Shotgun Lovesongs: A Novel (16 page)

I slid a key into the silver padlock and it sprang open with a jerk.
Maybe I’ll mail the ring to a fan,
I thought.
Wouldn’t that be something?
I set the chain down in a shiny pile off to the side, returned to the U-Haul, fired up the ignition, and pulled the cumbersome truck off the road in a cloud of black and blue exhaust. It labored down my long, long driveway, almost begrudgingly, and I rubbed its dashboard affectionately; it had gotten me home, after all. Overhead a canopy of autumnal maples formed a tunnel of fire—oranges, reds, yellows, a few greens still. I rolled the window all the way down, rested my elbow on the door, though it was fairly cool outside, and breathed the air in.

Home
.

The dirt and gravel potholes were filled with rainwater and I intentionally aimed the U-Haul’s wheels for each one. I’ve always liked to hear that splash, liked to feel the coils under my seat bounce and groan as I inched closer to home and the meadow, the trees I’ve planted and the creek beyond.

I relaxed, felt my shoulders loosen, my eyes widen. I hadn’t felt that way in months. Hadn’t felt
healthy
.

Home
.

The woods opened out now into the meadow, where I could see in the early-morning light that the summer grasses and raspberry bushes had gone yellow-brown in patches. And then,
look
: a dozen or more deer, their ears suddenly pricked up at attention, their white tails semaphores of caution. What could they have been thinking, as they watched the approach of that big, boxy, unfamiliar truck? Did they recognize me? I watched their very skin and musculature ripple and tremble with excitement and fear. I waved to them, waved goofily, waved like I knew I was alone, yelled out the window, “Hey, deer! I’m back! Lee’s back!” And that sent them scattering away.

I need to get a salt block out there,
I thought.
I’m going to need some company.

I parked the U-Haul in front of the driveway and went up to the front door, fumbling with my keys, and opened the place up, leaving the door yawning open so I could carry in a few loads. Stretching, groaning, scratching my head, all I wanted was a shower, to brush my teeth, to drink a cold glass of water.
The water tastes better here, tastes like something—like iron,
I thought
. Or maybe it’s the absence of things. The absence of chlorine, of sulfur, of being recycled a thousand times over.
Outside, the deer had begun drifting back toward the shadows of the trees near the hem of the pasture. There was so much to do and at the same time, nothing to do at all. God, to just make myself a pot of coffee, to spark up a cigarette on the porch, to find out if the old tractor would turn over. I’m sure I stood in my entryway a full five minutes, just walking in circles, just happy as hell to be home.

Home
.

The air inside the house smelled stale. Dead flies lay scattered on the window sills and the floors beneath. A layer of dust over everything: the furniture, my books, on the television screen. At the kitchen sink I turned on the tap but the pipes just coughed hoarsely, like they had an announcement they weren’t entirely sure they wanted to make. I remembered I’d shut off the water, had of course never thought that I’d be back this soon. And yet, there I was. Down in the basement, I turned the water back on, heard the kitchen tap sputter then rasp out water, at first haltingly, and then coming in an easy flow. All around the house I could hear the pipes saying
ooohhh
and
aaahhh,
as if they were happy to have me back. I climbed the stairs slowly, the muscles in my back and butt still sore and tight. The refrigerator hummed out a drone and I peered in, looking for a beer. There was one! A Leinenkugel’s! I drank lustily, like a man who’d just wandered out of the desert.

Pacing the house I turned the dial of the thermostat, waited to hear the groan of the furnace, that good basement fire—then shut the furnace off again. I rolled open windows, switched on the radio, opened the refrigerator again to see if any more beer or food had magically materialized. Then closed the door. Opened it again—still nothing.

Standing over the bathroom toilet, peeing, I held the beer up to my lips with my free hand—the breakfast of champions. Taped to the bathroom mirror was a photograph of Chloe from Kip’s wedding. It was a perfect picture of her. One of the paparazzi, a friend of hers from New York who worked at one of the grocery store rags, had taken it and then sent her a nice copy along with a note, apologizing for the ambush. He’d sent along a few other good shots of the two of us but I’d left all those in New York. She could keep them if she wanted; I wondered if she would.

Souvenirs
.
Mementos. Keepsakes
.

I flushed, went to the bathtub. The showerhead spat at first, but then gushed out hot water enough to steam the mirrors and warm the room—apparently I’d left the hot-water heater on, a happy mistake. I stripped, threw my clothes into a ball, stepped into the water—and then stepped out again, still dripping, to snag the brown bottle of beer, before returning to the shower. I leaned gratefully against that wall of tiles, swallowing down the cool of the beer in water so hot it reddened my pale skin. I closed my eyes, breathed deeply, slipped all the way down into the tub, and fell asleep in there, hot water still raining down all over me.

Home.

*   *   *

I don’t know how long I slept, but it couldn’t have been too-too long because I woke up with an empty bottle of Leinie’s between my legs and cold water coming down. If Chloe could have seen me: a goddamned shivering prune laying one-beer drunk on the bathroom floor, licking his wounds. Anyway, there was shit to do. Namely to return the U-Haul truck. Also: beer. I knew I needed beer. Cases of beer. And food. I wanted a freezer full of pizza and fish sticks. A refrigerator full of bratwurst, steaks, and pork chops.

Standing before my bathroom mirror, I surveyed the goods: a waif, an NYC hipster waif.
Well fuck that
. It was time to get ready for winter. Time to put on a few pounds. Time to split some wood. A towel wrapped around me, I went out of the bathroom and into my bedroom, put on some of
my
clothes—an old green chamois-cloth shirt and a pair of Carhartts, some nice thick wool socks. Then, pulling on an old mesh Brewers cap, I went out into the living room.

And there, standing four-legged and yellow-furred in the middle of my living room, was a coyote—the front door still wide open behind it. I froze. The coyote lifted his head, appraised me, lifted one white-socked paw to scratch the air between us.

I couldn’t tell you how long we remained that way, sniffing each other out, but at last I had the presence of mind to say sharply, “Go on now, shoo.” I had been afraid my voice wouldn’t work.

And he did, turning slowly, like a scolded dog, and went right back out the front door in what turned into a jaunty lope, before breaking into an outright run in the strip of lawn that separates my house from the driveway, before entering the meadow, where I saw his white-yellow back occasionally popping up over the tall grasses and wildflowers. My hand shook as I shut the front door. Then, I actually locked the door—something I rarely do, but I did. I sat down, I sat down, I sat down. I stared at my hands. I felt alive, every fiber of me vibrating, every atom energized, my blood rushing.

I live here, I have chosen to live here, because life seems
real
to me here. Authentic, genuine—I don’t know,
viable
. I suppose maybe everyone feels this way—but maybe not. I don’t know. What did Chloe think about New York? It’s true—that city throbs, every day, all day, time fusing like a weld: late night and early morning, dawn and noon, lazy afternoons and late nights and early mornings all over again and people never leave that island, they live seventy, eighty, ninety years in one small apartment. They’re in love with the very idea of being marooned.

But I was never in love with New York, or any other city for that matter. None of the cities I ever toured in. Here, life unfurls with the seasons. Here, time unspools itself slowly, moments divvied out like some truly decadent dessert that we savor—weddings, births, graduations, grand openings, funerals. Mostly, things stay the same. There is Henry in his fields, waving his ball cap at me from atop his tractor. There is Ronny, on Main Street, kicking a stone with his cowboy boots, both hands in his pockets. There is Beth, sitting with the kids outside the Dairy Queen, wiping ice cream off their faces with a wet paper napkin. There is Kip, standing outside the mill on his cell phone, waving his hands like some eccentric conductor who has lost his orchestra. There is Eddy, outside the post office, his white short-sleeve dress shirt tucked in tight against his grand belly as if his gut were a great gust of wind billowing out a spinnaker, buying a red plastic poppy from an old Vietnam vet.

And in the fields as it is in the forests: the springtime prairie fires and tire fires and shit-spreaders slowly spraying the fields with rich, rich manure. Sandhill cranes and whooping cranes in the sky big as B-52s and all the other myriad birds come back home like returned mail, making the night sky loud as any good homecoming party. And then summer comes, the green coming in such profusions that you think maybe winter never even happened at all, never will come again. Long days, languid days and the VFW Post #88, all neon brewery signs, all open windows and screen doors and sweet, smoky darkness. And Kip’s mill, throwing long shadows over the whole town. Pigeons and mourning doves cooing there in the cool dewy dawns, bursting off to seed blue skies with the first early-morning traffic, as the farmers arrive to sip their scalded, gas-station coffee, come to eat stale doughnuts, come to bitch politics, taxes, the price of commodities, and everything in between. Late-night softball games at rural diamonds behind crossroads taverns where the sodium-nitrate lights bring in billions of bugs and moths, and wives and mothers and aunts sit in stands checking their cell phones and filing their fingernails, pretending to look on with even a halfway interest in the proceedings. And in the backyards clothes pinned to lines snap in the cooling-down breezes that signal autumn’s arrival, that elegant season, that season of scarves and jackets, that season of harvest and open night windows and the best season for sleep. When in the fields everything waits to be sown, the pale yellow corn, dry as paper, and then the soil turned over once again and left to rest until next year. The October air filled with corn dust enough to make each sunset a postcard, with colors like a benign nuclear explosion. And then snow. Snow to cover the world, to cover us. Our world left to sleep and rest and heal underneath those white winter blankets. The forests that in October threw hallucinogenic confetti at the world now withdrawn, bereft, composed, and suddenly much thinner, looking like old people who know their time has just about come. Winter: make like the bears and stay in bed, hibernating, growing paler, reading Russian novels and playing chess through the mail with distant relatives and exiled high school friends. Winter: strap on a pair of skates like two knives and carve a frozen pond with your footsteps, slap a frozen puck with a long hockey stick, then stand still, catching your breath, sweating out there in subzero temperatures. Winter.

Leave your front door open here and a coyote strolls in. But it could’ve been a bear. Once, Henry and I got stoned down by the creek. And as we passed a joint back and forth, an eagle landed in the boughs of a huge cottonwood just across from us. And we saw him and we were happy for his company. Then a crow landed on a huge rock in the middle of the creek and you might have thought it was his pulpit. And we were happy to see him, too. Finally, a seagull, blown about as far off course from any saltwater sea as could be, set down on the peak of a tall white pine. Three such different birds, and they formed a kind of quorum, evenly spaced along the water before us. We waited, watched, said nothing as they began
talking
to one another. First the eagle gave his high whistling sound, then the crow’s gruff caw, then the garish squawk of the gull. Back and forth they went, never leaving their perches, never interrupting one another, each in turn—
How could it have been anything other than a conversation?
We watched, listened, and I could not tell you how much time passed before finally, the gull rose up off the white pine, made three lazy pirouettes in the air, and then skimmed the surface of the river with one wingtip before disappearing over the trees. Like a ribbon-dancer, showing off.

The wolves, the bears, the phantom elk and bobcat and cougars. The geese in their uniform squadrons and the ducks and wild loons. But the deer remain my favorite. That pasture that I watch, their families moving through like nomads or refugees or better natives—I’ll never know. I have fallen asleep in their bedding-down places, the places in the pasture where they have laid the grass down flat, warmed it with their bodies and fallen asleep dreaming of,
dreaming of what?
Other Wisconsinites, I know, think of them almost as vermin, a pestilence, some kind of creature that is nothing but an inconvenience, a species that daily commits mass suicide by walking into oncoming traffic, a creature that harms crops, that ruins gardens, whose population has grown to the point of infestation. But I’ve never believed any of that.
We’re
the reason there are so many deer. It’s not their fault. Maybe there are too many of us: too many people driving cars, eating too much corn, building too many houses, crowding out the wolves and coyotes. I love deer.

Leave your door open in the big city and you’ll wake up with no furniture and no clothing. Leave your door open here and a coyote comes in looking for a handout.

This is my home. This is the place that first believed in me. That still believes in me. This is the place that birthed the songs on that first album.

*   *   *

I called Henry. Beth answered.