A Hard and Heavy Thing Read online

  A HARD

  AND

  HEAVY

  THING

  MATTHEW J. HEFTI

  For Monica,

  my own life’s love story.

  And for Madeline, Lillian, and Zoe,

  the amazing ladies that make everything worth everything.

  ADUMBRATION:

  It’s Not a Suicide Note; It’s a Love Song

  God made clay; the clay made men; the men made war. They fingered the triggers on their rifles as they labored under the rucksacks. They were mules, trudging along the path. Silhouettes and eyes hovered in the windows of the huts while the soldiers fought the muck. The tread on their boots gripped the wet clay, turning their feet to anvils. Their thighs burned as they heaved the weight. No one spoke a word, and the downpour drowned the sound of their panting.

  Levi walked point. Water fell from his helmet and streamed in front of his eyes, so he did not see the battle erupt. He did not hear the shots because of the storm. He did not hear the explosions because of the thunder. Levi focused on the road ahead, and the road did not stop; so Levi kept walking.

  While the men behind him killed, Levi walked. When the men cried for their mothers, Levi took off his helmet. When the lieutenant barked orders, Levi had gone miles past the men.

  He was tired from all the fighting and leaving and returning. All the fighting, leaving, and returning. The fighting, leaving and returning, and fighting.

  He was tired, so he dropped his pack and ammunition. When the blood mixed with the water, and when the dying men lay on the path wondering how it had all happened, Levi didn’t look back. When the men cried out to God to stop the fighting, Levi put down his rifle and walked out into the world.

  The world he had left was not ready for his return; or rather, he was not ready to return to the world he had left. After years of the slow agonizing burn of his own guilt, which stood in stark contrast to the sudden and violent flames that caused it, he sat on a rock near the edge of the mighty Mississippi, longing to ease himself into the river’s dark currents.

  He could not make sense of all that had happened, but he had to explain it somehow. He owed his friend that much. So he left the river for home, where he wrote and remembered. He wrote in such a way as to ignore his ego, a task that still remained difficult despite his narrative tricks.

  [I did exactly what you told me to do, Nick. Didn’t you tell me to just write the stupid book already? And that even doing the worst thing on the planet had to count for something? Well I can’t think of anything worse than what I’m about to do, which is why I think you deserve an explanation. And maybe after you read it you’ll realize why I don’t have the hope that you have. The truth is this: We begin and end alone.]

  When Levi was done explaining everything, he would do it. He would ease himself into those cool waters and embrace the end on his own terms.

  It took an entire life to get to this point, but what was a life? A life was a red hole in a forehead. A life was a man suspended against a backdrop of smoke and flames, one bootless foot covered with a green sock. A life was the maddening immutability of the past, the monomania of the present, and the frightening black hole of the future. Out of ten thousand days, he only carried a handful. Single moments exploded in detail and vibrancy in his memory, yet entire years had disappeared.

  So starting. Starting was difficult.

  A life was a story, and a story was nothing more than a promise that something bad would happen. It was a promise that people would desire and want and ache and burn, but it was not a promise that they would find what they sought.

  And what did any of them want?

  All Levi ever wanted was to be a writer.

  But that’s not exactly right. Levi wanted other things. He wanted kicks. He wanted greatness and immensity. He wanted to be one of Kerouac’s people, the fabulous yellow roman candle people. The mad ones. Levi was desirous of everything at the same time. He wanted big parties, loud music, risks, gunfire, and explosions, and vastness, and immortality, and romance, and—

  He wanted what Nick had. He wanted Eris.

  And what did Eris want? Like her mythical namesake, all she ever wanted was to create mayhem and sow discord.

  But that’s not true either. She simply wanted someone to pay attention to her. She wanted someone to listen.

  And she wanted Nick.

  And what did Nick want? He simply wanted to do good. To be good. He was mad to be saved. That was good enough for him.

  It wasn’t good enough for Levi. He wanted more and his desires burned through him like the flames from a roadside bomb. But that’s not true either. It wasn’t fast, violent, or exciting. He wanted more and his desires burned through him like acid. Burned through them all. He didn’t know when he began wanting to destroy Nick. He didn’t know how he ended up with his fingers around his neck, staring at the bulging eyes of his best friend in a murderous rage. [And how can I begin to tell our story when I’m so perplexed about my own motivation?]

  The start of their story, this story, could have been way back when they were children wrestling on the sticky floor in Oma’s Pub, when Nick learned he would be an orphan. The start could have been that first time Nick saved Levi without cause—the time in middle school when their principal caught them smoking in the ditch behind the chain-link fence of the playground. The time Nick told Oma he stole the cigarettes from her purse, not Levi. As she snapped the leather belt Opa left behind when he died, Nick pleaded with her to believe him when he said Levi was blameless. That was the first time Levi said nothing to stop Nick from getting hurt.

  It could have started freshman year when Eris’s older cousin, Jesse, answered the ad Levi posted at The Deaf Ear record store as he and Nick went looking for a drummer to round out their fledgling punk band, A Failed Entertainment. Or, it could have started when they opened their first practice in Jesse’s basement and Eris appeared at the bottom of the stairs with one hand on her hip. She glared across the room at Jesse sitting behind the drum kit. She held up a middle finger for two and a half minutes as they ran through their first song. When they finished, she walked upstairs without a word.

  It could have been the night Nick and Levi got drunk, threw bottles at invisible foes from the roof of their apartment, cut themselves so they bled for America, and pledged to join up because it was just past September 11th, 2001, and they took that hell personally even though they were a thousand miles from those towers.

  It could have started when Nick woke up in the burning rubble of a Humvee on Main Supply Route Tampa in central Iraq, the weight of another man’s severed arm on his chest; it could have started right at that tense moment when Levi’s face appeared in his field of vision with all the sad, unspoken truths about how they got there ignored to make Levi look like some hero. But that was more of a climax, wasn’t it? Only twelve minutes of their lives at the top of the mountain.

  [And if that was the climax of our lives, I’m telling you now, it came too soon. I cannot handle this long slow denouement that my life has become. This slow burn that makes me want to drive drunk, get high, jump off bridges, get in fights, and do whatever I can to make things feel real again.]

  The story didn’t start—and this was obvious—until some time before a cloudless midnight in early spring many years later. It didn’t start on the bank of a stream that flowed into the La Crosse River, where both of their faces dripped blood on the green grass that had already begun to accumulate dewdrops in the rapidly chilling air, where each of their knuckles screamed to take out on each other what they couldn’t take out on their enemies [whom we rarely knew], or their leaders [who sent us there], or the ghosts that still haunted them months and even years after they had left
.

  That is to say, it didn’t start tonight.

  They hadn’t always been broken. They used to be tight like the skin of burn scars. But by that time, it was far too late for them to recognize what had pulled them apart, what had grown into a cancer so large and so irreversible there was nothing left to do but risk death in order to extract it—to get it out in the open air where it could be examined, studied, dissected, and then kept for posterity: something ugly and sad in formaldehyde.

  Levi James Hartwig

  6 April 2010

  BOOK ONE

  WE JOINED IN A FIT OF YOUTH

  1.1 DEAR NICK, LET’S BE HONEST; WE WERE BROKEN BEFORE THE WAR EVEN STARTED

  September 8th, 2001

  They were only able to find Eris dying in the bathtub because she was making woofing and growling noises like a very large dog. By then it was late night or early morning, and Nick and Levi believed they were alone. They were rolling hard on designer drugs, and it was not their first time. It was, however, the last time.

  It was always the last time.

  Levi lay on the floor of their apartment and complained about how bored he was until he realized that his complaining was picking up speed. With that realization came other realizations. He noticed the wiggling of his toes. He noticed the way he sucked his cheeks between his clenched teeth. He recognized that the hollow drumming sound that now filled him came from the rapid tapping of his hands against his sternum. With that, he realized he wasn’t bored anymore.

  Nick—still amped from their band’s show that night—noodled on his unplugged electric guitar, already completely entranced by how he was able to watch the notes bounce off the useless pickups with each strum, after which they floated in a glorious arch over to Levi’s ear.

  Levi’s ears still rang with tinnitus. He turned onto his stomach and buried his face in the brown carpet, which smelled of the earth. “Shut up. Will you please shut up, please?”

  “Me shut up?” Nick said. “I didn’t even want to do this tonight, and now that we’re doing it, you’re telling me to shut up?” He banged on the guitar. “I can’t just do this stuff like you can, with no guilt or pangs of conscience.” He held out his hand. It trembled.

  Levi got up and went to the closet in the hallway.

  Nick called after him. “But you always get your way, right? And like always, even though I resist at first, I give in to the temptation and the sense of anticipation that sits deep in my bowels like a bowling ball.”

  “Shut up.” Levi grabbed his ex-girlfriend’s pink earmuffs from the floor of the closet.

  “Ooooh,” Nick moaned. “For the good that I would: I do not, but the evil which I would not, I do.”

  [You really did talk like that when you got conflicted about things. Sometimes you still do.]

  Levi snapped the pink earmuffs over his ears.

  The telephone rang. Nick played on. The phone rang again, and the LCD on the caller ID window displayed KEVIN & CHARLOTTE HARTWIG, Levi’s parents. The guitar grew louder; the thin treble of the unplugged strings battled against the high-pitched ringing. Levi screamed, “Will the noise never end?”

  Even with the earmuffs, Levi heard his mother’s voice when the answering machine kicked on. “Levi?” she said. “If you’re there, honey, can you pick up?”

  Nick stopped playing and leaned forward on the couch.

  Levi lifted the earmuffs from his ears and let them snap back around his neck.

  “Levi, sorry it’s so late, but, I thought you should know.” She sniffed. She waited.

  He waited.

  “It hath pleased Almighty God—” She cleared her throat.

  “Who?” Levi asked the answering machine.

  Because Levi and Nick had spent their lives surrounded by this kind of phraseology, they knew what was coming. Because they had endured hard wooden church pews for fifty-two Sundays a year for eighteen years—to say nothing of extra services for Advent, Lent, or Holy days—they knew that nothing good served as the referent of That Which Hath Pleased Almighty God. Because they had spent twelve years in parochial school, they recognized the preludes to bad news. Because every moment of their youthful lives had been punctuated by liturgy, they knew that they were about to learn that someone had kicked the bucket. “Who?” Levi asked again.

  “It hath pleased Almighty God—” She sniffed. “To summon out of this vale of tears the soul of your grandfather, Randall Hartwig.” She took one loud breath and rapidly exhaled the rest into the telephone’s receiver. “Your father and I are trying to figure out the funeral. Call us as soon as you get this.”

  Levi closed his eyes. Finally. He had his silence.

  Nick set the guitar down. “Man. I’m so—”

  “Ssssh.” Levi placed an index finger in front of his lips.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Ssssh.” He kept his eyes closed and he held his breath.

  With the house finally silent, Levi heard the noises coming from the bathroom. It sounded more animal than human. He cocked his head.

  Nick eased himself to his feet. Levi marched down the hallway without hesitation. Always one to cross busy streets without looking, he found himself glad for the diversion.

  “Dude, wait,” Nick said before following in a crouch. “Aren’t you going to call your mom back?”

  Levi followed the noise, knocking through the bathroom door with his shoulder. Once inside, he flung back the shower curtain to find Eris.

  The last time Levi had seen her that night was shortly before A Failed Entertainment took the stage for their final show of the summer. He stood on the fire escape of The Warehouse smoking a cigarette. Eris had looked like she was in a hurry the way she was trucking through the alley two floors down. Levi dropped a lit cigarette in front of her to get her attention, but it accidentally landed on her head. The orange sparks bounced off her black hair, and she jumped and swatted at the air as if she had stepped into a spider web. She looked up and yelled at him. Threatened to kick his ass. Her big green eyes matched her flannel shirt. As the sun dropped behind the old brick buildings downtown, her skin looked like it had been tanned brown like a farmer’s, not orange like a co-ed’s. “Where you going?” he had yelled. She shook her head and walked on down the alley. He didn’t see her at the show.

  Now in the bathtub, her fierce eyes were closed and her skin was pale. They realized she was the one making the dog noises. Her flannel shirt soaked up long tendrils of thick drool. Her knees were tucked into her chest, the pale patellae popping out of the holes in her jeans.

  Nick pushed past and turned the shower on. He spun the knob to cold and flung the curtain closed. “This is bad. This is bad. I didn’t even know she was still here.”

  “Still here? What do you mean still?” Levi opened the curtain again.

  “You were at the store. The cigarettes. She was drunk. I told her our plans. She left in a huff.” He opened the curtain just a bit to look in. “Oh God, what do we do?”

  “Do?” Levi said, looking oddly triumphant, like his plans for the night had finally materialized. Like he had been hoping for some disaster like this to happen so he didn’t have to be bored anymore. Like even a dying girl in his bathtub was better than calling his mother to confirm that his grandfather actually was dead, and that what he had heard on the answering machine wasn’t a mere auditory hallucination. “We save her, of course.”

  [This was denial.]

  “We gotta call 911.”

  Levi opened the curtain again and turned off the water. “Nuh uh. No way. We gotta save her ourselves.”

  He climbed into the tub behind her and placed his feet as wide apart as the tub would allow. He squatted down, hugged her around the chest, and stood. Her head dropped forward, her neck twisting as it dropped to her chest.

  She slapped at his hands; the right one cupped one of her small breasts. “That’s no way to touch a lady,” she said, the thick drool falling from her lip, down her chin, and onto Levi’s wri
st.

  “Here. Gimme a hand,” Levi said.

  Nick was the larger of the two, the solid first baseman in high school, the strong power forward in summer rec leagues, but now he stood motionless, his mouth hanging slightly open. He lifted a hand and brushed it over his light sandy hair, which was just long enough to be soft and fuzzy. He rubbed his hand over his hair again. His dilated eyes took up half of his round boyish face, which was now slack. His hand went over his hair a third time.

  “Nick,” Levi said, exasperated. “Take her.”

  Nick moved like a man underwater, but he hugged her and pulled her from the tub. He lowered her to the floor, where the water from her clothes pooled around her limp body.

  Levi put both his hands on his chest and felt his damp T-shirt. “We need to get her to a hospital.”

  “We need to call 911.”

  “And what do we tell them?”

  “I can’t drive.”

  “We tell them you can’t drive?”

  “You can’t drive.” Nick reached down and touched the pool of water on the floor as if testing its viscosity. He rubbed the wet flannel of Eris’s shirt between his thumb and forefinger as if he doubted that it was tangible. He straightened up. “We are definitely not driving.”

  That’s how they ended up dragging her through the heart of La Crosse, her toes skimming along the cracked asphalt of back alleys lined with six-bedroom Victorian frat houses and low-income apartment complexes. They rushed past dimly lit parking lots as they tried to stay out of sight, until finally they had no choice but to drag her along the sidewalk next to busy South Avenue as they neared Gundersen Lutheran Hospital.

  [Most people don’t realize how things can get serious so quickly. One second you’re face down on your carpet listening to bad guitar-playing, and the next second there’s a dying girl in your bathtub. One second you’re playing with your best friend and his GI Joes under the pool table, and the next second Oma is pulling you off the barroom floor trying to explain that the crash was really bad and you have to leave right now, right this second, and then all you can do is stand next to your newly orphaned best friend as two caskets get lowered into the ground. Or, you’re cruising along in your super-cool-guy Humvee thinking about chicks or cheese curds, and your best friend’s truck disappears into a Hollywood ball of smoke and flame. The next thing you know, you’re covered in blood and you’re tossing around the severed limbs of your friends.