“I’m sorry, Trevor. Truly. I’m sorry about your parents.”
The boy shakes his head resolutely. “This is just so fucked up.”
“All you can do is try to be a better man, you know? You take moments like this, and you learn from them. You think to yourself, This isn’t the dad I want to be. This isn’t the husband I want to be. And you hold that inside you, like a memory, but bigger, too. Like a code.”
Trevor is focused on the pool.
Sliding the Land Rover into park, Nelson kills the engine. “Look, Trevor, do you think I’m a good man? Right now, do you think I’m a better man than your father? Do you think I’m a better man, some sort of paragon? Is that how you think of me?”
Trevor turns to look at him. “I don’t know. Yeah, I guess. I mean, you’re not a married guy making out with some married woman in clear view of his son, so . . . you’ve got that going for you. Yeah, I think you’re better than him.”
Deanna gets out of the van and very elegantly walks over to Nelson’s aged vehicle, parked just a few spots away. Trevor quickly reclines his chair, turns his head, and feigns sleep, even as she raps her knuckles lightly on the window, her left ring finger making a different-sounding tap. Nelson leans over the teenager and rolls down the window for him.
“Oh,” she says, taking in Trevor, the light snoring he affects. “Well, Nelson, it was a pleasure meeting you this evening. I hope we’ll have another opportunity to see each other.”
“Let me get out and say a proper goodbye,” he says, opening his door and walking around the Land Rover to give her a polite kiss on the cheek, and a gentle hug.
She holds him by both elbows, leans in close to his face. “Please tell Trevor how much I enjoyed meeting him, too. I’m sorry tonight, you know, turned out so awkward for us all.”
“He’s a good kid, isn’t he?” Nelson says. “I’m sure he’ll take things very maturely. These things are difficult to understand, I think, no matter what a person’s age.”
“We’re in love,” Deanna says with a shrug. “What can I say?”
“It shows,” Nelson says, smiling.
Over her shoulder Nelson has been watching Jonathan struggle with his room key, the lock on his motel room door some sort of moving target. Finally, and with two hands, the key finds its bull’s-eye and he shoulders the door open, only to emerge moments later, belt unbuckled, shirt untucked. It can be so difficult, Nelson thinks, to look dignified when drunk.
“When do you head home?” Nelson asks, filling time.
“Tomorrow morning. Wish me luck.”
“Good luck, Deanna.”
“And you take care of these two,” she advises, pointing her chin at Trevor, and then, reaching through the open window to caress the boy’s shoulder. He startles as soon as her hand touches him, surely betraying his ruse. “Good night, Trevor,” she says, each of her words soft as a petal falling from a flower. “It really was so nice to meet you. Maybe sometime soon you can meet my son.”
Jonathan, finally having weaved his way across the parking lot, stands beside Deanna. “Walk you to your room?” he slurs.
“No, that’s all right,” she says, laying a hand on his chest. “Don’t misbehave too much tonight.” She pecks him on the cheek.
“Oh,” he says, “we wouldn’t think of it.” He winks at Nelson, a slow, one-eyed wink that quickly degrades into just shutting his eyes.
They kiss once more, and then she walks to her room.
“The kid asleep?” Jonathan asks. “Did they say goodbye?”
“Get in the back and shut up,” Nelson says, returning to the driver’s seat. “My rig, my rules.”
“In that case, let’s take my van. Look at it this way, the cops are a helluva lot less likely to finger a minivan for drunk driving, don’t you think?” Jonathan hands Nelson the keys.
Nelson smirks, nods. Shakes the kid’s shoulder. “Wake up,” he orders. They pile into the van. Trevor immediately pretends he’s sleeping again.
“You know the way?” Jonathan says, slumping down across the backseat and lying down, closing his eyes.
“I think I can get us there,” Nelson says, aiming the Astro north and east toward Hurley, a town of about 1,100 with six strip clubs lining the main street and not much else to speak of.
ABOUT FIVE MINUTES down the road from the motel and with Jonathan dozing resoundingly on the backseat, Nelson growls, “You can quit pretending to be asleep now.”
Trevor sits up and says, “Why, so you can tell me about how the world isn’t black and white, that we’re all doomed to some kind of moral mediocrity, that sort of thing? Maybe I’d be safer asleep.”
Nelson chuckles, glances in the rearview at the backseat. “Hey, Jon!” he calls out. “Got any smokes?”
“Check the glove box,” Jonathan murmurs.
“Whad’ya say, Trevor? Pass me one of those cancer sticks, would you?”
“I didn’t know you smoked,” Trevor says, obliging.
Nelson rolls his window down, hangs an elbow out into the night. They’re off the main highways now, deep in some forest that is truly emblematic of the Northwoods: close, dark tamarack forests and bogs, tall white and red pines, not a trace of civilization in sight. The stars are uninterrupted, a perfect circuitry, pulsing, and steadily, gently, twirling, like the lighted gears of the grandest machine. Nelson lights a cigarette, takes a deep drag, rubs his middle and index finger against his temple, and exhales.
“Your dad was the only friend I ever had,” he begins, “and—though this may not be especially evident this evening—he happens to be one of the kindest people I’ve ever met. I’m not sure I’d be alive today without him.” He turns his attention away from the road, stares directly at Trevor until the boy looks down into his own lap.
He tells Trevor about his childhood, about the bullying, the alienation; about his own father, his abandonment; the depression and desperation that began to overtake his mother; the years in military school, away from home. In this narrative, Nelson’s only friend is Jonathan, which isn’t exactly true; for there were others, especially at St. John’s, and then, of course, in the Green Berets. But that isn’t important tonight. Tonight, Nelson thinks, the kid needs to know that his dad saved a boy from the horrors of an outhouse hell, that his dad wrote letters addressed to Vietnam, that his dad was the only kid at that birthday party . . .
He makes up other legends, other heroic tall tales, nothing so dramatic that Jonathan will deny it out of hand if ever interrogated about the details. But Nelson knows enough. He removes the chain necklace and passes it to Trevor; the old buffalo nickel with a little hole drilled into it to accept a necklace—his lucky charm through Vietnam. He tells Trevor about how while traveling through Spain back in college, Jonathan had been running with the bulls in Pamplona and saved another runner from being gored (all this from those infrequent epistles during Nelson’s days in Vietnam). Nelson exaggerates the details: how the runner Jonathan saved was an old man who’d broken his ankle on an uneven cobblestone, how Jonathan hoisted the man off the street with superhuman strength; and how the man’s family gave a party for Jonathan, a party where the beautiful young niece of the man promised herself to Jonathan . . . Other stories, too, each meant to obliquely explain Jonathan’s behavior this evening: his own big vulnerable romantic heart, his disdain for money, his uncommon charity, his pride in Trevor and love of the boy.
The Jonathan that Nelson constructs is an impossibly good and decent man, flawed only in ways all grown men are—susceptible to the wiles of women, ever lonely, always sacrificing, forever vigilant of their child’s future. If Jonathan has fallen out of love with Trevor’s mom, then, well, surely this is as natural as a coastline collapsing into the ocean, almost an inevitability, and who knows? Who knows whose fault it was?
Nelson is careful not to portray Sarah Quick in any sort of villainous light. Not least as he is sensitive to the fact that Jonathan is very likely responsible for this marital schism, su
ch as it is. Nor does he care to fabricate some notion that Trevor’s mother won’t be sideswiped, dumbstruck, heartbroken. But the truth is this: Jonathan is not a bad man; he won’t abandon this boy, and he’ll likely support Sarah financially in a more than generous manner—they’ll both be cared for. And anyway, isn’t this the reality of today’s America? No one’s marriage lasts; no one is innocent; and the Boy Scouts, like every other code of morality, is just an antiquated set of stone tablets, the words melting into obscurity, acid-washed by rain and returning stone to sand, until it is all just so much tiny particulate, forever shifting beneath our feet.
Trevor’s posture seems to straighten as the road goes on and Nelson continues his chain-smoking. Rolling down his own window, the boy peers out at the stars.
“I thought you were going to tell me about yourself,” Trevor says, after a time. “I thought you were going to tell me about how bad you are. All the bad things you’ve done.” He leans his chin into a cupped hand, breathes in the cool, wet air. “As if.”
And so, for the first time since he worked at that ranch in New Mexico, Nelson talks about his time in Vietnam. Tells the boy about the horrifying hum of flies on open-eyed children, the napalm scars on the legs of young girls; the whorehouses and their opium pipes and acid nightmares; tells him about the long, long deaths of his friends, their chest wounds sucking and wheezing; the letters they received from girlfriends and wives who had taken new lovers, the parents who passed away, the altar boys who forgot God, the former Boy Scouts who were soon practicing only nooses; the men they killed who were not men, but boys, like Trevor—just boys.
He tells Trevor about his own father and his mother, too. And as loose as he was with the facts of Jonathan’s life, he is brutally specific with his own autobiography, utterly truthful. He tells the boy about the closet he discovered in his mother’s house, before the place was sold, this closet that held all those Christmas presents she’d bought him, while he lived in New Mexico, happy to forget her, forget that house. New cowboy boots, bolo ties, books, calfskin gloves, a watch, and for each year that he was away: a set of Topps baseball cards, wrapped in cellophane, untouched.
THEY PULL INTO HURLEY, to the single set of stoplights and the corner gas station where four bikers huddle in a loose circle, smoking cigarettes, tugging at their beards.
“So this is it,” Nelson says with a flourish. “Hurley.”
The light turns green and Nelson slowly turns left.
“Strip clubs,” Trevor says. “All I see is a bunch of strip clubs.”
From the backseat they hear Jonathan lurch up. He leans between their seats, wipes his mouth, and from a back pocket extracts a comb, begins to work it through his thick head of hair.
“A bit of advice,” Jonathan says, his hand on the back of Trevor’s seat. “You got five hundred dollars in your pocket. Spend it however you please. But I’ll say this, you may get a little more bang for your buck back home with Rachel. So . . . gird your loins. We’ll just stay for a beer or two. Continue your miseducation before I relinquish”—a word that takes a painfully long time to pronounce—“you to the morality police tomorrow.”
“Wait a minute, Dad—I’m sixteen,” he practically giggles. “There’s no way they’re going to let me in there. I can’t even smoke yet.”
“Oh yeah?” Jonathan says. “Nelson, kindly hand me one of those smokes, eh?”
Passing the box over his right shoulder, Nelson parks the van on an otherwise abandoned street slick with a recent cloudburst off nearby Lake Superior. The neon lights reflect garishly off the asphalt, like a circus kaleidoscope.
27
THE DOORMAN WOULD SEEM A GOOD DEAL LESS ADEPT at negotiating than Trevor, because the boy is waved into the club on the strength of a twenty-dollar handshake and a cursory glance up and down Main for the presence of any cop cars, of which there are none.
Inside the club it’s a pounding pandemonium of AC/DC, strobing colors, an intense low-hanging cloud of cigarette smoke, and, of course, skin, skin, skin. Women at the bar, long legs crisscrossed, impossibly high heels dangling off the floor like daggers, big hair ponderously perfumed and sprayed into place for ease of movement in every other part of the body. There might be ten or twelve patrons in the place, arrayed about the long, narrow room, some scattered at the bar, a few others sitting at high tables on the margins, staring intently at the stage, where an upside-down woman is languidly sliding down a brass pole scissor-clenched between her legs as five men closer to the stage clap their hands approvingly with cigarettes pursed beneath mustaches, inside yellow-stained goatees.
All Trevor can manage is a feeble, dazed, “Wow.”
Jonathan stands beside his son, slapping him on the back, and taking a final drag from the cigarette before letting it fall to the floor and rubbing at it with the toe of his shoe. “Yessirree—in my experience, sin rarely registers until the next morning. So, for now, I’d advise you to thoroughly enjoy this cultural epicenter of the great Northwoods.”
“What?” the kid asks, still staring and stunned.
“Well, there ain’t any ballet in town, but that looks curiously akin to modern dance, if you ask me.”
Nelson joins them, with three bottles of cold Leinenkugel’s. “Let’s find a table,” he growls agreeably enough.
AC/DC gives way to Whitesnake: Here I am again on my own . . . The dancer is sweating now and Trevor is really looking at her, really scrutinizing her. He realizes he’s never seen Rachel naked before, though he can feel her body, even from two hundred miles away: her smallish breasts, the soft, nearly invisible hair on her thighs, the pads of her feet, the fingernails she chews to nubs mostly while sitting in the classroom, or on the bench during a softball game. This, however, is a woman and her body looks . . . so much different; it is astonishing, a miracle.
These raw, raw gymnastics she’s performing, and her breasts, no, these can only be called tits—her tits are big and appear to be peppered by some kind of glitter. She’s the glossiest, most shimmering thing he’s ever seen and he sort of feels in love with everything about her: the piercings in her belly button and wide, dark nipples, the places where the folds of her meet and sweat collects to roll to the floor below where dollar bills go flying like paper planes, little green balls. And when she lies on her back, raises her long legs, and peels her panties off the way you might peel a price tag off the cover of a book you intended for a present . . . she hides herself with both hands for a period of five seconds before unfolding her legs and it’s like the mystery of the cosmos has opened for Trevor: her vagina, no: pussy.
He feels a lump in his throat, suddenly can’t remember what Rachel looks like at all.
“I’m going to sit by the stage,” he tells his father and Nelson, carrying his bottle of Leinie’s like he’s done this a hundred times before.
“All right,” Jonathan says, drowsily, his chair leaned up against the wall. Then he thinks to sit upright, reaches for his wallet, and peels off about ten one-dollar bills, handing them to Trevor. “Please don’t give her one of those hundreds, okay? You want to tip these dancers, you give them singles. This is Hurley, Wisconsin. Not Las Vegas. Capisce?”
“So, what do I do?” Trevor asks. “Just throw it on the stage?”
Jonathan closes his eyes, yawns. “She’ll help you, I promise.”
The kid finds a seat near the stage, is uncertain how to sit, whether to lean forward like an eager pupil (he is eager) or to slouch back, cool as can be, like this is all very stale news. Also, there is a noticeable stiffening in his pants that he would prefer to camouflage. As he fidgets, readjusts, and tries to establish where to store his ten singles, he knocks the bottle of Leinie’s over and some of it spills on his crotch, quickly extinguishing that problem. Only there are no paper napkins and the only waitress he sees is snapping her gum near the bar, talking to Nelson—Nelson?!?
“Ummm, looks like you’ve made a mess of yourself,” coos a voice just above him.
It’s her. She’s on all fours, her face a scant six inches from Trevor’s and her perfume is the most intoxicating thing he’s ever smelled. Rachel doesn’t wear perfume; she usually smells like Dove or Irish Spring, or sometimes the horses she rides on Sunday afternoons, after church.
“I’m sorry,” Trevor squeaks. It is the best he can manage. His hands smell like beer and his head is as fuzzy as a poorly tuned radio, this new frequency buzzing within him.
She moves forward, her chest and head and arms out over the lip of the stage and now she’s pressing Trevor back into his chair, her hair arrayed all around him. Her breath, he thinks, smells like tequila and lime, and possibly Doritos. Her tongue looks shiny as a honey dipper and he so wants to taste her, has never wanted to kiss anyone as desperately as this glistening stranger. She breathes in his ears—Rachel has never done that—runs her hands down his chest, and his body tightens like a coil as she draws closer and closer to his increasingly erect penis, which feels like a secret he needs to simultaneously defend and release into the world. His body’s supply of blood is rushing away from his heart to flood his face with a blush so intense he feels his ears will blow off; meanwhile, an awful lot of blood also seems to be careening south as well—he has literally lost control of himself. It feels wonderful: like here beneath this woman he is the most immovable object in the universe, and yet, every cell in his body is as light and effervescent as a vagabond bubble.
Then, just as quickly, the music is gone and she is sitting on her knees, onstage, like they were just playing a game of marbles. She is staring at him.
“Wow,” he says. “You’re . . . amazing.”
“Ummm, how amazing, exactly?” She raises a pierced eyebrow, looks pointedly at his left pant pocket, from which the corners of at least four dollar bills poke out, like magazines fanned out at the dentist’s office.
The Hearts of Men Page 19
