The corners have long since been rounded on that first card Nelson received on his birthday, so many years ago now; Hubbs’s left ear appears to have been almost buffed off, worn away with time. So, too, is part of his inscription: the word birthday is barely legible. All those nights when a much younger Nelson, lying in his bed, would rub this card between his thumb and forefinger, staring at this strange memento that arrived in his mailbox with no return address, his name typewritten on the envelope, as if by a secretary.
Ken Hubbs, whom Nelson followed with an almost religious fanaticism, even pestering old Whiteside to purchase a shortwave radio so that he could tune into the Cub’s games late into the summer of 1963 from his cabin. This scrappy second baseman who was terrified of flying in airplanes, but who resolved to overcome his fear, took up flying lessons. This smooth-fielding epitome of happiness and health, who was lauded for his generosity and kindness. This young Cub, who, in the winter preceding the ’64 season, died in an airplane crash in his native Utah. This young Cub, whose pallbearers included Ernie Banks, Don Elston, Glen Hobbie, and Ron Santo—consummate Cubs, all.
Hubbs’s death was reported on February 15, 1964. Nelson cried himself to sleep that night, clutching the card that was one of two keepsakes he brought to St. John’s from his mother’s house in Eau Claire, the other being a card signed by the great Cubs first baseman inscribed with: To Nelson, Happy Birthday, 1963—Ernie Banks.
That card is nearly in pristine condition, despite the years it was stored in his mother’s attic while he studied at West Point, or was off in Vietnam, or New Mexico.
For over thirty years, Nelson has imagined his father attending games at Wrigley Field. Perhaps with his new family, perhaps sitting over the first base or third base dugouts, or standing near the guardrails, calling down to the players during batting practice or between innings, asking, “Hey, mister, you mind signing a card for my boy? It’s his birthday. His name’s Nelson.”
For more than thirty years, on and off, Nelson has been falling asleep, in beds or, as he grew older, in chairs, his boots still tied, with this thin little rectangle of cardboard between his fingers, tucked into his hand, imagining that great emerald field with its brick and ivy walls, its crowded Budweiser bleachers, its encroaching brownstones crowned with roofs full of businesswomen and businessmen looking on, cheering, and surrounded by miles and miles of metropolis, spilling out in every direction save east, where the great Lake Michigan shines on and on, every rolling wave a sparkling phalanx of freshwater foam hustling on to crash against the shore.
PART III
SUMMER, 2019
ORIENTEERING
33
THESE DAYS THEY COMMUNICATE SOLELY THROUGH their telephones and tablets in a language so broken that a hundred years ago it might have been identified as idiot pidgin, though the phones do wonders, damn near anticipating thought itself. Their communications float between each other inside this old house via bubbles. Indeed, without his phone texts she would know next to nothing about her son’s life, except what she can glean by rifling through his closet, his dresser drawers, the pockets of his pants as she does their laundry.
Where are you? It’s getting late.
Sleeping at Jim’s. See you tomorrow for dinner.
She wishes she could take one of her long knitting needles and pop these bubbles from the air—pop pop pop—so that instead of reading his thoughts, she could actually hear his voice, fill this house of silence with conversation, sound. In two years he’ll be off to college and she honestly wonders if she’ll ever hear from him again.
We’re going to camp tomorrow, remember?
Fuck, for real?
Are you packed? I don’t see a bag . . .
Do I have to go? I’m 16. Camp is moronic.
This is the only time he communicates in complete, intelligent thoughts: when he is arguing. Suddenly his contrarian teenage intellect is honed to a stake-sharp point, and sometimes, yes, he does skewer her, pierce her right in the heart.
I’m not arguing. You’re eight merit badges away from Eagle. I don’t ask much. Do this for me.
Or, what she might just as easily have said: Do this for your father.
Can you pack for me? I’ll be home before lunch.
I love you. Be safe.
There is no need these days to hide a stash of Playboys in a closet, some racy photos of a girlfriend—all of that safe now behind a password on the smartphone. Still, his room holds its attempted secrets: a Ziploc bag of pot, a pipe, a bracelet from a concert in Minneapolis she never knew he attended, a rainbow selection of condoms, a receipt from a café in Milwaukee . . . Perhaps someday they’ll find a way to digitize drugs, but for now, she’s glad that pot still seems analog. She finds this as she packs his bag for camp. Men’s underwear, socks, shorts, pants, shirts, his Boy Scout uniform. All these things she throws into a bag. His deodorant, toothbrush, toothpaste. He’ll be pissed, she knows, but she intentionally leaves his tablet behind. It’s not what camp is about.
She flops onto his bed and stares at the ceiling where a poster of some actress she can’t identify stares back down at her, leeringly. The bed smells of teenage boy: sweaty feet, fast-food farts, overscented deodorant, stale masturbation. Not like crawling into bed with him when he was five or six years old and staring at the stars he’d asked her to affix to the bedroom ceiling—I gave him the stars—smelling his little-boy hair, all fresh air, sunshine, and shampoo. She thinks better of the nostalgia, sits up, carries the bag downstairs, and begins packing her own bag.
She’s always enjoyed taking Thomas to camp. As a little girl, she was first a Brownie, then a Girl Scout—and hated every minute of it—envying the boys she knew who journeyed on semidangerous backpacking treks and canoe trips. Their camps were wilderness outposts where sometimes gruesome injuries were suffered and returning back to school those boys had tall tales of encounters with bears, wolves, coyotes. They learned to shoot guns, manufacture rope bridges, administer tourniquets, and fly-fish. Rachel did not want to sell cookies, or have lame sleepovers and gossip about boys. And so for almost ten years she’s made up for lost time by chaperoning these trips to the Whiteside Scout Reservation. Some years there have been other female leaders at camp: a mother or two, a youthful grandma, a favorite aunt. Other years she’s been the sole woman in attendance, an odd feeling, to be sure; surrounded by hundreds of teenage boys wrestling with their pubescent hormones, and, let’s face it, dozens of grown men no doubt fantasizing about sneaking out into the woods with her. She’s still pretty attractive, has never let herself go, even when Lord knows there were times it would have been the easy thing to do.
From Trevor’s closet she removes his old Boy Scout shirt and tries it on. It fits her well enough, not very flatteringly, of course. The fabric lies flat over her chest and the sleeves are a bit too wide and long, but she doesn’t much see the point in purchasing a uniform that adheres to her any more snugly; she does not chaperone these trips to put her body on display, to attract a new lover or husband. No, at thirty-nine, having been married three times already, she has sworn that institution off as the curse it seems to be. Trevor, she thinks, might have been the last good man; or, at the very least, the last good man for her.
No, it is for other reasons that Rachel chaperones these trips. She relishes the Northwoods morning air, the serene lake water for her daily swims, the access to beautiful old wooden rowboats and canoes, the time she spends sitting in the back of merit-badge sessions, practicing her knot-tying or first-aid skills. And, of course, the evenings in Nelson’s cabin, playing chess or cribbage, and drinking from his cabinet of good Scotch: Laphroaig, Talisker, Lagavulin . . .
He’s almost seventy years old now, and time hasn’t been especially kind to him. Despite his years in the Green Berets, he has begun to slouch forward, his backbone bowed and stooped, and in recent years he has suffered some falls and the subsequent setbacks that accompany broken hips. His hair is white but he keeps it shor
n tight on the skull. And though he won’t admit to it, he must have suffered a stroke, because his left eye seems a little dull, a little saggy, and he no longer swims beside her in the mornings; instead, he’ll take to an Adirondack chair and watch her from shore with a cup of coffee.
She tries to pack light, smart, filling a single large Duluth pack with enough clothes for the six-day trip, a swimsuit, a beach blanket, two bedsheets, a small camera, some toiletries, a few novels and some poetry. She sets aside two hours of every day to lie beside a lake and read the books that always seem to Jenga up on her bedside table without her managing to actually read them. She carries their two bags to the front door, where their sleeping bags wait.
It’s just past nine in the evening, and the western horizon is smeared in pinks and purples, like hastily applied makeup. The house is too big for just the two of them. It is the house she and Trevor bought together before he was killed, when the world still held forth some bright promise, when there was hope of creating a family, of traveling the world together, of attending PTA meetings, family reunions, growing old together . . .
How exciting, that day out of days, not long after they’d decided together to buy a home, to start a life, to raise a family together in this old farmhouse outside Menomonie. That was a conscious decision, too, to stay in Wisconsin. With Trevor deployed so frequently, he insisted she have help from their parents. She refused to live in Eau Claire itself, though; just a little farther afield, enough so that her mother couldn’t simply drop in without first calling.
Less than a year after they’d bought the house, Trevor was killed. Her last very clear memory of him was the weekend they had in Paris, when at some point over the course of two days, making love almost constantly, breaking only to walk the city, to eat and drink, hold hands, they conceived their boy. Trevor looking so out of place with his long beard, long hair, sunburned skin—the men in his Special Forces unit took a certain pride in that mountain man look, in their beards. It had surprised her, that aspect of him, thrilled her even. That this man she had known more than a decade had become an elite soldier, this bear of a human being, so wide and thick at the chest, so quiet and strong—in some ways just a truer, more intense version of who he’d been at sixteen or seventeen, and yet, so much of that earlier softness just completely melted away, even the frequency of his smiles, too, his laughter and jokes. He was a different man.
She lay against his chest in that hotel bed in Paris, his hairy forearm holding her, a big technical watch circling his wrist.
“You want to understand war?” he said, apropos of what she can no longer even remember. “Politics? Check out a book on thermodynamics. All the rules apply. What you’re talking about is essentially energy, or the absence of energy. Because in most cases, political power is totally congruent with energy, with heat. For over a hundred years Afghanistan looks like a very erratic weather pattern, right? The only constant is the Afghanis themselves. Otherwise, you’ve got the British, the Russians, the Taliban, and now us—chaos and colonialism. And someday we’ll be gone, and that vacuum opens up again, with someone to fill it.”
He had told her, vehemently, that he did not wish to be buried at Fort Snelling, outside of Minneapolis and underneath the flight paths of the hundreds of airliners taking off and landing at MSP. Not Arlington, either. It was strange, really, how ever since joining the Special Forces, he had become, almost at once, completely disenchanted with the military, foreign policy, politics. Strange, too, how he’d come to accept his own fate, or at the very least, foresee it, a reality, she supposed, of that unknowable life he led, so close to extreme violence.
She never said, Let’s make a baby, but that’s what it felt like they were doing—something desperate, something ecstatic, some transference of, yes, energy. His thick hands running through her hair, holding her hair, while they kissed eagerly, roughly . . . After Thomas was born, she began to feel guilty, as if she’d somehow sapped Trevor of his light, his power, made him vulnerable somehow.
THOMAS RETURNS HOME just before lunch, his eyes bloodshot and his clothes stinking of cigarette smoke.
“I was just about to text you,” she says. “We have to head out. We’re supposed to check in at three.”
“Sure,” he says. “We got any orange juice?”
He rifles through the refrigerator.
“Are you high, Thomas?” she asks.
“Mom,” he sighs, “we were smoking cigarettes.”
“Oh, like that’s okay?” she says, already exasperated. “I mean, I know you’re a smart kid. So, when I tell you those things will kill you, this hopefully isn’t news to you. And where are you getting money for those, anyway? I mean, what do they cost now, twenty bucks a pack?”
He crooks a finger around the handle of the plastic container and drinks, like some thirsty peasant farmer, orange juice leaking out of the corner of his mouth, down his chin, onto the floor. Sometimes she feels that he is in cahoots with the ants and mice that every day seem to threaten to overtake their household. She wets a paper towel, bends down, and wipes up his mess.
“Go take a shower,” she orders.
“Ten-four, capitan,” he says, burping.
“And we really do need to leave soon.”
“You know, we don’t have to do this,” he says, stopping at the staircase. “I mean, nobody’s in Scouts anymore. It’s, like, pointless. Just this stupid paramilitary Christian fraternity or something. Bunch of paranoid Republicans shooting guns and preparing for the damn apocalypse. Jesus.”
They’ve had this argument, and every time it breaks her heart. Not because of the words falling out of his teenage mouth—no, she expects that sort of pyrotechnics. What crushes her is that this young man has no memory of his father, just pictures of a stranger. He does not understand, for example, that his father collected more than eighty merit badges, that by the age of eighteen, Trevor could have been dropped into any wilderness on any continent and survived on his wits alone. That he always credited his time in the Boy Scouts for helping him later in basic training, Special Forces training, and beyond. She imagines him standing in their kitchen now, this hirsute, imposing man, dwarfing the coffee mug in his hands. Imagines Thomas’s enthusiasm as the two of them head off for camp, Trevor later on surrounded by a group of young boys, showing them how to take a compass bearing, explaining why orienteering is one of the very most practical skills a person can master.
But all she can say is, “Get upstairs,” in a tone that will suggest she is on the verge of either crying or throwing something at him—both of which happen to be true right now.
Within an hour they are in the Cherokee, headed north up Highway 53, driving in complete and resounding silence, and all that she can think about is asking, Did you bring any of those cigarettes with you? She doesn’t smoke cigarettes often, but sometimes it is a welcome release valve. Thomas thumbs away at his telephone in the backseat of the Jeep. He can’t even sit beside her. So she rolls down the window, the air rifling up her left sleeve, and feels like the saddest taxi driver in all of northern Wisconsin.
TROOP #42 HAS RESERVED THE SAME CAMPSITE at Whiteside ever since Thomas’s grandfather, Jonathan, was a boy. And so after parking the Jeep in the lot, Rachel and Thomas shoulder their belongings to begin the one-mile trek through the parade ground, past the counselors’ campsite, and all the way down the shady two-track path that leads to their site, Arrowhead.
Rachel slaps at her legs, her arms, her head. “The flies are terrible this year.”
“Could’ve stayed home,” Thomas says flatly. “It’s not too late, either.”
Chagrinned, she does her best to ignore the mosquitoes and flies burrowing through her hair to bite into her scalp. “Oh well—a little discomfort’s good for a person, right?” she says, gritting her teeth. “We’ve probably gotten too soft, all of us. I mean, how many people are doing what we’re doing right now? Hiking into a remote campsite—no tablets, no laptops, no social media, none of the mode
rn distractions.”
“What did you just say?” Thomas has stopped walking and stares daggers at her; she can feel it.
Wincing, she presses on: “I was just talking about how soft we’ve grown, you know? About how fortunate we are to be up here . . .” Her voice trails off.
“You’re telling me you forgot to pack my iPad?” Thomas shouts.
She shrugs her pack up higher on her shoulders, swats a hand at her forehead. “Actually, Thomas, I didn’t forget.”
He stares at her, aghast.
“You fucking left my shit at home—what, to just, like, get under my skin?” Thomas hollers, “To rub this whole fucking thing in? Making me come up here like some kinda kid! And all because Trevor was an Eagle Scout or whatever? Jesus, Mom!”
She rushes at him now, and though he is taller and stronger than her, she is his mother, and she does not fear him, will never fear him. Because she made him, this kid, and cared for him, and more than any emotion, no matter how disrespectful he is, how crude or nasty, what she feels for him overwhelmingly is love.
Raising her hand as if to slap him, Rachel instead takes his hot face between her hands and says, “He was your father. And I’m sorry that I haven’t been a better mother, that you’ve grown up without a dad. I’m sorry about some of my choices, too, those men . . .”
She shakes her head, as if to clear her thoughts, to collect herself. “But none of that is your father’s fault. He did the best he could. But—” She begins to cry. It’s been months since she fell apart like this, but now her emotions are bubbling up, burning her cheeks, making her head heavy with pressure, spilling tears. “And I know he’s watching you, right now. I know that he is.” She wants to say, Just make him proud.
The Hearts of Men Page 22