Shotgun Lovesongs: A Novel

by Butler, Nickolas

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I just—I didn’t know.”

  She exhaled deeply. “Look, it’s not your fault, sweetie. It’s his. I’m sorry for dumping all this on you.”

  I reached out for her hand, and she took mine.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  “It’s just—I’m running out of time, you know?”

  “I understand.”

  She took another deep sip of her beer. “God. All we’ve been talking about is me. I invite you to the bar and you get to hear me bitch all afternoon. Ugh. What about you? How are you guys? How are the kids?”

  I looked down at my hands.

  “Everybody’s great,” I said, looking up, nodding. “We’re great. You know, same old same old.”

  * * *

  For their part, our kids didn’t seem to take any notice, which is, I guess, a credit to Henry. He might have hated me then, might still hate me, but he kept it under his hat. In fact, he was better with the kids than I’d ever seen him before. Weekend mornings, he’d wake up early, make pancakes or waffles, and then get the kids organized. Almost before I knew what was happening, he’d have them out the door—the three of them—and I’d say, wiping the sleep from my eyes, in pajamas, bedraggled, “Where are you guys going?” And he’d say, “We’re going to Eau Claire. I thought maybe we’d go to the logging museum. We haven’t done that in a while. Maybe have lunch at Chicken Unlimited. Go see a movie.”

  “Um, can I come?” I’d ask.

  “Naw,” he’d say. “Relax. Stay here. Sleep in. Read. We’ll be back this afternoon.” And then he’d close the door and they’d be gone. Gone without a wave, a kiss good-bye, anything. Suddenly just a big, empty house and a pile of dishes in the sink, soaking.

  It only happened two, three times, but I began to realize that I was losing him, losing control of my family. So one morning, the week before Christmas, I woke up as soon as I felt him leaving our bed. “Hey,” I said, “come back here.”

  “No,” he said, “I’m awake. I was just about to go downstairs. Put some coffee on. Maybe make some omelettes.”

  I got out of bed, went to him, kissed him, pushed him down on the mattress, kissed his shoulders, his ears, ran my fingers through the hair of his chest, down past his belly button, all the way to his cock. Made love to him, said things into his ear I could not, don’t want to repeat again, ordered him to do things to me and then, when we were done, and lay panting in bed, morning light beginning to pale the bedroom, I just said it, I took a chance and just said it:

  “Baby, I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry. I should have told you. I should have told you ten years ago. Five years ago.”

  “You’re damn right,” he said, pushing himself up on one elbow. “How do you—”

  “Shut up,” I said. “All right? Shut up. You’ve been sulking around here for months, and I understand that, but I’m trying to apologize. Okay? So shut the fuck up and let me apologize.” I gathered a breath, sat up, looked at him. “We weren’t married, Henry. It happened one time. One time.”

  “Must have been some night.”

  “I don’t love him. I love you. You’re my husband and I love you.”

  He shook his head. “The only reason why I haven’t and why I won’t file for divorce, Beth, is because this did happen before we were married, okay? And I get that.” He sucked in a breath. “But it’s still a pretty big goddamn ugly secret. Christ! He’s my best friend. Was my best friend. Okay? Of all the people. Goddamn it.”

  “I made a mistake. You know?”

  The fact was, before that moment when I saw Henry alone, out in his truck, out in the dark in our driveway, I don’t know that I would have thought about that night with Leland as being a mistake, but I did now. How could I not? Would I forfeit Henry for him, forfeit my children, what they’ve come to think about me, and will yet come to think of me? My house, my life? All because I was lonely, because I was curious.

  “Looking back, I totally regret what I did,” I said. “I’m sorry. Sorry for doing—sorry for keeping it a secret.”

  “I mean, do you love him? Do you want to be with him? Because frankly, Beth, I don’t want to be married to you if you’re not in love with me anymore. I mean fully in love. Do you understand me?”

  I punched him, and not just lightly, I mean hard, right in the meat of his arm. And then I smiled. I don’t know why—I couldn’t help it. First with my lips, then with my teeth. Then I said, “I love you.” I punched him again, in the arm, except this time even harder. “I’ve always loved you, Henry fucking Brown.” I wound up and tried to punch him again but this time he caught my fist and rolled on top of me, his body heavy on top of mine, his body between my coiling legs, and now my legs wrapping around him, tight. I bit his lower lip.

  “I love you so much,” he said. “Don’t you understand that?”

  And then he fucked me and it felt like we were trying to make another baby.

  * * *

  Felicia had just returned from the bathroom and was settling back down in the booth.

  “Sure would be nice if this town had, you know, like a normal café, where, you know, normal people could go to talk about how their lives were so fucked up,” she said. “Is that asking too much?”

  “Make a mistake,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Make a mistake. Are you on the pill?”

  “Not for a little while. He doesn’t know that though.”

  “Good. Get back together. Go on a vacation. Someplace hot. Someplace near a beach. Drink too much. Enjoy yourselves. Relax and don’t think about it. You wouldn’t be the first couple to accidentally let a puck through the goalie’s legs.”

  “But you’re asking me to pull the goalie, right?”

  I shrugged, sipped my beer.

  “You’re serious?” Her eyes were wide. She finished her beer.

  “Are you still in love with him?”

  Felicia shrugged, nodded. “Yeah. Sure. Of course I am.”

  “He ever cheat on you, use drugs, gamble too much, beat you?”

  “No.”

  “So the only thing that you want, that you can’t have, is children?”

  “I mean, I don’t want to trick him into having a baby if he’s just going to freak out and leave us. That’s not exactly the foundation I want for parenthood. Trickery. I don’t know, Beth. Really? Just make a baby and talk about it later? Like I’m buying a new Lexus without his permission or something? I mean, I’m a feminist. I minored in women’s studies.”

  “So, what’s your other plan?”

  Felicia looked at me, arms crossed.

  “I mean really—what? Get on the Internet, start dating that way? Move back to Chicago and try out a few guys from the office? I don’t know how these things work. And who’s even left these days? We’re in our thirties. And you think that new guy is going to want to jump right in to things? Start a family on the fly? Maybe. Or maybe you just try harder. Maybe you move out of here. Go back to Chicago. Have a kid. Forget this whole thing ever happened. Maybe it was, just, like, a bad holiday. You know? You meant to stay here a week and somehow ended up staying a few years. Don’t worry about the mill. Come to think of it, maybe the best thing’s just to blow the whole thing up. Start all over.” My voice trembled, my hands shook just slightly. I sipped, then gulped my beer. I had just told my only friend to leave, and the advice I was dispensing almost sounded like I was talking to myself.

  “I don’t know,” Felicia said. “I’ll have to think about it.” She lowered her gaze.

  We sat in silence. Old men were beginning to enter the bar. A Monday night football game. Packers versus Vikings. The place would be wild, a frenzy of green and gold.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  Felicia slid off her bench seat, stood, swayed. “I don’t think I can drive,” she said.

  “I’ll call Henry,” I said.

  “What time is it?”

  My watch was hard to see in the dar
k but it seemed to say four or five.

  “Every time I see you,” Felicia said, “we seem to drink too much.”

  K

  YOU CAN ALMOST SEE the curvature of the earth from up here. It’s beautiful. The world laid out forever. Sometimes, back when I lived in Chicago, I’d take the Mustang out on a Saturday morning. I’d wake up before the city started stirring, and just head west, just drive, the rising sun in my rearview, like I was racing the day, trying to get back into the night. Open that big engine up and rush across Illinois, across that flatland, those black earth fields, those strange, lost canals, and lazy rivers. Past greasy truck stops and junkyards, past towns with nothing to show for their efforts. Stop for gas and let the ragtop down, the blue sky so big above me.

  Once, at a gas station in western Illinois, not far from the Mississippi, an old farmer approached me, complimented me on the car.

  “How far you headed?” he asked.

  I remember shrugging, saying coolly, “Oh, I just try to get as far as I can before Monday morning.” Before I had to get back. I was a bachelor then, as I am now perhaps. My condo in the Hancock building spartanly furnished, cold-feeling, like the cell in some cement-and-steel hive.

  “Where you from?” he asked.

  “Chicago,” I said, aiming my thumb behind me. Though I wasn’t from Chicago. I was from Little Wing, Wisconsin. A no-nothing town like the one I then stood in, a dot on the map, not yet known as the home of Corvus, America’s most famous flannel-wearing indie troubadour. Back then, it was just a down-on-its-luck Midwestern village with a falling-apart mill near a set of rusty railroad tracks.

  “Must be nice,” he said, “to be free, not to be chained down. Go anywhere you want. Anytime you want.”

  A plastic shopping bag blew between us, toward a barbed-wire fence where I knew it would become entangled. I nodded, ready to push on. But the gas pumped out slowly, as if the tank buried beneath our feet was dry. “You a farmer?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Soy.” Adjusted his seed cap, spat at the space of asphalt and gravel between his boots.

  I handed him my business card. It was my practice. I had a whole box in my glove compartment, and another in the backseat. I handed out cards at cocktail parties, baseball games, bar mitzvahs. I hear colleagues, other brokers, say that they never hand people their cards, that the secret is getting someone interested in you and your spiel right up to that point where the thing they want most in the world is your card. But that’s never been my m.o. I’m proud of who I am, proud of what I do; proud that I’ve made it to a point in my life where I actually have a business card.

  He peered at it, so clean and white in his dry, dirty hands. “A broker,” he said. He flicked a thick forefinger at the card. It made a noise like a baseball card flapping in a bicycle spoke.

  “Yes, sir.” The numbers on the gas pump were barely moving, moving slower than time on a wristwatch.

  “Why don’t you work on getting me some higher prices?” he said. Then, “Naw. I’m just fooling with you.”

  He stared at me with blue eyes so pale they might have dripped out of his face, onto the dry ground beneath him.

  “Well, come on out sometime,” I said, looking at his left hand, only four fingers there, but yet a ring finger and a golden wedding band so dirty it looked like he wore buried treasure. “Bring your wife,” I said, taking a chance that he was no widower.

  And then we were quiet a moment. The sound of gasoline pumping into the filling tank, the wind rattling some loose vinyl siding, a tin sign swaying on its noisy rusted chains. On the highway: eighteen-wheelers rushing by like runaway trains and a pair of crows picking at a blackened deer carcass, their feathers stirred crazily by the constant traffic, though the birds hardly seemed to notice.

  “Well,” said the farmer, holding my card in the air. “Maybe we’ll do that. We’ll have to give you a call sometime.”

  “What’s your name?” I asked. “You got my card, but I never got your name.”

  “Harvey,” he said. “Harvey Bunyan.” He rummaged around in his pocket for a pen and a little wire-bound notebook. He jotted down his name and telephone number in a neat cursive. “There. Now you got my card, too.”

  He wiped the palms of his hands on his overalls, fumbled to slide my card into the breast pocket of his bibs, and we shook.

  “Safe travels to you,” he said.

  “You, too,” I said, though I immediately regretted it. The man had never traveled anywhere, and it showed. Back in Little Wing I’d seen that farmer’s face hundreds of times on men my father’s age, men older than him, too. Their eyes so used to squinting out at the sun that you’d swear they were near-sighted as voles. Their world always right there before them. In their bedroom, the kitchen, their televisions. Out in the fields, out just ahead and more importantly, behind their tractors.

  * * *

  Over the Mississippi and into Iowa. Eighty, ninety, a hundred miles an hour. Off the highway and onto gravel roads, racing clouds, racing horses in their fields. If I kept driving west, there was the sense that I could beat the sun, drive forever against the revolutions of the planet, slow time itself down. I probably lost Harvey’s “business card” before I even entered Nebraska. Probably had stopped for fast food in Iowa City or Des Moines and somewhere along the line, threw his name and telephone number into the garbage along with the other junk in my pockets: gum wrappers, dirty pennies, gas-station receipts.

  I made it into Nebraska. Pulled off the highway before a storm filled the ditches with water. Watched the night sky crack itself like a broken window. In the motel room, eating gas-station snacks, drinking lukewarm beer, listening to televisions in neighboring rooms, lovers, arguments, reconciliations.

  In the morning, I drove back east, seven hours straight into the rising sun, my face burning so badly, you might have thought I watched an atomic bomb detonate at Las Cruces.

  But that morning, that morning in Nebraska, that was about as happy as I’ve ever been. Because I’d gone over the known horizon, that flatland I well knew from Chicago skyscrapers with their top-floor martini lounges; the planes I’d flown in. In that Mustang I was my own explorer. It didn’t matter that a million, million people had trampled every inch of America for hundreds, hell, tens of thousands of years. I hadn’t. Doing it by myself. Not listening to music, not talking to someone else, no maps, no agendas.

  * * *

  If I could do it all over again, I wouldn’t have come back here. I wouldn’t have brought Felicia here. And if I’m being totally honest, I’m not sure that getting married was the right thing either. Nothing wrong with Felicia. It’s me.

  I don’t think I’m a good man. I’m not good to people. I know that. What I’m good at, what I understand and what I intuit, is how to make money. Or, at least, that’s what I used to be good at. How do I explain it? That all I needed were two things, a world weather report and the nightly news, and I could tell you where to stick your money the next day in such a way that I was rarely ever wrong. I made millions, millions. Sticking money that most people would put into IRAs or bonds or Coke stock into corn futures, coffee, hog bellies.

  But throw me into a dinner party, invite me over for your kid’s birthday party, and suddenly I’m helpless. Worse than helpless, because I can never seem to say the right thing, never do the right thing. So instead of being just plain awkward, it looks like I’m being cruel. Because I should be smart enough to navigate these things, but I can’t. Some nights Felicia would just tell me to be quiet, not to embarrass her.

  I thought this mill, this building, would be the catalyst to change things for me. I thought it would give me something concrete, something real to deal with. I thought that if I came back here, resurrected this thing, that the town would pull me in, embrace me, maybe even set myself up for a run at being mayor, or a run in the state legislature. Go around the county, glad-handing farmers, kissing babies, Felicia right there at my side, looking the part, guiding me with a strategic
whisper in my ear. I know that she’s smarter than me. I don’t have a problem admitting it. It’s one of the big reasons why I fell in love with her.

  And now the mill is done. The basement is dry for the first time in decades. The general store is busy. The parking lot is full of trucks. Trains are not just coming through, they’re stopping. I’ve got a tenant lined up to take one of the converted spaces beside the general store—a Mexican restaurant. This town needs it, needs some spice, some flavor. The towers are all painted. All the broken windows of our teenage years and our early twenties, they’ve been replaced. When the painters asked if I wanted something, a name or a logo painted at the top of the towers, I gave it some thought, then told them that what I wanted them to paint up there was Welcome to Little Wing in nice, old-fashioned, slanted, cursive red paint. I could have had them paint my name up there, but I’m really trying. I’m trying to do the right thing.

  Sometimes I come up here and I don’t even know why. To get away, I guess. To look out at the world. To see what’s coming next. To smoke a cigarette.

  Felicia left me. She wanted children and I—I just couldn’t do it. I could never muster the excitement, the love. I loved her, I really did. I still love her. But I couldn’t see being a dad, being that kind of upright, decent man. I look at a guy like Henry—how easy he makes it look, how his kids adore him, how Beth adores him—how this town adores him—and I just think, I can’t compete. I can’t do that. I know who I am and I’m not Henry Brown.