He hugs her now, the heavy, gawky hug of a teenage boy saddled with a backpack and unaccustomed to even these brief moments of affection with his mother.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” he says, his cigarette breath near her ear. “Okay? Just . . . Please stop crying, all right? I’m really sorry.”
She wipes her nose with a Kleenex and pats him on the chest, backs slowly away, then points a finger at him.
“I don’t like it when you disrespect me,” she says quietly, firmly. “But I will never, ever tolerate you disparaging your father. Do-you-understand-me?”
He nods his head, murmurs, “Can we go now?”
34
THERE ARE CERTAIN PERKS TO BEING THE ONLY woman in a camp full of men. For one, she has a small cabin to herself. Oh, they aren’t “real” cabins, certainly not. The walls are aluminum mesh screens framed in by old two-by-fours, and the floors are sheets of plywood. The roof is corrugated plastic, the screen door loose at the hinge and riddled with holes, some “patched” by nothing better than purple, green, or pink bubble gum. The door has all the security of a hook-and-eye lock, the walls nothing more than rolls of moldering olive green canvas a camper can unfurl to create some semblance of privacy.
But she loves her cabin, the sounds of boys outside, all around, only with none of the expectations that she must constantly mother, parent, supervise, discipline. The cabin has four single bed frames, each outfitted with a very abused mattress. The air inside is close, tight. A slight breeze goes unnoticed; only strong winds seem to pass through the somewhat rusty screens.
Rachel lays out her effects, careful not to leave her bras and panties out in open sight; those will remain secure in her bag. She pushes two bunks together and, utilizing one of the few luxuries she packed, wraps both mattresses in a queen-size pad and bedsheet, then unrolls her sleeping bag and lies down, closes her eyes.
Her world sounds like this: mosquitoes, screen doors slamming, the wild running of boys, an ax splitting wood, the wind rustling the copse of aspens outside.
THE ONLY RESPONSIBILITIES on this first Monday are dinner in the mess hall and an early evening charge—a kind of challenge Nelson traditionally levels at the boys: What kind of men do they want to become? How will they achieve their goals—this week, this year, and beyond? Normally the entire camp meets at an amphitheater adjacent to Bass Lake and a film or PowerPoint is presented before the boys are dismissed. This first night, their candy supplies will seem unlimited, the fresh air invigorating, each campsite ringing with laughter and tomfoolery into the early, early hours of the morning.
At dinner in the mess hall, the father of one of the boys in Thomas’s troop sits down the table from Rachel. He is a big man, well over six feet tall. The molded plastic tray in his hands looks very small, like he’s holding some dainty dessert plate, a coffee saucer maybe. It takes him some time to swing a leg over the table’s bench, then the other leg, and after he is sitting, his gut so exceeds the bounds of this tight space that he needs to scooch the bench back a couple of inches to even get at his food.
“Christ, Bill,” snickers one of the other fathers at the table, “that bench is made for hundred-pound boys, not a lummox like you.” The table titters with a laughter that is clearly little more than nerves, social awkwardness, the desire to settle in. She notices that not just one, but as many as two silver flasks are rotating about the table, the fathers pouring what smells like brandy into their mugs of coffee; some of the men, she realizes, are already drunk, their eyes beneath sunburnt foreheads marked by that glazed, dazed look of the well soused.
The big man across from her, Bill, looks at Rachel and without so much as blinking says, “Maybe when they changed this place to a Girl Scout camp they brought in some more feminine benches, too.”
Rachel tends to consider herself a strong woman; still, she can’t hold this ugly man’s stare, and looks down at the food she no longer hungers for.
A couple of men at the table guffaw, raise coffee mugs to their mouths. Most of the fathers at the table say nothing.
“I mean,” Bill continues, “seems like every goddamn institution in this country is broken. Everywhere you go. Gays in the military. Gays in Scouts. Gays getting married. These tranny freaks, or whatever they call themselves . . .” He disappears a dinner roll in a single bite without removing his eyes from Rachel. “Half the time, I don’t recognize this country anymore. Ain’t my country—that’s for sure. Land of the free, but”—his great big hands fly up before his face in mock horror—“don’t say what you think, what you feel. Don’t hurt anyone’s feelings. Don’t offend anyone. We can fly a goddamn Chinese flag at the UN but we can’t fly the Stars and Bars? Don’t make sense to me.”
This is a moment, Rachel thinks, when a person should say something, stand up, leave, fight . . . But she can’t think of anything to say, can’t even seem to move. Pinned where she is by his gaze, by his sheer size, and seemingly without a sympathetic mind in the bunch. He is a particular kind of Wisconsinite, she understands. The world is a bullet train that has passed him by so quickly, it’s as if he’s standing on the side of the tracks spinning like a weather vane.
“Listen,” she finally manages, “women have been coming to Scout camps for a generation or more, leading troops, working in the front office . . .” It’s a lame rebuttal, she knows, but in such moments her brain has never fired as quickly as she’d like, and she already knows that tonight she won’t sleep, thinking about every plank of her argument that went unsaid, undefended. Somehow, this nimrod has left her tongue-tied, unable to claim the intellectual high ground she knows is hers, if she can only locate it. She peers up at him, the intellectual high ground, sweet Lord.
He is spooning corn into his mouth, kernels dropping onto his chest, his lap, like poorly broadcast seed. He wipes his face with a paper napkin, points a fat finger at her, says, “And are there more Scouts now than there were thirty years ago? Hell, no. Scouting’s dying. And it’s because of women, ’cause of gays, ’cause we’ve thrown the doors open to every religion under the sun. Hell, we got Muslim Boy Scouts out there, prob’ly. That make sense to you? Christ, it’s like training al-Qaeda, ISIS, right here at home.”
Now she is incensed, notices that her fists are clenched. Why isn’t anyone else saying something?
“If Scouting is dying,” she says, her voice tremulous, “maybe it’s because we waited so long to welcome those people in.” You stupid bastard, she would dearly like to add, but it is only the first day of camp. “This isn’t 1950. Heck, you were born when? The early eighties? Exactly what country is it you think you remember?” Her face is hot and red but she is proud of herself, proud of standing up to this ignorance.
“I’m with Bill on this one,” another man says.
Rachel looks down the table at him. He has thickly flowing red hair, designer glasses, thin fingers that spin a green apple by its stem. He is finely featured, not a big man—the opposite of Bill. She dimly recognizes him as the father of a boy named Ulysses. This man, the father, is a surgeon in Eau Claire, Dr. Platz, if memory serves.
“I think we’re all a little too sensitive these days,” he says, breezily. “How does that prepare these boys for the world? How does that prepare them for the evil out there? The competition, hell, the brutality?” He takes a pull from a flask, as casually as if it were a canteen, right out there in the open. No one seems to take note.
She thinks, This is another argument . . .
But the doctor leans into the table now, looks at the men around him, almost as if intentionally avoiding her eyes. “The thing is,” he says, “in the real world, you’re not invited to every party. Right? You can’t join every club. Not everyone wants to be your friend. And I’ll be honest with you, there are people I don’t want my son going to school with. There are people I don’t want to have to see on my weekends, at dinner.”
What is he even talking about?
“But,” she says, determined to redirect this conversation,
“we were just talking about women in Scouting. Surely you believe that women belong in Scouting.” She pauses. “Right?”
“Well,” the doctor says, “isn’t there Girl Scouts?”
“But my son,” she says, “I have a son. What about parents like me.” Widows, she would like to say. And, Where is the cavalry? Where are the gentlemen? Other mothers, wives?
“Doesn’t he have a father? Or a grandfather? An uncle? Some family friend?” the doctor presses on, a cruel sort of kindness to his tone. He has removed his glasses, rubs at the bridge of his nose, and looks at her now with the condescension of someone with a small but certain amount of power in the world. This is the air of someone manning a backwater security checkpoint, a jaded receptionist, a disgruntled cashier or tollbooth operator—their power at once minuscule and ultimately final.
His tone and delivery, so reasonable, seem to lend some credence to his argument, and for a moment, she wonders, Is this all about me? Is this my problem? Thomas doesn’t even want to be here . . . Or perhaps Jonathan could . . .
But Jonathan Quick is now something like a recluse, a hermit with means. He lives in a cabin on a small lake in northern Wisconsin, where he spends his days drinking Baileys with coffee, his nights eating frozen pizzas and fish sticks and drinking bourbon. He putters around a woodshop, ostensibly building furniture, but mostly, she thinks, smoking cigarettes and reading spy novels. He is now divorced a second time, and she doesn’t see him much, on Thanksgiving perhaps, when he’ll venture down to Menomonie with a bottle of expensive Bordeaux and some eccentric gift for Thomas: a hand-woven basket, a French pocketknife, an Italian bicycle, a small stock stake in some upstart tech company . . . Jonathan’s first wife, Sarah, remarried a man she met online, and eventually moved to Hawaii. Every couple of years she pays for plane tickets for Rachel and Thomas and they ride a zip-line through the rainforest, surf the constant Pacific swells, and for a week Thomas eats nothing but shrimp.
Her own father, a retired Lutheran minister, has battled cancer on and off for a decade. He is so weak these days, so frail, so tired. Her mother is his constant caretaker. There are no uncles, no cousins. She and Trevor were both only children. Inventorying her family and Trevor’s right now makes her desolate, clarifies her own aloneness in the world, how much Thomas means to her, how gaping Trevor’s absence is. She lowers her head for a second, thinks, Some of these men must know about Trevor. She scans their faces, fairly confident she and Trevor went to high school with at least one or two of them.
“No,” she says, “there isn’t anyone else. Thomas’s dad died. It’s just us.” Standing up from the table, she collects her tray, says, “Excuse me.”
On her way out of the mess hall she spots Nelson, sitting at the edge of a table, near a boy in a wheelchair, who is talking excitedly to the old man, gesticulating as if reenacting some epic battle. It’s the first time she’s seen him since arriving, and, boy, can she use a welcoming face right about now. Rachel makes her way to this old friend, where he listens intently to the boy, a terribly gangly fellow, suffering that awkward intersection of baby fat, glasses, and acne. He is clearly thrilled to have Nelson’s ear.
“Excuse me,” Rachel says kindly to the boy, and then, “Scoutmaster Doughty.” She lays a soft hand on the old man’s shoulder and he jumps, as if gently shocked, before turning his head to look at her.
“Rachel,” he says and begins to stand, ever so slowly. His feet seem tangled, knotted beneath the table, and he accidentally topples a glass of water. “Hellfire,” he mutters.
“Please,” she urges, “you sit down.” She quickly cleans the spill with a handful of paper napkins, then gives him a hug and instantly her body feels warmed, soothed, like slipping a foot into a warm sock, a slipper. He has always been so very kind to her, always. She never knew her own grandfather, but allows herself to imagine him a man like Nelson Doughty, smelling of tobacco, wood shavings, pine-tar soap, and some old-man pomade that he employs to curl his white mustache up.
“You’ll come by my cabin tonight?” he asks with an eager, quavering voice. He leans toward her, places a shaky hand on her shoulder, whispers, “Got a bottle of your favorite.”
“Oban?” she asks, smiling, then remembers the fathers at her table, their own drinking. She waves their behavior away as unsanctioned public drinking, irresponsible, like a group of Aqualung hobos day-drinking at the school playground.
He nods, blinks his eyes, holding her hands in his, as if she were his daughter, come for a long-awaited visit.
“Maybe not tonight.” She frowns. “I’m afraid I might not be too much fun.”
“Nonsense,” he insists, tightening his grip. “It is especially on such nights that a person should not be left alone.” He lets go of her hands, holds out one finger in the air. “One drink. With an old man.”
She smiles. “Okay, one drink.”
He adds another finger, winks. “Or maybe two.”
35
BEFORE LEAVING HER CABIN TO WALK TO NELSON’S, she visits Thomas’s cabin, knocks on the door. No one answers. She peers through the screened wall. No one around.
She punches into her phone.
Where are you?
Camp, Mom. Chillax.
I’m going to visit Mr. Doughty. Have a great night, sweetie!
No reply. Typical. He seems to respond only to threats, real or perceived. Or offers of food. This has the effect of making her feel like a prison guard. She often wonders what it would have been like to parent before the advent of cell phones, texting, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and all the other technology and social media that parents now seem to depend on.
The night carries a chill and she grabs a light sweatshirt from the cabin. Sets out on the path back to the parade ground.
Dinner has left her unnerved, really rattled. Never before has the camp felt to her an unwelcoming or hostile place, and surely Nelson has certainly always embraced her presence. But, then, it’s not just this small place, she thinks—there seems an atmosphere everywhere these days in America, a malevolent vibration in the air, every citizen so quick to righteous rage, some tribal defensiveness, seeing the fault in each other’s arguments, rather than some larger common field of compromise, if not agreement.
From across the parade ground, she sees Nelson’s cabin aglow; her pace quickens, like a girl visiting a beloved grandparent or uncle. How right he was. She is suddenly aware of her need for adult interaction, a good honest conversation. At the door she knocks lightly, hears a distant, “Come in.”
The cabin is like a diorama of early-twentieth-century America, softly backlit by old, dust-encrusted lightbulbs, every stick of furniture the softest, oldest wicker or leather, no book on any given shelf published after about 1970, it seems, the walls festooned with bone-dry, fragile snowshoes, fishing nets and poles, lacrosse sticks, cross-country skis, and old, old taxidermy. A lynx whose charismatic ears seem rubbed to nubbins, a huge lunging northern pike minus several sharp teeth, a massive sixteen-point buck less one shining, marble-like eye.
Nelson is back in the tiny galley kitchen, little more than a wall where the refrigerator, stove, and sink reside. He’s lifting a kettle of boiling water off a burner. The air smells of moldering paper, leather, and dust, commingled with the zest of the freshly sliced lemon on the counter. All at once, she feels heavy; her bones and all her muscles, lead. She wants nothing more than to flop into one of Nelson’s chairs and close her eyes. Nelson’s got his old Grundig switched on, and she recognizes a deejay’s voice from the nearby radio station, WOJB, operated by the Lac Courte Oreilles band of Lake Superior Anishinaabe. Soon, one voice is replaced by another—George Jones.
“How was your day?” Nelson asks lightly, puttering about the kitchen.
She exhales. “Other than the fact that Thomas hates me, resents being here, and the other parents are a bunch of friggin’ fascists . . .”
He frowns at her. “Fascists?”
She thinks, No, right-wing
nutjobs is probably more accurate, waves a hand in the air as if to dismiss her own complaints. “I’m just . . . happy to see you.”
“Me too, kiddo,” he says, smiling. “Me too.”
THEY LISTEN TO CLASSIC COUNTRY—Merle Haggard, Johnny Paycheck, Patsy Cline, Johnny Cash, Hank Williams—drink their Scotch, and stare out into the night, at bats swooping over the lake for insects, the stars reflected perfectly in the water below them.
“Strange—I don’t hear any kids,” she says, swirling the ice cubes around in her Scotch; she pulls her feet up and sits on them for warmth. It feels like she’s having some very sophisticated sleepover with her spiritual sensei or guru. She has always avoided the term life coach, finding it utterly pathetic: You need a coach to live? To help you live? Get up in the morning?
“Kids keep you young,” Nelson says. “I believe that.” He takes a sip of Oban. “But Christ, they make you feel old, too.”
“How long you plan to keep doing this?” she asks.
“This’ll be my last summer,” he says, looking at the floor. “I haven’t told anyone yet. You’re the first. I ain’t gonna’ die here, though, like Wilbur. I love Scouts, Scouting, but . . . I ain’t gonna die at a Boy Scout camp. I got a lady friend and we’re thinking about buying a place down in Costa Rica, Belize, maybe. To hell with winter. I want to croak with a cold cerveza in my hand.”
Startled by this news, saddened even, she gives him a smile of encouragement, summons a toast.
“To cold drinks and warm beaches,” she says, her glass raised up to meet his.
“I’ll drink to that,” Nelson says.
The notion of the Whiteside Reservation without Nelson Doughty is jarring to her, and she can’t banish a profound sense, even now, of abandonment. Who will she have left? Thomas? Jonathan?
“I’ll miss you,” she says, careful to aim her eyes away.
The Hearts of Men Page 23