The Hearts of Men

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The Hearts of Men Page 31

by Nickolas Butler


  “Well, Bill, if you see the other guys, tell ’em I’ve got it. Everything is under control. She’ll be good as new, come morning.”

  They walk toward the fire, where he shakes Bill’s hand again and wishes him good night. Then, basking in its heat, colors brassing his face, he unzips his fly and pisses down into the flames before turning back to her cabin, his belt still flopping freely. Inside the cabin, he latches the door securely shut, slowly lets the canvas walls fall loose, and then, sitting next to her body, he lights the lantern, taking some pleasure in the quality of that antiquated light, how golden it is, how the shadows of the room offer so much more promise, how her skin seems like a precious metal extravagantly spilled into this most pleasing form—every mole, every rib his fingers brushes, a lavish luxury.

  He undresses.

  46

  HE WAS DREAMING OF VIETNAM. A STRANGE BIFURCATED dream, all episodic, like a poorly edited film, a home video that jumps and skips through time. Elephant grasses spinning like dervishes beneath their helicopter blades. A full blue-and-red can of Pepsi in the middle of the jungle, not even booby-trapped, not a footprint in sight. The yellow cross on a chaplain’s army-green poncho. The head of a very old man—just the head, his beard some six inches long and dirty with mud. Laboring through a rice paddy, the sky perfectly reflected. A dead tiger.

  And then the tunnel.

  He is crawling and crawling through the tunnel, calling out his mother’s name. Calling for her. He is a little boy inside the cold, muddy tunnel and the roots of the plants all feel like fingers. He is so afraid. Of being buried alive. Of being trapped for ages and ages. Of never finding her. He calls her name out through his own sobs but the tunnel is so dense, the ground so soft and residually wet that his voice is nothing, all of it swallowed by this long throat of earth.

  Just as he touches that other face, he awakens with a scream to find a boy he does not recognize standing over him, one hand on his chest. The boy is panting, sweating, and he smells like the cigarettes they were issued in Vietnam. This boy has huge jug ears and his eyes are full of the concern and fear only children are bold enough to display in such bright earnest.

  “What’s the matter?” Nelson asks, instantly alert.

  “Thomas’s mom,” the kid spits out, as Nelson sits up, his face bathed in moonlight. “She sent him a text, asking for help. He thinks something is wrong.”

  Already Nelson is scrambling for his clothing, reaches into his nightstand for a pistol, chambers a bullet, and tightening his belt, secures the gun against the small of his back. He is practically running for the door. “Arrowhead campground, isn’t it?”

  The boy nods, struggles to keep up with Nelson’s pace, his head down, his chest heaving for air.

  Nelson stops, kneels into the dewy grass, and, clasping the boy by the face, says, “Son, I’m going to need you to grab a hold of yourself now. Can you do that for me?”

  The boy nods.

  “Go now to the counselors’ camp,” Nelson says, “Wake them up. I don’t care if you’re scared to. I don’t care what they say. Do what you have to do. Start their cabins on fire for all I care. But do it. Tell them we may have an emergency on our hands. I want you to send one of the older counselors out to your campsite. You tell that counselor he must be prepared to call the police and an ambulance. Wake them all up. Make sure they listen to you. Do you understand me?”

  The boy’s eyes are wide; he has stopped breathing.

  “Do you understand me, boy?”

  The boy nods.

  “All right then, son, go,” he says, and watches the boy move through the night, fast as a frightened colt.

  Now Nelson begins to move over the parade ground, walking as fast as he can, and then breaking into a jog, his old legs popping and so unsteady. Now he is running. He hasn’t run in decades. The night unnaturally quiet. No boy noise. No owls. Even the frogs have gone mute. There is no wind. He is flying through the forest.

  TWO HUNDRED YARDS from the camp, he hears voices, moves toward the sounds. Thomas is standing beside a campfire and two men are talking to him in hushed voices, both of their hands out, as if trying to mellow this young man. Thomas backs away from them, swats at their outstretched fingers.

  Nelson is out of breath when he reaches them.

  “What’s the problem?” he manages, smoothing his shirt. “What’s the meaning of all this? Thomas, where is your mother?”

  “They won’t let me see her,” the kid says. “I think something’s wrong. I just want to see my mom and they keep making up these excuses.”

  “Look, calm yourself down, Thomas,” says one of the men, a smaller man, drenched in sweat, with expensive-looking glasses, and rusty-red hair. “With all due respect, Scoutmaster Doughty, if I could just talk to you privately . . .” He leads the older man away from the fire, toward the shadows of the forest.

  Nelson turns to see the other man, a huge hand on Thomas’s shoulder, trying to coax the kid into relaxing, pushing the boy toward a picnic table and bench.

  “The thing of it is, Scoutmaster Doughty,” the man begins, “and, oh, by the way, I’m Doctor Phillip Platz—we met at orientation? I practice down in Eau Claire . . . Now, I’ve been monitoring Ms. Quick’s situation from the get-go and I think we’ve got everything all squared away—”

  “Her situation? Where is she? Take me to her now!” Nelson says, ready to move through this Platz. “I’ve got reports she messaged her son asking for help, now—”

  “See, I don’t know anything about that,” Platz says, laughing, “and I’ve been with her the whole time, as I said, monitoring her vitals and what have you—”

  “I don’t like this one bit,” Nelson says, moving around Platz in the direction of her cabin.

  “If you’ll just, sir, kindly allow me a minute to give you a review of the circumstances, I think you’ll agree that I’ve secured the situation and perhaps”—here this doctor runs his smallish hands through thick hair, nudges his glasses up, and then continues—“saved Ms. Quick’s son some embarrassment. Really. Please, sir. Will you just allow me to speak.” The doctor raises his hands in gentle submission as he once again maneuvers in front of Nelson. “Please?”

  Nelson nods, so exhausted, so bloody exhausted. He blinks his eyes. He can still smell the tunnel in his dreams: the wet soil, the rot, the minerality of stone . . .

  “Ms. Quick had a little too much bourbon this evening around the campfire, all right?” the doctor begins. “And she passed out. We got her back into her cabin and she’s fine. I’ve been monitoring her blood pressure and pulse and, really, she’s fine. She’s going to wake up in the morning with a doozy of a hangover, sure, but she’ll survive. We didn’t want Thomas in there, because we thought he might be unnecessarily concerned. She’s passed out, see, and it might seem to him that she’s seriously unwell. Which she most certainly is not.

  “I mean”—the doctor collapses the distance between the two men, now speaking into Nelson’s ear—“would you want to see your mother drunk, passed out on her bed?” He steps away from Nelson. “Also, as a physician, I have to raise the very real possibility of her being an alcoholic. This behavior, I mean, it simply isn’t normal.”

  The old man studies him. Something is not right, though he can’t put his fingers on it. Rachel had also more or less passed out in his cabin . . . But would she drink so heavily, in the company of these men? In front of her son? In their camp, in front of other boys and parents? Then again, how well does he know her, really? Is she a drunk?

  No, no. That’s nonsense. No, there’s something else. She had, after all, messaged for help. That was why he was there. She was clearly in distress.

  “Fine. Then let me see her at least,” Nelson says evenly. “She’s my friend, and I want to see for myself that she’s being well taken care of.” He casually waves a hand in the air, as if to shoo away his earlier intensity. “That’s all. And, if need be, I can arrange for any further medical treatment. It’s m
y responsibility, you understand. This is my camp, after all.”

  “Tell you what,” the doctor says, hands on his hips, “you give that boy some peace of mind, you get him settled, and then we’ll go see her together. I need to check on her anyway.”

  Nelson walks back to the fire, to where Thomas is now sitting, seemingly under the observation of one of the fathers, and says, “Come on, son. Let me walk you to your cabin.”

  “So she’s okay?” he presses. “My mom’s okay?” He rises from the wood bench, clearly shaken, suspicious even, looking from one adult face to the next, searching for some assurance that this is not the disaster it appears it might be. “But then why did she text me looking for help? I don’t understand.”

  “She’s fine,” Nelson lies in a voice loud enough for Platz to plainly hear. “Come on. Let’s get you settled. Too late for so much drama.”

  “But she sent me a text,” the kid blurts. “I’ve got it right here! Mr. Doughty! Why can’t we just go see her?”

  Nelson takes the boy by his elbow and bends toward his ear: “Keep walking now, okay? Go.” He rests an arm on Thomas’s shoulders and they move into the night, away from the two watching men, the curling red-orange flames of the campfire.

  When they are twenty paces away, he whispers to Thomas, “You’ve done good, son. Okay? Now something is wrong, I think.” They stand in front of Thomas’s cabin, where two boys’ faces are pressed close to the metal screen windows, flashlights dancing all over the camp, and the low buzzing of voices whispering. Looking around him now, Nelson says, “You stay inside this building for two minutes.” He pushes Thomas into the cabin, then reaches behind him, and taking the pistol, places it in the boy’s hand. Thomas’s cabin mates titter with excitement and confusion. “If I don’t come back for my pistol in two minutes, you’ll know something is definitely wrong. All right? You stay here. You hear me? And if anyone comes for you, you fire a warning shot. The first one in the air. The second at their feet. And if they keep coming . . .” He kisses Thomas on the forehead. “Tell me you understand me? Help is on the way.”

  The boy nods. The heavy pistol in his soft young hands smells of gun oil. He can’t stop looking at it, the blued metal, the carved wooden handle.

  Nelson slaps him lightly across the face, holds a finger in front of his nose. “Focus,” he says. “Steady now. Concentrate. You’re the good guy. You’re the one who is prepared. Who is smart and courageous. All right? I’ll be right back.”

  He eases the door shut and walks back toward the fire with the flickering hope that Rachel is just as the doctor said. But if there is one emotion that he understands, it is fear, and the night right now is thick with it. If Rachel were merely drunk, no one would be afraid. If there were nothing to hide, she would have been seen by someone other than Platz by now. No, he thinks, something is awry. Pray that she is safe.

  HER CABIN IS STIFLINGLY HOT, and instantly Nelson smells the telltale tang of sex in the close canvas air. He says nothing, kneels beside her bunk, his old knees on the pebble and pine-needle-scattered floor. She is facedown in a flimsy T-shirt. He pulls a thin bedsheet away from her body. She wears only underwear. He sees a stain on them.

  “Awful hot in here,” he mumbles, pulling the bedsheet back up and wiping strands of her hair away from her face. She does not flinch at his touch, no response at all, though she is breathing faintly, her chest rising and falling regularly.

  “I wanted to save her any embarrassment,” the doctor says, “so we shut her curtains. I suppose we could open those now.” He crosses his arms and rubs at his nose. “I tell you, these women—”

  “Dr. Platz,” Nelson says in a voice almost as low as a whisper, “I’m gonna need you to start telling me the truth.”

  “I don’t understand, I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” Platz stutters out. “I’ve been trying to help her.”

  “She passed out?”

  “Yeah, like I said, we carried her in here and—”

  “And undressed her like this?”

  “Like you say, it was so hot.”

  “Dr. Platz, I am gonna leave this cabin right now and call the sheriff unless you start making some sense.”

  “Look, I’ve only tried to help her,” Platz says. “I’m a doctor. I don’t need to stand here and take this from you.”

  Nelson turns back to Rachel, and without looking at Platz, says, “Then you’ve left me no choice. But I’ll say this—if you’re the one who hurt this woman, I am going to skin you alive.”

  But before the old man can rise from his knees, Platz brings the heavy lantern down hard on his head, sending him to the dirty plywood floor of the building, where he lies groaning, his feet sliding to find purchase. Kerosene spills everywhere, fumes thick. Platz drops the lantern, bends down beside the old man. “Oh my God,” Platz whines, “oh my God. I didn’t mean . . . Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ. What have I done?”

  “Everything all right in there?” Bill calls through the canvased doorway.

  Kneeling next to the old man now, Platz roughly takes his pulse. Still alive. “No!” he shouts. “Doughty fell. Go get help, quick!”

  Bill bursts through the door, but the cabin is all darkness now, the brightest thing visible now the white of Rachel’s underwear.

  Platz rises, pushes him back out into the night. “Go on now! Get me some help!” He projects a roaring voice over the campground. “Go on, man! Get a goddamn ambulance!”

  Boys standing outside their cabins, holding their elbows, terrified, looking from their phones to Platz, pointing: Is that blood? And Bill, his chest now painted red with Nelson’s blood, too, backpedaling quick before moving off into the forest. Other fathers, banging out of cabins, donning eyeglasses, lanterns and flashlights in hands, approaching Platz with squinted eyes, phones held to their ears, mumbling . . . Think we’ve got an emergency . . . Scratching their heads, yawning, others more alert, holding boys back, ordering them back to their cabins.

  “Don’t come any closer!” Platz screams. “For chrissakes! We’ve got spilled kerosene here, stay away!” He ducks back into the cabin, digs quickly into a pocket for a box of matches, strikes one, and immediately the cabin huffs on fire. He bursts back out. “This thing’s going up, goddamnit—get water, get water! Fire!”

  But Thomas is walking toward him now, pistol drawn, and from a distance of perhaps ten yards, shoots two rounds over the doctor’s head. The gunshots sound like the universe splitting open, thunder separating reality into crooked shards. Platz startles, raises his hands in the air, and in doing so, knocks his own glasses off so that they fall to the darkness near his shoes. The boy walks closer, brandishes the pistol confidently, looks very much as if he is about to fire a bullet between Platz’s eyes.

  But then one of the fathers rushes out of the darkness, and commandeering the pistol from Thomas, says, “Go get your mom, Thomas, go!” The father holds the gun on Platz, who seems dazed now, kneeling in the dust like a stunned hostage, searching for his glasses.

  Thomas runs to his mother’s cabin and pulls the door open wide, to be met by flames spilling out at him. She is lying on her bed, surrounded by fire on three sides, with only the wide window screen beside her offering a possible route. He goes around the cabin, punches right through the metal screen by the bed, grabs her arms, and roughly pulls her out.

  Her body falls limply to the ground, but other men are gathering, and they help him, help him drag her to safety. Now several of the men rip the cabin’s door off and reach through blue kerosene flames and dripping molten plastic for Nelson’s pant legs, which are on fire. They grab his shoes, which slip off. They peel off his socks, burning, too. Finally, the old man is pulled free. They begin to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

  Grown men, their arms covered in burnt skin, hair singed off, sit away from the flames and weep. Their sons come to them and cry, too. The little cabin is utterly engulfed. The flames reach the treetops, where green leaves
reluctantly burn. So much fire. So many men, so many boys weeping before the fire. Or stone-faced with the sheer shock of it.

  Thomas holds his mother in his lap. Her lips are moving, but he cannot understand what she is saying. She is so dirty, and some of her hair is burnt away. Her arms are utterly limp, and as he holds her, it is with the sudden certainty that someday, decades from now, she will die and he will be holding her just like this then.

  Now her cabin collapses entirely and the flames rush up further yet. He watches more Scouts yet emerge from the darkness, carrying buckets of water that they hand to their fathers who douse the inferno, bucket after bucket, but the flames roar on, and in the treetops fire burns like a broken matrix of frayed wires.

  He holds her tight as he can.

  47

  RACHEL IS WATCHING A MORNING TALK SHOW, SOMETHING she would never do in her everyday life, would never do were she not lying in a hospital bed, when there is a knock at the door.

  “May I come in?” a voice asks, and she assumes if it is not a doctor or nurse, it will be a policeman, come to ask her yet more questions.

  “Yes,” she croaks. Her voice is dry and raw. An IV runs into her arm; her veins feel cold.

  Jonathan, as he steps into the room now, looks so much older than her memories; he is so much older. There is a gentle stoop to his shoulders and backbone, and the skin of his face seems to be drooping down, collecting beneath his chin. He has shaved this morning, she sees. He carries in one hand a vase of flowers, and in the other, a thermos of coffee. He still favors Sperry topsiders, but now shuffles his feet, rather than strutting like a senator.

  Tears slip from her eyes, unbidden, and she hurriedly wipes them away, manages to collect herself. This unexpected ghost.

  He stops, notices the wetness on her face. “Oh, dear. Darling, I can go, if you’d like. I didn’t mean to disturb you. I know it’s been some time.” He turns away from her, seeks an unoccupied surface on which to set the vase, but there are flowers everywhere.

 

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