Inside her cabin she changes into a navy-blue one-piece suit, which always has the effect of making her feel like a “mom.” Even her mother and her mother-in-law, Sarah, still wear bikinis, both of them crowing that they are “in better shape now than I was at forty-five.” Or, “Who am I trying to impress?”
Her telephone vibrates where she set it down on one of the unused mattresses.
I feel like a parent . . .
She smiles.
Why is that?
Because I never see you. I’m the one checking in on you! No breakfast? Where are you?
Going for a swim. Wanna join me?
She stands in the cabin while minutes tick by. Finally the phone vibrates again.
Ha. You made a funny.
She stretches on the reedy shores of Bass Lake, bends to touch the pebbles between her toes, reaches up into the blue sky to caress the clouds. She breathes deeply, wades slowly into the cool, cool water, and finally plunges forward.
After holding her breath for half a minute as she pushes herself surely through the water, so much cooler even a couple of inches below the surface, she rises, perhaps twenty yards away from shore. Treading water, she wipes at her eyes. The tremulous mist clings to the shoreline. She hears the rising sound of boy noise, laughter. Diving down again, she swims in the direction of a tiny island, five hundred yards out into the lake.
What relief she feels, standing up, some ten yards off the island, and wading ashore, her feet now and then slipping on algae-slimed rocks, on sunken logs smooth as soapstone. Finally, she sets herself down on a large flat granite slab, wringing her hair of water. The sun is well above the forest canopy now, the morning fog burnt away, and far off, she can see boys running through the forest.
She’ll never marry again. Why would she? And it isn’t that she even desires another husband, or even, for that matter, a man, a lover. Men bore her, frankly. If only it weren’t so lonely, fighting the single-parent fight. Wouldn’t it be nice, she thinks, to simply have someone to confide in? Who had dinner ready when she came home from work? To occasionally help discipline Thomas, so she isn’t the sole villain, the dreaded Voice of Authority. To help pay bills, carry the garbage out, remove a dead mouse from the basement. Someone to call on the phone and say, Can you believe these assholes? It’s the twenty-first century! Of course a woman can come to Boy Scout camp!
There is a man at work and they’ve gone on three dates. Spencer. He’s ten years younger than she is. He’s also a field biologist, and twenty years ago she would have found him irresistible: six foot three, narrow at the hip, longish wavy black hair, perennially sunburnt (except around the eyes, where his temple-hugging sunglasses keep the skin always paper-white). His feet are flipper-long and he wears Chacos in the office; his cologne seems a mixture of insect repellent and pine sap.
On their first date they canoed the Chippewa River, beginning their journey in downtown Eau Claire, where the Chippewa and Eau Claire converge near the new Farmer’s Market building and the Haymarket Landing. He portaged the canoe single-handedly a short distance from a nearby parking lot, his shoulder and bicep muscles bulging, which might have been the idea all along—displaying the goods, so to speak.
“I can help you carry that, you know,” she offered.
“And I’d let you,” he said, “but someone’s got to carry the picnic basket and cooler.”
She laughed. “If you think I packed a picnic basket, you’re going to be totally disappointed. I’m really not that kind of woman.” It was eight in the morning on a Saturday and downtown was bustling with shoppers milling about the market. Rachel had barely woken up in time to meet him. She prized her Saturday mornings, savored them, usually lingering in her bed until ten or ten thirty, then rising to make coffee and listen to public radio. Thomas rarely woke before noon.
Spencer smiled. “Got it covered.”
“Oh,” she breathed.
So they paddled the morning away, the conversation easy. It was nice, talking to Spencer. About work, Thomas, her old farmhouse and its myriad maintenance issues.
“I’m not a carpenter,” he said from the stern, “but if you need some help, my dad and I could maybe come out. He’s pretty handy with a hammer.”
She turned around. “Should I be dating your dad, then?”
He smiled. “I dunno . . . You are quite a bit older than I am . . .”
She splashed him with her paddle; a good one, water drenching his face and shirt.
“Is this some kind of ploy to get my shirt off?” he asked.
She turned back around, denying him her grin, the obvious flush on her face from their flirtation. “No, I’m still thinking about your dad and that hammer of his.”
But in truth, she was frankly more attracted to the kind of man who was handy, practical, and no-nonsense. Much more so than she was to the sort of guy who spent any amount of time grooming his body hair or what not, sculpting his six-pack. At thirty-nine, Rachel’s primary interest in men seemed to align with their interests in camping, NPR, books, the ability to make a strong pot of coffee, the willingness to keep quiet, and a genuine concern for Thomas’s welfare. She glanced at her watch, deciding she’d test Spencer’s aptitude for silence.
The river flowed on.
Under the Water Street Bridge, and then University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire’s pedestrian bridge, beside Water Street’s shopping and bar district, under the Clairemont Bridge, past Shawtown, under the Highway 94 bridge where swallows dive-bombed them and traffic screamed overhead . . . Finally, they were away from the city. So far, her canoeing partner had been silent for almost a half hour.
“Lycaeides melissa samuelis,” Spencer said at last. “I think.” He pointed his paddle toward a break in the shore’s forest, what seemed to be a patch of remnant prairie perhaps.
Their canoe had drifted close to shore, but she squinted into the vegetation.
“If memory serves,” she began, “that’s Latin for, you’re fucking with me.”
He laughed, “No. I was pretty sure I saw it, a Karner blue butterfly, up there on top of that escarpment. Just a flash of blue.” He pointed again with his paddle. “Wait—there!”
She couldn’t see anything. Another sign of her age. A month prior she’d had her eyes checked and her prescription updated. There had even been a trip to Walmart for a pair of reading glasses, which seemed to cement in her mind the notion of mortality as an actual reality.
“I don’t see it,” she admitted. “The sun’s too bright.”
“Or your eyes are too old,” he joked, splashing her with a polite volume of river water.
She made a show of exhaling. “All right, the age jokes? Getting a little stale. We’re on a date, remember?”
“Sorry,” he allowed, paddling quietly.
“It’s okay. The sad thing is, it’s true. Ughhh . . . With birds, I find it doesn’t much matter. I can still get by because of a college ornithology class. Their songs. But something like a butterfly . . .”
“For what it’s worth,” he said softly, “you look great.”
She turned. “Thanks.”
She allowed herself to enjoy this a moment. It felt good. Then, a minute or so later, “I didn’t think we had many of those butterflies left.”
“I know,” he agreed. “I’ll be honest with you, I’m sorta freaking out back here about it. Mind if we stopped for a second? I’d like to try and photograph that sucker if we can find it.”
“Let’s do it,” she said, paddling forward.
THEY SCRAMBLED UP a steep talus slope, Spencer first, offering her a hand when he reached the top. Just a simple gesture, but the kind of thing Trevor would have done. Nothing patronizing, nothing sexist—just a slightly outdated politeness, and the general regard it might suggest.
“You have a camera?” she asked Spencer.
He held up his phone, said, “Boy, you are old.”
She shook her head.
They wandered the grasses and shrubs l
ooking for the bright-winged insect.
“There can’t be too many of those butterflies left,” Rachel said, offhandedly, letting bee balm and milkweed tickle her palms.
“Probably not,” Spencer admitted, shrugging his shoulders. “But it sure would be cool if we had a lot more.”
“You think anything will be left?” she asks. “In say, a hundred years or so?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Of course there will be something left. The question is, what? If you’re asking me about lions and orangutans and Karner blue butterflies, my answer’s probably no. But I don’t think we have to worry about crows, say, or deer or coyotes.”
“Can you imagine?” she continued. “Growing up as a kid in a world without elephants? Or whales? Even monarch butterflies?”
They’d reached the edge of the pasture, where an ancient knee-high stone wall separated them from a sea of gently undulating corn. The leaves made a most pleasant sound in the wind; so stiff and glossy, those elongated olive-green leaves.
“When I was sixteen,” Spencer said, peering out at the corn, “my parents took us on a trip to Alaska. I’d always hated family trips before then. Just the usual classic teenage sulking around. All I ever wanted to do was watch TV, play video games. But my dad and I went fishing one day, and I’ll never forget, this sow grizzly and her two cubs came down to the river, and at first, I was terrified. I’ve never been so scared. But my dad settled me down. This was during the salmon run, and the bears were pretty content, fairly docile. So we reeled in our lines and just sat there, by the river, watching them fish and play. And, I think . . .” His voice trailed off.
“What?” Rachel prodded.
“It’s just that . . . I know this sounds mushy, but, for me at least it’s true. It was the first time I ever remember feeling alive. Exhilarated, you know.”
“And that’s why you became a biologist?”
He nodded, turned to look at her. “And to get chicks.”
She snorted with laughter. “Right, chicks.”
“I tell you what,” he said, stretching his arms up to the sky. “Corn might be the epidemic that kills us, but I’ve always loved staring at a big field of it, perfectly planted.”
“Better than soybeans, I guess,” she agreed, though without much excitement.
“You get a nice field of corn planted on a rolling landscape, it’s like a topographic map.”
“’Course, it’s also the reason we’re searching for one butterfly,” she says, “rather than seeing, you know, hundreds of them,” she says.
“No doubt, no doubt,” he conceded. “Corn is king.”
THEY WALKED BACK toward the river, and standing on top of the shore’s slope, he noticed a small blue butterfly on one of the canoe’s gunwales. They did not say a word, but slowly sat down, feet dangling over the lip of the scarp, to watch the creature’s wings fold up and then out, as it rested.
She whispered in his ear, “Aren’t you going to take a picture?”
He turned his head, and the short, dark whiskers of his chin brushed her exposed, sun-browned shoulder. “I thought maybe I’d kiss you instead.”
She looked down at the light dappling off the river. At the symmetry of the canoe. At the butterfly. Shook her head no.
“Not yet,” she whispered.
Moments passed before Spencer reached slowly into his pocket for his phone, and in doing so, disturbed a small stone, which rolled down the bank, plinking off the fiberglass of the canoe and sending the butterfly wobbling away across the water.
“Shit,” he said. “I’m sorry.” He waved his hands in the air now, quite like the escaping butterfly. “I’m such a—just—sorry about that. Sorry about, I don’t know, everything.”
“Don’t be,” she replied, already climbing down the scree. “Let’s keep going.”
FARTHER DOWN THE RIVER he spoke up again. “I don’t know how to ask this.”
She knew what was coming. One of two things. “It’s okay,” she told him. “I don’t mind.”
“You don’t even know what I’m going to ask.” He laughed.
She squinted into the sun, sweat trickling down her backbone, off her forehead. “I bet I do.”
He was quiet again for a moment. “Yes,” he said, “I suppose you do. Still, I’m curious. You’ve been married before?”
She rested her paddle across her knees, turned back to him. “I’ve been married three times, actually,” she said. “My first husband died when he was twenty-four. The second two husbands were . . . well, complete mistakes. Let’s put it that way. One of them had a gambling problem. Thought he was clairvoyant or something when it came to betting on college basketball. Took all our money and moved to Phoenix. The third one was just a drunk. A bad drunk, too. Liked to throw things so he could really hear ’em smash. Punched drywall and doors. That kind of thing. One day after the Packers lost a playoff game, I watched him take all my coffee mugs and walk outside with a baseball bat. Then he just tossed them into the air and swung at them like they were balls. I locked the door and called the police before he could get to my grandma’s china.”
“How did your first husband die?”
She sighed deeply. “He was on leave, back home in Eau Claire. A younger boy, one of his old neighbors, was excited that Trevor was back in town and they went out to the movies. The kid was in Trevor’s Boy Scout troop. This is back in 2003.
“It was one of the Matrix movies. A Friday. The theater was packed, and at first a little rowdy. I think people were geared up to see something revolutionary, something incendiary, you know? This was during the Bush years, you know? Everyone was angry, right and left.
“Apparently there was a drunk guy sitting in the row behind them, catcalling the movie, making a big scene. He was drunk, pretended like he was shooting the screen, made his hands into pistols and was all boomboomboomboom. A lot of people were scared, but they didn’t know what to do. This drunk, he was a big man, almost six foot six, I guess, long scraggly hair. Everybody in the theater just froze. Nobody did a goddamn thing. Finally Trevor had enough, warned the guy, and then went to complain to security. The theater manager and a cop came and got the guy and escorted him out. After the film was done, people actually applauded Trevor. The neighbor kid told me that he was mobbed by folks trying to shake his hand.
“Anyway, they get out of the theater and they’re almost at the car when this crazy man, he uh . . .”
She covered her mouth, closed her eyes, breathed deeply.
“Um, the guy shot Trevor in the head. Killed him. In front of this kid. I mean, right there. One shot.” She motioned to the back of her head, then blossomed her fingers out to imitate the subsequent explosion. “Dead.”
“Look, Rachel . . . ,” Spencer began, “I’m—I’m so sorry. I didn’t . . . I didn’t mean to . . .”
Neither of them paddled. Spencer leaned forward, placed a warm hand on her shoulder.
“The thing is,” she said, pulling away from his light, sincere touch, “Trevor was just like that. He was a hero, in the truest sense of the word. And I hate that word, I fucking hate it. But . . . he was. He really was. I don’t know how else to say it. He was righteous. He had a sense of duty, of what was right and wrong in the world, and I don’t mean that in some evangelical sense of the word. And I don’t mean that his world was just black and white. He just had a code, you know? He used to talk about that, about how few people had codes anymore. It was his thing. He was always reading books about the samurai, about Japanese culture.”
The river conveyed them south and west, all the time toward the Mississippi, that great American jugular coursing all the way south to the Gulf of Mexico.
“He sounds like an amazing man,” Spencer said.
“He was.”
“I’d like to see a photo of him sometime.”
“He looked like a bear, by the end. Had a huge beard.” She laughed, motioning to her own face. “That was the other thing about the day he was killed. He’d just sha
ved his beard off. I remember that, going into the bathroom that morning where he’d left all his whiskers in the sink, like this crazy bird’s nest.
“Can you imagine? He served all that time in the most dangerous places on the planet, fighting terrorists, parachuting into war zones, climbing mountains, carrying his buddies on his back for miles at a time. And he gets killed in a parking lot of a movie theater in Eau Claire fucking Wisconsin. Some drunk asshole who’d lost a softball game earlier in the day. Kills my beautiful husband.”
Just then the canoe slid to a stop against a sandbar and they simply rested there, beneath the white banking light of the midday sun. She stared at the shallow shore, the tiny tracks of water birds, reeds bent with the wind.
“And you were pregnant at the time?” Spencer asked.
She nodded.
“Jesus, I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
She placed her hands on the gunwales, looked up at the passing clouds, some jetliner soaring away from Wisconsin.
“I don’t mean to be a bitch,” she said. “Actually, you know, I’m not a bitch, and I know that. But when you wanted to kiss me, you have to understand: Trevor is my gold standard. He just is. Maybe that’s why my other marriages didn’t work out. Who knows? Maybe that’s why I’m single. So the question, really, I guess is: do you want to date a woman who’s as haunted as I am, by this bright and shining ghost—you know—this unattainable ideal? Because most of the time, I honestly don’t even know why I’m out on a date; I actually forget. Forget what I’m even doing, what I’m looking for. Does that make any sense at all to you?”
He lifted one leg out of the canoe, then the other, stood ankle deep in the river. “Maybe,” he said, “the best thing I can offer you, then, is my friendship. So let me apologize for that—you know, for trying to kiss you. I’m sorry about that.” His shoulders slumped, and standing beside the canoe he looked like a voyageur after a day’s paddle with a very long portage ahead.
The Hearts of Men Page 26