The Hearts of Men

by Nickolas Butler

  Jonathan drinks beer to remember the freedom of his high school and college days; drinks vodka to forget the reality of his present situation: almost fifty years old, upper-middle-class bourgeois, somehow less than happily married, owner of a minivan and a whole fleet of eighteen-wheelers, due for yet another colonoscopy in two years.

  “They have rest stops, Dad. Geez . . .”

  “Rest stops are for the Great Unwashed,” Jonathan declares. “We Quicks prefer to piss on nature.”

  THEY EXIT THE HIGHWAY and Trevor drives east into the countryside, pulls off on a lesser county highway where the land is flat as a dinner plate, the trees young and sparse, the earth sprouting nothing but corn and marsh grasses.

  “You see any cover around here?” Jonathan asks, opening his car door and flipping the empty into the ditch. He spreads his arms to indicate the vast vulnerability of their position. “There isn’t even a sapling to pee on.”

  “Yeah, well, we could have just stopped at a restaurant, Dad.”

  “I know that.”

  Jonathan unbuckles his belt, loosens his blue jeans, then kneels in the gravel beside the front passenger wheel of the car. In a move he’s copied from professional soccer players competing in long, intense matches, he pretends he’s tying his shoes. His urine comes shyly, at first, then urgently, sending a small puff of pale dust into the air. He shakes, tucks himself back in, and stands, stretching deliberately for all the prairie to see.

  “We’re above the forty-fifth now,” he announces breezily, scratching at his stomach hair, then performing some cursory stretches: the touching of toes, leg stretches, about a dozen jumping jacks.

  “So? What?” Trevor asks, bored as can be, restless as a sheet of newspaper in the wind. He lays a teenage hand across his forehead in utter exasperation.

  “The forty-fifth parallel. We’re now more than halfway between the equator and the north pole. Isn’t that something?”

  “Dad, it’s just an arbitrary line some, like, cartographer drew across the globe a long time ago. It means nothing. Can we go?”

  “Trev, camp starts tomorrow. What’s the hurry?”

  “I want to check into our motel.”

  “Why?”

  “I dunno. TV.”

  “You want to hurry up to watch TV?”

  “Better than this.”

  “You know why I stopped us here?”

  This time, nothing. No response from the kid. Not even an exhausted sigh or embarrassed, “Daaaaddd . . .”

  “Every time my dad, your grandpa Jasper, and I came up to camp, we would stop right about here. Sometimes a little farther up the road. And he’d say to me, the same thing, every summer—every fall, too, for hunting camp. He’d say, “Jon, my boy, everything that happens henceforth, from here north, that’s our little secret. Between you and me.’ He started me on that philosophy when I was twelve. And you’re what, sixteen going on forty? Fifty? Sixty?”

  “Dad.”

  “Seventy. I don’t know. You’ve gotta be about the stodgiest teenager I ever met.”

  “Dad . . .”

  “What I’m saying is, relax. Tonight we’re going to a famous supper club. It’s an institution. Theodore Roosevelt once ate there, I think. Or maybe Franklin, I dunno. Anyway, I want you to meet a friend of mine. We’re going to have a very nice, civilized dinner. If you want to have a beer, or a nice glass of wine, that’s fine. I won’t tell your mom. If you’d like to order a cocktail, that is also fine. Order whatever you like. Heck, as long as you’re acting the teetotaler, order a damn Shirley Temple, I don’t give a shit. You can remain my designated driver—the Morgan Freeman to my, ah, Jessica Tandy. What I’m saying is, this is vacation. Okay? All I’m saying. Just don’t be so damn judgmental. All right? You’re a kid. Loosen up.”

  “Yeah, well, someone’s got to be responsible.”

  “What are you, Trev, a goddamn Republican? Where’s your hope and excitement and irresponsibility and carefree fucking la-dee-dah?”

  “Are you done?”

  “Yes. I just wanted to give you that speech, which happens to be part of your family’s history. Take it or leave it.”

  “Fine.”

  “I get the sense that you’re leaving it, so to speak.”

  “Dad . . .”

  CREEDENCE GIVES WAY TO THE DOORS. Jonathan is three beers into things by the time they pass Rice Lake on their right, fully into what is nominally dubbed the Northwoods, demarcated mostly by greasy cooking, two-lane roads, cutover forests, and a general nostalgia surrounding the heyday of the place—the 1950s—when everyone’s dads and brothers and uncles were safely back from World War II and there was some spare money to spend and, hey, why the hell not buy a shitty little cabin or pop-up camper in the memory of wilderness and spend the summer up there, swatting mosquitoes and shuttlecocks, eating fried bluegill and crappie every night, playing euchre or trying to shoot the moon, all with roasted marshmallow and cobwebs in your hair?

  “Is Bugler coming to dinner tonight?” Trevor asks, a note of earnestness in his voice.

  “You shouldn’t call him that,” Jonathan says, for the first time all day exhibiting some trace of seriousness.

  “Sorry. Mr. Doughty. Is he coming to dinner?”

  “I don’t know. I invited him. Sent him a letter with the date, the time of our dinner reservation, the restaurant. Haven’t heard back.”

  “I hope he comes.” A deep, sensitive, thoughtful teenage silence fills the cab of the van, a silence that Jonathan decides has about the color and density of lemon pudding. Trevor reveres Nelson, loves seeing him each year at camp; Jonathan hears all about him every summer. Nelson tying knots blindfolded and with impressive speed. Nelson hitting bull’s-eyes from impossible distances. Nelson squatting three hundred and fifty pounds without shedding a bead of sweat . . . The stories are legion. “Dad, could I ask Bu— Could I ask Mr. Doughty about Vietnam?”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because, Trev, it’s not polite. The fucking guy was nearly killed over there, and his spine is held together with shrapnel and Crazy Glue. It’s just not real rosy dinner conversation, all right? The way you handle stuff like this, as an adult, is to wait patiently, until said person wants to offer you something of their experience, and then, boom, you’re there, ready to hear it. But you can’t just, you know, dive right in there, asking about the Viet Cong and fucking bouncing betties and pongee sticks and whatever other fucking shit he saw. Not over shrimp cocktail and popovers.”

  And like that, the sincere teenage curiosity suddenly dissolves, turns to poisonous silence, leaving Jonathan to half-regret his delivery. Not what he said, not the content. But goddamn, the kid’s sensitive. Boom, he’s shut out, Trev looking fully forward, straight ahead at the road like some presidential chauffeur, eyes totally blank, save for the edge of anger constantly rippling through that teenage body. Jesus.

  “Sorry, Trev. But, come on, you know what I mean, right?”

  “I’m just wondering, is all, okay? Geez, Dad. Not like I’m going to ask him how many gooks he fucking shot.”

  Jonathan exhales. “Watch the language, all right? Vietnamese, please. Or possibly Cambodian, uh, you know, depending on . . . Never mind—look, maybe you get a pass if you actually fought in the war and lost your buddies, but you’re a sixteen-year-old kid from Eau Claire, Wisconsin. So, chill out, all right? I won’t sanction a bunch of ethnic slurs.” So exhausting, this parenting gig—how fast the tables can turn.

  Fields and fields of waist-high Cargill corn and knee-high Pioneer soybeans, muddy barnyards of shit-splattered Guernseys and Holsteins, sun-bleached and woebegone trailer parks, falling-down barns begging for a splash of gasoline and a match, cemeteries ringed in browning arbor vitae and chain-link fences, derelict stone silos, small to middling northern rivers, forests of maple and oak and red pine sliding by at fifty-five miles per hour.

  At last, the kid breaks the silence. “Sorry, Dad.”r />
  Jonathan cracks his heavy eyelids, stirs. That’s another parenting tip: Try to remain silent, however long it takes. Most of the time, parenting is like a contractual negotiation. Let them spill their guts. Let them come to you. Don’t go chasing waterfalls, as the FM radio is right now so prone to preaching.

  “It’s okay.” He’s still just a kid. Just imitates what he hears, like a fucking toucan or something. A parrot.

  “Just—so, did he, like, kill anyone, over there?”

  Jonathan looks out the window, away from his son, and thinks about Bugler, the years and years in which he and Bugler did not speak, exchanging letters no more than two, three times a year, especially when Bugler was in Vietnam, and then years of total silence, until, improbably, the news that Bugler had been hired to replace Wilbur Whiteside, Camp Chippewa’s legendary Scoutmaster. The newspaper said Wilbur had gone out for his regular morning swim and returned to his cabin, but never made it out for the flag ceremony, and when he was late, everyone knew something was horribly wrong. Though, it is difficult to feel too much sorrow for a man who lived such a good long life, survived a world war even, and manages to leave in excess of three million dollars to the camp that now bears his name, the Whiteside Scout Reservation.

  “I think,” Jonathan says carefully, “that Mr. Doughty killed a lot of people, over there, and I’m not sure he needs to be reminded of it, either.”

  “Oh.”

  “Green Berets, Trev. Mr. Doughty is a bad mamma jamma.”

  “Oh.”

  Jonathan decides to reorient the conversation in an unexpected direction. He clears his throat.

  “So, how’s that, ah, your girlfriend of yours?” he asks, stumbling a bit. “Sorry, is it Robin, Raquel, Rose . . . Help me out here.” He’s always teasing Trevor about her name, partly because he’s never actually taken the time to memorize it, assuming this girl his son is dating won’t last. That she’s just a phase he’s going through.

  “Rachel,” the kid corrects flatly. “Rachel Gunderson. Jesus, Dad. We’ve been dating for, like, six months.”

  “That so? Terrific, Trev. Really great.” Jonathan doesn’t think much of Trevor’s girlfriend. To start with, they’re sixteen years old, for chrissakes. This is the time for casual backseat explorations. Heavy petting, as Jimmy Carter called it. Oh, Rachel is cute enough. Big, big brown eyes with a dumb kind of gleam. Slender about the hips, and maybe a little lacking across the chest, but still, cute. He can really only imagine her in the capacity of a babysitter, though, or maybe working at a McDonald’s drive-through. She hardly seems edgy enough for seriously rewarding teenage sexual shenanigans. Always refers to him as Mr. Quick (even after his dogged encouragements to call him Jon), is stingy with her eye contact, and troublingly, cites as her favorite book Misty of Chincoteague.

  Jonathan sips his beer with eyes closed. Listens to Ray Manzarek’s fingers float over the Vox Continental organ.

  “Dad?”

  “I’m still here.”

  “I think I’m in love with Rachel.”

  The car fills with lemon pudding, heavy citrus air, like a fucking cloud nine bursting with buttery shafts of sunflower light or something. It’s a little embarrassing how happy this lovestruck boy is right now.

  “That’s great, Trev.”

  “She’s like, so amazing, Dad. You know? So talented. I guess some colleges are going to scout her next year for their softball teams, you believe that? And she turned me on to this amazing book, The Celestine Prophecy? Dad, it’s totally changing the way I see the world.”

  “I am delighted for you, Trevor. Love like that—a wonderful feeling, yessir.”

  Jonathan scans his memory banks in search of that teenage sensation, being in love. And how about now? Is he in love with Deanna? No, he’s pretty sure he isn’t in love with her. Not exactly. Well, maybe. Is he in love with his wife, Sarah? No. That ship sailed a long time ago, he thinks. Christ, decades ago . . . But why? How? He was in love with her once, he recalls that much. Their honeymoon in Hawaii . . .

  How pale her skin was beneath her bikini, the billowy fabric of her dress at dinner one night, the sound of surf in the background, thinking, We’re adults. We’re starting our life together. They rented a little Jeep and rode around the island, stopping along the road to slip into the jungle and make love, then running back to the vehicle laughing like two bank robbers with bags of cash in their fists. Marching up the slope of a volcano and standing within spitting distance of a lava flow; following it down to the ocean where the newest ground on the planet had just cooled black and steaming, right there before them, the newest thing in the world. At night they ate beneath tiki torches, big feasts of barbecued pork and fresh exotic fruits and grilled fish. She wore a tropical flower in her hair, each day, and how sunburnt she became—sun poisoned, actually, the night before their flight home. How painful that long flight must have been for her, nowhere to lie down comfortably, no way to groan or weep or complain without drawing attention to herself. So she simply laid her head against his shoulder and shivered with pain, snoring lightly.

  “What?” Trevor asks, actually glancing away from the road for a second to look at his dad’s lax face. “You don’t like her, do you?”

  Jonathan sighs, scooches up in his seat, finishes the can of beer, and chucks it out the window. He turns the Doors down, just as “The End” is coming on. Not exactly midmorning, summer highway tuneage.

  “Look, Trev. Here’s the thing. You’re sixteen, okay? Why do you want to commit to anything as heavy as love right now? I mean, you can go to Baskin-Robbins and try all the flavors. All thirty-one flavors. Don’t get me wrong, you like one flavor, by all means. Get two, three scoops. But why, oh, why would a sixteen-year-old boy lock into vanilla for the rest of his life? I don’t get it. I didn’t do it. Neither did your mom, I don’t think.” He seems to recall that as a high school exchange student in Venice, she fell in love with a boy named Gianmario, remembers feeling seriously jealous of this Italian phantom, even five years into their marriage. Imagining his wife making love to some dark-haired, olive-skinned stud muffin as gondolas navigated the romantic waters below their fourteenth-century rococo sex den.

  “Rachel is not vanilla, Dad.”

  “Well, Trev. She ain’t piña colada either. Or blue moon. Or mint chocolate chip. She’s a sixteen-year-old girl who likes playing softball and reading pseudo-religious self-help books. I mean, don’t you want to join the Peace Corps? Fall in love with some girl from fucking—I don’t know—Colombia or something? Nepal? Ethiopia? Iran? Iranian girls are hot.”

  “I don’t want other girls, Dad. I love Rachel.”

  “All right, then. What about college, huh? Right? You’ve got college ahead. What are you gonna do—go to the same school? That’s kind of immature, don’t you think? Don’t you want to meet new people, branch out, party, have some good, old-fashioned anonymous sex?”

  “Dad, that sounds terrible. That’s how people get HIV.”

  This kid!

  “Are you Mormon?” Jonathan asks.

  “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Anyway, I thought you would like to know. You’re always asking about, like, my life, and stuff.”

  “When I ask about your life, Trev, mostly I’m just trying to determine if you’re on drugs, or hanging out with the wrong kids, or need help procuring rubbers—which, I guess, is actually an opportune time to ask you about that . . . I assume you’re taking precautions to protect yourself from sexually transmitted diseases, and or the possibility of an unwanted pregnancy?”

  “Dad . . . Jesus.”

  “Well, you brought up your undying love of Rachel, and now you don’t want to talk about brass tacks. Brother, love at the major-league level, like marriage, is all brass tacks. Fucking jobs and mortgages and health care and taxes and wall sconces and wallpaper and Roth IRAs and honey, we’re-out-of-baking-powder-can-you-go-get-some? and oil changes and driving your kid to soccer prac
tice and a million nameless other drudgeries. Capisce? So let’s talk brass tacks. You guys using a condom?”

  Trevor grips the steering wheel with what seems enough force to snap it off the column. “We haven’t gotten that far.”

  “That’s too bad. Well, do you want some condoms? You could practice with them, on your own time, or whatever.”

  “Dad!”

  Jonathan raises his hands up—don’t shoot. “What happens if she gets pregnant?”

  “I just told you, we haven’t had sex!”

  “Oh, right. But it’s totally not a slippery slope, is it? Right now, you’re probably getting a few hand jobs, maybe getting proficient at unclasping her bra. But, mark my words: a month from now, you’ll be playing Just-the-Tip, and let me tell you something—after that, watch out. Baby-making time.”

  “You’re gross, you know that, don’t you? You’re, like, a dirty old man. A lech.”

  Jonathan ignores that. “So, where does she stand? She gets pregnant tomorrow, right? To keep, or not to keep?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you want to be a dad, right now, at sixteen?”

  Trevor squirms behind the wheel. “I don’t think so.”

  “Good answer because I don’t want to be a grandpa yet, either. What about her?”

  “Well, I’m pretty sure neither of us wants a kid right now . . .”

  “But what if it happened? Would she consider an abortion? Have you guys talked about that kind of thing?”

  “I don’t think so. Her family’s pretty conservative.”

  “All right, then. That’s fine. But you guys should be on the same page. Think about it. I’m serious now, Trevor. That’s what I’m talking about, brass tacks.”

  THEY DRIVE WELL NORTH OF CAMP, past Haugen, through Trego, tiny Seeley, through Hayward, Drummond, to Cable, little Cable—not much more than a gas station, grocery store, café, bar, and library. Outside Cable is their motel, the Bel-Aire, a relic of the 1950s, with molded plastic chairs standing vigil outside exterior doors numbered 1–8. Out front is a small pool and a Coke machine, and beyond that, a derelict nine-hole miniature golf course with threadbare AstroTurf, the windmill on hole number 3 missing two of its half-sailed arms.