Shotgun Lovesongs: A Novel

by Butler, Nickolas

  * * *

  Not long after Chloe and I were married, Ronny called me, catching us at dinner. At first, I didn’t want to take the call. This was only the first month of our marriage, but already things were in decline. That evening we were actually having fun—talking, holding hands, drinking wine. It was the kind of evening that gave me hope. So when my phone rang and I saw that familiar 715 number, I let it ring five times before finally standing up and tossing my napkin onto the seat of the chair. I held a finger out, mouthed Back in a minute to Chloe, and then stepped out onto the street.

  “Hey, Lee, it’s Ronny. How are you, buddy? How’s Chloe?”

  A nearby bar was pumping out dance music onto the sidewalk, and so his voice was hard to hear. I plugged a finger in my ear. “We’re good buddy, real good. Look, I don’t want to cut this short, but we’re actually out at dinner. Can I call you back?”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line, and I knew that I had deflated him. Ronny’s like me, goddamn it—he’s never liked telephones; always likes to talk face-to-face, likes to look at people’s eyes, says he can get a better read on people that way.

  “Well, I have some good news,” he began again. “Do you have a minute for some real good news?”

  I exhaled. “Sure I do, Ronny. I’d like to hear some good news. Tell me some good news.”

  “I’m getting married. I’m getting married, buddy. You believe that? I’m getting fucking married!”

  He was laughing, and I could hear Lucy’s voice in the background, and I thought about how I’d announced my own engagement to Ronny, to Henry—to the most important people in my life. I stuffed an envelope full of plane tickets and a little note. And later, Chloe’s personal assistant had sent out a bunch of formal invitations. I never called them; we were too busy, or something, I don’t remember. But Christ, this was how you were supposed to do it. I could picture Ronny in his apartment, Lucy beside him, maybe their limbs intertwined, smiles on their faces broad as a prairie rainbow. I leaned up against the building behind me, but it was a window, and the patron on the other side rapped their knuckles angrily at me. I stepped away, gravitated toward the nearest parking meter, and leaned against that.

  “Ronny,” I said, stammering, not half as happy as I ought to have been, caught up in the simple disbelief that he had found someone, “that’s great, man. That’s just—Jesus, that’s the best news!” And only then did the joy of it really hit me. Straightening myself up, I felt a building excitement, the volume of my voice rising, suddenly and truly I wanted to hug my friend, to lift him off the ground. “Jesus, Ronny! That’s the best goddamn news I’ve heard in fucking forever. Good for you, buddy. Good for you.” I nodded to myself.

  “You remember Lucy, right,” he asked. “From your wedding? First time I met her was at Kip’s bachelor party. Remember that?”

  “Sure I do, buddy. Sure I do. Of course. Beautiful Lucy.”

  I heard them kissing, heard her say in the background, “Hey, Lee.”

  And then Ronny again: “Well, I really want to talk some more, but I know you’re busy out there. I just wanted to say…” And here he paused. I could hear him, thinking, collecting his words, as if they were spare change spilled across the sidewalk—his entire fortune. “I just wanted to ask you, if you would be my best man. Would you? Would you be my best man?”

  A car horn honked angrily, a long low note that seemed to fill my world.

  “Lee?”

  “I’m here, Ronny. Of course. Of course I’ll be your best man. It would be my honor.”

  “All right, then! All righty, man. I’ll let you get back to whatever you were doing. I just wanted to tell you first, man. You’re the first person to know. Shit, I’m so excited! I can’t hardly wait. Bye, Lee. Thanks. Bye.”

  He hung up before I had a chance to tell him I loved him. Must have hung up because he thought he was inconveniencing me, his so-called best man.

  I walked back into the restaurant. Chloe was staring intently at her iPhone, the bill already paid. I sat down, drank all the wine in my glass. Refilled my glass, drank again.

  “I’m ready to go,” she said.

  “Ronny’s getting married.”

  “Who?”

  “Ronny. Ronny is getting married. Ronny is getting fucking married.” I laughed, drank, swallowed.

  “Really?” she said, still looking at the phone. “That’s amazing. How fabulous.”

  “I want some more wine,” I said.

  “All right. Do you mind if I make a dash, though, sweetie? I have a brunch tomorrow. That Czech director.”

  “Chloe, my friend is getting married.”

  “You know what? I’m just really tired. Okay?” She bent down and kissed my forehead. Her lips felt very cool. “I’ll grab a cab.”

  * * *

  All I could think of, plodding blindly through that blizzard in hopes of finding my friend, was that evening in New York City, and how I had not wanted to take his call. How I had wanted to avoid hearing his voice.

  “Let’s head back,” Eddy hollered over the wind. “It’s been almost an hour. We should check in with everybody else. Someone must’ve found him.”

  “Christ, Eddy. They’ll start blaring car horns if they find him. We’ve got to keep going.”

  He leaned in close to my ear so I could hear him, even if I couldn’t make out his face. “There’s too much snow, Lee. I don’t know how we’d ever even see him.” He put a hand on my shoulder. I shrugged it off. “Look, Lee. There comes a time—” he began.

  “No, damn it, Eddy—we keep looking. We ain’t splitting up and we ain’t quitting. We’ll just keep moving. We’ve got to keep looking.”

  The snow was crotch high in places and where drifts had collected, we waded through snow past my belly button. If he was buried under a drift like that, we’d never find him. We called his name, shone our flashlights through the gloom. I could not even remember what he had been wearing, though I remembered that after he tried on his tuxedo, he had switched into his old pair of cowboy boots, and I thought of the number of times I had studied how worn the heels of those boots were, how it affected his gait down Main Street, rolled his feet and knees inward. How I had offered to buy him new boots—any pair he wanted—but how he always declined, how he defended those boots. And then I thought of Lucy, pregnant, and terrified of losing him.

  “He can’t have gone too far,” I said. “We’ll find him. Somebody’s got to find him.”

  “Sure we will,” Eddy said, relenting, panting out his exhaustion. “We’ll find him. Hey, Ronny! Ron-ny!”

  We kicked through the snow with our boots, groped through the night with our hands, screamed out his name, shone our flashlights in vain. I couldn’t remember any storm as tenacious as this one.

  * * *

  We found him not far from Main Street. He was lying down in the school playground, close enough that we could hear the swings blowing in the gusting wind. He was singing—that’s how I heard him. Eddy and I walked toward the sound. We could hardly believe it. We crouched beside him.

  “You found me,” he mumbled. “Shit, I think I must be drunk.”

  “Come on, buddy. We’re going to carry you back.”

  “Did you hear me singing? That was one of your songs. I always liked that one.”

  I wiped the snow from his face. We lifted him off the ground, Eddy taking one arm while I took the other, and Ronny bowed over between us, head hung low.

  “I can’t move my feet,” he said.

  “Well,” said Eddy, “the least you could do’s sing for us then.”

  “Everybody left me,” he mumbled. “Why’d everybody leave me like that?”

  “We’re here now, Ronny,” I said. “We got you.”

  We carried him a hundred yards or more before the Girouxs heard our calls and came running. Cameron Giroux, all six foot three, two hundred and fifty pounds of him, swept Ronny up and placed him on his shoulders the way you might transport a lamb, a
nd then disappeared toward the headlights of our parked cars and the new lights of an ambulance that had arrived to the accompaniment of police sirens. Soon, we heard the horns of cars and trucks and the night was no longer so quiet.

  We marched back in Cameron’s size-sixteen footsteps.

  K

  AFTER THEY FOUND RONNY, I went back inside the mill, brewed some coffee, and sat in my office, looking out the window. My watch read 4:44. He was supposed to be getting married in all of twelve hours. The morning of my own wedding, I had a hot-stone massage, a latte heavy on the cinnamon, and a two-egg omelette. I shook my head.

  Ever since the day of our wedding, I’d wished I could have done things over, done things differently. For one thing, Felicia and I would have talked about everything we needed to talk about, everything that had been bubbling up, right underneath the surface the whole time. Kids, Little Wing, the mill, money, everything. Also, I wish I hadn’t called the paparazzi. What good did that do me? Sure, I was able to pay a few bills, but in the meantime, every friend I had in the world decided that they’d effectively boycott my business—boycott me—for the next eight months, probably costing me about the same amount of revenue I got from selling my friend out to a bunch of gossip rags.

  I got up from my desk and began walking around the mill. It is a huge building, the biggest building in Little Wing, by far. You could probably fit three or four small-town Lutheran churches in here, especially if you accounted for all the space in those grain towers and all the space in the basement. It’s a strange thing, to walk around inside the mill at night, alone, in all that space.

  The building was first owned by the Little Wing Farmers’ Cooperative, which organized in about 1885, best I can tell from some old records in the library. Just a group of like-minded Norwegian farmers looking to consolidate their buying and selling power. And they hung together until the 1980s, when small farmers really were getting their asses handed to them. The co-op dissolved, and some guy named Aintry bought the building as a warehouse. His idea was pretty good, in theory: he wanted to subdivide the place into self-storage units, get about forty dollars a month, and just sit back and collect his retirement. The trouble was, the building was falling apart, the basement was filling with water, he had mice and bats everywhere, and, in a small farming community where everybody lives on one-acre lots, there really isn’t a great demand for more storage room. People just store their stuff in barns, or pole-buildings, or their front yards. After that, the mill sat vacant, waiting patiently for a wrecking ball. Or a fool like me.

  I walked into the old warehouse, where once pallets of powdered milk might have sat, or bags of grain. Everything was set for Ronny’s wedding. The folding chairs were set out in rows, perfectly spaced, all facing a central podium and a little stage. I walked up there and looked back at the chairs, thinking of my own wedding, thinking of Felicia.

  I decided to drive out to where she was, to that old motel between Little Wing and Eau Claire. I went outside, climbed into my Escalade, let the engine warm up. I took the roads slowly. Forty-five minutes to go only a few miles.

  I knocked on the door, gently at first, hoping not to scare her, and then a little louder. She opened the door an inch, and I could see the chain pulled to its farthest extent. She looked tired.

  “Hello,” I said.

  She closed the door, causing a momentary lump in my throat, and then opened it.

  “Take off those wet clothes,” she said.

  I slid into bed beside her and she wrapped herself around me. I looked at the bedside table. Pulled open the door and felt for the Gideon Bible. Someone must have stolen it. My fingers only touched a cold glass ashtray; I ran my fingers around its smooth, square concave shape.

  “Let’s leave this place,” I said. “Little Wing.”

  “I want a baby,” she said. “Someone told me I should trick you. But I don’t want to do that. You give me a baby and then let’s go.”

  I looked at the motel’s old curtains. They were printed with a hunting scene: ducks flying away from three men armed with shotguns, spent shells ejecting jauntily from the smoking chambers. And below the arc of their flight, cattails and what looked to be a very peaceful slough. The walls were smoke-stained, the carpet old and worn. Above the bed: a nautical scene of a schooner crashing through angry seas. I sighed, thought, Chicago wasn’t so bad.

  “In the morning,” I said, closing my eyes. “Tomorrow morning, let’s make a baby.”

  But Felicia would not wait that long.

  L

  THE WHOLE TOWN CAME OUT and there were not enough folding chairs, not enough room for the bystanders and gawkers to stand in. Many stood outside the mill, in the cold, peering in through windows already fogging with heat. Others gathered in the mill’s basement, which Kip had stunningly transformed into a dance hall of rustic elegance: where once dead mice and rats had floated in six inches of tepid water, now the huge stone space glowed a golden yellow beneath white Christmas lights and candles. You would have thought it was some kind of royal wedding, two houses of the American Middlewestern aristocracy merging. As big as Kip’s wedding was, Ronny’s surpassed it by far. And perhaps due in part to the prior evening’s excitement. Because despite frostbitten fingers and a bright red nose, Ronny insisted on getting married on schedule.

  I had been among those urging him to lie in bed and recuperate. “Ronny,” I said, “Lucy will understand, I promise. You can get married next week, next month, next year. This is crazy. You’re lucky to be alive.”

  For her part, Lucy sat so close to his hospital bed that she may as well have crawled into Ronny’s lap. She nodded her head. “Lee’s right, baby. I ain’t gonna leave you. Never ever.”

  “Just get me out of here around noon,” Ronny said seriously. “I’ll stay here ’til noon. I’ll rest that long. But that’s it.” He pointed a finger at me, at Henry, at Eddy, Kip, and the Girouxs. “I’ll sign the goddamn paperwork myself if I have to. I ain’t no invalid.”

  * * *

  At noon, he was taken by wheelchair to the vestibule of the Sacred Heart Hospital, where Lucy’s aged Dodge Neon sat idling. His hands and feet were heavily bandaged, and when he rose wobbly out of the chair, we raced to support him.

  “Gimme a break,” he said, “I ain’t dead. I been worse off than this. Just get me back to my place. Just get me the hell into my tuxedo.”

  I rode in the backseat of the Neon while Lucy drove, her protruding belly rubbing the steering wheel, nervously glancing over at Ronny from time to time, holding his hand in hers, asking if the heat was too much. He waved her off, pretended to inspect the world outside his window.

  “Baby,” she said softly, “baby, what were you doing out there last night?”

  “I don’t know…,” he began, his voice trailing off.

  “Baby.”

  From the backseat, I watched them, their faces, her fingers in his hair, the road before us.

  “I just got lost is all.”

  “But what were you even doing out there? Why weren’t you home?”

  “I don’t know. Lost track of time, I guess, and then I went out to take a leak, and when I turned around the bar had moved or something.” Ronny laughed, turned around to me. “Shit, maybe the bar got lost, too.”

  I smiled at him.

  “Baby,” Lucy said. “You’re going to be a dad now. You know that. You’re going to be somebody’s dad. There ain’t any more getting lost, all right?” She’d begun crying now, and pulled the car to the shoulder of the road. “You stick by me, you hear? We stick together now.”

  He looked at her. “I wanted to be with you,” he said. “But I thought we wasn’t supposed to be together the night before. Tradition, or whatnot.”

  She rubbed his face, his cheeks, with her hands. “After tonight, you don’t never have to worry about that no more.”

  They kissed each other, straining against their seat belts. “You know, I could drive us the rest of the way back,” I said. And
without saying a word they both unbuckled their seat belts, stepped out of the car, let me move into the driver’s seat, and then hurried into the backseat, where they spent the final miles holding each other as tightly as possible. I watched in the rearview for a few seconds before aiming my eyes away.

  * * *

  The ceremony itself was held in what would have been the main warehouse of the old mill, a cavernous room that still smelled vaguely of malt. There was no church organ, obviously, but Kip had spared no expense with the sound system, with a professional deejay to handle the soundtrack.

  I stood at the front of the room, beside Ronny, holding the wedding bands that had come to him through his grandmother … His grandfather’s old ring, the one Ronny has been wearing for weeks, almost like the string a forgetful person ties around his finger as a reminder, and hers, this ring I rubbed between my thumb and index finger within the confines of my pocket, felt the softness of the gold, imagined all the places the ring had gone, all the fingers and objects it had touched. I felt the little diamond—this was the wedding ring of poor people, of middle-class America, it was a promise of things to come, not some gaudy galleria ring, some designer monstrosity like the one I bought for Chloe.

  Waiting up front as well was Lucy’s younger sister, the maid of honor, a girl not yet twenty-one years of age. Her makeup already ruined with tears, she clutched a bouquet of flowers so severely that from several feet away I could hear individual stems breaking, could smell something that I imagined to be chlorophyll—the smell of freshly cut grass or shrubs. I imagined green stains on her palms, and possibly the puncture marks of thorns.

  It was a nice, traditional Lutheran wedding. The same worn-out Bible verses you always hear at Midwestern weddings. The pastor spoke about time and patience and forgiveness, his voice warm and tired-sounding. Lucy’s sister pulled herself together long enough to sing a shaky rendition of “I Will Always Love You,” a selection that few of my own friends at the highest echelons of American popular music would have attempted on their best days. But thankfully she veered toward a more subdued Dolly Parton rendering, rather than going for a full-throated imitation of Whitney Houston.