Shotgun Lovesongs: A Novel

by Butler, Nickolas

  But I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t hungry.

  B

  OUTSIDE, THE DAY WAS WHITE as heaven, and entering the bar, I had to pause just inside the door to let my pupils adjust to that box of darkness. There wasn’t any music playing, but above the bar was an ancient television mounted to the ceiling where Alex Trebek stood browbeating three nerds in turtlenecks: Jeopardy. The female bartender, oblivious to my entrance, was mumbling out answers in the form of questions. I peered deeply into the bowels of the VFW and thought I saw a hand back there, long fingers, waving. Felicia. I moved past a row of illegal slot machines, past the battered pool tables, past a collection of pool-cues standing in a corner, and then past the jukebox so old it seemed almost senile, repeating the same songs like so many shell-shocked war stories. Felicia was sitting alone in a booth, a pitcher of beer in the middle of the table near two glasses.

  “Thanks for coming,” Felicia said. “I really didn’t know who else to call.” She poured beer into the glasses, offered a half-hearted toast, and then took a little sip. And then a bigger one.

  I set my purse down inside the booth, removed my coat, and settled in. The beer was cold and the first taste didn’t set well with me, I would have rather drunk a coffee or tea, even hot chocolate, anything but cold, wheaty beer, but this was the VFW, and no one orders tea at the VFW. Across the table, Felicia was taking another long pull from her glass, a little foam collecting in the very fine invisible hairs above her lip. The foam only there for a second before she ran the back of her hand across the lip, like a little girl wiping away her runny nose.

  “Kip and I are separating,” she said, and the statement just hung there a moment, ugly, awkward, and unbelievable. She shrugged, and then began crying, covering her face.

  My first reaction was to collapse into the wall on my right, the one graffitied over with the names of Little Wing residents who drank there. Is everyone getting a divorce? I thought. Has the whole world lost its freaking mind? But I moved out of the booth momentarily and slid in beside Felicia, pushed the beer away from us, and handed her a Kleenex. I was unsure whether or not to touch her back in comfort, but then decided to, rubbing her shoulder blades and neck much as I might rub my own children’s bodies. Felicia blew her nose, loudly. It sounded like a foghorn on a soupy Lake Michigan day. The bartender looked up for a moment as if she had forgotten she had any patrons at all, then resumed her focus on Jeopardy.

  “He doesn’t want kids,” Felicia said, “doesn’t now, never did. I don’t know what I was thinking. I have no fucking idea what I was thinking. Marrying him. Coming here.” She looked up, held her palms out in surrender. “No offense, it’s not your fault. But I’m just—I’m fucking pissed. Ever since I came to this place, my whole life has just been one big shit-show.”

  I shrugged. “Don’t worry—none taken.” I reached for my glass, the one without lipstick, and took a long drink. The beer was warming; it tasted better now, smoother. I glanced at the bar. “Hold on, okay? I’ll be back in a flash.” I slid out of the booth and moved back toward the sound of Trebek’s voice.

  I leaned against the bar. The bartender sat on a stool, her thick arms crossed, and said at the television, “Who is Bart Starr?”

  “Excuse me,” I said, “I’d like to order a few shots.”

  The bartender held up a finger. “Who is Vince Lombardi?”

  “Ma’am?” I said.

  “Hold your horses, sweetheart. Today, they actually got a category I know something about.” She bounced a finger against her lower lip, then erupted in a triumphant smile. “Who is Brett Favre!”

  “Ma’am.”

  She turned from the television and said, “If there’s anything I know about, it’s the Green Bay Packers. Now. What can I getcha?”

  “Two buttery nipples.”

  The bartender, a woman who looked like she’d ridden a hundred thousand miles’ worth of back roads on the saddle of a Harley-Davidson, looked at me with two squinty eyes and said, “Darlin’, did I just hear you right?” She leaned warily against the back rail, against a rack of potato chips that made a noise suggesting that the contents had just been pretty well pulverized. Also behind her: cheese doodles, pork rinds, and bags of peanuts. And the monster jars: one of pickled eggs. Another of pickled pigs’ feet. The jars were dusty, as if they hadn’t been touched in decades, and it wasn’t hard to see why. She recrossed her arms, pursed her lips, and cocked her head at me. “Care to tell me how the hell I’m supposed to make one of those things?”

  “Half butterscotch schnapps, then a little Irish crème, and a little Midori, I think.” It was a shot I’d always favored in college, and later on, at that fried-chicken bar where I worked as a waitress. I looked outside. It was a little past noon on a Monday. The kids were at school, Henry at home. When I left home he was reclined on the couch, reading a book about Lewis and Clark. Henry can take care of the kids, I thought. Already, the light outside seemed to be waning. The winter solstice had been three weeks before, so that the daylight was actually elongating with each new day; but still, it felt like Siberia, like we lived in some suicidal Lapland backwater. “Hell, make it three. You ought to have one, too. My treat.” I reached across the bar and extended my hand. “Beth.”

  The bartender stepped forward, accepted my hand. “Joyce.” She set three shot glasses down the bar. “I know who you are, by the way, Ms. Brown. You’re Henry’s wife, right? You might not come in here much, and I might not get out of here much, but that don’t mean I don’t know what’s happening in the world. I know just about everyone—or who they are anyway.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Joyce.” I suddenly remembered with a trace of embarrassment that Joyce had worked in our elementary school, cooking the food that had once nourished me and now, for all I knew, nourished my children. She had grown old, cigarette smoke and alcohol leaving her skin gray, her fingers yellow. She looked ragged.

  “Now, what’d you say was in these”—and Joyce paused a moment, peering at me with a half-grin—“buttery nipples?”

  “Butterscotch schnapps, Irish crème, and Midori. Or, I think you can also use cinnamon schnapps. I can’t remember.” I hadn’t had one in years but all of a sudden, there it was, the perfect elixir for this deeply discouraging afternoon.

  Joyce nodded, and began grabbing bottles, pouring each in turn. “Well, what I propose in an instance such as this is that we do a little taste test. How ’bout that? You buy this round, I’ll buy the next. Dial in our recipe, so to speak. We’re still confused, why, your friend back there, I bet she’d welcome another round.” Setting the three shot glasses on a cork-bottomed tray, Joyce moved out from behind the bar. “Here, lemme take these back to you. Hate to drop such a thing as a buttery nipple on our nice floor here.”

  I glanced at my winter boots. Beneath them: a detritus-field of peanut shells, spent matches, empty matchbooks, pennies, dried gum. I followed Joyce back to Felicia, who was hastily wiping her face of tears. Joyce tenderly set the shots on the table. “To a new year,” she said. “’Cause the last one sure as shit wasn’t anything to brag about.” Felicia barked out a surprise laugh, her sudden smile so reassuring. “Cheers,” we all said, touching glasses, which were immediately emptied.

  “What was that?” Felicia asked.

  Joyce nodded her head. “Not too bad,” she said. “Not too bad at all.”

  “Buttery nipples,” I said, smiling broadly. “Buttery nipples.”

  * * *

  For a moment, I regretted buying the shots. Felicia had asked me there, after all, to talk, not to drink. But then, the shots weren’t really for Felicia. They were for me. Felicia and I had become friends. Which is a cowardly way of saying that Felicia is my friend. She really is. She isn’t one of us—not exactly—but that isn’t her fault, and I came to realize that if I continued to ignore her, I’d be the one losing out. Having her there in town, having someone to call, having someone to jog with—these were pleasures I’d never had before she
and Kip moved to town. And here’s the thing: she’s a sweet lady. It’s not her fault that she’s incredibly put together, that she’s intelligent and driven, and beautiful. Maybe in a bigger city I could afford to hate her. But not here. Not in Little Wing. I’d certainly rather be friends with Felicia than the she-vampires out on the edge of town in their trailers, cooking meth or huffing gas or doing whatever the hell it is they do out there. Felicia is interesting and kind and generous, and she’s never been anything but genuine to me.

  And now this. Another divorce. Before Henry and I were married, our church made us go through premarriage counseling. We took compatibility tests, talked about money and children. The marriage counselor was surprised to learn that we’d known each other since childhood.

  “That’s pretty unusual,” she said, “you know, these days.”

  The fact is, half of all marriages end in divorce. But it’s not like, when you walk up to the front of the church the pastor or priest asks you, What’ll it be? Heads or tails? Lee and Chloe and now Kip and Felicia. And, of course, ever since Lee lost his mind and began spilling his guts about what happened almost ten years ago, Henry was as pissed with me as I could ever remember. Taken all together, it was almost more than I had it in me to process. And so for a long time after finishing our shots we just sat there quietly, Felicia and I, in the half-dark of the old cinder-block VFW post.

  I couldn’t blame Henry. As secrets go, it was a bad one. That day when Lee came back to Little Wing, Henry was supposed to bring him over for dinner, but when I looked out the front door at Henry’s truck he was just sitting there behind the wheel, the engine idling, this look in his eyes like all the light normally stored there had suddenly failed. Maybe I should have intuited what the matter was, but I didn’t. I hollered at the kids to set the table and they did, excited to be near Lee, to see him again. I threw on a sweater and went outside to check on Henry. He didn’t notice me until I was right beside his window; I actually tapped on the glass and he turned his head, looked at me. There were tears in his eyes.

  “What is it?” I said.

  He looked away from me.

  “Roll down your window. Is everything okay? Is Lee okay?”

  But he wouldn’t roll down the window. He just sat there. His hands on the wheel, like a little boy pretending to drive a truck.

  I circled the truck and got in, sliding over the bench seat next to him. He wouldn’t look at me. And so I grabbed his face and turned it toward me.

  “Don’t. Fucking. Touch me,” he snapped. “Don’t touch me.”

  I moved away from him. Henry never spoke like that to me. He never so much as raises his voice. Never.

  He shook his head, the way I’ve seen him shake his head when a bill comes in the mail and I know he’s thinking, Where the hell did this come from? What the hell am I supposed to do with this?

  “Henry, come on. Come on inside. The kids.”

  “Let me be, all right? Damnit. Will you please just go away?”

  “Baby, tell me what’s wrong. What can I do? What can I do to make it better?”

  He turned on the radio. Turned the volume way up. Old-timey country, voices that sounded like hyenas, banshees, sirens. I went back inside the house.

  The kids asked where Uncle Lee was and I told them he’d gotten sick, that we’d all see him soon, though I knew then not what Lee had told Henry, but that something had come between them. We ate in silence—the kids and I—and when bedtime came they asked me, “Is Daddy still out in the truck? Can we go out to the truck too?” And I said, “No, your daddy’s just thinking.” “Is he listening to music out there?” they asked. And I said, “Yes, I suppose he is. Now get upstairs and brush your teeth.”

  I watched him from the front door for an hour, but he never moved, just kept the truck idling, the country music flowing out loud enough for me to identify Patsy Cline’s voice and then some newer stuff too. At ten o’clock I went up the stairs and crawled into bed; I’d left the dishes to soak, and a lasagna out on the table for Henry, if he wanted to eat.

  Sometime after midnight I heard the front door open and close and then the sound of Henry taking off his boots. The sound of him in the bathroom, peeing, washing his hands. I imagined him looking at himself in the mirror, washing his face, touching a day’s worth of whiskers. He never did come to bed, though; I waited and waited, until the red digital clock beside our bed read 1:01, at which point I must have fallen asleep.

  I woke up again at four in the morning and reached out for him in our bed, but he wasn’t there. I went downstairs, quietly, as quietly as I have ever descended those stairs, and there he was, lying on the couch, in his clothes, a quilt wrapped around his body, his head on some smallish throw pillows. He started, as I sat down beside him, and turned to look at me, his eyes bleary and tired-looking. I touched his forehead, brushed the hair there. I had witnessed in slow motion, this man, my husband, as he grew older, as the years whitened his temples, wore away at his hairline, made his bones creak.

  “Come to bed,” I said gently. “Come on.”

  He looked at me, like a stranger. “All these years,” he said, “you two have this secret. All those nights he came over to our house. My friend. Played with my kids, ate my food.” And then he looked away from me and turned his head too.

  I began crying. It felt like he’d punched me in the gut, all my wind gone. I wasn’t heartbroken for myself. I was heartbroken for Henry—this decent, decent man, this good man—my husband.

  “Henry, Henry, I’m so sorry, baby.”

  “You fucked him,” he said. “There it is.” He didn’t bother whispering. He just said the words out loud, as if he didn’t care if our children heard, as if to make abundantly clear that the dishonor was my own.

  “Henry—”

  “What else is there to say? You know? And Christ, now the fucker’s convinced he’s in love with you. He told me. One minute, we’re about to come over here for dinner, and the next minute, he’s saying, ‘I think I might be in love with Beth.’ Fuck. We live in a town of a thousand people, Beth. How long before people start talking, huh? How long before I’m walking around town with people whispering about us? Jesus!”

  He pushed his legs out away from the couch, and they brushed against me roughly, not a kick exactly, but close enough that it was clear Henry did not have the same regard for my body, in that moment. He placed his feet on the ground, lowered his head between his knees, ran his hands through his hair. “I can’t fucking sleep,” he said. “Every time I close my eyes, every time, I start to imagine you and…” He stood up, exhaled so loudly I thought he might wake the kids, and then said, “I’m going for a drive.”

  “It’s four in the morning,” I protested. “Come to bed. Please. Please just come up to bed.”

  I watched him lace up his boots, watched his arms find the sleeves of his jacket, watched the keys in his hand as they loudly jingled.

  “Fuck you,” he said. “You know? I love you, but fuck you.”

  Then he slammed the door and started the truck, the headlights suddenly so bright in our front window that I had to turn away and shield my face. And then he was gone, down the driveway and out onto the road.

  * * *

  “I’ve asked him probably a thousand times,” Felicia said, “why it was that he wanted so badly to come back, and, you know, he could never tell me. He’d start talking about the mill, or his friends, and I tried to understand. I thought I understood. Wanting to come back home, to be surrounded by people you know. I get it. And he’s never told me in so many words, but I really have to wonder if Kip ever fit in here. I mean, even back when you guys were all kids. And I’m not asking you to tell me either. Because I think I already know.”

  I took another shot, then a sip of beer. Outside, the day had almost totally yielded over to evening blue. Two hours ago I’d called Henry, told him to pick up the kids. It was easier now, between us. Some of the ice had thawed from his voice. He had even begun touching me
again, allowing himself to be touched. We were making love again, although, sometimes I recognized that the way he fucked me wasn’t all love either. There was anger there, too. I understood. That there was probably a part of him that might like to slap me, to shake me, but that he never would, never could. Henry, gentle man. So tender with our children. There were times I wanted him to explode—to call me names, to throw a plate, to break a window. But he wouldn’t, not ever. And yet I thought that if he ever did, if he ever so much as pushed me, we might be more even again. So most nights he just simmered away on low, faced away from me in bed, and I knew, of course, that his eyes were wide open, watching the snow that fell beyond the frost-laced window of our bedroom. I knew that he was thinking about spring, about being back in the fields, about his tractors, about work, about being away from me. He’d begun to spend more time in the milking parlor, and the kids said that sometimes they found him in there, talking to the cows. Maybe spring will help, I thought.

  “I’ve always wanted a baby,” Felicia continued. “I wanted a house full of babies.” She smiled at me, almost condescendingly. “I bet that surprises you, doesn’t it?”

  I looked at my own hands, at the scarred tabletop, at the bubbles of my beer, rising slowly and dying. I knew I could not meet Felicia’s eyes without displaying the very disbelief she’d anticipated. I glanced up. “No. Well, maybe a little.”

  “This job I have, I just fell into it. Came out of college, wore a short skirt to my first interview, got a job, and I’ve had it ever since. Never really had to think about what it was I wanted to do. What would really make me happy. I’m good at this job. Really fucking good. That’s why they let me work from home. That’s why I could come all the way up here, away from the office in Chicago. That’s why I’m on the telephone all the time, why I fly so much. Because they don’t want to let me go. And I used to like my job, quite a bit, actually. But you know what? I started to think, This is a distraction. This is a trap. Because what I really wanted, if I was being honest with myself, what I’ve always wanted, was to be a mother. And I’d walk down Main Street”—she pointed out the door without looking in that direction—“and I’d see these girls. These fucking girls, pushing strollers with babies. Or at the grocery market, pushing carts with babies, and I would just lose it. You know? Why in the hell do they get families and I don’t? What am I even doing? When is my life going to start?”