“LEAVE MY FRIEND ALONE!” Ronny screamed. “LEAVE HIM THE FUCK ALONE!” He was crying. We pulled him down.
The helicopter hovered another few moments before finally circling the barn once and absconding. Evening was now draped dark over the barn, little candles burning everywhere and in places, lanterns too. Some had been blown out by the aircraft, and the wedding-goers went around with lighters and matches, gamely relighting as many wicks as they could. We heard Sinatra playing from the barn and took our drinks in with us. Ronny was still upset.
We found them in the basement, sitting in a corner, Chloe on Lee’s lap, running her fingers through his thinning hair. He looked older, just then. I handed Lee a brown bottle of beer, and he took it from me, tipped his head back, and sipped. But he would not look at us. We stood there awhile, in silence, our arms crossed.
“It’s not your fault,” Beth said to him finally. “We know you didn’t want this.”
“I don’t want this,” he said vaguely. A moment passed as we waited for him to finish. Then, “Maybe I need some air,” he finally said.
We followed him outside, into the pasture, and Chloe and Beth removed their heels as we continued. I loosened my tie. We went to the horses, their eyeballs still big and wild. Ronny was talking to them up ahead of us, his voice low and soothing. And then he was singing to them, his voice like a ragged lullaby, and we stopped to watch him. He sang: “Shall I stay, would it be a sin, if I can’t help, falling in love with you.…”
He touched the horse in front of him then, his gnarled rodeo hands soft on the velvet of the horse’s muzzle, the muscles of its great breast. His mouth was near the horse’s ear, he was singing to it. We sat in the grass, watching him, listening to his sweet warble.
* * *
Lee moved to New York not long after the wedding, and we saw him less and less. The packages still came, and sometimes letters, but the time between his visits became greater and greater. Grass began to sprout in his driveway. In time our children stopped asking about him. But we still listened to his albums, and my daughter even began to play the guitar. She had taped a photo from Rolling Stone to the wall near her bed. In the photo, Lee is on stage somewhere in the world, a spotlight shining brightly on his sweaty face, his eyes closed in concentration, his mouth nearly wrapped sideways around the microphone. In his arms, the very guitar he had once forgotten to bring to a wedding.
It was hardest for Ronny, but we tried our best to fill the void Lee had left. I drove Ronny to his doctor appointments and to the grocery store. We cooked for him, and there were nights that he watched our children. He was very tender with them. They sat in his lap and on the arms of chairs as he read Dr. Seuss to them. Frequently they corrected his pronunciation. Sometimes they read books to him.
One Saturday afternoon I walked the long walk down our gravel driveway to the mailbox. Spring had come, and the ditches were full of meltwater, the fields and trees timidly green. I had just finished changing the oil on one of the older tractors. Plowing and planting would begin soon. I reached into the mailbox and there was a thick envelope from Lee’s address in New York City. The paper was expensive and our address and names had been written in calligraphy. I opened it.
He was getting married to Chloe. Inside were four airplane tickets and a hand-tooled note:
Henry, I miss you like hell. Come out and see us.
Make sure Ronny gets his invitation.
And tell him to bring a date.
Love, your best friend, Lee
L
THE DAY AFTER KIP’S WEDDING they came down the driveway like tourists on safari, big cameras aimed out the windows of rented Jeeps, gawking behind expensive sunglasses. The first one actually got up to my house before I noticed, before I grabbed a shotgun and came out onto the porch in my boxers. They didn’t know that the gun was unloaded, that I’d run out of shells months earlier. It’s a beautiful gun, my Ithaca. A pump-action with ornate scrolling and nice bluing to the steel. I bought it as a gift to myself after Shotgun Lovesongs first went platinum. It seemed fitting enough.
“Get the hell out of here!” I screamed, pumping nothing into the chamber. “Go on! Go before I call the police!” In truth, I knew it would take the police a half-hour or more to get to my place—part of the beauty of the Ithaca. They retreated, sending gravel flying into the air and kicking up a plume of dust. I watched their heads bounce against the ceiling of the Jeep as they raced back up the driveway to the road. Two more trespassers came down the road that morning until finally I’d had enough and towed Ronny’s taxidermied bull to the mouth of the driveway, where I left it with a cardboard sign draped around its neck that read: NO TRESPASSERS! THIS MEANS YOU!
Chloe found it all somewhat amusing, in the way that I now know she finds so much in life amusing. Nothing ever seemed to upset her. Those weeks at my house, that time after Kip’s wedding, they were some of the happier days of my life. Chloe, walking barefoot around the house in one of my old flannel shirts. Or the two of us, building a fire beside the creek at night so that after we finished skinny-dipping, we could warm ourselves against the autumn chill. Sometimes we’d go to Henry and Beth’s house and cook for them in their kitchen, and standing at the stove I’d watch Chloe on the floor, playing checkers or jacks with the kids. But most of the time I wanted her to myself. Wanted to show her my world, make her fall in love with Wisconsin.
Cell phone reception is spotty at my house, so I’ve always insisted on a house phone, which is mounted to the kitchen wall. My Internet connection is also hit-or-miss, oftentimes only a minor upgrade over dial-up. Chloe would insist that we drive or walk to the tallest nearby hill, where we’d stay for an hour or so while she checked her email or talked to her agent back in New York and I’d sit beside her, combing her hair with my fingers or warming one of her hands in my own.
Some nights we would get bored and drive to the VFW and sit at the bar and shake dice in an old leather cup or just watch a football game on the television, and on those evenings it was not uncommon for a young woman or a middle-aged man to tap on Chloe’s shoulder with a single finger and then produce a magazine for her to sign or even just a cardboard coaster from the bar. But no one ever asked for my autograph anymore and that was exactly the way I wanted it to be. What was more surprising were the evenings when no one said a word to us, when the bar was dead, when we sat on our stools with perhaps one or two geezers and simply played cribbage or euchre and drank Manhattans or brandy old-fashioneds, and in those times I felt that maybe we could actually stay in Little Wing, that Chloe might come to love Wisconsin.
One night we were driving back to my house, and as she sat close to me on the bench seat and we held hands, I said, “Do you think … do you think you could ever see yourself living here, with me?”
She snuggled closer against me, into my right shoulder. I could smell brandy on her breath and I knew that she was closing her eyes to fall asleep.
“Chloe?”
“It’s so quiet here.”
“But isn’t it nice? No one bothers us, we’re just like normal people. We have normal friends here…”
“Oh, Lee,” she said. “Let’s be quiet now, can we?”
“No, come on. We should talk about this.” Behind everything I was thinking, I want to marry you.
“I don’t know, baby. I haven’t wanted to be normal in a long time. I like my life. I like New York. Everything is in New York. Everybody wants to be in New York.”
I couldn’t say, I don’t want to be in New York.
“Besides,” she yawned, “think about it: we’re busy people. You tour. I’m on location. New York just makes sense. It’s easy to fly out of. The media is all there. Projects are there. People like you and me, Lee, we don’t live in small towns.” She kissed the palm of my hand. “You know?”
* * *
When I had nowhere else to go, I came back here. When I had nothing, I came back here. I came back here and made something out of nothing. I could live he
re on next to nothing; there is nothing to spend money on, no one to impress. No one here cares about anything other than your work ethic and your kindness and your competence. I came back here and I found my voice, like something that had fallen out of my pocket, like a souvenir long forgotten. And every time I come back here I am surrounded by people who love me, who care for me, who protect me like a tent of warmth. Here, I can hear things, the world throbs differently, silence thrums like a chord strummed eons ago, music in the aspen trees and in the firs and burr oaks and even in the fields of drying corn.
How do you explain that to someone? How do you explain that to someone you love? What if they don’t understand?
K
THIRTEEN, FOURTEEN YEARS AGO, we used to go up there with a backpack full of pilfered beer, maybe a joint or two or three. I never smoked, but they did—Lee and Henry and Ronny. We were always up there, especially during summer, when there was nothing else to do. The feed mill was closed then, derelict, and it always seemed to be on the brink of being razed, but then someone would put up a big stink, hold a town meeting, maybe even throw a fundraiser—a pig roast, a bake sale, raffle off a new Ford pickup—and the mill’s sentence would be stayed. The taxes would get paid and there would be rumors of some out-of-town messiah come to save the day, some corporation come to breathe new life into those old beams and bricks and stones. Other buildings, beautiful buildings, were demolished: the old depot, the original post office, even an old opera house; a four-story hotel that in later years became first a flophouse for migrant workers, bikers, Vietnam vets, then later, something like a nursing home. The building so old it lacked an elevator shaft. The most feeble of the building’s occupants were always lodged on that first floor. On soft spring evenings, crisp autumn afternoons, many of them sitting on the elevated front porch, an architectural remnant of the American Old West, the frontier. They rolled wheelchairs out there or sat on the porch swings, rocking, watching the sporadic traffic on Main Street. On the Fourth of July, those geezers clutched small American flags in their trembling hands, waved them at the morning parade, and in the weeks and months that followed, still waved them at pedestrians, at funeral processions, the after-church crowd rushing home for Sunday football, until the red, white, and blue fabric faded and frayed at the edges.
My grandpa lived there for two years before he died. We used to visit him on Friday evenings in the old hotel’s tall-ceilinged dining room. The room was dimly lit, and what light did enter the space seemed to pass mostly through ancient, warped windows, the glass thicker at the bottom of the pane than at the top. I imagined another time when candles and kerosene threw a different kind of golden light onto linen tabletops. We ate poached cod, mashed potatoes, peas, dinner rolls. My grandpa picked fish bones from his dry mouth and set them on the rim of his plate. It always took him a long time to remove the bones from his mouth, as if he had swallowed a hook himself. There was a bar in there too and rumors that once upon a time, way way back, the hotel had been a brothel. Sometimes you would see an old man or an old woman at the bar, peering around for a bartender, saying in a sad, confused voice, “All I want is a taste, just a little taste.” But the bar had been bereft of bottles since the flophouse evolved into a nursing home.
The old hotel finally came down in 1988, when I was nine years old. By then, Grandpa was gone, buried in the cemetery just outside of town along the Little Wing River where it is dammed up, where the water grows green with algae in the summertime and thick with ice in winter. We call that stretch of the river Lake Wing, and in summertime occasionally we’d go out there on water skis, though the “lake” was hardly more than a pond, and our circuits were confined to tight nauseating circles behind a smallish outboard motor better used behind a sixteen-foot aluminum fishing boat, the water so silty and thick with lily pads and algae you could almost walk on it with a pair of snowshoes.
No demolitions expert was needed. A sweep of the building was made to ensure no senior citizens had holed themselves up in a broom closet or stairwell; then, when the hotel was confirmed to be totally and finally vacant, the biggest excavating machine I’d ever seen rolled right down Main Street, its steel-fanged bucket held at the ready. The volunteer fire department kept a steady stream of water aimed at the hotel as the excavator began gnashing at the old bricks and wood. Families came out for the demolition, laid blankets on the sidewalk, packed picnics. It was a Saturday in October, the air dry and cool. My mother handed us cold fried-chicken sandwiches wrapped in paper toweling. We drank warm apple cider from a thermos, ate potato salad, baby carrots, pickles. Dad was a volunteer firefighter, and that was the first and only time we’d ever see him in action. In his uniform, underneath his fluorescent yellow helmet, he looked so official, so heroic, so brave.
Mom elbowed us gently. “Isn’t your father handsome?”
Along the sidewalks, the hotel’s former inhabitants looked on, chewing their tongues like jerky, looking defeated, depleted. I don’t know where they went after the building came down, though I suspect many ended up in Eau Claire, just north of Little Wing. It made me sad to think of them, most of them likely to be separated into different institutions, like elementary school children whose parents all suddenly decided to take jobs in new cities or neighborhoods, and the kids, shuffled someplace new without a say in the world.
When the old hotel was finally gone there was nothing but a new hole along Main Street, a gap between the pharmacy and hardware store where only a pile of rubble lay. We pushed a red wheelbarrow down Main Street and spent afternoons collecting the leftover bricks, though, at that age, we could only fill the barrow up halfway before it became too much to push. Then we brought the bricks back to my father, who paid us a dime for each one we scrounged. He built an outdoor fireplace with those bricks, a little grotto of fire we congregated around in warmer months, a place where we could toast marshmallows or roast hot dogs.
* * *
Sometimes we took girls up to the top of the feed mill, but mostly, it was just us. Just the four of us: Lee, Ronny, Henry, and me. Nights, it was better than any telescope, better than the planetariums we visited with our middle school or high school teachers. Because on top of those old wood and cement grain silos, we found narrow places to lie on our backs and stare at the stars, to drink beer, to talk big, to dream. Our town, Little Wing, down there, not much to see and always shrinking, not even a stoplight blinking against the night, and everyone, all of us, putting it down, talking about leaving, going somewhere, going anywhere but here. The sense that staying in town meant we were failures, meant we were yokels—who the hell knows what we thought back then on those nights.
Henry and I, we preferred mornings. Dawns, sunrises. It’s funny—but I suppose he was already becoming a farmer back then, getting up early, helping his dad with the family dairy operation, working on old engines, listening to all the retired or bankrupt farmers after church. And it wasn’t many mornings, but there were a handful, when we’d climb up those steel rebar stairs all the way up to the top of those grain silos and wait there, the air cool and blue, our breaths just barely visible. Maybe a thermos of coffee between us, or a stolen bottle of brandy or blackberry schnapps from our parents’ liquor cabinets. And there must have been a morning or two when we didn’t bring anything, just hugged our knees, blew hot air into our hands, waited for the sun to come, the day to begin warming. At the time I didn’t think much of it, but I suppose looking back, it was mostly me who called Henry, mostly me doing the inviting. We didn’t talk much on those mornings. Just sat and looked out, as if we were waiting for a ship.
I’ve never been to the Grand Canyon, to Yosemite or Yellowstone, to any of the places you hear people talking about—spectacular places, I mean. But, even without having been to the Grand Canyon, I imagine a sunrise there has to be something bordering on a religious experience, all that ancient red, orange, and yellow rock lighting up in their striated layers, all those majestic deep purple shadows.
I wish you cou
ld see a sunrise from the top of those grain silos, our own prairie skyscraper. I wish you could see how green everything is in the spring, how yellow the corn’s tassels even a few months later, how blue the morning shadows are, and creeks winding their own slow paths, the land rolling and rolling on and on, studded here and there with proud red barns, white farmhouses, pale gravel roads. The sun emerging in the east so pink and orange, so big. In the ditches and valleys, fog collecting like slow vaporous rivers, waiting to be burned away.
I really can’t remember who I was back then, that teenage version of myself, what I was thinking. I guess, like everyone else, I was restless. Maybe I was lonely. Maybe being up there, at the top of those grain silos, maybe I thought I could see something, my future, some spot on the horizon where I’d land, some future version of myself, some girl I hadn’t met yet, my future wife. I don’t know. But it felt good I guess. Maybe it even felt like something artistic, something thoughtful, the kind of thing that our old high school art teacher, Mr. Killebrew, would never guess we had in us.
Lee and Ronny preferred sunsets, moonrises. Some westbound freight train roaring through the night below, never stopping, its cyclopic light to cut the night, its whistle the loudest thing in the world, and high on top of those towers, feeling wobbly-kneed, as if the train might shake the building to the ground. Those two: always high, always singing “Idiot Wind” or “Meet Me in the Morning,” hurling their beer bottles out into the night, out at the passing trains, listening for a crash, listening for police sirens that never came, the voice of authority telling us to “Get down goddamn it!” But no—the entire town always too mild, too asleep, dozing in front of blue-faced televisions as Johnny Carson charmed everyone into a satisfied snore.
But sunsets. That was how I first understood that Lee was different from us, that he was maybe even destined to be famous. Because in the ten or twenty minutes before the sun was totally extinguished in the west, he always demanded our complete silence. And I don’t know why, but we listened, we acquiesced. And we’d sit there, sipping our dads’ beer, looking out on that chameleon sky, and we’d listen to Lee. Listen to him hold court.
Shotgun Lovesongs: A Novel Page 5
