bill, holds it before his son. “The thing is, it’s a bit of a drive. So I really do think we’d be best served by ordering some coffee, having a little dessert, and collecting ourselves before we go. I’ll pay you a hundred dollars if you come.”
“Dad . . . I mean, look, I just want to go back to the motel, okay? It’s not about money or anything.”
Jonathan pulls another hundred-dollar bill from his pocket, holds one in each hand, like winning lottery tickets.
“How about two hundred dollars, then?” he asks. He raises his eyebrows and purses his lips like some crazed TV game show host trying to make a deal.
“Dad . . .”
Jonathan laughs, looks at Deanna, and raises an eyebrow. “Kid drives a hard bargain.” He sits up off his chair a bit, reaches for his wallet, examines its contents, before licking his fingers and extracting another hundred-dollar bill. “Three hundred dollars. How about it?”
“Looks like Trevor has the basics of negotiation down,” Nelson says, crossing his arms. “Stay quiet, seem disinterested. He’s also created a little immediacy by claiming he wants to call it a night. Must have a smart mother.”
Deanna glances at Nelson, nibbles benignly at her fingertips. The restauran
t seems to have downshifted into another speed, a slower speed. The music taking on a less buoyant tone, yielding now to those sad-sack, tear-in-your-martini dirges Sinatra might’ve crooned if it were just him at the bar, him and Set-em-Up-Joe, I could tell you a lot, but you’ve got to be true to your code . . .
And now another hundred-dollar bill comes out, two for each hand. “Imagine the date you could take what’s-her-face out on, huh?” says Jonathan, grinning. “For four hundred dollars you could hire a limousine, have dinner in Minneapolis, or hell, get a hotel room down in Milwaukee or Chicago, give each other hand jobs or whatever it is you guys do these days.”
Trevor’s arms are crossed and he’s frowning deeply. “Rachel,” he mutters.
“Also,” Jonathan says, “we still have that matter of the bet. I’m going to get Nelson to pony up later tonight.”
“He’s coming, too?” Trevor asks hopefully. “To the next place?”
Nelson leans toward the center of the table. “Somebody’s got to keep your dad honest.”
“Last call,” Jonathan says. “What’ll it be? Four hundred dollars and some unknown fun, or back to the motel to watch a shitty little TV and hope your Rochelle is home? For what it’s worth, I kinda think you’ll like where we’re headed. Hell, if I can’t educate you here, maybe somebody else can.”
“Rachel, Dad. Rachel. And if we’re going to do this nonsense, I want five hundred,” Trevor blurts. “Five hundred. Cash on the barrelhead.”
Jonathan smiles in the golden light, his teeth shining.
25
NELSON LIVED WITH HIS MOTHER FOR TWO MONTHS, the tedium of everyday life beginning to drown him almost immediately. Nowhere to go, nothing to do, no one who understood precisely where he’d come from, what he had seen, the things he had done. The first month he contented himself by sleeping sixteen hours a day, rising only to eat ice cream and then walk into downtown and drink with the enthusiasm and urgency of someone desperately trying to black out into an eternal velveteen Johnnie Walker night. Most times, he couldn’t even find someone to fight; every insult he flung, every chest he pushed, every beer he tossed into an unsuspecting face—they all went ignored. He daydreamed about his adolescence, when boys used to mob him, their fists churning at his body, their feet kicking him like a ball in the middle of a scrum.
His favorite part of the day came either when a bartender or bouncer smacked him with a blackjack, or their thick hand found his yellowed crumpled collar or a tangle of hair and dragged him into the soft blue evening’s humid embrace or onto the sidewalk halo of a sentinel streetlight. How many times had he lain on the cement, laughing, thinking, I’m alive, I’m fucking alive, this is life, I am alive and drunk in Wisconsin. Lay there, on the cement, smoking a crooked Marlboro, and fingering the nickel he kept on a chain necklace.
On the first day of August, early in the morning, he entered his mother’s bedroom, sat gently on her bed, and said quietly, “Mom, wake up. Wake up, Mom.”
She startled awake, sat upright, looking so very old.
“No, I mean, it’s okay,” he said, “lie back down. It’s okay. Sorry to wake you. It’s just . . .”
She held the hem of her blankets below her chin, studied him with a look of fear and confusion. The lace curtains framing her window twirled with the wind; they were no longer white, but the stained yellow of a cigarette filter—the color, really, of just . . . time.
“I’m leaving, Mom,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Why?” she croaked.
“I don’t know,” he said, “I’m afraid . . . I’m afraid something bad will happen if I stay here.”
His favorite fantasy, his favorite dream involved a bar fight in which he did not stop punching his opponent’s face, kept throwing haymakers until it was little more than hamburger, that face, a mess of spaghetti and meat sauce. It was a dream he experienced often, and not even with horror, either—just a splendid sense of relief, more relief than he could get swallowing any kind of downer. He dreaded the thought of his mother visiting him in the county jail, sitting in a courtroom, with Nelson having nothing to say for himself except perhaps that he was going exactly where he belonged, to prison. He had, after all, killed so many human beings in Vietnam. Wasn’t he, in fact, a murderer?
“Well, you have to do what you think is right, Nelson,” she managed.
They were silent a moment before he spoke again.
“Did you ever see him again?” Nelson asked. “Did he ever call?”
She shook her head, covered her mouth, began crying as she seemed to do so easily, weeping with that same sense of resignation.
“There’s a box down in the basement. Letters, I suppose, he sent you after you left St. John’s. They seemed to come around your birthday.”
“He’s down in Chicago, isn’t he?”
“Yes, well . . . I don’t know. Does it matter, Nelson? Would it matter so much? Don’t you see? You leaving now . . . Oh, please—just—go. Go already!” She swatted at him, rather feebly.
“Do you have his address?”
“No,” she sniffled, “I don’t care, either. I would have burned those letters if they weren’t addressed to you.”
“Why Chicago?”
“He would talk about living there sometimes, about the lake and the trains, I guess he had a cousin who was a bus driver or something. Anyway, he wasn’t happy here. I don’t have to remind you of that.” She turned away from him. “Where will you go?” she asked after a moment.
“West,” he said. “Somewhere out west.”
“Will you do me one favor?” she asked.
“I’ll try.”
“Two favors, actually. Send me a postcard, if you would, so at least I know you’re alive. And come back for Christmas, will you? Take me to church. Is that too much to ask?”
“No,” he said, “it isn’t too much to ask. I can do that.”
“And take that box of letters. I want them out of my house.”
He leaned down and kissed the top of her head. There was something inside him, in fact, that wished nothing more than to crawl into bed beside her and watch the day brighten. But instead, he rose, collected a small backpack, found the box in the basement, emptied its contents into his bag, and walked downtown to the bus station beside the Eau Claire River, and bought a westbound ticket for Albuquerque, New Mexico, a destination attractive to him for several reasons, not the least of which was he knew not a soul in that city.
He took work on ranches, mucking out horse stalls, fixing fence lines—all the dude duties of a greenhorn farmhand. Nelson relished the labor; he woke early, ate quietly, and the other hands left him pretty much alone. At night he went to bed tired, and on some evenings he walked out to a campfire where some of the men sat on stumps laughing and telling stories and over time they asked him about where he’d come from, and it was these men he first told about Vietnam.
He sent his mother a postcard in early October that read: Dear Mom, Working on a ranch north of Santa Fe. Please don’t worry about me. See you soon. Love, Nelson.
He did not come home for Christmas that year, or any year, for that matter. Did not return to Wisconsin until the fall of his thirtieth birthday when he received a call at the ranch from Sacred Heart Hospital in Eau Claire. He’d been in the horse barn talking to the farrier, passing him tools and shoes, when the owner of the ranch, an elderly woman named Maria, hurried through the barn’s open doors and spoke his name with a note of concern in her voice. “Phone’s for you,” she said, with a hand covering her heart.
He buried her on a cold day in October with low, gray bristly clouds sweeping through the sky. Fourteen people attended her funeral; he’d had to pointedly ask her neighbors if they would come, unsure they would even have enough coffin bearers otherwise.
The minister, after reading his liturgy and leading the grieving through a graveside prayer, lingered a polite amount of time, shook hands with the attendees, and then, before passing Nelson en route to his car, sa
id quietly, “I want you to know she didn’t suffer, if that helps. I was there at the end. It was some kind of stroke. But I don’t believe she was ever in any kind of pain.”
Nelson stared at her graveside coffin, the one he had hastily picked out at the funeral home, its shiny wood now beaded with rain. The funeral home director’s wife herself had come out to Nelson’s mother’s home, to pick out her eternal ensemble. His relatives were now crossing themselves and retreating to their cars, most without so much as shaking his hand or bothering to mumble their condolences. Fifty feet away he saw a man sitting inside a small Bobcat tractor, a cigarette smoldering between his lips, a mound of dark soil next to the machine.
26
JONATHAN AND DEANNA IN THE VAN, TREVOR WITH Nelson in his cool old beater of a Land Rover.
“You got any notion where Dad’s taking us?” Trevor asks, as they pull into the parking lot of the motel, Deanna, at the wheel of the Astro van, guiding the vehicle to a spot just in front of Jonathan’s room. Trevor watches as his dad leans from the passenger seat across the center console to kiss Deanna, her hands on his face, the headlights backlighting their heads. The kiss is excruciatingly slow and real, and after a moment Trevor turns to look instead toward the sickly glow of the pool.
Nelson nods dispassionately. “If I were you, I’d just remember that five hundred dollars. Focus on your girlfriend, focus on your feelings for her. Your dad seems hell-bent on some kind of juvenile antics, but that doesn’t mean you need to engage in it. And, Trevor—”
“What?” the kid asks.
“You might not understand now, or even in a few years, but . . . try to give your Dad a break, if you can, you know? Cut him some slack.”
“Are you kidding me?” Trevor says. “Of all people, I thought you’d be, like, outraged! Now you’re, what, colluding with him or something? I mean, are you seriously condoning this bullshit? Look at them! Look at them over there!” He points to the lovebirds, necking in plain sight. “That’s my fucking dad! Who is married, by the way. Married!”
The Hearts of Men Page 18