“That’s okay,” he said. “I’ll take it home with us tonight. We’ve found a place here, but the walls are still pretty bare.” He looked at Henry. “Be sure to thank Kip for me, though. This is really something.”
Then Lee hugged us all one more time, as if we were going away for a long, long time. I felt his rib cage against my chest, remembered how skinny he was that winter, at Bea Cather’s farmhouse out on the range and, kissing his cheek, I said into his ear, “Take care of yourself.”
I don’t know why I suddenly felt so sad, but I did, I really did. New York City felt as far away from Wisconsin as I could imagine. When he waved to us and moved to another table, smiling, laughing at their jokes, I thought, Maybe we weigh him down. Maybe he needs to let us go.
I looked down at my dress, Felicia’s beautiful dress, at my body, hardened from all the miles I had pounded out on the roads near our house, and that was the only place I wanted to be—back home. The kids, crawling into our bed on a Sunday morning—or not, just Henry and me, watching the new white-yellow sunlight set the lace curtains on fire, the black fields beyond, studded in green and growing greener every day; mourning doves on the telephone wires and perched atop our silo, cooing; and all those men, all of Henry’s friends, stopping by our house unannounced, throwing our children in the air effortlessly, crowding around our kitchen table for coffee and pie. I thought of the Giroux twins, standing around Henry, almost like a football huddle, talking about seed or tractors, talking about rain or erosion, talking loud and sure, like two men who’d never left town and never would. Two kings sharing a kingdom. It is true that I smiled then, thinking of them. Thinking of pot-bellied Eddy Moffit lumbering down Main, grinning kindly at passing cars, tapping them on their slow-moving trunks, hiking his pants up only to have them drift down again, beneath the great, fleshy porch of his belly. Eddy, in our church, reading out that week’s scripture, doing so with a rich, generous baritone, the kind of voice you imagine as a child, reading you bedtime stories. Eddy, looking out over the church, out over reading glasses like two half-moons. Easing his Bible shut and saying, “Here ends the reading.” Or Ronny. Ronny roaming Little Wing’s streets, falling asleep in the warmth of the public library, a newspaper spread out before him, and What do you suppose he was reading? Or volunteering at the high school as a varsity football coach, bracing tackling dummies for collisions, the town kids protecting Ronny, treating him the way you might a revered uncle, a damaged angel. Ronny, lonely on a Tuesday night, wandering into the VFW, where the bartenders know to serve him only Coca-Cola, to place bowls of popcorn before him, to switch the big television up top to rodeo coverage on ESPN, or nature documentaries of the American West on PBS.
“Come on,” I said to Henry. “I’m tired. Let’s go.”
He looked at me, pulling back to survey my face. “You sure?” he asked. “The night’s young. You want to dance? We haven’t even had cake yet.”
“I’m sure, let’s go. Come on, let’s get a cab.”
I kissed Ronny on the cheek, so happy that he was there, there with a woman, just like any other man, and to anyone else in the room, no different. Lucy sat in his lap, her long legs crossed, off the ground.
“Go on,” she said, “I think we’ll hang on here for a while.” She shooed us away with a hand. “Don’t worry—I’ll watch this one.”
Outside the mansion, we found our driver, rolling dice against a curb with three other chauffeurs, dollar bills stacked on the pavement, music pumping from the back of a parked limousine. We told him to wait for Ronny and Lucy, that we were going for a walk. He seemed unconcerned, and waved us good-bye, hunched over the curb and rattling the dice in a big noisy fist.
We did walk for a while, watched the NYC police, leaning against their squad cars, the street vendors, lit by greasy lightbulbs, slinging food into waxed sheets of paper, into paper boats. Watched diners through the huge windows of fashionable restaurants, bouncers with folded arms outside clubs with no windows, and young people: the cocktail-dress girls on the prowl, the throwback hipsters in secondhand shoes and skinny jeans with suspenders and ironic facial hair, the seersucker-bow-tie boys with deck shoes and Ray-Ban sunglasses at ten o’clock at night.
I moved off the curb, hailed a taxi, the easiest thing in the world for a woman in a tight-fitting evening dress to do. Two fingers in the night air, as if I were testing the temperature, one leg out, at a thirty-degree angle, the other straight up to my shifted hip. Henry behind me, like a boy seduced. A yellow shark crossed three lanes of traffic with an almost unsettling swiftness and pulled right up to us, suddenly at our service.
I passed the cabbie a hundred-dollar bill, a gift from my parents before we’d left. My father had handed it to me saying something like, Have fun, okay? Don’t worry about anything. You two kids have some fun.
“Just drive us around,” I said, “I don’t know. Show us whatever you think a tourist should see. We’re staying at the Waldorf. So whenever we run out of money, just drop us off there.”
He took the money wordlessly, eyeballed us in his mirror, and eased the cab away from the curb, soon settling into a speed that seemed just about right for touring. I leaned into Henry, rested my head on his chest, felt his heartbeat.
“You okay?” he asked, kissing the top of my head. “You seem a little out of sorts.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “I think I’m just ready to be home. To see the kids.”
Skyscrapers flashed by, all of them invisible to me just then, all of them the same.
“Maybe we can come back here,” Henry offered. “I don’t know. Next spring? Come out and visit them. Make it a yearly thing. You could go shopping. I’d like to see a baseball game here.” He looked down at me, his chin compressing itself, the type of angle you only see on the face of a person you love—his nose hairs, the crow’s feet about his eyes, his hairline, gently receding. I pulled his face down to me, and we kissed.
I didn’t answer him, just closed my eyes, felt the road beneath us, traffic lights flashing, flooding over my face, Henry’s hands in my hair.
I don’t know how much time passed before the cabbie pulled the car to a stop, said in a deadpan voice, “The Brooklyn Bridge,” as if we had requested this destination as part of our tour. “Go on,” he said, “take a look. I’ll be right here.”
We stepped out of the cab, the air suddenly warmer, wetter around us, and above, hulking over everything, this great gray bridge of granite and steel, the lights of cars traveling both toward us and away, the gentle lapping of the black river water, a tugboat’s horn, faint laughter.
“Mr. Killebrew used to tell us that he thought the world’s best cities all had one thing in common,” I said, looking at Henry. “Do you remember that?”
Henry nodded. “I do,” he said. “He really liked bridges, didn’t he?”
“You remember?”
Henry said, “I was afraid to admit it then, but I really liked him, you know? He tried to get me to go to college for painting, you believe that?”
I could actually feel my jaw drop, my mouth hanging wide open. It’s a funny thing, being married to someone for so long, being someone’s best friend for so long. Because on those few occasions when they surprise you, it feels like the biggest thing in the world, like a crack in the sky, like the moon, suddenly rising over the horizon twenty times bigger than the last time you looked.
“I had—I never knew,” I stuttered. “What did you paint?”
He kicked at an upturned street-brick. “I liked to paint the mill. Tractors. Creeks. I don’t know. I think Killebrew was just being nice.”
We watched the traffic on the bridge, stood against each other, quietly.
“Come on,” Henry said after a while. “Maybe he’ll take us to another one.”
We rode the city, holding hands, sometimes stealing little kisses, other times as composed as perfect strangers next to each other, staring out our separate windows.
“Can I tell you something?�
�� I finally said, breaking the silence.
“What is it?”
“I don’t think they’re going to make it. Lee and Chloe, I mean.”
Henry studied me, exhaled deeply, looked out at the city. “Why not?”
“I don’t know. I just have a feeling.”
“I feel like he’s not coming back,” Henry said. “Like he’s gone already.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I suppose you get to a point where you can’t be, you know, stymied anymore. Where you need to find a bigger place. I mean—is he really supposed to stay in Little Wing? I don’t know.”
“I’m sorry, Henry.”
“We’ve been friends since we were eight years old.”
“I know.”
“And now it’s like, I don’t know, it doesn’t feel like him anymore.”
“I’m not sure I like her,” I said.
We stopped at an intersection bathed in red. An old man pushed a three-wheeled shopping cart loaded with what looked to be everything he owned in the world. I watched him struggle to push the cart up a curb. The light turned green.
“I miss winter,” Henry said.
“I miss fall,” I said.
L
I PULLED THE U-HAUL to the side of Uecker Road, to the mouth of my driveway where the gravel scatters itself out onto the asphalt like a runaway game of marbles. My mail had been forwarded on to New York the last few months, but still, circulars and a few envelopes littered the dirt and weeds around the mailbox. I stooped over, collected the soggy paper into a sodden bundle. The mail was everywhere, and many of the letters were hand-tooled—fan letters. I can recognize the handwriting of a heartbroken thirteen-year-old girl from across the room: pink ink, that big bubble alphabet, exclamation marks galore. Or the handwriting of a down-on-his-luck twenty-something Midwestern meatpacker or pipefitter: bold angry block lettering, yellow legal paper, misspelled words crossed out everywhere. Some of the letters had blown all the way into the ditch. My legs were tired from the drive, but ambling down into the ditch, into the cattails, it was a pleasure to feel my spinal cord unbow. My Red Wings became soaked, my socks sopping. I had no idea how long ago those letters had been delivered, how long they’d sat in the ditch, their ink bleeding out, but I couldn’t leave them there like that, strewn around like so much garbage—like I didn’t care. Because I do care. I was happy to find them there. Especially just then, arriving back home. It was as good as someone hanging a giant WELCOME HOME banner across the driveway. Though, of course, no one did know that I was coming home. Anyway, I knew I’d have something to read, someone to write to if the loneliness was too much.
After I was satisfied that all the wayward mail had been collected, I set the wet stack on the bench seat of the truck, then walked toward the thick steel chain that hangs across the entrance of my driveway. Just six months before, I’d dug two holes, setting the posts into the stony ground on either side of the driveway, and then poured cement around the posts, and when the cement set, I hung the chain, padlocked the works, and caught a flight from Minneapolis to New York. I’d never done anything like that before, never fenced myself or my house off from the outside world, never felt the need for it, even with the occasional trespassing journalist, autograph hound, or groupie. I remember thinking that the chain was something new, some kind of sign, that I was becoming less attached to Little Wing, to Wisconsin. It had scared me. But that was in the spring, before my wedding, back when I was still officially single. And now I was single again, I guessed, though technically, legally, we were only separated. We were getting a divorce, Chloe and I. The wedding ring was still on my finger, but it had begun to feel more ridiculous each day I wore it. The whole drive from New York back home I hung that left arm out the driver’s-side window, letting the night cool contract my skin and always with the idea that I might lose it somewhere along the way. But it hung on, still noosing my finger tight. Sort of a souvenir of love, I thought, spinning it around and around.
I slid a key into the silver padlock and it sprang open with a jerk. Maybe I’ll mail the ring to a fan, I thought. Wouldn’t that be something? I set the chain down in a shiny pile off to the side, returned to the U-Haul, fired up the ignition, and pulled the cumbersome truck off the road in a cloud of black and blue exhaust. It labored down my long, long driveway, almost begrudgingly, and I rubbed its dashboard affectionately; it had gotten me home, after all. Overhead a canopy of autumnal maples formed a tunnel of fire—oranges, reds, yellows, a few greens still. I rolled the window all the way down, rested my elbow on the door, though it was fairly cool outside, and breathed the air in.
Home.
The dirt and gravel potholes were filled with rainwater and I intentionally aimed the U-Haul’s wheels for each one. I’ve always liked to hear that splash, liked to feel the coils under my seat bounce and groan as I inched closer to home and the meadow, the trees I’ve planted and the creek beyond.
I relaxed, felt my shoulders loosen, my eyes widen. I hadn’t felt that way in months. Hadn’t felt healthy.
Home.
The woods opened out now into the meadow, where I could see in the early-morning light that the summer grasses and raspberry bushes had gone yellow-brown in patches. And then, look: a dozen or more deer, their ears suddenly pricked up at attention, their white tails semaphores of caution. What could they have been thinking, as they watched the approach of that big, boxy, unfamiliar truck? Did they recognize me? I watched their very skin and musculature ripple and tremble with excitement and fear. I waved to them, waved goofily, waved like I knew I was alone, yelled out the window, “Hey, deer! I’m back! Lee’s back!” And that sent them scattering away.
I need to get a salt block out there, I thought. I’m going to need some company.
I parked the U-Haul in front of the driveway and went up to the front door, fumbling with my keys, and opened the place up, leaving the door yawning open so I could carry in a few loads. Stretching, groaning, scratching my head, all I wanted was a shower, to brush my teeth, to drink a cold glass of water. The water tastes better here, tastes like something—like iron, I thought. Or maybe it’s the absence of things. The absence of chlorine, of sulfur, of being recycled a thousand times over. Outside, the deer had begun drifting back toward the shadows of the trees near the hem of the pasture. There was so much to do and at the same time, nothing to do at all. God, to just make myself a pot of coffee, to spark up a cigarette on the porch, to find out if the old tractor would turn over. I’m sure I stood in my entryway a full five minutes, just walking in circles, just happy as hell to be home.
Home.
The air inside the house smelled stale. Dead flies lay scattered on the window sills and the floors beneath. A layer of dust over everything: the furniture, my books, on the television screen. At the kitchen sink I turned on the tap but the pipes just coughed hoarsely, like they had an announcement they weren’t entirely sure they wanted to make. I remembered I’d shut off the water, had of course never thought that I’d be back this soon. And yet, there I was. Down in the basement, I turned the water back on, heard the kitchen tap sputter then rasp out water, at first haltingly, and then coming in an easy flow. All around the house I could hear the pipes saying ooohhh and aaahhh, as if they were happy to have me back. I climbed the stairs slowly, the muscles in my back and butt still sore and tight. The refrigerator hummed out a drone and I peered in, looking for a beer. There was one! A Leinenkugel’s! I drank lustily, like a man who’d just wandered out of the desert.
Pacing the house I turned the dial of the thermostat, waited to hear the groan of the furnace, that good basement fire—then shut the furnace off again. I rolled open windows, switched on the radio, opened the refrigerator again to see if any more beer or food had magically materialized. Then closed the door. Opened it again—still nothing.
Standing over the bathroom toilet, peeing, I held the beer up to my lips with my free hand—the breakfast of champions. Taped to the bathroom mirror was a
photograph of Chloe from Kip’s wedding. It was a perfect picture of her. One of the paparazzi, a friend of hers from New York who worked at one of the grocery store rags, had taken it and then sent her a nice copy along with a note, apologizing for the ambush. He’d sent along a few other good shots of the two of us but I’d left all those in New York. She could keep them if she wanted; I wondered if she would.
Souvenirs. Mementos. Keepsakes.
I flushed, went to the bathtub. The showerhead spat at first, but then gushed out hot water enough to steam the mirrors and warm the room—apparently I’d left the hot-water heater on, a happy mistake. I stripped, threw my clothes into a ball, stepped into the water—and then stepped out again, still dripping, to snag the brown bottle of beer, before returning to the shower. I leaned gratefully against that wall of tiles, swallowing down the cool of the beer in water so hot it reddened my pale skin. I closed my eyes, breathed deeply, slipped all the way down into the tub, and fell asleep in there, hot water still raining down all over me.
Home.
* * *
I don’t know how long I slept, but it couldn’t have been too-too long because I woke up with an empty bottle of Leinie’s between my legs and cold water coming down. If Chloe could have seen me: a goddamned shivering prune laying one-beer drunk on the bathroom floor, licking his wounds. Anyway, there was shit to do. Namely to return the U-Haul truck. Also: beer. I knew I needed beer. Cases of beer. And food. I wanted a freezer full of pizza and fish sticks. A refrigerator full of bratwurst, steaks, and pork chops.
Standing before my bathroom mirror, I surveyed the goods: a waif, an NYC hipster waif. Well fuck that. It was time to get ready for winter. Time to put on a few pounds. Time to split some wood. A towel wrapped around me, I went out of the bathroom and into my bedroom, put on some of my clothes—an old green chamois-cloth shirt and a pair of Carhartts, some nice thick wool socks. Then, pulling on an old mesh Brewers cap, I went out into the living room.
Shotgun Lovesongs: A Novel Page 12
