“It’s time,” he says. “Time for some young blood. New ideas, new energy.” He takes another sip of his Scotch.
THE BOYS THESE DAYS come to camp with their laptops and tablets, their telephones, their gaming systems, their earbuds, and it is a miracle if they ever hear the cry of a loon, or watch a star fall to earth. He’s walked by their cabins after dusk and seen their tablets illuminated with fake fire while four separate boys lie in their cots thumbing away at their phones. In some campgrounds, the fire rings are mossy and perennially cold, the fishing line on certain rods grown brittle with age. Dry rot eats at the beautiful wooden canoes, like some infection. He’s even heard some kids insist that burning wood is bad.
“Why?” he’ll ask.
“Because it’s killing trees, for one thing. And, plus, putting more crap in the atmosphere,” they smugly reply.
“What about dead trees?” he’ll ask.
To which, they shrug their shoulders. Few of them make eye contact anymore, so trained are they to monitor their phones for the constant updates to their world. Many of them, he expects, have never touched an ax, a hatchet, or a chain saw, let alone a pocketknife.
For the past five years not one Scout has signed up for the Orienteering merit badge. It took him a while to understand why before he realized that kids these days of course carry their compasses with them everywhere, right inside their telephones, along with their cameras, televisions, movies, music, watches, maps, notebooks, calculators . . . Not such a bad thing, he supposes, unless it rains. Unless there is no electricity handy. Or you’re fighting a war, and don’t want to broadcast your position to the enemy. Likewise, no one has taken: Coin Collecting (Everyone uses plastic, or their phones to buy things, why carry a pocket of metal? Why bother collecting it?), Collections, Radio, Signaling, Stamp Collecting (What kind of fossil buys stamps anymore?) . . .
For years, Nelson fought the onslaught of technology the only way he knew how—banishing it—watching his camp’s attendance plummet as other camps installed Wi-Fi, Internet-connected canteens, and movie theaters. Finally he acquiesced to a cell phone tower on the far side of the camp, over a ridge. In camp, the signal is surprisingly weak. He was advised, after all, to install it in the center of the parade ground, where interference would be minimal—no forest or hills to interrupt the signals. But he prefers this solution: the boys can still log on to the Internet, but at frustratingly slow speeds, and the tower blinks off to the northeast so that looking out at the lake from his cabin, his view isn’t the least bit disturbed. Campers are charged twenty-five dollars for access, and this drives them bonkers, not to mention their parents, who are frequently, if anything, more addicted to their technology than the boys. He really doesn’t give a shit. That money makes up for the steadily sliding numbers in attendance. Let the next Scoutmaster move Whiteside all the way into the twenty-first century.
He has grown so weary of the world. To the south and west the stars are becoming increasingly crowded out by the light spilling out of ever-sprawling Minneapolis and St. Paul and even Eau Claire and Rice Lake. There are too many deer, many of them diseased. Fewer birds every year. The lake water more and more acidic. Last year he found the carcass of a dead wolf on the margins of the camp; he found its DNR radio collar in the ditch on a walk over to Lorraine’s. The animal was probably killed by a neighboring farmer or some yahoo out shining—cowardly gut shot. He only hopes it wasn’t a Scout, or the parent of a Scout, or even a counselor. Nelson has always had an affection for wolves, for predators. In his earlier years, after all, he was one.
“Are you, uh, I’m not sure how to ask this politely . . . ,” Nelson says, adjusting himself in the chair.
“Refill my glass,” she orders, “then ask your question.”
He laughs, retrieves the bottle, pours her an inch.
“Are you dating anyone these days?” he asks now, settling back into his chair.
She shakes her head. Though a more accurate answer might be, maybe. There is always Spencer, waiting patiently in the shadows. If he owned a top hat he’d probably be clutching the rim 24/7 and frowning, like some staunchly patient Victorian suitor.
“Why not?” Nelson says, leaning forward. “You’re beautiful. Smart. A good mother. I’m telling you, if I was thirty years younger—hell, ten years younger.” He pours himself another finger or so of Oban.
“You’re sweet,” she says.
“You’re evading my question.”
“I don’t know. I’ve been married three times, Nelson,” she says. “Maybe that’s a sign, you know? That I’m actually kind of a horrible wife.” She laughs, sips her Scotch.
“Not your fault,” Nelson argues. “You know that, don’t you? Tell me you know that.”
She is shaking her head again, then sets her glass down on the coffee table and covers her eyes, bites her lower lip.
He sets his own glass down, stands slowly, walks to her, bends down, and kneeling before her, wraps his arms around her. She hugs him so fiercely.
“He was a good boy,” Nelson says. “Such a good boy. He loved you more than anything.”
“I miss him every day,” she sobs. “Oh God, I miss him every fucking day.”
They stay that way for a while, for many minutes, until Rachel sits up, wipes her eyes again with Nelson’s handkerchief, then loudly blows her nose.
“Could I have some tea,” she asks.
“Of course,” he says, rising slowly from his old knees. “I take mine with a little bourbon. You?”
She laughs. “No, I think I’m done for the night, thank you.”
CLUTCHING A MUG OF TEA, blowing at the lemony-honey steam, she says, “Maybe I never should have remarried, you know? But I thought that just seemed kind of hokey.” She sips her tea. “No. Honestly, I wondered about other people, too. Other men. I’d been with Trevor since we were sixteen. Well, you know, of course. Am I a horrible person for thinking that? For being curious?”
“Of course not,” Nelson says. A dim, long-undisturbed memory rises, and he recollects a night in Hurley, years ago, watching Trevor disappear into the nether regions of a certain bar, holding the hand of a woman not named Rachel.
“But the reality was,” she continues, “no one could ever stack up to Trevor. No one. These other men, they were okay, but the truth is, most of them were pussies. They weren’t—I don’t know, they weren’t real men. They wouldn’t hold open doors or buy dinner; they weren’t kind, they certainly weren’t tough or strong. And after a while I’d just get disgusted. Goddamn golf shirts and gym memberships and fake muscles and tans and cell phones and new cars. Trevor didn’t care about any of that garbage. All he wanted was a garden. Isn’t that funny?
“I don’t even give a fuck about chivalry,” she continues, pausing to sip deeply from the tea, considering. “I care about strength. Thoughtfulness. Kindness. All these other guys seem to have confused strength with, I don’t know . . . muscles? Authority. Power. Meanness. That’s the worst. Trevor was never like that. And definitely never to me. He worshipped me. Maybe too much at times.”
She sips her tea again.
“This is just the sentiment of an old, unmarried man,” Nelson says finally, “but it seems to me we ought to worship our spouses, our partners.” They are silent a moment, both of them. “Isn’t that the idea?”
She shakes her head. “I just wish I’d known. I wish I’d known where it was all going, but of course . . . we can’t; I couldn’t.”
36
WHEN SHE WAS TWENTY-ONE YEARS OLD, A JUNIOR IN college, she was awarded a scholarship, traveled to Botswana, and fell in love with an Afrikaner, a huge, sunburnt man who’d played semi-professional rugby, bench-pressed four hundred pounds, could speak four languages. He sported a massive scar on his forearm from a bar fight and could drink a case of beer in a long, dry veldt evening. Willem was his name, though people called him Sundown—a preposterous nickname if there ever was one.
Trevor was back home in Wisconsin, s
tudying in Madison, working two part-time jobs to avoid the strings that came attached to his father’s money. He lived in a ratty old house on St. James Court, where the bats migrated from the belfry of the street’s namesake church into the house’s attic and came crawling literally through the woodwork. It was not uncommon for Trevor to walk around the house armed with a frying pan or a tennis racket.
He wrote her the most beautiful heartsick love letters, pages long. Letters written late at night from the hotel where he worked as the night auditor. Letters written in the early morning from the kitchen of Mickey’s Dairy Bar, where he bused tables, arriving early to drink coffee with the cooks. She could imagine everything, that little old café, staring out at Camp Randall Stadium, how quiet Madison was on those weekend mornings as the students nursed crushing hangovers or walked home shamefully, clutching their high heels, holding their shoulders against the cold—jackets lost in some new lover’s room. She could imagine the garbage trucks moving slowly through the morning, a few cabs, the capitol building lit up like a white citadel, early-bird joggers pounding the sidewalks, the Greenbush Bakery, its trays of doughnuts tantalizing the insomniac drunks and stoners and homeless . . .
The letters came twice a week, sometimes more frequently. And they were intense, even profound at times; Trevor had always been like that. The way he loved was almost like a vise, a weight; at times she felt it verged on codependence—that his identity, his value system, all of it very much hinged on her. And who was she? A twenty-one-year-old girl from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, who had seen so little of the world, who had known exactly one lover, whose favorite book until college had been basically a kid’s book about horses?
God, how embarrassing! To land in college never having read Kerouac. Steinbeck. Flannery O’ Connor. Even Ayn Rand. To have only ever traveled to Cancún? Never eaten sushi!
Willem’s family was unfathomably wealthy. They owned wineries in Stellenbosch, vacationed in Monaco. Occasionally his mother took her shopping in Cape Town, where they were doted upon by storekeepers. Once, she made the mistake of asking how much a dress cost. “Ten thousand rand,” the storekeeper replied. “About a thousand of your American dollars.”
Rachel wilted with embarrassment.
“It’s a good lesson, child,” the mother had said with friendly amusement, sipping a glass of Veuve as she appraised Rachel’s body outside the dressing room. “If you have to ask . . . well, there you are, aren’t you?”
She had met Willem in one of Gaborone’s expat bars, she talking to a group of wildlife biologists about the black rhino, and he, leaning against the bar, staring at her, just staring.
Late in the evening, drunk, he walked across the barroom and said to her, “You ever seen a black rhino, sweetheart?”
She was dumbfounded, curious, and her body vibrated with an excitement she wasn’t sure she’d ever felt before. No one had ever approached her like this, talked to her in this manner.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Uh, did you just call me sweetheart?”
He grinned at her, standing there, sipping his bottle of Tusker.
“Come on,” he said.
“No way,” she protested. “I’m here with my friends—I mean, I just got here.”
He set his bottle down, reached out a hand. “Please, come with me,” he said. “I want to show you something.”
And for some reason, she went.
They drove through the darkest night, under a southern sky totally unfamiliar to her. He drove an open-roofed Range Rover, took her thigh in his hand, and then pushed his fingers farther up her leg. She felt her eyes closing, the vehicle slowing, her breathing became a frenzy, her shoes on the floor of the Rover, her bare feet against the dashboard, and then his lips on hers, his tongue. Her hips smashed into his hand.
She did not see a black rhinoceros that night, or the next week, for that matter. She did not check her mailbox for post, or monitor her email. She did not answer her telephone. She did not eat until late at night, when they went to restaurants, eager for the meal to end so they could return to his flat. She did not feel happy or sad or homesick or guilty. She felt free, alive, revived, new.
This went on for weeks, and if anything, Trevor’s communications became more frantic, more dutiful. She watched as his letters stacked up on her bed; the postman had begun to rubber-band them together, the only mail she ever received. Her voice mail box filled to full, until she could accept no more messages.
And then one night, alone in her apartment, there only to pick up some books, toiletries, and take a quick shower, her phone rang. Trevor. She decided to answer. Maybe this wouldn’t be so painful for her after all. After the standard lame litany of sweet nothings and what seemed like an endless cavalcade of “what’s it like?” and “how are you?” she simply said it.
“I’m not in love with you anymore. I’m sorry, Trevor.”
Even his name sounded ridiculous to her now, this very midwestern-sounding American name. Trevor. Like the name you’d give to a kitchen tool: trivet, baster, cleaver, trevor . . . And frankly, she was not sorry, not in the least. She was having more fun than she could remember. Even his upbeat voice, familiar accent (her own long gone, missing somewhere around the first two weeks in Africa), and reportage from the home front could not forestall this breakup.
“What?” he said.
“I’m not in love with you,” she repeated. “So, please, Trev, can you stop sending me these stupid love letters? I don’t even have time to read them.”
“Oh,” he lamely offered. “Because you’re, like, having an affair or something. With another dude.”
Had she cared to listen closely, she might have heard his heart breaking just then. Only this wasn’t exactly how she had imagined it; she’d imagined him screaming at her, asking juvenile questions about her new lover: his penis size, blow jobs, how many times they’d had sex. But he just seemed . . . stunned. Stunned and somehow . . . accepting of it all.
“Well, Trevor,” she said, “I’m not sure it really constitutes an affair if you and I aren’t even engaged, let alone married. And he’s actually Afrikaner, more of a man, you know, than a ‘dude.’”
The sound of a phone receiver juggled between sweaty hands, of a face wiped clear of tears . . . How powerful she felt. To live here, in Africa. To sleep with whomever she wanted. To study one of the last wild places on the continent . . .
“Um, well,” he stuttered.
She sighed with exasperation. He was snuffling and sniffling like such a little boy. She began to jam books into a duffel bag.
“Well, um, you probably don’t really care anymore, but I want you to know that I’m going to volunteer for the Marines,” he said. “I tried to call you before, and I wrote to you, but . . . Geez, Rachel, this is really shitty.”
“What? Come on, Trevor, don’t be so fucking dramatic!” She slumped down on her bed, held her hair in her hands, away from her face.
Now his tone was different. “You really haven’t read my letters, have you? I mean, not for, like, weeks.”
“No,” she said, “I haven’t. I’ve been living . . .” My life. “. . . I’ve been busy.”
“Did you get that copy of A Sand County Almanac? I sent it about a month ago.”
This was her favorite book, a discovery during her first year in college, and Aldo Leopold had since become her favorite writer, one of the reasons she had pursued a degree in biology. But Leopold was a Wisconsinite, and she didn’t want to think about Wisconsin right now.
“Maybe. I don’t know, Trevor. Jesus. Who cares?”
“Wow, maybe my fucking dad was right,” he said. A long pause. “Maybe you really are a bitch.”
That gave her some level of satisfaction, to be called a name. Trevor wasn’t exactly the name-calling type. Though she didn’t much care for the mention of Jonathan, the notion of Trevor’s smirkingly omniscient father seeing this coming like some slow-moving storm front.
“Your dad what?” she said, r
ising to the bait.
“It doesn’t matter now,” Trevor said, “but he warned me—God, like four, five years ago—told me this would happen. Told me it’d be pretty much just like this.”
“Your dad never liked me,” she said. “He never even learned my name. Not until, like, last year. He used to call me ‘Racquel,’ or ‘Rochelle.’ How do you think that made me feel, huh?”
“I’d say it doesn’t really matter anymore, does it?” he said.
“So you’re—wait, you’re gonna join the Marines? Trevor, that’s just stupid.”
“I don’t think so,” he said calmly. “I’ve really thought about it.”
“Thought about what?”
“After nine-eleven,” he continued, “I just couldn’t see not volunteering. I couldn’t see standing on the sidelines. I’ve always wanted to be something more than what I am.”
“It’s so strange,” she murmured, “because nobody really talks about nine-eleven here. They talk about Bush this, or Cheney that, sometimes it’s about Halliburton, or oil, of course . . . but I don’t think it’s the same thing. People aren’t as connected.”
She felt a pang of guiltiness for her ignorance of what was happening back home, but it was true, she liked not being upset about Bush, liked feeling distant from the still smoldering World Trade Center site. She thought of the night sky, the limitless flat of Botswana, the sand dunes of Namibia and sleeping with Willem in a hostel there, of the Canadian flag she’d stitched to her backpack.
“I suppose not,” he said.
“Have you already signed the papers?” she asked.
“Yep, I head down to Fort Benning this summer, after school’s done.”
“Oh, Trevor.”
She could hear him, blowing his nose quietly, could picture him, shaking his head.
“I don’t fault you,” he said, with some effort. “I think I’ll always love you, but I don’t fault you for this.”
“I have to go,” she said.
“Okay,” he said.
And she hung up. Without saying “good luck” or “stay in touch” or anything. For all she knew, he could be dead before she returned to America. There was something sobering in that thought, that she was now traveling down a completely separate path from him, and he her.
The Hearts of Men Page 24
