Shotgun Lovesongs: A Novel

by Butler, Nickolas

  How would I even begin to explain it? That I met an old man one time, at a gas station in the middle of nowhere, that I gave him my business card and then months, years later, he and his wife came to visit me one time in Chicago? That I look like their dead son?

  “Oh,” I’d say, “they’re just old family friends.”

  “Well, should we invite them to the wedding?” she asked me on more than one occasion.

  “No. They’re all the way down in Illinois, near the Iowa border. Harvey’s a farmer and he doesn’t like to travel. I wouldn’t want to bother them. We’re not that close, not really.”

  “Are you sure? They seem to really care about you. I mean—they send more cards than your parents do.”

  “No, trust me. It’s okay.”

  * * *

  And then, a few months ago, there’s a note. But it isn’t written in Harvey’s cursive. This is a softer script, more elegant, more curvaceous, the indentation of the pen less severe. And walking back from the mailbox I read the news that Harvey had died. That he’d had a bad accident with a piece of farm machinery. That Edith had found him out there, in one of his fields, that there was nothing for her to do, no more time, that he was gone too.

  And I’ve thought, as I’m thinking now, why hadn’t I invited them to the wedding? Of all people—why not them? Who would have been more proud? Who had given of their time and faith more unwaveringly? Who had actually loved me, like a son? And what had I done? Telephoned them? Not once. Written? Maybe once a year. Visited? Never.

  How proud would they have been of me? Of Felicia?

  * * *

  How can I be a father? How can I be trusted? What have I ever done but fail? Fail with Felicia, fail Leland, fail poor old Harvey. And now, this business. God. Who am I?

  The sun is rising. Soon, the day’s first customers will begin to trickle in. Lee used to hear music in sunsets—jazz. I don’t know about that. And the sunrise? I don’t think sunrise has a musical sound. To me, it’s like a beautiful woman yawning as she first wakes up, or maybe, I don’t know, a baby. A baby opening her eyes. Maybe both. Either way, I feel less and less that I deserve another day, another dawn like this one.

  R

  WE WATCHED THE BLIZZARD come creeping across the Doppler radar on the teevee like some kind of alien invasion: a huge blob of white stretching from Oklahoma all the way to Ontario, but the brunt of the storm aimed square at us, right at Wisconsin. On the teevee there were pictures of what lay behind in the blizzard’s path: streets buried in Iowa City, Iowa, and telephone lines down in Lincoln, Nebraska. Cattle frozen to the fucking ground in Pierre, South Dakota, and a forty-car pileup outside of St. Louis, Missouri. The weather woman wore a very yellow blouse as she told us the storm was set to strike on Saturday, January 5—the day of my wedding to Miss Lucinda Barnes.

  The Friday afternoon before the wedding, Lee drove me into Eau Claire, to the men’s clothing store inside a little strip mall off Hastings Way, near the Army Navy store and a closed-down Chinese restaurant shaped like a red pagoda. We went there to pick up our tuxedos, to make sure everything fit just right. Lucy wanted me and Lee to wear tuxedos that matched, but I insisted on choosing my own wedding suit. For one thing, I planned on wearing a new pair of cowboy boots and a turquoise bolo my dad had bought on a family trip to Albuquerque. I smiled into the mirror, checked myself out.

  We ate lunch together at Lee’s favorite fried chicken restaurant right down the road—Chicken Unlimited—the last business left alive alongside an old highway that got bypassed a long time ago. We sat on red stools and ate French fries, fried chicken sandwiches, and cheese curds. We sipped root beer, and he read me articles out of some old copies of Sports Illustrated.

  After lunch Lee drove us to the bowling alley. Lee is a straight-up shitty bowler—he really is. He scored a 101 and I got a 215. But it was fun. The bowling alley was sort of abandoned, and we supposed that was because the blizzard was coming, and people were at the grocery stores stocking up on food and whatnot.

  “Christ,” Lee said, “you’d think a hurricane was brewing the way people are acting. This is Wisconsin.”

  “Lucy’s worried about the wedding,” I said. “She’s worried people won’t be able to drive out to Little Wing, or their planes’ll get delayed over Minnesota.”

  “Ah, well,” Lee said, “the important thing is, you’re getting married. Right, buddy? I’ll be there. And Kip and Felicia. Eddy. The Girouxs. Beth and the kids.”

  “And Henry.”

  Lee nodded, spun a bowling ball in his hands. “Yep. Henry, too.”

  “Maybe we ought to head back,” I said. “We don’t need to bowl two games. Let’s get home.” Outside, the sky was going gray.

  * * *

  Lee drove slow back to Little Wing, taking back roads and glancing up at the sky through the windshield.

  “Gettin’ dark out there,” he said.

  I wondered what Lucy was doing just then, wondered if her hands were resting on top of her stomach, if the baby was kicking her. I remembered my own parents, wished they were still alive, wished I could see them on my wedding day.

  “Well,” Lee said. “Your last hours of bachelorhood.” He looked across the bench seat at me. “Any last requests?”

  There was already a fresh layer of snow covering everything. The sun had turned in for the day. Lee turned on the headlights, though it was barely four in the afternoon. He was a good driver, slow and deliberate.

  “You know what I wish?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “I wish I knew why you and Henry ain’t talkin’.”

  Lee looked away from the road for a second, toward his driver’s-side mirror; not a car or snowplow or salt truck in sight, I knew. It was just us out there on those roads.

  “Because, Lee, it just don’t feel right. Something’s wrong. You two are never ’round each other no more.”

  It was true. I couldn’t figure it out, but something had come between them like a wedge, and when we all got together, them two seemed to push each other to opposite sides of the room. They didn’t joke anymore. They didn’t get together like they always used to, so close they might be horses in a stall, their shoulders rubbing, talking to each other behind cupped hands, laughing in a way that made you wish they’d include you.

  “Is it money?” I asked.

  “No,” Lee said sternly. “We never talk money.” He looked at me to let me know he was pissed, and not just at Henry either. “You know that.”

  “Well, are you moving again?”

  “No. I’m here for good now. I ain’t going anywhere,” Lee said.

  I hadn’t found a way to tell him yet, but Lucy and I were going. Come spring, we’d be moving to Chicago, to a neighborhood called Bucktown, which I guess isn’t too far from Wrigley Field. Lucy’d been keeping in touch with Lee’s old wife, Chloe, and turned out Chloe really liked Lucy. Got her a job working for a dance company down there. She’d be starting off in the office, like answering phones or something, but it’d be something. A foot in the door. I didn’t want her stripping anymore, and with the baby, neither did she. It was our time to be a family, to be normal people, like everyone else.

  Lucy knew about how I’d tried to get away. She thought maybe this was our chance, to do it, and move on with our lives. To try something different. She’d been saving up for years. She said I could stay home with the baby while she was working. She said that with a baby, if we don’t try to go now, it’ll be too easy to stay here forever, and she knew that I felt trapped.

  “All’s that I want is for everyone to be friends again.”

  “Ronny, it isn’t always that easy.”

  “Did you do something wrong, or did he?”

  Lee looked ahead. “I guess I did.”

  “Then apologize. Say you’re sorry.”

  “Well, we’re not really talking that much right now, me and Henry.”

  I thought for a second.

  “I don’t know if
you already got me a wedding gift or not, but if you didn’t, you could do one thing for me.”

  Lee was silent, his knuckles white and flexing on the wheel. It looked like he was trying to snap it in half.

  “You could apologize. That’s your present to me.”

  “That’s all you want?”

  “Well, I mean, you want to fly me and Luce to Hawaii or somethin’, I ain’t going to fight you.”

  He laughed. I love making him laugh. And I had the feeling he didn’t laugh much when he’s away from Wisconsin. I’ve never had much of an idea what his life’s like, but I think it must be pretty tough, pretty lonely. He travels more than anyone I’ve ever known, and I know from my days on the circuit that travel ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. You just get tired of moving. Right when you find a spot that interests you, right when you find a bed that’s pretty comfortable or a restaurant that isn’t too greasy, you got to keep moving on.

  “Well,” Lee said, “I guess I’ll go ahead and keep those tickets to Aruba then.”

  I laughed. “Where’s Aruba?”

  “You know, I really couldn’t tell you. The Caribbean, I guess? I don’t know. I’m a musician, not a geographer.”

  We watched the snow gather. It was coming down harder, but ahead, I saw Kip’s mill, the yellow of the towers against the gray sky.

  “He did a good job with all that, Kip did,” I said, pointing.

  Lee nodded. “Yeah. You’re right about that.”

  “You want to come over to my place?” I asked. “We could watch teevee. Lucy’s with her sister and family, I think. Guess I’m not supposed to see her tonight. Or maybe I ain’t allowed to see her dress? I get confused. Either way…” What I wanted to say was that I didn’t want to be alone, that I didn’t like my apartment very much anymore. It didn’t smell like Lucy, didn’t remind me of her. It was no place for a baby, that was for sure, no place to grow a family. I had exactly: one frying pan, two pots, a microwave, a hot plate, three bowls, two plates, and a handful of silverware. And some of my silverware was plastic, from McDonald’s. The teevee was new, but my bed was so used up it looked like a taco, all bent into a tired old U shape. My pillows were yellow and the sheets were old as hell, covered in Green Bay Packers logos—which I liked, but Lucy said we wouldn’t be taking them with us to Chicago. I supposed she was right. Sometimes I’d look at them and think, Goddamn it Ronny, you ain’t a little boy anymore.

  “Naw,” Lee said, “why don’t we just stop off at the VFW? Isn’t there a basketball game on tonight? The Badgers … I can’t remember for the life of me who they’re playing…”

  “Sure. Sounds good,” I said. Already I was thinking about pork rinds or a frozen pizza, potato chips or warm cashews.

  Lee parked the truck in front of the bar and the neon lights weren’t on, which was strange, especially considering how dark it was. Normally, you could count on them to glow the sidewalks, to attract moths and beetles in summertime. I pressed my face up against the glass: inside, the bar looked closed, not a soul along the rail, everything dark as can be.

  “You sure they’re open?”

  Lee held the door open for me, said, “Pretty sure. The door’s unlocked.”

  * * *

  “SURPRISE!!!”

  Inflated condoms and balloons fell from the ceiling where someone had kept them waiting for us, in a bedsheet that had been tacked up there. People started to bat around beach balls and the old Wurlitzer suddenly kicked on like a time machine and played one of my favorite Garth Brooks songs from back when I was nothing more than a horny, zitty teenager.

  You could’ve about knocked me over with a feather. ’Cause I thought no one had organized a party for me and I didn’t know how to ask for one. I ain’t sayin’ that I wanted to go to Vegas and behave like a shitheel or nothin’, but I did want to do somethin’, some kind of bachelor party, and I’d begun to think no one remembered, or that no one cared. I even told Lucy, “Luce, we may as well get the hell out of here. All my friends have about lost their minds.”

  It seemed like just about all of Little Wing was at the bar, stacked up on top of one another right out to the alley behind, where the overflow was packing snowballs and flinging them at the broadside of a purple Dumpster. The snow was really beginning to come down by then. And many of the folks there had kazoos in their mouths, or noisemakers. Others had brought their elementary school recorders and tambourines, cowbells and triangles. So the bar was about as loud as a hometown rodeo crowd, and everyone was slapping my back and giving me hugs and there was Lucy too! My girl! And she came right up to me and wrapped her sweet arms around my neck and gave me a big sexy kiss and when the bar saw that, you’d have thought the damn roof was about to come unstuck.

  Then Lee got up on the bar and he called for silence and he took up a glass of beer and said, “To Lucy and Ronny and their little baby, too. If you can hear us in there, give your mom a little kick. But hold on first.” And then he got down from the bar and he waded through the folks that separated me and Luce from the bar and he put my hand on her stomach, and then he said, “All right now everybody, let’s give Lucy and Ronny a big hip-hip-hooray!” And the bar went wild with people blowing their noisemakers and people pounding the bar with their fists and people stomping and singing and sure enough just below my hand, the tiniest flutter, like a kitten trying to escape a paper bag.

  Lee hugged me, said, “I love you, buddy. Congratulations.”

  I couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t believe that everyone was there, everyone that I knew, that I loved. They all came up to us, hugged us both. Henry, Beth, their kids—Alex and Eleanore—kissed me on the lips like I was their uncle, squeezed me just as I tight as I squeezed them. Kip and Felicia. Felicia saying something into Luce’s ear that I couldn’t hear, but it must have been something sweet, ’cause Luce got to bawlin’ and they were hugging like two long-lost sisters such that you’d swear they’d never see each other again. Eddy and his family. The Girouxs—those twins—like two big bears. A few old teachers of mine, of ours. Old classmates, old girlfriends, cousins and second cousins, guys from the rodeo circuit I hadn’t seen in years. Got to be that my hand got tired from shaking so many hands.

  And somewhere along the line, somebody—probably one of my rodeo buddies who didn’t know no better—handed me a shot of tequila, and I tossed it down the hatch like cough medicine before I even realized what I’d done. I guess no one noticed either, everybody else already in their cups and livin’ it up, for sure, Lucy waylaid by some women over at the bar, them touching at her belly, Henry and Beth sitting at a booth with their kids in their laps, Lee playing shuffleboard with Eddy, both of ’em sweating like crazy, their forearms covered in the shuffleboard table’s sawdust. So when the next shot came, and the next, there wasn’t anybody there to knock it out of my hands. And so it went, down my throat.

  Before the night was through, I think I may have shotgunned three or four more shots. Five maybe. More alcohol than I’d tasted in almost a decade and yet, not even enough to fill a coffee mug. And after that fourth or fifth shot, I don’t remember much at all, except knowing that I wasn’t in the bar anymore and that it was real goddamn cold, and I was real goddamn lost. I don’t remember Lucy leaving, don’t remember saying good-bye, don’t remember kissing her. Don’t remember Lee offering to walk me home, or Henry and Beth offering to drive me. Don’t remember whether Eddy offered me a job or not. Whether Kip said that he could use a hand around the mill.

  Truth is, I blacked out. I blew out my own candle, good night.

  * * *

  By the time I came to, I must have been some distance from the bar, ’cause I couldn’t see them neons. Couldn’t even make out the streetlights that glow over Main Street. Everything just real quiet and white and cold. No headlights. No screams of midnight snowmobiles or the low, dull roar of plows out clearing the roads. Nothing. Just snow. Big, heavy snow. A little bit of wind and the snow sizzling against my skin. You don’t have to
be a bright person, a rocket scientist, as my dad used to say, to know that you’re lost, and that’s what I knew—that I was lost. And drunk. It got to be that I was dizzy, that up and down didn’t make sense and I got afraid, too. But I think I might’ve been laughing as I went, ’cause I remember feeling, How the hell do you get lost in Little Wing? I know I had my hands out, because they got so damn cold and I didn’t have no gloves. I just kept reaching out ahead of me, hopin’ to touch something: a wall, a car, hell, even a tombstone, which would have meant I was north of town. But no. I didn’t touch nothing. And so, I just kept on. Kept on saying Lucy’s name, kept saying it with each footstep I took, like a way to count my paces. And thinking, This is real stupid. Tomorrow you’re going to be a groom, a husband, a daddy-to-be. Moving to Chicago. And, then too … you’re going to have to put together a crib. Paint some walls …

  I kept thinking that if I could just find a car, a building—a window to smash, a door to kick down—any old way inside, to warmth, away from that snow. It piled on my shoulders, fell down into my shirts, melted against my chest. And where the hell was everyone anyway? Where was Lee? Where was Henry? Eddy? Kip? Where were my friends? I think I must have begun to sober up a bit because I got colder.

  Inches, feet, yards. They felt like miles. Long cold miles. My thighs ached with the cold through the denim of my Wranglers. My kneecaps felt like ice cubes. I began to sing a song, one of Lee’s real early songs that I still knew by heart, thinking that maybe someone’d hear me, would hear my terrible singing voice and come lookin’ for me. It also kept me warm for a while, like being a kid at summer camp and walking in the rain singing some camp song with your buddies just so you weren’t focused so damn much on how wet and muddy you were. All the time I tried to have my hands out there in front of me, reachin’ for a touch, but never, not once running into anything and then, just about when I’d lost all feeling, I stuffed them into my pants pockets and kept on moving.