30
WHEN THE LIGHTS COME UP, EVEN IN THE MOST REMOTE corners of the bar, Trevor’s lips are red with lipstick and he is wearing her perfume. She leads him back toward the bar, where a few die-hard bikers lean against the rail while the bartender stares at them with derision, washing glasses. The dancers seem a jagged mixture of newfound energy and complete exhaustion as they sip coffee topped with whipped cream, or pound shots of Jameson and Jägermeister.
Aspen gives Trevor the long hug of two ultimately ill-fated potential lovers, then stands with her hands on her hips and looks at him, all devil-may-care, and slightly glistening. He notices that she no longer wears her high heels, and is now significantly shorter than him, seemingly more frail. He looks at her, tries to imagine how old her son is, what his name is, where he is sleeping at that moment, Her dressing room? A friend’s place? Or maybe she’s actually married . . . Then he peers around the bar for his father, nowhere to be seen.
He leans toward Aspen. “Uh, have you seen my dad?”
“Twenty-five, huh?” she says, glancing around and shrugging her shoulders.
“Check outside,” the barkeep barks. “Took off about fifteen, twenty minutes ago.”
Trevor touches Aspen on the elbow, then leans down, and, taking the biggest chance of his young life, kisses her on the cheek. “Thanks,” he says.
“Stay safe,” she advises, blowing him a halfhearted kiss even as she rubs her feet against the dirty floorboards strewn with cigarette butts, spent matchbooks, and scratched-off and worthless lottery tickets. The music has quit and now toward the front of the bar someone is extinguishing each of the neon lights in turn.
Outside, the bars are all emptying, men teetering on broken-concrete sidewalks, fumbling with lighters and smokes, while above them, moths and June bugs still orbit the streetlights. Farther down Main, two pugilists are dizzily swinging at each other and one man wobbles over and falls off the curb into the street. The other fighter begins kicking his ribs like a hated soccer ball and around the two a small crowd gathers to seal the violence into a huddle of cheering fists, jeering insults, a growing pool of blood.
The cops come at last, scattering the mob, though the one fighter kicks on. The beaten man lies still. Trevor’s heart rattles. He is ready to be home; not here in Hurley, not at the motel, not at camp. He wants his own house, the bed he seems to have outgrown, the soft threadbare Green Bay Packers sheets Rachel teases him about, the Brett Favre posters tacked and taped to his walls, his Mom’s buckwheat pancakes waiting for him in the morning, her hands on a steaming mug of coffee, asking him about his tenuous plans for college, asking him about Rachel though he suspects she does not really approve of her either, though in a different way from his father; and his dad coming down the creaking stairs in his khaki shorts, pink Polo golf shirt, and black visor, smelling of cologne, ready for a weekend round at the country club. Trevor recently noticed that his dad’s ankles were oddly bare of hair and he wondered if that was some hallmark of getting old, of being a father; that eventually all those years of wearing socks and winter boots would rub away at you, and that maybe this was what happened to men’s heads as well, their hair just worn away with worry.
He looks down the street to their van. The bikes are missing.
“Ah, crap,” Trevor mumbles, quickening his step. The rack still juts from a trailer hitch off the back of the van and nothing else seems awry—no windows broken, no doors left ajar. Trevor sits on the curb, his chin in his hands. He smells like Aspen and that at least makes him happy. Maybe he’ll wait a few days before showering at camp.
Another police cruiser and an ambulance have pulled toward the scene of the fight and the winning combatant has been tossed into the back of a squad car by two cops while the defeated man lies on a gurney, motionless, red, white, and blue lights strobing across his bloody face, a stethoscope pressed to his chest.
“On three,” a paramedic says, and the man disappears into the closed-door ambulance, quick to wail its sirens, abruptly U-turn in the wide street, and peel off into the night for whatever regional infirmary they even have this far north.
One last cop stands jauntily on the sidewalk, thumbs crooked into his belt, and that is enough to disperse most of the remaining gawkers, though two or three bikers stay on to stare right back at the police through their dark sunglasses, until that last cruiser flashes its lights once, hiccups a timid siren, and slides away into the night. Five minutes later, the bikers mount up and roar off, satisfied in their way.
Trevor stands, walks up the street, and peers down at the gutter puddle of blood coagulating dark on the pavement. He’s never seen a fight before, except on television. A little pushing and shoving in the hallways at school, sure, but not like this. He leans down and picks up a tooth lying on the pavement, then four more, one of them golden. For some reason, he pockets the teeth, all of them.
It is foggy and the night air has turned cool. He turns back toward the van. Sits down. Closes his eyes. Then he hears his name, repeated, high-pitched and merry, like a tease, “Treevv-orrr!” And how he wishes it might be Aspen, idling her car on Main Street, speaking to him through the open passenger window, inviting him to go make out in that steamy-windowed late-model Camaro, off some long-abandoned logging road.
But, of course, it is his father’s voice, far off but coming closer, and opening his barroom smoke-crusty eyes, he watches the wobbly eighteen-speed approach of two older men drunkenly pedaling and coasting, cigarettes dangled precariously between their lips. They ride right past him, waving like participants in some tragic fools’ parade, and he watches them teeter along, through the early morning fog, standing up on the pedals now and belting out what seems to be, what sounds like, what might have been . . . “Wonderwall”?
Trevor stands, the evening’s binge having reduced the world to a rush and blur, and then sits back down heavily, empties his stomach between his shoes, very thankful indeed that Aspen is not idling her car in front of him just now. His father’s voice is vectoring back toward him, and then he hears both bicycles crash onto the pavement, the dull spill of two grown men falling in more or less slow motion. Now they are laughing, sprawled flat out on the pavement.
“Toss your cookies?” Jonathan asks in the aftershocks of laughter.
“No,” Trevor lies, wiping the corners of his mouth with his shirt.
“Probably for the best,” Jonathan says. “You’ll wake up good and sober for Scout camp tomorrow.”
“Jesus,” Nelson groans.
“He can’t help us now,” Jonathan says.
“A Scout is reverent,” Nelson reminds him. “Reverent, I’ll have you know.”
“Got any money left?” Jonathan asks his son.
Trevor hangs his head, then decides to move to another stretch of curb. He spits into the street.
“And this is why I’m going to win that bet,” Jonathan says.
“Yeah, well, I’m still in love with Rachel,” Trevor protests, though without perhaps the same resolve he felt earlier in the evening. He smells like another woman’s perfume, can even taste her lipstick, knows that one of her breasts is slightly larger than the other. That when she tans, most likely in some dirty Hurley salon, she does not, apparently, wear bikini bottoms. Somehow all this knowledge makes him feel at once worldly and tainted.
“You think I’m a jerk for tonight, don’t you?” asks Jonathan. “That I’m the devil?”
At the beginning of the evening, Trevor might have said yes; now he’s simply confused, frazzled. “I just don’t understand,” Trevor says. “I don’t get it. Why do you want me to fail, too? Why don’t you want me to be my best person? The best I can be? Why am I even in Scouts? What’s the point of all this if we’re just going to end up embracing this badness?” Not that he is convinced that congress with a beautiful woman necessarily equates to badness, but . . . The world is such a very confusing place.
Jonathan rises wearily, lights a cigarette bent slightly askew at its
filter. “Because, Trevor. I don’t want you judging me. That’s all. You just got a taste of it—how easy it is, falling down. Happens every day. Like being born, or dying. People fall in love. People fall out of love. It’s no one’s fault. Look, I knew what would happen tonight if we took you here. You didn’t do anything any other guy, or hell, gal, wouldn’t’ve done.”
“But what about Mom?” Trevor asks.
Jonathan lowers himself to the curb beside him; Trevor isn’t accustomed to seeing his father smoke. “She’ll be all right, Trev. Hell, she might be better off without me, you know?” Jonathan rubs his son’s head.
“Did she cheat on you, too? I mean, is everybody cheating on everyone?” Trevor asks, picking up a pebble from the gutter, throwing it at a manhole about ten feet off.
“I don’t think so,” Jonathan says. “Though she’d certainly be entitled. And if you want me to be candid—”
“Dad,” Trevor says, “actually, I just want to go to sleep, I think. If that’s okay. I just . . . I don’t really need to hear any more confessions tonight.”
“Fair enough,” Jonathan says.
“I still believe in the kid,” Nelson says from the pavement. “He can learn from this, from you.”
“I hope so,” Jonathan says. “I believe in him, too. He’ll be better than me someday, I’m sure of it.” And that’s all there is, Jonathan thinks, raising a better man than yourself, on into the future forever and ever. It is the second time today he’s considered the possibility that someday, he might be a grandfather.
NELSON, APPOINTED THE LEAST DRUNK DRIVER, shuttles them back to their motel. The drive is quiet, somber, as the van plows through banks of low-hanging fog past armies of lightning bugs in the bogs. From the ditch, a pure white deer stares into the headlights, then saunters off. Nelson hits the brakes, hoping to catch sight of it again, but the deer is gone. No question, though, it was one of old Wilbur’s. Only, so far from camp. He hopes it is safe.
IN THE PARKING LOT, Nelson stands beside the minivan, shakes both of their hands. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” He stands at rigid attention, gives them a salute, then wheels, finds his Land Rover and climbs in, revving up the big engine before finally pulling away.
“Good night, kiddo,” Jonathan says.
“Good night, Dad,” Trevor says.
In his motel room, Trevor dials Rachel’s number, hoping against hope that she’ll be awake, too, restless beside the telephone, waiting for his voice. But the phone rings and rings and just as he decides that his late-night call may be obnoxious and poorly timed (it is past three o’clock in the morning), Rachel’s father answers.
“Hello?” he grumbles. “Who is this?”
“Uh, hey, Mr. Gunderson, it’s Trevor. Trev—”
“It’s three o’ clock in the morning, Trevor. Is everything all right? Are you in jail? Hurt? Are you in trouble?” Mr. Gunderson’s questions are surprisingly fast. Staccato, like gunfire.
“Uh, no, I’m just . . . Do you think I could talk to Rachel?” The Gundersons have only three telephones, Trevor knows, one in the kitchen, one in their family room, and one in the basement laundry room. The family room phone is cordless, and he was banking on Rachel perhaps having brought that up to her bedroom.
“No, Trevor. She’s sleeping. I was sleeping, too, until you called, actually. And now I’m going back to sleep. Good night, then,” and with that, Mr. Gunderson hangs up.
Trevor sits up in his bed, sighs deeply. He is lonely, lonely enough almost to talk to his dad, but no doubt his father will already have tiptoed down to Deanna’s room, Pink Panther–style, and that’s not something he wishes to witness, interrupt, or frankly, even think about. He turns on the TV, but most of the stations have retired for the night, so sighing again, he turns it back off. The room is so very quiet now, not even a set of headlights to split the night. He thinks about Aspen, places his forearm by his nose and inhales. She is still a little there.
31
IN THE MORNING, SUNLIGHT PARTS THE CURTAINS like a white sword and he wakes, cotton-mouthed. A maid is pushing her cart outside the window, listening to a boom box. Crosby, Stills & Nash’s “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.” He swings his legs out of bed, leans his head into his hands. It doesn’t hurt half as much as he feared; in fact, he isn’t really hungover at all. Standing, he scratches the small patch of hair on his belly and stretches. Many mornings back home, this is when his mother will tackle him onto a couch to tickle him. It is one of the things she does that both annoy him and fill him with an unaccountable happiness. Though smaller than he is, she always manages to surprise him with these tackles, careful to time her attacks so that she won’t end up toppling coffee tables, vases, lamps in the process—impediments that only a mother’s vigilant radar would detect, even in the heat of a fight.
He decides to call her. She answers after the second ring.
“Hello?” she says, cheerfully. He imagines her in their kitchen, her reading glasses on, as she leans against a kitchen counter with her hip, one foot balanced on the other, a mug of coffee within easy reach.
“Hey, Mom,” he says. He feels old, calling her. Like this is what he might do as a college freshman on Mother’s Day, or as a thirty-year-old, or further off yet, when perhaps she’ll be living in a nursing home. The thought that his parents will very likely divorce in the not-too-distant future makes him instantly morose; he doesn’t like the idea of her spending her final years alone.
“Trevor?” she says, clearly surprised. “Are you okay up there? Is Dad okay?”
He shifts the receiver to the other ear, carries the ancient phone to the window, separates the drapes. His father is standing beside Deanna’s car. Her arms encircle his trim waist and her face is upturned, toward his. They’re kissing now, like sweethearts, like new love—even Trevor can see it. He lets the drapes fall.
“No, we’re okay,” he says, slumping onto the bed.
She is silent a moment. “Are you sure? Trevor?”
He feels like crying. He feels very far from home, very far from the young man he supposed he was. He misses Rachel, the odd smell of her family’s laundry, that off-brand detergent. He wants to be in his family’s kitchen, with his mom, waiting for her to place a tall stack of pancakes before him.
“We’re fine,” he says. “We’re all just fine.”
32
NELSON KEEPS HIS COLLECTION IN A CABINET HE once bought at an estate sale. The prior owner was a rock hound who filled the case with hundreds of geological specimens from however many trips around the world, and these specimens came in handy for instructing the Geology merit badge. Handy enough that Nelson had a small cabinet built to house the collection so it wouldn’t be hidden in these dusty old drawers. With his own money, he even bought a largish piece of fulgurite—fossilized lightning—which is a favorite among the boys.
Now, each drawer of the old maple cabinet, liberated of its rocks and minerals, holds dozens and dozens of Nelson’s most valuable, most treasured baseball cards, collected over the years, ever since he was eight years old, squirreling away nickels and dimes he found like treasure in the seat cushions of the couch, the shag of the living room, the shadowed crannies of the family’s station wagon, or pilfered from atop his father’s dresser drawers. Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Satchel Paige, Larry Doby, Yogi Berra, Phil Rizzuto, Bob Gibson, Jackie Robinson, Frank Robinson, Harmon Killebrew, and even a Lou Gehrig card his grandfather had once casually bequeathed to him, saying, “Not much good for anything other than a bookmark.”
In a separate cabinet, once utilized by a now-defunct small-town Carnegie library’s Dewey Decimal System, Nelson stores another collection of cards, a collection he hasn’t had to curate, but which had come to him mysteriously, through the United States mail, without fail, every year on his birthday: one baseball card, carefully protected between two pieces of thick, rigid cardboard, taped so that no edge of the card ever kisses the adhesive binding it in place. These envelopes were first mailed to St. Jo
hn’s, then West Point, then his mother’s house, and the last few to the Whiteside Scout Reservation.
And each year, the card is that of a Chicago Cub, autographed, “To Nelson, Happy Birthday, 19__.”
Through the years: Ernie Banks, Ron Santo, Shawon Dunston, Jose Cardenal, Rick Sutcliffe, Bill Madlock, Rick Reuschel, Bruce Sutter, Lee Smith, Andre Dawson, Mark Grace, Greg Maddux, Ryne Sandberg, Fergie Jenkins, Billy Williams, Dwight Smith, Jerome Walton . . .
The same inscription, To Nelson, Happy Birthday, 1962, 1963, 1964 . . . 1975, 1976, 1977 . . . Every year until 1994, the year of baseball’s strike, when the cards finally stopped coming.
The Chicago Cubs have never even been his favorite team; that honor would belong first to the Milwaukee Braves, and then, later, the Milwaukee Brewers, that team within radio earshot, whose box-score triumphs and tribulations can be found in the Eau Claire Leader-Telegram or the Rice Lake Chronotype.
And so, after the drive back to the Whiteside Scout Reservation, after parking his Land Rover in the far lot near the mess hall, and making his way back to his cabin in the darkest of night, he goes to the filing cabinet, removes the first five cards he received in the mail, all those years back, and turning on a floor lamp, slumps into an old leather chair that accepts his weight so easily, so generously.
The first card is signed by Ken Hubbs, who in 1962 was the starting second baseman for the Cubs at the age of twenty. It was a monumental year for Hubbs, the first rookie to ever win a Golden Glove for his play in the infield and also be awarded the Rookie of the Year Award, despite leading the National League in strikeouts.
Hubbs’s rookie card is part of the seminal 1962 Topps set, a design that mimics many basement living rooms of that time with its faux wood panel framing a youthful portrait of the second baseman on a pumpkin-colored background that seems to peel upward from its bottom right hand corner. Above and to the left of Hubbs’s face is a yellow star that reads: “1962 ROOKIE.”
The Hearts of Men Page 21