The Hearts of Men

by Nickolas Butler

  She looks up at him. There is an impishness about his face: the thick red hair, fair Irish-American skin, fashionable glasses. Under different circumstances she might have mistaken him for being attractive, in an intellectual sort of way.

  “So if I cave in here, and accept your bourbon and apologies, you’ll stop talking to me?” she asks, turning her rude into charming.

  He bobs his head as if considering her question, like some unrequited suitor at a bar. “Deal,” he says finally. “Accept my bourbon and I’m gone.”

  “Deal, then,” she says.

  He removes the silver flask from the seat of his pants with a secretive flourish and she watches as two long glugs pour into her coffee mug.

  “I tasted that coffee,” he says, leaning close to her ear. “This should, ah, vastly improve your situation. You can thank me later.” He pats her on the shoulder lightly, and then, just as he’d promised, quits her side.

  Toasting the darkness he’s slinked off into, she raises the tin cup to her lips and sips. The coffee is indeed much enhanced and through the burnt-rope and gym socks of this wretched cowboy coffee other flavor notes rise through the discord to blossom in her belly like flowers: caramel and vanilla brown sugar sweetness.

  One of the boys has thrown an entire bar of magnesium fire starter into the flames and now the circle of rocks and teepee of logs glow with a white-hot brilliance. The kids group around the fire pit, oohing and aahing for all they’re worth and it is better than anything they’ve seem on the Web in days, utterly enthralling. She is enjoying herself. This is everything Girl Scouts failed to be during her youth. The camp, the fire, the parents behaving poorly, some cool father strumming away on his guitar . . .

  “Any requests?” the guitar dad calls out.

  “‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’!” a father says and all the old heads laugh, even though she suspects most of them have no idea who Iron Butterfly was, or is.

  “‘Oops! I Did It Again!’” someone shouts.

  “‘Call Me Maybe’?”

  “‘Freebird’!”

  The guitar dad smiles sadly. “Fucking ‘Freebird,’” he gripes.

  So Rachel decides to put one out there. “How about ‘Heart of Gold’?”

  He nods his head appreciatively and frowns at his guitar as he tunes the strings. “We can do that.” He adjusts his harmonica and blows some test notes, strums out some practices chords, takes a sip of coffee, and then begins.

  She drinks her coffee and watches him play and wonders why she hasn’t noticed this man before, with his tired Chaco sandals and suntanned, dirty toes, his blue jeans in appealingly bad repair, a flimsy cardigan over a paint-splattered gray T-shirt, and closely cropped silver-black hair that shines in the firelight like a quartz stone. Maybe there is still time for love after all, her heart allows for a moment.

  For hours, it seems, he plays almost every song she or anyone else might want to hear, and when one of the smartass boys requests “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” he knows all the words of course, and leads them in the Lightfootian dirge. She finishes her cup of coffee and when Platz swings around again, she aggressively signals for more bourbon, and he obliges and disappears again. The fire is fed and fed and the coals in the center of the ring glow like some alien element and the boys run to the cabins and back with aluminum cans and throw them at the fire, watch the flimsy metal melt in minutes. Larger and larger chunks of metal are sought, until, at last, some boy throws the coffeepot into the inferno, and they all watch, rapt, as the metal deforms, then, like wax, slumps into nothing, and drips back into the earth.

  How full her heart is with happiness. She peers around the fire for Thomas, but as always with teenagers, they’re never close at hand when you need them. When you desire to share your love with them. She reaches for her phone, types:

  I love you so much. Your father loves you too. He is watching us, you know, right now.

  She slumps back in the camp chair she must have requisitioned at some point. Overhead, the stars are like germinating seeds budding light. The branches of the trees dendritic veins, black and beautiful. She shakes her head. Must have been too much bourbon. Closes her eyes, feels the earth flying through outer space beneath her, stars rushing past, the moon forever in chase, streaking meteorites, exhausted satellites . . .

  Rachel holds the telephone in her hands with some effort, afraid to fumble it. The fire feels so hot, her face, her hair. The voices she hears begin to garble and meld, conversations become impossible to separate. Even the flames of the fire blur into a wash of orange. She feels ill.

  She hopes her fingers aren’t too clumsy, or spell-check too aggressive:

  Don’t feel well. Please.

  Drops the phone into her lap. Voices swirling around her like smoke. The chair beneath her seems to pitch and heave as if the steady ground were an angry ocean. She picks up the phone once more and tries to type one word, this time feeling confident spell-check may be her ally.

  Help

  She tries to form the word with her mouth, as well, one four-letter word, but her lips are numb as if with novocaine, the world steadily slipping away from her, a black hole that has swallowed her ability to think, to speak, to exist.

  “You okay?” It was Bill, that giant galoot whose deep, unrefined voice she remembers, “Hey—”

  And then his huge hand, like Andre the Giant’s, on her shoulder, shaking her, before another voice, this one much higher in pitch, more authoritative, saying, “She’s taken ill. Here, help me carry her to her cabin. I’m a doctor.”

  I’m a doctor I’m a doctor I’m a doctor help me help me help me I’m a help me . . .

  44

  THOMAS HAS CRAWLED NEARLY TO THE CROWN OF A white pine on the shore of Bass Lake, where he straddles a stout branch, under the big night sky, smokes a cigarette. His friend Dax is there, too, and the moonlight is bright, reflected on every needle of the tree as if it were a great hairy thing, every green fiber shining silver-gray and far off in the distance, their troop’s campfire still visible, if tiny now, through the trees.

  Thomas has taken to smoking unfiltered Lucky Strikes, in homage to the Beat writers he’s reading on the sly, stealing their novels from his mom’s office in their house and longing to be on the road like Kerouac, miles and miles spooled up from the asphalt and concrete to be recorded on an old odometer. The tall buildings and big cities he’s never seen: San Francisco and New York and Los Angeles and Nashville and Seattle and New Orleans . . . Girls he hasn’t met yet, and women even. Boys, maybe . . . How should he know? And isn’t that just it? The mystery over every mountain, in every stranger, their story, and those Beat writers, recording everything, right there and living it, totally unabashed.

  How he’s come to resent these weeks in camp, pretending like he’s interested in this antiquated code, these White Indians in their phony military uniforms and made-up ranks. What if he doesn’t even want to be an Eagle? Maybe he should have remained a Tenderfoot, because that’s what he is, really, not some crazy soldier like his father, and what good had that been for anyone? To fight and survive years in Afghanistan and Iraq, only to come home and take a bullet from some psycho outside a movie theater. His dad’s old neighbor, Kyle, was with him that day. Still visits a counselor once to week, trying to recover from that horror.

  His phone jiggles an incoming message and for an instant he fears it falling from the top of the tree, what must be five stories up, feels the phone shaking out of his pocket and he struggles with what to do with the cigarette, how not to fall out of an ancient white pine. In the end he simply flicks the Lucky away, sends it arcing out through the night, this tiny orange dot, falling and falling . . . Cigarettes are hard to come by. He can’t afford to keep throwing them away, half-smoked. Kerouac used to collect old butts and recycle the tobacco, he remembers.

  It’s just a stupid text.

  I love you so much. Your father loves you too. He is watching us, you know, right now.

 
His goddamn spooky mom. The only woman in camp. Visiting Doughty like some . . . He doesn’t even want to think about it.

  His mom with yet another man, though—that would be a departure, he thinks. Not another loser that’s just going to abandon her, after wiping out their savings, emptying the pantry, stealing their car. Not some jackass pretending to be his dad, trying to act like an enforcer, some kind of disciplinarian. Or worse yet, acting like his “friend.” Yeah, right. As if this grown-ass man would want to be his friend if he didn’t happen to be tapping his mom . . . Ugh.

  He still remembers the one creep’s midnight escape.

  Thomas must have been, what, six, seven? He’d just woken up for a glass of milk and padded down the old farmhouse stairs. He remembers his own hand on the rail as his feet navigated down in the darkness, once kicking a toy that landed in the kitchen with a clatter.

  That had startled the loser, whom Thomas found packing cans of soup and boxes of macaroni and cheese into a cardboard box.

  “Go back to sleep,” the man growled.

  Without a word to the man, Thomas went to the refrigerator, retrieved the gallon of milk, then a small cup, and sat at the kitchen table, drinking, watching him.

  “What? You’re just gonna sit there? Just gonna watch me?”

  Thomas nodded, licked at the white of his temporary mustache.

  “Weirdest kid I ever met,” the man said, standing, pressing his fists into the small of his own back. He reached up into a cabinet, and there was the crinkling of plastic packaging, and then they were sitting together at the table, eating Oreos, not talking at all, moonlight spilling in through one of the old windows over all the wilting houseplants, the shelves of knickknacks and curios, shining down on his mom’s collection of skeleton keys and tiny mirrors.

  When they had finished two columns of Oreos and Thomas’s milk was finished, the man poured him another glass, stood, tussled the kid’s hair, and said, “Nobody’ll ever be good enough for your mom, Thomas. Must’ve really been something, your dad. Lotta good it did him.”

  “You’re leaving, too?”

  “Shut up about it and I’ll leave you five bucks.”

  So Thomas nodded, watched him load the cardboard box into the back of his mom’s car, a few bags of clothing, a gun from their basement, and then the car growled to life, its taillights shone red, and the man was gone, easing away into the early morning fog that so often clung to their pastures and fields.

  The next morning, his mom didn’t even notice the car was gone until they were standing on the driveway where it should have been, Thomas holding the straps of his school backpack as she scratched her head and surveyed their property.

  “Where’s the car?” she asked Thomas, her keys in one hand, purse balanced on a wrist, and a steaming travel mug of coffee in the other hand.

  “He took it,” Thomas said matter-of-factly.

  “When?” she asked.

  “Last night.”

  She dropped the coffee mug and ran inside. Her screams spilled out the front door with the sounds of dishes breaking.

  He began crying, his backpack so heavy a burden for his little shoulders to carry. He sat in the dewy grass and pulled clover until she stumbled back outside.

  “When, Thomas? When did he leave?”

  Thomas shrugged.

  She was crying, too, her makeup beginning to run.

  “You saw him leave?”

  Thomas nodded.

  “And you just let him go? Just like that? Watched him drive away with our fucking car?”

  Now he started to seriously sob. “He left me this.” Held up the five-dollar bill.

  She fell into the grass beside him now, hugged the little boy to her chest.

  “Should we call the police?” he sniffled.

  But she just rocked him, holding his little body tight. Back and forth, back and forth.

  HE’S JUST LIGHTED ANOTHER CIGARETTE when the phone vibrates again.

  “Fuck, Mom! Really?”

  “What is it, dude?” Dax asks.

  Thomas shoves the phone deeper into his pocket.

  “My fucking mom. Keeps sending me these goddamn texts.”

  “Maybe she needs you,” Dax says. “Why’d she keep messaging you this late?”

  “Nah, man,” Thomas says, scraping another match into flame. “You should’ve seen the last one. Touchy-feely bullshit.”

  “Well, send her a message back,” Dax says, shaking his head. “Get her off your back. Moms love that. Trust me.”

  The cigarette between his lips, toasty and becoming more appetizing by the second, with the spill of moonlight everywhere, on the lake, like a wedding day cake glaze, and his phone, incessantly vibrating. Dax is right. Placate her. Something nice. Tomorrow—in a matter of hours—they’ll be back home. He glances at the phone.

  Help

  The screen glows bluish white in his palm, like a square little moon with that single awkward spur, and he stares at the message, and then the real moon, then back at the message. “I think something’s wrong, Dax.” He drops the cigarette.

  “What do you mean?”

  But Thomas is already crawling down the tree, pine sap adhering to the hair of his forearms, to his clothes, his ears burning, and Dax calling down to him, “I’ll get Doughty!” And bark raining down on his head from Dax’s scrambling feet, as they both wind their way down the wide trunk, leaping from bough to bough, fingers holding fast to the thick bark, fingers sticky with pitch.

  45

  HE COULD NOT HAVE CARRIED HER, THOUGH SHE WAS hardly a heavy thing. But between Bill and two other dads, they hurried her to her cabin and laid her out on a cot. She was not speaking.

  “Should we call 911?”

  “I could get Doughty. You want me to get Doughty?”

  They are all looking at him with concern, as if he is the authority. It’s not unlike the hospital, that thrill of controlling a room. But these are men. Grown men. And not other doctors or nurses, not paramedics or even his colleagues from medical school. These are big, dumb, Wisconsin hicks. Mouth-breathers totally unprepared for any kind of medical emergency—hell, even some minor mishap. And this is no emergency, Platz could tell them. This is a covertly administered drug—the dust of several sleeping pills. He ought to know.

  “No, no,” he says evenly, without a hint of concern in his voice. He runs a hand along her forehead, then smooths her hair away from her face. Sits down on the bed beside her, takes her wrist in his hands, feels for a pulse. Touches her neck in much the same way. So beautiful . . .

  “Platz?” Bill asks. “Is she okay?”

  The oaf looks genuinely concerned. This Neanderthal, this piece-of-shit Wisconsin hillbilly that Platz has had to endure all week long. His regurgitated Rush Limbaugh talking points and rants: walls along Mexico, walls along Canada for crying out loud, guns and guns and guns, and stamp out the gays . . . Jesus.

  “She’s fine, Bill. Just drunk is all. Passed out. Like a high school cheerleader who’s overshot it a bit.” He turns to the other fathers. “You remember your prom nights. Pretty much like that. They all think they can drink like champions and then, boom. Facedown and blacked out. I see this way too much at the hospital.” He casually pats her arm.

  “Well, is there anything we can do?” someone asks.

  “Actually, yes,” Platz says coolly. “Look, boys, I’ll stay here with her. You know, make sure she doesn’t choke on her own vomit. Somebody get me a pail for the puke. Maybe a gallon of water for when she wakes up? And some aspirin. I got it from here. There’s no need to call Doughty. It would only serve to embarrass her, and unfortunately”—he clicks his tongue—“I was the one who served her the whiskey. So, I’m responsible, too, I suppose . . .”

  They nod and dutifully charge off back into the night, ordering the boys back to their tents and then dousing the fire with water, causing a huge cloud of steam to rise hissing into the darkness and yet, the flames come right back, half as tall as before,
but still raging. “Never seen a fire like that . . .” Platz can distantly hear. And, ” . . . Some hangover in the morning . . .”

  He inches his fingers from her shoulder, down her breast, pinches her nipples, and turns quickly to see if her face responds, but she is out. He smiles. Runs his hands along the flat of her stomach to where her blue jeans terminate below the belly button. Once, he can see, she must have had a piercing there, back in her teens or maybe during college. God, he is so hot to undo those pants.

  Bill bursts into the cabin just then with an empty aluminum pail and a canteen. “Got these,” he says proudly and utterly out of breath. The big man’s eyes momentarily fall on Platz’s hand, but nothing seems to register.

  “Perfect,” Platz almost whispers. “You did great.”

  “Sure she’ll be okay?” Bill pesters. The man seems some sort of sympathetic ogre: big of heart, if small of brain.

  Platz stands now, reaches up to pat him on the shoulder, and then holds the screen door open for him, walking him out into the night, where beneath the tight forest canopy no light falls on their faces, where Bill cannot possibly see the contempt blazing in Platz’s eyes. And still: That goddamn fire persists!

  “You’ve done all you could,” Platz commends him. “Now, let a doctor take over. All right? Get some sleep.”

  Bill shakes his hand like a man overjoyed to be on the wrong end of a business transaction, as if thankful to have been duped. “Always good to have a doctor around, huh?” he says. “Fact, when I was a boy, that’s what I thought I wanted to be, you know? A doctor.”

  Platz almost laughs, catches himself. “Now, you probably told me already, Bill, but what is it you do for work?”

  “Construction,” Bill says, “mostly roads. It’s good work. Not fixing people, like you, but . . . Fixin’ somethin’ at least.”

  Platz does laugh at that one, can picture Bill leaning on a shovel, listening to AM radio with a bunch of other dropouts, convicts, and deadbeats.