The Hearts of Men

by Nickolas Butler

  “Oh, right,” he says, “sorry about that.”

  “You’re cute,” she smirks. “How old are you anyway?”

  “Uh, tonight’s my twenty-first birthday.” He is a terrible liar, tries to take a sip of his beer, but it is, of course, empty.

  “Not much of a poker player, are ya?” she giggles.

  “I like cribbage,” he says with one hundred percent genuine earnestness, as if maybe they could play a game now that she’s done dancing.

  She laughs so hard that for a moment it is the loudest sound in the bar, turning heads in their direction; she has a belly laugh that truly snags his heart. She covers her mouth. “So, you’re sixteen, right? Maybe seventeen? You’re way too nice to be twenty-one, that’s for sure.” She blinks slowly, her eyelashes two exquisite onyx curtains.

  He hands her two dollar bills as if he were buying a milk shake or a Coke, and she stands somewhat awkwardly on her heels, begins retrieving the other money onstage, crumpled like so many discarded cocktail napkins or paper flowers. Someone has actually thrown onstage what appears to be a Hallmark greeting card, a deep purple envelope that she now collects like dropped mail.

  “I’ll look for you,” she says over her shoulder. “Maybe you’d like a private dance later.”

  “All right,” he says. “It was nice to meet you.”

  This time she turns and comes back to him, kisses him on the cheek.

  He watches her walk off the stage, disappear into some side room. He is entranced, wants to follow her to the ends of the earth, but just stands instead, readjusts himself through some pocket finagling, and wobbles back to his father and Nelson, who actually do happen to be playing cribbage, oblivious, it would seem, to their surroundings.

  “Make a friend?” Jonathan asks.

  “Yeah,” Trevor says, touching his cheek. She didn’t kiss anyone else in the bar—that has to mean something, doesn’t it? The kid slumps into a chair.

  “Well, what do you think?” Jonathan asks. “Ready to head back to the motel? Or do you want another beer?”

  Trevor sighs, looks to the stage. Guns N’ Roses’ “Paradise City” is blaring as a new dancer storms onto the stage wearing what appears to be Slash’s signature black hat and strumming furiously at an air guitar strategically held over her hunter-orange thong panties.

  “Uh, I guess I’ll take another beer. Thanks, Dad.”

  Nelson shakes his head, rises from the table, and says, “I got this.”

  28

  THERE IS A WIDOW WHO LIVES IN A SMALL RANCH house outside the town of Haugen, Wisconsin, not far from the southernmost boundary of the Whiteside Scout Reservation. Her name is Lorraine, and she works as a receptionist at the nearby pool cue factory, fielding phone calls from around the world; customers placing orders, confirming shipments, lodging complaints, purchasing supplies such as chalk, talcum powder, cue tips.

  She lives on a five-acre parcel of meadow surrounded by cornfields. Her husband died in a drunk-driving accident, at age forty-eight. Every day she feels fortunate for his death, for the poetic justice that the passengers in the other vehicle, a family of four, driving south from a vacation in Bayfield, were all spared; the daughter who broke only her clavicle, the father whose left eye socket was irreparably caved in, the mother and son who escaped unharmed, a few scratches. At her late husband’s funeral she remembers standing by his grave thinking, Stupid selfish sonuvabitch.

  In summertime she tends to an elaborate garden of tomatoes, peas, beans, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, squash, pumpkins, peppers. From June until October her fingers smell like tomato plants, her toenails are crescented with dirt, her neck, arms, and legs burnt a deep chestnut. She likes to wear tank tops; imagines each freckle speckling her chest as representing a long summer day toiling beneath the punishing but beneficent sun. On the southern edge of her garden is a flimsy aluminum camping chair with a plastic woven seat where she sits beneath a huge faded Corona beach umbrella, there to sip a glass of sun tea, a lemonade, perhaps a light beer, and when she closes her eyes and flexes her toes in the dirt, she hears the hum of passing bees, feels the occasional butterfly or moth alight on her forearms.

  She lives to garden. And for her two-week vacation every winter to Costa Rica, when she packs a suitcase full of paperback mysteries and romances, two swimsuits, three sundresses, plenty of underwear, and two pairs of nice flip-flops. She plays on a volleyball league with some folks from work, goes to the same bar most every Friday for a fish fry and a brandy old-fashioned, and then heads home, where she watches TV and crochets blankets for the local church charity sale each December.

  And this: two or three times a week he rings her doorbell. In summertime, always after nightfall, sometimes holding a VHS movie in his hands, or a bottle of lukewarm white wine. September through May, he might visit a little more frequently, often before dusk. She’ll watch him, walking down Whiteside Road, then taking a shortcut path that he has grooved through the field grasses to her backyard, and then to her front door, always her front door, where he waits as patiently as a little boy, never just allowing himself in, no matter how many times she’s invited him, implored him to. She’s even given him a key.

  They eat supper together and after he always washes and dries their dishes. Most evenings they watch TV together, or play cards. Sometimes he fixes her toilet, mends a patch of leaky roof, changes her car’s oil. And then she takes his hand and guides him into her bedroom.

  The first time, she was afraid of his body. The myriad scars, each one a brutally crude pucker. But he was so kind, so kind to her body. To her breasts, her nipples, her backbone, her shoulders. He smelled of lake water and cigarettes, burnt coffee and the cologne of open fields, northern bogs. It was the first time in her life that she considered clothing as a method of camouflaging our scars, the traumas of our lives. She’d seen him around Haugen before: filling up the gas tank on an old blue International pickup truck or an aged Land Rover, picking up the ditch trash along Highway 53, and once, outside the Lutheran church on Christmas Eve, with a somewhat melancholy look on his face as he inspected the snowflakes falling through the glow of a streetlight.

  She is a secret, she supposes, though this is foolishness, of course; there is no need for secrets. He could take a wife if he liked, a girlfriend. She could live with him at the camp, in his little cabin, a building she has only twice visited, in the camp’s off-season. It has the atmosphere of an old-men’s working club—everything in its place, the floor perfectly swept, even the clutter bearing a certain utility: old fishing rods and creels, snowshoes, two rifles clearly unfired in decades. She remembers staring at the wool blanket on his bed, how perfect and tidy it was, the flat surface smooth as the felt of a billiard table.

  When his nightmares come, as they do most nights, she holds him tighter than she ever gripped her husband, because the sounds he makes are the whimpers of a scared little boy so far away from home, so terrified of the dark and the secrets kept there, so sad for the bad things he must have done.

  One dream, more than the rest, seems to haunt him. He talks about it some mornings, at her kitchen table, a cup of coffee before him.

  They discover a tunnel outside a village and when they pull back the bamboo hatch covering its opening out plumes a smell like death. This is not unusual. The men of his platoon help him shed his backpack, his M16, and they hand him two extra pistols, four extra clips. There’s not enough room to enter the tunnel feetfirst, so he must slither into the darkness like a snake. He crawls and crawls, feels hairy roots brush his face and ears, dry slick insects scuttle past his forearms, over his hands. He crawls for minutes, hours, days, and the air is a noxious fume he chokes on.

  And then he feels a presence, another life-form in the tunnel, ahead of him. It is not a small thing, not a rodent or a snake. It is a person. There is a ragged breathing. It may or may not be his own, though, he can’t be sure. There is no light ahead and the entrance is ages behind him. He carries a penlight on a cord loo
ped around his neck, the same cord that holds his lucky nickel, but this other person in the dream is invariably a VC. It is the first time he’s encountered someone alive inside a tunnel—if they are alive, that is; if his senses haven’t failed him, his mind, his imagination. Always these tunnels lead to chambers, to caches of weapons or ammunition, maps, intelligence, or food. Sometimes the tunnels lead to other tunnels or to villages. Sometimes the tunnels are not even completed, dead-ending in nothing more than a wall of damp soil—the last, worst place on the planet.

  Only this is not a dead end. He reaches a hand into the gloom, and, touching a face, screams, even as the other man does. Without hesitating, he aims his pistol in front of him and pulls the trigger, feeling the man’s face and brains wash over his own face as the deafening report of the gun rings in his shattered eardrums. He is weeping and the planet is trying to crush him.

  It is his platoon that pulls him out. Hruska, a big Polish kid from Vermont, no doubt too tall for the tunnel but the bravest of the bunch, clambers right in and seizes hold of Nelson’s ankles, wrenches him backward until—an eternity later—both men are free of the tunnel and holding each other as hot rain falls from the sky above them, washing the mud and blood off Nelson’s face.

  “Poor baby,” she’ll shush, “poor, poor baby.” She’ll pet his hair, rub at his earlobes, while he sobs and sobs, this damaged little boy. Sometimes in his sleep, during his dreams, he calls out for his mother.

  29

  TREVOR IS SCANNING THE BAR WITH THE EAGERNESS of a birder but without the aid of binoculars. He’s seen three other dancers take the stage since her, but none of them are her—none of them half as beautiful as she is. Two of the women looked to be about his mother’s age and when he asked his father if this was normal, his dad just shrugged. “This is northern Wisconsin, Trev. Not exactly Wall Street. They’ve probably got kids to feed. People do what they have to do.”

  This was a revelation. That there were mothers in the world without husbands. Trevor thought of his own orderly neighborhood: the jade-green lawns, the fathers out washing new cars on Saturday mornings, the weekend backyard campfires where dads passed around flasks of whiskey and mothers sat on Adirondack chairs, legs folded beneath their butts, chic Hudson Bay blankets spread across their laps. He could not quite visualize any of those women living up here, this neon intersection of a hardscrabble neighborhood in Hurley, Wisconsin.

  “Hey, there.”

  Out of nowhere. It’s her. Sweet Jesus holy shit. Trevor turns, manages a clumsy, “Oh, hey.”

  “I’m Aspen,” she says, standing right there in front of his dad, in front of his Scoutmaster, producing a hand for him to shake.

  He takes it. Jesus. “I’m Trevor. Trevor Quick.”

  “Yeah, last names really aren’t that useful in places like this,” says Jonathan, extending an eager hand. “I’m Jonathan. Trev’s old man. And this here is Nelson, chieftain of the northern wilderness clan of Scouts.”

  Nelson nods at Aspen, gives her a tiny salute.

  “Oh, we’ve met,” says Aspen, giggling.

  Jonathan leans away from his old friend, whistles. “You old dog.”

  Nelson shrugs, takes a long pull off his beer. Trevor stares at him, his ears burning with jealousy, envy, disbelief.

  Aspen wraps an arm around Trevor’s elbow, asks, “You want a private dance?”

  “Um, sure,” the kid manages, as she pulls him away from the bar.

  “Don’t forget what I said!” Jonathan yells into the Aerosmith din of “Sweet Emotion.” “She’ll take you for all you’re worth!”

  Trevor shakes his head, and Aspen laughs, turning to give the two men a long, perfectly manicured middle finger.

  NEAR THE BACK OF THE BAR they approach another bouncer, a big man perched on a very small, fragile-looking stool. He appears to be reading Guns & Ammo. “Twenty-five bucks,” the man mutters, not looking up as he holds out his thick pork chop of a well-callused hand.

  “Uh . . . ,” Trevor stutters.

  “It’s for the dance,” Aspen explains, pressing her body against Trevor’s. All those soft curves, her smell. In her heels, they are of about the same height and now she rests her head onto his shoulder, against his neck. He can’t remember Rachel ever doing that.

  He reaches for his wallet, peers into it through the gloom, sees only hundred-dollar bills.

  “If you want,” she presses, “you could pay for two dances . . . or more. So we won’t be interrupted . . .”

  That sounds good to Trevor. He finds a hundred-dollar bill, lays it into the man’s huge palm.

  “How long is each dance?” he asks. He imagines prom, hopes that his hundred dollars might ensure that they have hours of something more than slow-dancing below the glittering of a disco ball.

  “’Bout three songs,” the man grunts. “Enjoy.”

  Trevor does the math. About twelve, maybe thirteen, fourteen minutes. “Can I pick the songs?” he blurts. The most bang for the buck, he thinks quickly: Don McLean’s “American Pie,” The Allman Brothers Band’s “Mountain Jam,” and CCR’s version of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”—true jukebox values.

  But she is already leading him through a set of velvet curtains into a deeper, close-hanging darkness. The music is more diffuse here and there are five or six wooden booths with the kind of swinging doors you see in spaghetti westerns. She guides him into one.

  “The deejay handles all that,” she says. “You just sit down. And relax.”

  She begins slowly removing her clothing.

  “Do you know the rules?” she asks huskily.

  “No,” he gulps. He feels himself sinking into a very warm, languid sea. The darkness seems to swirl. She swings her legs over his thighs and sits lightly down upon him, runs her fingers through his hair. He touches her hips, gently.

  “That’s rule number one,” she whispers. “You don’t touch me. I touch you. And no kissing. Or licking.” She licks at his earlobe.

  He looks at her breasts, a single-incision scar, like a small bowed-out U just visible beneath the slope of each one.

  “How did you hurt yourself?” he asks.

  She sits back. “What?”

  “Your . . . uh, your . . .” He points.

  “My tits?” She slaps at him playfully. “I had a boob job.”

  “Oh,” he says.

  Her chest sparkles with that glitter, reminds him of a cliff of quartz or the alleyway by the State Theatre in downtown Eau Claire, always awash with broken glass glimmering beneath the midnight moon, bouncing headlights, the furtive orange of throwaway cigarettes.

  He looks at her wrists.

  “What about there?” He touches them very lightly, with the pressure of smoothing a stamp, the flap of an envelope.

  She shakes her head.

  “How ’bout we just be quiet?” she asks.

  “Okay,” he agrees. “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re sweet,” she whispers. “Nobody ever apologizes to me.”

  “You’re beautiful,” he says, even as he notices her heavy makeup, the tiny bumps of acne on her chin, the wrinkles on her forehead. He can’t say whether she’s twenty-five or thirty-five. Older than he is, that’s for sure, and certainly younger than his parents.

  “Do you have kids?” he ventures.

  She smiles, breaking for a moment from the act. “I have a son.”

  “I bet you’re a good mom.”

  She closes her eyes and moves in the darkness above him, but says nothing at all, and he watches like the supplicant he’s become—worshipper of this backroom goddess.

  Armies of warm, frothy waves wash over his head, break on his shoulders, and he thinks of nothing but this woman, Aspen, the specific weight and smell of her. The maddeningly sweet ticking clock that is this heavy metal music, and outside, still audible, the laughter and beer-bottle clatter of grown men, the distant revving of Harley-Davidsons, the rattle and cough of bad mufflers—all of it the insulated crash
of the sea deep within a conch shell that is pressed right to his ear.

  “Is Aspen your real name?” he manages after a while.

  “Shhhh,” she says, “it’s really better if we don’t talk.”

  She moves against him with a rhythm quite apart from the new song that’s come on, Night Ranger’s “Sister Christian,” and he is glad for that.

  “How old are you?” he persists, something like hope rising in his throat.

  “How old are you?” she breathes into his neck, holds his arms up over his head.

  “I told you,” he says, and then, with the bravery of several daiquiris and a couple of beers, “twenty-five.”

  She laughs, “Now you’re getting the hang of it. And what do you do for a living, my twenty-five-year-old boy toy?”

  His voice catches, but he thinks he can play this game if it means hearing her laugh, prolonging this moment, “I’m a war correspondent, actually. For the BBC.”

  She sits back and there are her breasts. Like, right there. “I’ve never heard that one before.”

  “It’s true,” he continues heavily, speaking slowly with the fabrication of it all. “Iraq, Rwanda, Algeria, Afghanistan . . . You may have seen my work in National Geographic, too? Or do you get the Times?”

  “Absolutely,” she drawls. “You must be wise beyond your years.” She tugs a little at her nipples.

  He delves forward. “Yeah, but . . . you could probably teach me a few things . . .”

  “The trouble is,” she says, now touching her lower lip with a finger, her eyes playfully sad in the darkness, “we’re out of time.”

  He reaches into his pocket and produces a hundred-dollar bill, as if this was as commonplace as a quarter.

  “Maybe you could get us some beers,” he suggests, “or daiquiris? I often drink daiquiris when I’m”—he stumbles for a moment then rights himself—“abroad.”

  She takes his money, stands, re-dresses, and says, “I’ll be right back.” And then she leans back into him and runs her hand across the back of his neck, his hair, and kisses him on the lips in a way no one has ever kissed him before.