Shotgun Lovesongs: A Novel

by Butler, Nickolas

  “It doesn’t even look like the same place,” I said. “All that color. Gone.”

  “What’s your music like?” she asked.

  I looked at the sky, the unbroken cloudscape hanging low, dropping gray etchings of rain over the black farmland, the bleached tan stalks of leftover corn.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Winter, maybe.”

  She nodded. “It’s coming.”

  * * *

  Those first few days I walked Bea’s property. I walked out to the road, walked along the gravel shoulder. Walked through the waiting fields; let myself feel lonely. I wanted to scout my new world.

  Not far from the farmhouse was an old chicken coop. The coop faced south, light filtering into the low narrow space inside through a series of grimy little windows about eight feet up, not far from the uninsulated ceiling. The floor was dirt, and chicken shit coated some of the walls like a white-and-black fresco. The air smelled of urea, rotten straw, and cold wet air.

  This will do.

  I cleaned the coop up as best I could. Raked out abandoned bird nests and dead mice. Swept the walls and ceilings free of cobwebs. Cleaned the windows with newspaper and vinegar water. Between the old walls and new plywood I nailed up, I stuffed fresh straw. Bought five rectangular bales of hay to sit on, and to set my computer on. Electricity had once run to the coop to light a single naked bulb hanging from the center of the ceiling. Light is good for laying chickens, it warms the coop and staves off broodiness. Joaquin helped me rewire the coop and then he found me a four-by-ten piece of remnant carpeting that we laid down over the dirt floor. I bought an old woodstove at an auction in Eleva and set it in the corner. Joaquin cut a hole in the ceiling, ran a chimney, insulated the flue.

  I had a studio.

  The snow came early. Before Thanksgiving. I remember standing in my bedroom, looking out at a mid-November blizzard so fierce I could see no part of Bea’s red barn. The Mexicans were already at work (they woke early every day, worked late, milking cows, mucking out stalls), and so I went downstairs and made coffee. Bea sat in the parlor, reading a National Geographic.

  “You’ve been here two weeks,” she said somewhat sternly, “and I haven’t heard you so much as play the radio.”

  “Well,” I stammered, “I’ve, you know, been setting up the studio … getting settled and whatnot.”

  “All right,” she said, “it’s just that I thought you were a musician.”

  * * *

  Maybe I needed a little talking-to, because I began waking up early too, as soon as I heard the Mexicans rising. I ate breakfast with them. Made them coffee. We sat together in the early-morning darkness and ate, wordlessly. They left without good-byes, piling into one old truck, and pulling out, the headlights sweeping across the porch and the front of the house, the taillights red and sleepy as they disappeared onto the road. Three men, one bench seat. Garcia, there in the middle, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, finishing the last of his tortillas slathered in butter and maple syrup.

  I washed and dried their dishes. Cleaned up the kitchen. Filled a thermos with coffee and got myself ready for the cold. Long underwear, thick socks, Red Wing boots, flannel, a good jacket, wool cap.

  Ninety-nine paces to the coop. That was my commute. Time enough to finish half a mug of coffee if I didn’t have to watch my footing for ice, mud, or deep snow. Inside I had stacked dry firewood—oak—and within an old plastic milk crate were sheaths of newspaper, pine cones, and other kindling. That was my favorite time, making a fire, starting my day, my belly still full and warm, coffee already made, my fingers and toes cold but growing warmer. Sometimes I sat for an hour or more, hunched over the stove, just warming my palms. Bea gave me an old shortwave radio and I plugged that in, listening to whatever I could find: French lovesongs from Quebec, zydeco from New Orleans, bluegrass from Appalachia, even gospel from one of the local Bible-thumper stations.

  Then I’d start scratching out songs, ideas, poems. About anything I was lonesome for, which, at the time, turned out to be just about everything. I hadn’t told anyone I was there, not even Henry or Ronny. Eddy was in town, I knew that, and the Girouxs. But I hadn’t seen anyone. I never went into town, which was a scant five miles away. Bea liked to drive into Little Wing every day, so if I needed groceries I just gave her a list and some money. If I wanted beer or booze, I slipped Joaquin some cash and he brought me whatever I wanted. Also, Garcia could always score weed.

  The music sounded a lot like that coop: a cold place hungry for heat. Songs started slow, then thawed and began to flow. If the woodstove popped midtrack, midrecording, then so be it. If the wind was howling down hard from the Dakotas, from Alberta and Saskatchewan, and rattling the loose windowpanes, so be it. Reminded me of old jazz recordings—John Coltrane captured asking for a cigarette, Miles Davis murmuring to a producer, or those live tracks from the Village Vanguard—glasses tinkling, ice cubes calving, high heels clicking down stairs from Greenwich up above.

  Musicians I meet on tour, especially the young ones, younger than me, they ask, “How do we get where you are? How do we take that next step?” I never know what to say exactly. I think most of the time I probably tell them to just keep on keeping on. Stay after it. But if I was drunk, if I was really spilling my guts, I’d say this:

  Sing like you’ve got no audience, sing like you don’t know what a critic is, sing about your hometown, sing about your prom, sing about deer, sing about the seasons, sing about your mother, sing about chainsaws, sing about the thaw, sing about the rivers, sing about forests, sing about the prairies. But whatever you do, start singing early in the morning, if only just to keep warm. And if you happen to live in a warm beautiful place …

  Move to Wisconsin. Buy a woodstove, and spend a week splitting wood. It worked for me.

  * * *

  I walked the envelope down Bea’s gravel driveway, every step more difficult than the last, the mailbox and county road like some terrible black hole sucking that letter out into the world, toward Beth. I stood at the mailbox for several minutes before finally sticking the envelope in the box and closing the door behind it. A moment later I opened it again, put the letter in my pocket. And then I swore at myself, and put the letter back in. Then I took it back out. I looked both ways down the road, for motorists, bystanders, witnesses. Of course there were none. Possibly Bea herself, standing at the porch window, spying at me through her bird-watching binoculars, thinking, Fool musician. Finally, I put the letter in the box, walked down the road about twenty paces, and sat myself down, flicking gravel with my fingers. It was a warmish day for January and a friendly fog hung over the botchy patches of snow.

  By and by, the rural route mail carrier came along in an old minivan, the steering wheel on the right side of his vehicle. We never got much mail, but I’d taken on the responsibility of walking to the mailbox to retrieve whatever might have come. Mostly bills. Coupons. A circular advertising used cars, real estate. No one knew where I was, so I never expected anything. Sometimes a letter came from Mexico and I enjoyed touching those foreign stamps, holding the envelope up to my nose to see if I could smell anything exotic, but no. The mailman finished plugging our box and then closed the door. He eased his minivan beside me.

  “That letter in there,” he said, “you address that?”

  I nodded.

  “I know Beth,” the mailman said, “sweet girl.” He eyeballed me suspiciously. “Do I know you?”

  “Probably not,” I lied, “I’m just passing through.”

  If there’s ever a drawback to living in a small town it’s that you can’t ever disappear from your neighbors. They know where to find you. And more often than not, they do find you. Because they need you, or your tools, or your truck. See, we depend on one another. I recognized the mailman, if only dimly. Though I hadn’t lived in Little Wing for years, his face was familiar. He drank at the VFW early in the evening, preferred a cocktail called a rusty nail, and sometimes played cribbage at the bar with another
rural route carrier.

  “You do know this is her parents’ address, right?” he asked. “Not hers.”

  I nodded, stood, wiped the wet gravel off the seat of my pants. “Well, thanks again,” I said.

  “Next time,” he said, “use a pen. I can hardly read this.”

  * * *

  I just wanted to be close to her, I think. I wanted to be in a woman’s company. I wanted to lie in bed with a woman and smell a woman’s hair and touch a woman’s stomach, and more than anything I wanted to talk to someone. Was the letter I wrote to Beth honest? I think it was. I think it was utterly sincere, though all these years later, maybe it’s hard to say, really. We slept together, that much is undeniable, and I refuse to regret that, exactly, and I’ll remember that night the rest of my life. By now, I’ve slept with hundreds of women. Maybe more than a thousand. I’ve probably had more lovers than Little Wing has residents. But that night, with Beth, it’s the one I remember. It’s the one that confuses me, that makes my heart ache, that speeds my blood.

  What kind of friend am I? To have slept with my best friend’s wife? Sure, they weren’t married at the time—they weren’t even together at the time—but still. I’ve kept a secret all these years. And I imagine Beth has, too. Does that mean we’re ashamed of what we’ve done? Or does it just mean we want it all to ourselves, like an inexplicable dream, a dream you wake from and want to deliciously return to, a dream that you could dwell in for ages, as your body grew older, as your bed grew more exhausted, as the ones you love faded and died on the margins of your reality.

  * * *

  The morning after we slept together, Beth was gone before dawn. I could hear the Mexicans in the kitchen, breaking eggs, frying tortillas in lard, beans bubbling away in a pot. Bea shuffling around in her slippers, whistling “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree.” The radio murmured in a corner beside the toaster, smoking slightly from a largish crumb of Bea’s banana bread.

  “Buenas,” I said to no one in particular, to all of them in general. I was happy to see that coffee had already been made and I poured myself a cup and blew away its steam.

  “Buenas,” said my housemates, while Bea eyed me up and down as if I were nothing more than a bum.

  “Your sister, huh,” she said.

  Garcia snickered, forked eggs into his mouth, then choking, coughed, sipped orange juice and sat upright, recovering.

  “She could have joined us for breakfast, you know,” Bea said, “your sister. She was certainly welcome.”

  “She had an early flight to catch,” I said.

  “Did someone get up in the middle of the night?” Joaquin asked. “I thought I heard someone at the front door.”

  “You know,” I said, “I think maybe I’m just going to take my breakfast and coffee and head out to the studio today.”

  I scooped some eggs and beans into a bowl and laid three tortillas over it to trap the heat, then carried my food and cup of coffee and went outside. No jacket, no long underwear. Inside the studio I kicked the door shut, set the food down on top of the woodstove, started a fire, and that day, I finished Shotgun Lovesongs. I worked nonstop. When I needed to, I stepped outside, out of view of the farmhouse and Bea’s binoculars, and pissed into a snowbank. When I was hungry, I ran inside for more tortillas, more coffee. It was a Sunday, the Mexicans’ sole day off, so they lounged and loafed in the living room, watching college basketball, professional wrestling, a documentary on humpback whales. In the kitchen, menudo steamed the windows. Somehow, everyone seemed to understand what was happening, what I was doing—when I entered the house they simply nodded at me. They kept brewing pots of coffee. When I came in after dusk, an apple pie was waiting on the counter, the kitchen smelling of cinnamon and nutmeg.

  * * *

  The reason they’re called shotgun weddings is that the father of the bride is holding a shotgun to the groom’s back. Something has happened. A pregnancy, a popped cherry, a bankruptcy, a war broke out. Whatever it was that happened, though, that wedding is going to happen, and happen quick. No planning. Probably straightaway to the courthouse and maybe a nice reception sans alcohol in the basement of the bride’s church. No honeymoon, no aluminum cans dragging behind a limousine.

  That’s how I thought about Shotgun Lovesongs. It felt like I was holding a shotgun to my own back. I felt this pressure, this incredible pressure to do it, to finish, to prove to Little Wing, to Beth, to Kip, to Ronny, to Henry, that I wasn’t a failure. That I could do it, I could do something beautiful and different and noteworthy and I could do it quick and dirty in an ancient chicken coop with just my shitty little personal computer and a woodstove to keep me from freezing to death.

  That album, that album that cost me basically six hundred dollars to produce, it sold one point six million copies. It’s still selling. It sells more every week than the week before that. And the lovesongs. They were all written for Beth.

  * * *

  I drove the U-Haul into Little Wing, past the quarry, past the golf course, over the railroad tracks, and over a no-name creek. There was the mill, Kip’s mill. Trucks assembled outside, even a rumbling train accepting a freight of corn. The air seemed to idle, yellow corn dust rising up into the heavens. Men dangled from hanging platforms off the side of the mill’s tallest tower; painters. Up high, the mill was going from battered gray to a honeyed cream color. Against the blue sky, it looked like small-time prosperity, though closer to the ground, beneath the painters, the mill remained a building that had suffered too many long winters. I drove on, Eau Claire still twenty-odd miles away.

  Henry was waiting for me, in the U-Haul parking lot, leaning against his truck. We greeted each other with a big, hearty bear hug, smiled at each other.

  “You look like shit,” Henry said.

  “It’s good to be home.”

  “What do you have to do?”

  “Give them the keys and then let’s skedaddle. I wanna go grocery shopping, get some beer.”

  On the way back to Little Wing after stocking up on groceries, we rode in an excited silence, the particles of air between us electrified and happy, though neither one of us knew exactly what to say.

  “So,” Henry said, and I knew it was his way of asking about my divorce.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what happened. Nothing dramatic. We just—shit, we had no business getting married. You know? You and Beth. You guys got it figured it out. I don’t know. I really have no idea how you even do it.”

  We were silent a moment, focused on the road.

  “So, now what?”

  I shrugged, looked out my window: a valley full of rusty tractors and junked pickups, ridgelines delineated with rock walls and ancient oak trees connected by strands of barbed wire. “I guess I’m here. I guess I’m divorced. Excuse me. Getting divorced. Separated. We’re separated.”

  “Well, me and Beth feel awful for you guys. We liked Chloe. I liked Chloe.”

  “A lot of men do, apparently.”

  “Lee.”

  “No, apparently it’s true.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what to say.”

  We rode on in silence. Over there: a herd of cows in a line, all walking daintily toward a red barn. And there, far off on the horizon: a hot air balloon, yellow as a New Mexico license plate.

  “Feel like getting drunk?” I asked.

  Henry turned to me, then nodded his head slowly, as if he needed a little time to consider this question. “I think I do feel like getting drunk. Yes. Now that you mention it. Yes. Though, you sure that’s what you need?”

  “It couldn’t hurt.”

  We stopped at a liquor store and I bought so many cases of beer, so many cases of wine and booze, that the old man who owned the store lent us a dolly to better transport it all out to the truck. Back and forth we went, Henry holding the door open for me while I shuttled in and out, loading the alcohol into the bed of Henry’s truck.

  “You think that ought to be enough?” I asked at th
e cash register, winking at Henry.

  “I don’t know,” Henry said. “Maybe not.”

  I shrugged. “Sell us another three cases of Leinenkugels.”

  The old man blinked big behind his thick glasses before adding this onto our tally. The receipt tape on the cash register grew longer and longer, like a tiny scroll.

  “You throwing a party?” the old man asked, peering up at me.

  “A welcome back party,” I said, smiling, and placed ten one-hundred-dollar bills on the counter.

  * * *

  Back at my place, we unloaded the booze and groceries. There is an old General Electric refrigerator in the garage and we filled it entirely with beer. Then we restocked the kitchen until the pantries brimmed with cereal, crackers, potato chips, olive oil, pasta, spaghetti sauce.

  “I oughta call Beth and check in,” Henry said. “Mind if I use your phone?”

  I waved a hand. “Invite her over. Tell her to bring the kids.”

  “You sure?”

  I shrugged, let my shoulders fall. Looking out the window I suddenly felt like a very old truck whose odometer has lost track of its miles. I was overtaken by the desire to get drunk and stay drunk, but I dreaded the next day or the next, the notion of being alone, of thinking about Henry and his family. Of Henry and Beth in bed. Them touching, kissing. Them just being together. Her reading him the newspaper. Him painting her toenails.

  “Why not?” I said.

  “All right, I’ll see what she says. I can’t remember. Maybe one of the kids has practice. I can never keep it straight in my head.”

  “Kids,” I said. “Kids.” I wondered what it was like, to be a parent, to be responsible for another human being.

  Henry was punching in numbers on my house telephone, and he looked over at me. “You okay, buddy?” he said gently. “We don’t need to get lit, if you don’t want to. We could just make some coffee, take a walk. I don’t know, make a fire or something. Make sure your truck is running okay. Mess around with the tractor.”

  I stood in front of the sink, arms braced straight out in front of me. Outside the window and down below the house was the coyote, standing at the edge of the treeline, where the sumac stops because of the thick shade. I was crying, quietly—I couldn’t help myself, it just broke. I hunched over the sink, my shoulders heaving, my heart breaking in a way it never had in New York, and I could feel my lungs burn for oxygen—I had forgotten to breathe—and by the time I opened my mouth I was sobbing. All that I could do was sob. And I was so embarrassed, so sad. I was getting divorced. We had fallen apart.