The Hearts of Men

by Nickolas Butler

  “That’s right,” he’d say, solemnly.

  “Be prepared for what?” she asked him the first time.

  “For anything.”

  “No, but seriously. For what?” she pressed him.

  He pointed a finger at her belly, then looked her clearly in the eyes, without any expression at all, and said, “Someone possessed with hunger, with a thought, with a craving, with a perversion, someone who needs their drug, someone who comes to your door in the middle of the night—they won’t have any light in their eyes. And that’s how you know. That’s what I look for. I don’t look at their mouths. People lie with their mouths. I look at their eyes.”

  It was the only time in their entire relationship when she feared him, had some sense, suddenly, of what he understood about the earth, politics, war. About evil.

  “Imagine I’m gone,” he said to her, pulling his finger back. “What would you do? What would you do if you went to the front door and that face was staring back at you from the dark. And the only thing separating you from that darkness is a plank of wood. A little window.”

  “Trev,” she said, nervously, “you’re actually scaring me.” She meant it, too. She’d spent many dozens and dozens of solitary nights, and knew of the hundreds or maybe even thousands she could expect in the future. The nights she’d woken in fear at the sound of a tree branch scratching at their shingles, a set of headlights turning around in their driveway, the sparrow banging around in their attic.

  “Would you be prepared?”

  “Stop it.”

  “Would you be prepared, Rachel, for that kind of hunger. That kind of darkness?”

  Outside their kitchen window, it was a dark, gray November morning, crows black-winging over the stubbled cornfields.

  She did not yet know she was pregnant. “Quit it!” she said, “Okay? Just . . . stop it!”

  He walked to the back porch door, then just stood there a moment, looking at his boots. He was neither upset nor excited. What he had said, she could see, was something he’d spent hours, perhaps days, thinking about—and not just here, in this, their house; in their bed or out walking the gravel roads together, hand in hand; but also in the field, with or without his comrades, walking mountaintops and steep ravines, entering village after village, building after building, in search of that same darkness, that same dread hunger.

  He looked at her now, and she stared back into his eyes and they might have stood that way for minutes, she could not tell. His eyes were not happy, no. But they were not full of darkness, either. Just a deep well of sadness; that is what she would think of later, long after his funeral. And that his sadness was the knowledge of this absence of light, this hunger, so at odds with his own early optimism and kindness, so foreign to the letters he once sent her, that teenage boy she’d fallen in love with so many years before.

  “The world is full of bad men,” he said finally, “but if you are prepared, and if you are strong, then you cannot be taken off guard, and you will not be scared. And when they do come to your door in the middle of the night and you are there to greet them with all the light there is inside you, all the strength, they are the ones who will run for the shadows. And I’ve seen it.

  “You have to make your light into a fire,” he said.

  She realized she was trembling now. “I’m sorry, Trevor. I’m sorry for what you’ve seen. I’m sorry for what you’ve had to do.”

  “Don’t apologize to me,” he said, kindly. “If you want to be nice to me, just know that when I’m talking to you about this stuff, about preparation, I’m doing it because I love you more than anything. And I know you’re tough. But I still worry. I worry about not coming back to you and—”

  “Please don’t say that!” she said. “Jesus, please don’t say that!”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He knelt down to tie his boot laces and she walked right past him into their mudroom. Gathered up her Wellingtons, a barn jacket, a watch cap, and then stood beside the back door, peering down at him.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Fine, then,” she said. “Teach me how to shoot.”

  IT BECAME ONE of her favorite things to do, something they shared together, on Saturday or Sunday mornings, walking into that southern pasture, the topography of the land slipping away beneath them, drawing them gently downhill. Occasionally startling a pheasant or grouse, a cote of doves. Trevor, carrying a shotgun with his right hand, a backpack of ammunition over that same shoulder, and Rachel lugging another bag with a thermos of hot coffee and four small bacon sandwiches, perhaps a banana, too, or a bar of chocolate. It was like that, whenever he was back home; they always held hands.

  “All this talk about Second Amendment rights, assault rifles, high-capacity magazines,” Trevor would say, exhaling a plume of morning air, “that’s all bullshit. A bunch of ignoramuses playing soldier and acting tough. A regulated militia means nothing against a drone or a missile strike, or a Special Forces unit. But I’ll tell you this: there ain’t any substitute for a good, old-fashioned double-barreled shotgun. The toughest bad dude in the world is going to hit the floor if you shoot him with a twelve-gauge slug. Guaranteed. ”

  She nodded her head, smiled at him. “When exactly did you become, you know, such a badass?”

  He shrugged his shoulders, sipped at the coffee. “Probably about the time you broke my heart.”

  She slapped him across the butt. “You always said you were joining because of nine-eleven. Asshole.”

  “Well, sure. Although, when you were in Africa,” he said, “and I began to understand what was happening, that maybe you weren’t in love with me anymore, it was, like, I don’t know—a rip in the sky or something. All the colors of the rainbow draining away. I didn’t know what else to do with myself. And the doors weren’t exactly flying open for me and my cum laude in English.”

  “I’m sorry,” Rachel said, rubbing his back now, pulling him close, hugging him, feeling his chin stubble through her hair, on her scalp. The dewy morning air, a hint of woodsmoke, the spice of prairie grasses.

  “It was for the best,” he said. “I was probably a pretty big pussy before. Just a little boy.”

  “You were sweet. Always sweet to me. I miss those letters you used to write me.”

  “How’d you even fall back into love with me? I mean, how does a person do that?” He pushed away from her playfully. “Maybe you’re an impostor. A phony. A spy. A goddamn Taliban she-mole.”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted, though there were memories of him—visiting him at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, after driving more than eighteen hours straight, and then meeting him at a Holiday Inn, touching his face, now chiseled, his newfound physique, even those gruesome yellowish calluses of his feet, the palms of his hands. She remembers lying on that hotel bed, fucking him, feeling him come inside her, the release of years of anger and affection, loss and love, wrapping her legs around the small of his back, and hooking her feet together, closing her eyes, flexing her whole body against him.

  And the next memory, breakfast the following day, rain sweeping across the parking lot as they ran into a Perkins. Tucked into a booth together, the Naugahyde benches sagging with neglect, Trevor stacking containers of jelly and jam into wobbly cairns, balancing small plastic cups of creamer into trembling towers that inevitably toppled over. They drank mug after mug of cheap, hot coffee, devoured plates of pancakes and sausages and scrambled eggs, and afterward, when the rain finally quit, they returned to the hotel room and took a nap together, the room dark and pleasantly deodorized, though also detectable, the smell of sex hanging in the close air of that little room.

  Before they ate dinner that night, they made love again, and later, as she brushed her hair while perched on the edge of the bed, she asked, “Did you ever, you know, date anyone while we were broken up?”

  He laughed, leaned against a wall while he brushed his teeth. “What, we’re not still broken up?”

  Involuntarily, she scr
unched her nose. “I might want to reconcile our situation.”

  He nodded, continued brushing, stretched a leg. “You would.”

  “I might.”

  “But I’m a free agent now. I’ve got a woman in every port from here to Kabul. Why’d I want to settle down with the one person on this planet capable of destroying me in a way nobody else ever has? Hmm?”

  She stopped brushing her hair. “First of all, I hope like hell you don’t have a woman in every port from here to there because we just had sex, like, fifteen times.” She laughed nervously, and then, after a moment, more serious now said, “I’m sorry. It was a mistake, okay?” She shuddered, just thinking about Willem. Fucking asshole. “I’m sorry, Trev. What else can I say?”

  He spits into the sink, washes his face, leans against the wall again, crosses his arms, a smallish hotel towel wrapped around his narrow waist, trim hips. “Seriously, Rach. Why would I ever trust you again?”

  Suddenly, she feels desperate for him. “I don’t know, to be honest. Maybe it’s too late. Maybe I can never make it right again.” Her hands fly into the air and she flops on the bed.

  “I didn’t do anything wrong,” he said. “I never mistreated you, never stepped out on you. Looking back, I’m sure I smothered you, and I know I could be childish about how I expressed myself. But I never would have hurt you, never.”

  “I know that.”

  “And, you really screwed me, Rachel.” The cool chuckle he gave right then, shaking his head, just about broke her heart.

  She nodded, wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

  “And now,” he said, shaking his head slowly, “I mean, I’ve got commitments. I can’t just up and quit on the U.S. military. My brothers. And I don’t want to, to be honest. I like what I’m doing. So if we’re together, what it really means is that we’re going to be apart most of the time. Right? I mean, are you okay with that? Or are you going to flake out on me again? Because I can’t go out into the shit and be thinking about you with some other dude, or having a bunch of really sad phone calls and emails while I’m trying to focus on a mission. I see my friends going through that, the married guys, and it takes a toll. To be honest, I don’t think it’s sustainable. To be totally fucking honest, I think it may have cost one or two of them their lives.”

  This new reality, this new Trevor, was paradigm shattering, surreal. “Really?”

  “Yes,” he said, “really.”

  “I’d like to try,” she said gently, looking straight at him. “I want to try.”

  “Try? That’s not good enough. It has to be commitment.”

  “Okay. I understand.”

  “Why? Why now?”

  “Because I love you. I’ve always loved you.”

  “You sure didn’t in Africa.”

  “Oh, fuck Africa, okay? I made a mistake. I’m sorry. What, you never make mistakes? You’re always so confident?”

  He studied his feet. “No. I’ve made mistakes.”

  “Like what?”

  He sighed. “I don’t want to tell you.”

  “You have to. Otherwise, I won’t believe you. You’ll still be this scary archetype of goodness and morality. You’ll still be untouchable.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Sit down.”

  She smiled at him from the bed.

  “Good,” he said. “Maybe I should sit down, too. I have to remember everything.” He rubbed his forehead.

  40

  A MAN DRESSED AS AN AFGHAN POLICE OFFICER ENTERED their barracks, which was unusual, though not out of the realm of possibility, and it was somehow Otter, the youngest among them, the most likely to be plugged into his Xbox or thrashing away to some hideously loud metal, who intercepted him at the door, only to be blown away, no longer identifiable even as a man, but as a hot, wet, red shrapnel of flesh, blood, and bone exploded across their bunks and faces. For the remainder of his life, no day passed in which Trevor did not recall with revulsion and horror that moment, the blood on his face, his friend. Even looking in the mirror afterward became a difficulty.

  The bomber, Trevor would always remember, had the exact same look on his face as an NFL free safety preparing to tackle the bejeezus out of an unsuspecting wide receiver, the target’s rib cage stretched taut and totally unprotected. His eyes were wide, wild, and somehow gleeful. Ahead, no doubt, was paradise and some absurd sum of virgins, which the older guys in Trevor’s unit always chuckled about, claiming that virgins, after all, were notoriously boring lays, not exactly the ideal partners for an eternity in heaven. The married men in the unit said Valhalla would be populated by thirty- and forty-something single mothers with all the experience in the world and plenty of lonely, exhausted nights to plan their next foray. Now that would be a paradise.

  Because Otter met the intruder at the door, instead of allowing him into the center of the room, where most likely the entire unit would have created a monkey-pile scrum on top of the attacker, the bomb detonated just inside the doorway and was somewhat contained. Thus, there were only two deaths that day, rather than ten or twenty, or more. This is more or less the definition of the Congressional Medal of Honor, which Otter’s fiancée was too nervous to accept on his behalf. Nor would his mother or father, who were far too furious at the government, at Halliburton, at the Saudis, at God, to be trusted at any such ceremony. The so-called honor was left to Otter’s younger brother, a thirteen-year-old kid named Mickey, after his dad’s boyhood idol, Mantle, who’d spent time during spring training fishing off the coast of Florida, his giant, blond-haired home-run-cracking forearms flexing in the hot sun.

  Otter was to be married within the next month, while on home leave, to a Florida girl he talked about incessantly, a twenty-year-old knockout named Brittany. He claimed her hair smelled like tangerines and her skin of strawberries and vanilla. Said she liked to go tanning back in Tallahassee, and described her reclining in the back of his truck, resting on a mattress, a little Playboy decal just above her pelvic bone, that she’d peel off when her sunbathing was concluded. He liked to kiss her there. Said it reminded him of the sun going down over the ocean, that star kiss of light and endless azure sea; her Hawaiian Tropic–smelling skin and the triangle of her bikini bottom. That was about the extent of Otter’s poetics.

  Most of them had bought tickets to their wedding down in Florida a month and a half later, and so it was that they held a celebration of sorts anyway, even after he was laid to rest in a cemetery. The “reception” was held in the courtyard of Brittany’s apartment complex, a slightly claustrophobic rectangle with a few rusty barbecues, a small pool heated to what must have been a hundred degrees, and one mangy palm that in the close, damp air barely rustled out a sound. Brittany wore her wedding dress, pink flip-flops, glitter sprinkled across her face, her hair all done up with about a thousand pins and two aerosol cans of hair spray holding it in place. The guys there stood around in full dress uniform drinking Bud Light from red Solo cups, big dips of Skoal pooching their lower lips, swaying listlessly in dress shoes, getting drunk quickly in the near-tropical air. Neither Brittany’s family nor Otter’s attended; across the board they dubbed the event “morbid, macabre, and tragic.” Perhaps they were right, but then again, they weren’t fighting for their lives in Afghanistan.

  The “catering” consisted of Pizza Hut galore, cold beers, wine coolers, and about eight rotating bottles of Jack Daniel’s. No one seemed to mind. This was less a marriage, after all, than the funeral of a brother. There was no deejay and no band. About a dozen of Brittany’s closest friends and cousins were there and someone plugged an iPod into a set of overmatched speakers. Food was snatched from a folding table, buffet style. Trevor had been Otter’s closest friend, at least within their unit, if for no other reason than the fact that they were the youngest. Otter forever ballyhooing Gator football while Trev rolled his eyes and tried to read a book.

  Throughout the evening, Brittany hung close to Trevor, brushing against his elbows, or sweeping her hair in a
manner that brushed his chin or ears. She updated him regularly on her drunkenness, whispering, “I’m so hammered. I’m so sad.”

  Then someone starting playing Outkast and the girls were twerking up against the men, and the men looking around for any sign of authority, wanting desperately to peel their formals off, and a few girls were jumping into the pool, and then rising up, like mermaids, their sundresses and cocktail dresses clinging to their Florida brown skin, their nipples the most beautiful thing the men had seen in months, the married men staring, their wives swatting them less and less good-naturedly, and then everyone was kissing, tongues slipping over tongues, all Bartles & Jaymes, Bud Light and lime, all Tennessee fuckin’ whiskey.

  At some point in all this, Brittany leaned in close to Trevor and said, “I’ll be in my apartment. Door’s unlocked.” Then she handed him something very soft and his first thought was that it was a silk handkerchief. But examining his hand more closely, he registered it as her underwear, bright white, lacy, soft . . .

  “Jesus,” he murmured, scratching his face.

  “You know,” said one of the older men in their unit, Barnes, a married father of five young kids, “you only ever regret the things you didn’t do. And by ‘things,’ I mean women.” His hand on Trevor’s shoulder, he leaned all his weight onto the younger man, his eyes wide open in apparent seriousness and exaggerated sobriety, as if talking to a cop.

  “Really? That’s the extent of your fatherly wisdom?” Trevor asked. “You wouldn’t have any qualms about this?”

  “All part of the mourning process,” chimed in Chowda. “She’s obviously trying to forget how sad she is,” he explained with unimpeachably Bostonian street smarts. “You would absolutely be doin’ Otta’ a huge fayva. Trust me.” He smiled a wide, gap-toothed grin.

  “You don’t git yo’ self in there, I sure as shit will,” said Wiggins. “C’mon, man.”

  THE APARTMENT WAS DARK, lit sparingly by an array of candles, curtains drawn against the music pumping outside, muffling it only slightly. A television, an Xbox, a Tupperware container of video games, a card table likely purchased from Walmart, two chairs, a white pleather couch with a faux tiger-skin throw. A small kitchen: microwave, some cheap pans, a roll of paper towels.