Shotgun Lovesongs: A Novel (28 page)

“Call the police,” I said as calmly as I could. “Call the highway patrol. Call everyone you know. Get ’em down to the mill. I’ll be right there.”

The snow was nearly up to the running boards of my truck, but I dropped it into four-wheel low and just kept in the center of the road. I’d stowed about a cord of wood in the bed of my truck for traction, and that helped, though I did fishtail a half-dozen times before I finally saw the faint glow of other headlights and then the looming towers of Kip’s mill. Already, about ten cars and trucks were gathered in the parking lot of the mill, with a few snowmobiles pulling up, too.

Kip was there, and he took charge, partnering people together and handing them lengths of new rope, new flashlights already equipped with new batteries, signal flares—items he must have just commandeered from the inventory of his general store inside.

I headed out into the night on foot with Eddy, a length of rope uniting us, tied to our belt loops. We called out Ronny’s name, kicked at the snow, prodded at snowbanks with ski poles and walking sticks. The northern wind was like the teeth of a rusty old saw and still the snow kept falling as we moved farther and farther away from the mill and what little light that building and the vehicles around it could offer. I thought about Ronny, about losing my friend, and it seemed suddenly very
real,
very
possible
. We trudged on, shouting his name.

*   *   *

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, and 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

A
FTER THEY FOUND
R
ONNY,
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.