Shotgun Lovesongs: A Novel

by Butler, Nickolas

  Henry set the phone down quietly on its cradle. I heard him there behind me, right behind me, but he did not touch me and I wanted him to, though I understood why he did not, why one grown man does not touch another, even if it is the right thing to do.

  “What the fuck,” I said, “you know? What the fuck. She fucking left me.” I pulled at the hair on my head, pulled at my big, red ears. My whole face hot and dripping. I hung my head in the sink and just let it go, just let everything flow out of me and down, into the porcelain, down the drain. It sort of echoed there, my blubbering, and that half-sobered me up. I didn’t want Henry seeing me that way, didn’t want anyone to see me that way. I ran the tap, felt cold water on my face, ran water onto my hands and soaked my neck, my eyes, my nose. Coming up for air, I breathed deeply, wiped my face with the dry of my forearm, tears and snot glistening over my tattoos. The first time I took a shower after getting a tattoo, I was worried the ink would bleed right out of me. But by now, they’re just faded things, like old graffiti. “Sorry about that. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

  “Maybe that’s a no on the kids,” Henry said.

  I laughed, wiped my nose. Still, I couldn’t look at Henry. I looked again out the window and the coyote seemed to be looking back up at me. A crow flew over the ridge, black and shiny.

  “I’ll make some coffee,” Henry said.

  “Henry, can I ask you for a favor?”

  “Anything,” Henry said. I must have looked so frail, so sad.

  “Don’t leave me alone, all right?”

  Then Henry did hug me and I began crying again, but he squeezed me so hard he might as well have been trying to break my ribs, and it was clear he wasn’t going to let me go until I stopped crying. I understood then what kind of father he was, what kind of husband and man he was. I understood that he was stronger than me, better than me.

  * * *

  We sat beside the creek, passing a joint, watching the water carry leaves toward the Mississippi. I hadn’t gotten high in weeks and just then, I got stoned quickly, words flowing out of my mouth like musical notes that I could see and touch—the letters of those words out there in front of me like an alphabet banner floating away.

  “I’m so embarrassed,” I said. “I’m sorry, man. Sorry you had to see that back there. I don’t know. I’m just so sad. I’m sad and I’m confused and I don’t know what’s happening. I’m one of those people you read about at the grocery store. You know? Christ. We weren’t even married for a year. Who can’t stay married a year?”

  “Nobody cares,” Henry said. “Nobody will care. Just give it a couple months—you’ll see. We’re just glad you’re back.”

  “But you know what I mean, right? You see it. God. The fuck was I thinking?”

  Henry didn’t say anything, just tossed sticks into the river and watched them drift away.

  “You talked to Ronny lately?”

  “No. He okay?”

  Henry smiled wryly, nodded. “Better than okay, I’d say. He’s getting hitched.”

  “Oh, that. Yeah, he called me a ways back. I’m supposed to be the best man.”

  “So you heard then.”

  “What?”

  “That they’re pregnant. You know, that Lucy’s pregnant—the one who came to your wedding.”

  “What? You’re fucking with me.”

  “I swear.”

  “Lucy. The one who came to the wedding. She’s pregnant? They’re pregnant?”

  “Yep.”

  “Is this really happening, or am I just, like, totally stoned?”

  “She’s pregnant.”

  “No.”

  “Yup.”

  “No.”

  “Technically speaking,” Henry said, “depending on when your divorce is finalized, she’ll have been pregnant longer than you were married.”

  I looked at Henry, ready to take a swing at him, and then, I burst into laughter. And he joined in, and now we were riding it for all it was worth, our laughter loud enough to startle a grouse from the long grasses not twenty feet away.

  “You should call him,” Henry said. “He wanted to tell you personally. You being the best man and all.”

  “I don’t know what kind of best man I’ve been, tell you that. I feel like I’ve been a real shit-heel this whole last year. I don’t know what got into me.”

  Henry continued throwing sticks into the creek, looking away from me. “I thought you were going to leave us for good.”

  “No, I’d never have done that,” I lied. Then I said, “Henry, I got something I have to tell you.”

  Henry’s eyes were on the creek, the joint burnt down to a roach between his lips. The sun was down in the west, the day’s light almost all gone. It had grown cold and we pulled our jackets tight, blew into our hands.

  “Yeah?” He passed the joint back to me.

  I peered back at the house—the telephone poles and telephone wires linking my house to the world, the birds sitting on those wires like notes on a single lone unending line of music.

  “Well, it’s kind of a compliment, I guess.” Everything inside me is so blurry, so sad.

  “Everybody likes compliments.”

  It won’t be a secret if you say something.… “I might be in love with Beth.” I took a hit. Too late.

  Henry was silent. I waited for him to say something. But he didn’t. He just sat, ripping long blades of dead grass from the earth, his jaw strangely set.

  I wanted him to understand what I was trying to say. “I don’t know, Hank, but I think I’m in love with Beth. I think I’ve been in love with her actually a pretty long time.” She’s so beautiful.…

  Henry was quiet for a long time, and stoned as I was, I couldn’t discern how time was moving, if he had been quiet for a matter of seconds, or minutes, or hours.

  “I know we’ve been getting high together,” Henry finally said, “but I’m going to give you a chance. If you’re really fucked up and these things are just coming out of you and you can’t control it, then now might be the time to just say, ‘I’m sorry, Henry, I don’t know what came over me.’ Otherwise, man—I don’t know—we’re going to have problems.”

  You don’t know what you’re saying. “I think she might love me too.”

  “Lee, shut the fuck up.”

  “I’m sorry, but I just got to say it.”

  “Why? Why do you have to say it?”

  “Because it’s true. We slept together.” Stop talking.

  Henry stood, took two steps toward me, and lowered his face down beside my own. I stared out at the creek, could see his fist raised over my head, could feel his hot breath near me, could smell the tang of marijuana all over him.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  “I’m sorry, man.” This was a mistake.

  “Stay the fuck away from us, you hear?”

  “Henry.” Why did you say anything?

  “We’re done. All right? And don’t let me see you around, either. We’re done.”

  I did not watch him go away, did not watch him walk up the ridge, toward my house, did not see him pick up a stone and pitch it hard, straight through my kitchen window. Did not see him fire up his old truck and go peeling away from my house, kicking gravel thirty yards behind the snow tires he’d just put on.

  But I heard it. The glass breaking, the rage of that V-8 engine, the flying dirt and stones. And then the woods and meadow and sky were suddenly very quiet. Everything seemed to be watching me, waiting for me to move. And yet I sat, there in the dark, scared to do anything but breathe.

  H

  MY FATHER DIDN’T HAVE ANY friends. He didn’t play in any softball leagues and he wasn’t a member of any civic organizations. He shook hands with other dads at church, and I can remember that now, his short-sleeve dress shirts in summer and his navy blue wool suitcoats in winter. I can see him, holding a hymnal in his hands so that we could both read the words, his finger scrolling beneath the musical notes that neither of us could re
ad, understanding only the rises and falls of the music; his baritone and my soprano mingling in somber, self-conscious monotones. I can smell his cologne and feel his hand on the back of my neck. I can remember all that. But I don’t remember that he had any friends.

  He was a farmer, too, though back then, he and my mother milked about fifty Guernseys and Jerseys—a fairly sizable herd for that time. I’ve more than doubled the herd and right now, it’s all that I can do to keep up, even with Beth’s help. But it’s fair to say that he worked harder than I do and I remember that, too, him out in the milking parlor, hands buried beneath a cow’s udders—this was before all the new machinery that I have now, though Dad began installing his own machinery in my teens. I remember his hairy forearms, and how in the late mornings, they would be covered in motor oil and axle grease from the old tractors that he was perennially fixing. And mornings in our kitchen, sipping coffee and eating a plate of scrambled eggs. At lunch: standing over the sink, eating a salami, onion, and mustard sandwich, as he looked out over the fields or toward the barn, the herd out there, lazing and grazing. A look in his eyes that could have been pure contentment just as easily as it could have been the shock of seeing a ghost, the sure knowledge of being haunted.

  Evenings we ate early, my mother leading us in the same nightly supper prayer, and afterward, I carried our dishes to the sink as Dad retired to his favorite chair to watch the nightly news, always shaking his head. “I don’t even know why I watch,” he would say sadly.

  He died, three years ago. I’m happy to say that he met our kids, that he had time to play with them, to hold them in the hospital after they were just born. I know he was proud of them, of Beth, of me. I think I can say that he was happy, coming over to our house with Mom, surveying my new equipment, nodding his head as I talked about improved crop yields or greater milk production.

  But he didn’t have any friends. The telephone rarely rang for him. And I don’t think he desired friends either. I don’t think he was lonely. When I think about my dad, what impresses me is how dedicated he was to his farm, to my mother, to us kids. We were his life; we were his friends. When he sat down to watch a football game on Sunday, when he cracked a can of Walter’s Beer or balanced a plate of cheese and crackers on his chest and cheered on the Green Bay Packers, it was me who sat with him, who cheered with him. When he had high-fives to give, it was my little hand that he sought. When he felt like dancing, like singing, it was my mother who he grabbed to clumsily waltz or polka with in our kitchen. When he talked politics, it was with me, or my sister, pointing a steady and patient finger at us, saying, “I don’t care about left or right. It’s all nonsense. All I ask of you is this: Be kind. Be decent. And don’t be greedy.”

  My whole life, thirty-three years, and it feels like I’ve never been without friends. They’ve always been around, always been there. And maybe my life, our lives, have been richer for it. Ronny babysitting the kids, or, hell, the days when Lee would come over for dinner and play guitar for my daughter, showing her chords, placing her little fingers in the right places. My dad never had that. As kids, we didn’t have that.

  But I wonder now whether the reason my dad didn’t have friends, the reason he didn’t care to socialize, is that to be close to another man, to invite another man into your house, is to shake the dice. Because when it comes to men and women, to sex, maybe you can’t trust anyone, maybe everyone is an animal. You think you know someone, but you can never really know someone. You can’t monitor every shift in their eyes, every time your wife bends down to pick up a dropped spoon or stretches to unload the dishwasher. When I think now of all the times Lee visited us, it feels like my home was trespassed, that I was violated, lied to.

  No, the safest thing is to become an island. To make your house a citadel against all the garbage and ugliness in the world. How else can you be sure of anything?

  * * *

  After Lee’s wedding I began painting again for the first time since high school. I can’t explain it, maybe it was walking around those museums or just talking to Beth, but I couldn’t help myself. In the back of my tool shed I hid an easel and a plastic shopping bag full of oil paints in their tubes, and a collection of brushes. After taking the kids to school, I’d go out to the shed and I painted in the dim light of that building. Other times I would carry all my supplies elsewhere in a backpack. Out, way out, away from any of the roads and far enough out that Beth would never think to follow me. Tucking a little folding easel beneath my jacket and wearing knee-high black Wellingtons, I trudged over the resting fall and winter fields. I’m sure there must have been mornings when Beth watched me from the kitchen window, asking herself, Where is he going? What the hell is he doing? Maybe she thought I was out there hunting arrowheads, or killing varmints with my .22 rifle. Maybe she just thought I wanted to be alone—which was true. Later in the afternoon, she never seemed to notice me at the kitchen sink, washing paint from my hands, or sitting at the dining-room table with a pocketknife, cleaning dried paint from underneath my fingernails.

  I brought a little camping chair, and on the far side of a glacial ridge I sat and painted the creek that runs through our fields. I painted the cottonwoods and dead elms and poplars that line the creek like inverted buttresses. But mostly my paintings tended to be all sky—wide swaths of bruised purples and blues, foreboding whites and grays. I suppose I painted the sky because I’m not good enough to paint the things of the earth convincingly. When I finished a canvas, I built a bonfire so that I could incinerate the painting immediately. I’d throw the still-wet canvas on the fire along with our household garbage, old tires, or whatever other junk the farm produced. I hated most of my paintings and I was reluctant to tell anyone about my little hobby. So far, I’d painted only two pieces that I thought were decent enough to drive down to the St. Vincent’s store off Main Street, where I donated them both, telling Arnold the general manager that they had belonged to a great-uncle of mine who had recently passed away.

  In the weeks that followed, I’d stop in at the St. Vincent’s store on my trips to Main Street for postage stamps or groceries, gasoline or toilet paper, to check on my paintings. Arnold had hung them on a beige wall over a hideously upholstered secondhand couch, and in a way, they seemed naturally gaudy together, two paintings and a piece of furniture so ugly they were inevitably destined for someone’s fishing or hunting cabin, but certainly not anyone’s home. I had told myself that if either of the paintings sat there over a year, I would come back to the store, buy them, and incinerate them too.

  But then, one day, one of the paintings was gone.

  I found Arnold at the register, where I paid for a Duke Ellington LP in decent condition.

  “Hey, Arnold, who bought one of those paintings that I brought in? You remember?”

  He made change, dropped it into the cup of my hand, shrugged his shoulders. “Must have sold over the weekend. I was gone, snowmobiling up near Hurley don’t you know. You’d have to ask Brenda. She was manning the tills. You want me to leave a note?”

  “No,” I said, “that’s okay.” I left the store, looking at the blank place on the wall where one of my paintings had hung. I wondered who had been foolish enough to buy it.

  * * *

  The only friendship that ever mattered to my dad was my mom’s. They were best friends. You could see it, how much they cared for each other. How the love was there, how the love had changed, evolved into something different than what it was before we arrived, or even after we left the house, but was nevertheless still there, inside of them, inside the house they shared.

  When I think about that, I think, This is your fault. You didn’t know your own wife, your own best friend. If she felt she could have trusted you, you would have known this about her years ago. It wouldn’t have been this sudden tectonic secret, this bomb dropped on your heart.

  We think the world is steady, rolling through space beneath our feet, day and night, rain and sunlight. And then, one day, you just fal
l off the planet and drift away, into outer space, and everything you thought was true, all the laws that bound your life before, all the rules and norms that kept things in place, that kept you in place, they’re gone. And nothing makes sense anymore. Gravity is gone. Love is gone.

  * * *

  One afternoon in February, months after Lee’s little revelation, I drove into Eau Claire, drove to a bar that I used to frequent back in college. I sat at the bar, ordered a whiskey neat, determined that if a woman were to sit down next to me and smile at me, and if we were to start talking, and she were newly divorced or even separated … or if she were in town on business …

  I sat at the bar all afternoon and into the early evening, drinking slow enough that I never quite got drunk, just tired. I sat and drank and stared up at a television screen watching hockey highlights, basketball highlights, football highlights. A few women did come up to the bar, but they sat together in little groups, talking to each other, laughing into their martinis, daiquiris, and light beers. They didn’t seem to notice me, even when I occasionally rose to walk toward the back of the bar where the bathrooms were. And standing there, over the sink, washing my hands, I looked into the mirror. I just stared at myself. I said out loud, “Now what the hell are you going to do, bub? Huh?”

  Returning to my bar stool I remained invisible, and after paying my tab I went out into the gray evening cold and thought, What a strange place to try and find love. In the parking lot, my truck looked at me like a disgusted old friend who had waited there all along, so patiently. I drove home, took off my boots, and went into the basement, where I rummaged through my Craftsman tools, not sure what I wanted to fix or why, until Beth yelled down the stairs, “Henry, dinner’s on.”