Shotgun Lovesongs: A Novel (3 page)

“I’m bringing her to Kip’s wedding,” he said, a moment later. “I can’t wait for you guys to meet her.”

“Jesus, Lee, I’m—
shit,
I’m just really happy for you,” I said, though there was something in my chest that snagged like jealousy. “I’m so happy for you,” I repeated, staring into the fire, past the flames to where the coals were throbbing, the palest, brightest orange. I wondered what it would be like to touch her body, to be with a woman that beautiful. Then I shook my head, shook away those thoughts and was back alongside Lee, happy and proud of him.

Strange,
I thought to myself right then, how his life was like my own and yet not at all like it, though we came from the same small place on earth. And why? How had our paths diverged, why were they still even connected? Why was he then in my backyard, on my farm, the sound of almost two hundred cows, faintly in the background, mooing and lowing? How had he come back, this famous man, this person whose name everyone knew, whose voice was recognizable to millions in a way that made it impossible for him to be a stranger in so many places?

It was difficult for me to look up at the night sky and not think of Lee and his fame. All over the world at that very moment there were people no doubt listening to his music. I watched him take a final drag on the joint before flicking it into the fire. He was incandescent.

*   *   *

Ronny frequently stayed over at the old schoolhouse when Lee wasn’t on tour. They played music together, Ronny on the drums, banging away, Lee smiling appreciatively at his damaged friend. They rode on Lee’s tractor together under the sun. Lee made Ronny breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The two of them would sit on Lee’s huge porch, just being quiet. They watched the bats swooping in the night against a backdrop of stars. They listened to the owls. Watched deer grazing out in the fields.

Lee was careful about Ronny’s sobriety. They would sit together in their Adirondack chairs with mugs of coffee or hot chocolate, and that was good and enough. When he was with Ronny, Lee was clean, or mostly clean. And if they went out to the VFW in the evening to watch a Packers game or to eat a hamburger or share a paper boat full of cheese curds, Lee kept Ronny close, ordering his friend Coca-Colas and paying rapt and sincere attention to his friend’s sometimes convoluted observations and conversation. Prior to Ronny’s accident, none of us had fully understood the alcoholism that had almost killed him, but it seemed that alcohol had become his closest companion while traveling for the rodeo. After an event was over, sprawled out in some motel bathtub icing his purple-bruised body, he would grow drunk on cheap beer or rotgut vodka. Drinking became his lover and his lullaby, his needle and his pillow.

*   *   *

Lee had had an entire bull killed and taxidermied and then mounted to a platform on four sturdy tires. The two friends would roll the dead bull into one of Lee’s fields and then spend the afternoon taking passes beside it on Lee’s tractor, a lasso in Ronny’s hand, expertly twirling over his smiling face and then thrown out into the field, where it never failed to snag the impassive creature’s two shining horns.

“All his muscles still remember,” Lee would say, shaking his head in sadness. Then, “I ought to buy him a horse.”

*   *   *

The bachelor party was a mess. Kip had rented a stretch limousine and bought us all matching Polo shirts to wear for the day. We were to spend the day golfing. Thirty-six holes. He had rented out the entire course and the clubhouse. There was a rumor of strippers. But Kip had not invited Ronny, and Lee was irate. I wasn’t surprised. Kip had a way of moving too fast, of talking too fast, of barely listening, and he’d always been that way; he and Ronny had never quite meshed and maybe none of us ever really meshed with Kip. But certainly not Ronny, who would just stare at him, even when we were young, and say things like, “Now Kip, who gives two shits about advanced placement history? I mean, really. There’s a party at the quarry this weekend. That’s what I’m focused on. Focused on getting laid.” When I imagined the party we were invited to, I pictured his colleagues from back in Chicago: suit-and-tie men, martini men, expense-account men who’d gone to good universities and drove nice cars. These men would own their own sets of new golf clubs and spiked golf shoes. Their hands would be office-soft. Perhaps Kip had not invited Ronny to protect him, or because he was too embarrassed. But I also knew that none of those excuses would fly with Lee, whose love for Ronny was almost righteous.

Ronny had marked the date of the wedding on a calendar that hung from a magnetic hook attached to the side of his refrigerator, and in the preceding months, he asked Lee and me regularly when the bachelor party would be.

“
Got
to have a bachelor party,” Ronny would say. “You just got to. It’s the last hurrah. Right? The last hooray.”

It made me sad to think that Ronny himself might never be married.

Lee and I went to Ronny’s apartment on the day of the bachelor party.

“Did you get an invitation?” Lee said, looking anxiously through the mass of mail piled up on Ronny’s kitchen table, mostly junk: coupons, political propaganda, credit card offers; no bills were ever posted to Ronny’s apartment.

“Nope,” Ronny said, “probably just lost in the mail. I know he wants me there.”

“Oh, no doubt, bud,” said Lee, seething with anger, “no doubt. Hang on there, buddy, okay? I got to make a phone call real quick.” He eyed me seriously and I knew to watch Ronny, to keep him entertained. I turned on the television and flipped the channels until we found a nature program about a herd of Montana buffalo.

“You can use my phone!” Ronny yelled, but Lee was already down the stairs and outside. I watched him from the window as he paced the sidewalk and shouted into his mobile. He looked like a man who needed something to kick.

A few moments later Lee came back up the stairs, his face red. “Hey buddy, look, no problem, all right!” he said, reentering the apartment. “I just talked to Kip and he explained everything to me. Your invitation, turns out, just now came back to him in the mail. He had the wrong address or something, I guess.”

Ronny was watching the television, buffalo grazing on an endless expanse of prairie. “But I don’t understand,” he said. “Why didn’t he just bring the invitation over himself? I wave to him every day when I walk by the mill.” Ronny shook his head at the illogic of it and chuckled good-naturedly.

Lee exhaled. “I don’t know, buddy. It’s a good question.” His fists were clenched. He looked outside. It was a beautiful October day. The sun bright and clear, the autumn leaves a cool inferno across the land. In the air: the smell of overripe apples, manure.

Not long after that, a limousine pulled up outside Ronny’s apartment and blared its horn six times. Lee looked at me and I saw then, noticed for the first time, that he was a powerful man, that he could get things accomplished with a single telephone call. I saw that he was used to getting his way, he was not accustomed to disappointment.

Ronny turned from the television, his face bright with excitement. “Party time,” he said, grinning, and he gave us hard, loud high-fives. My palm hurt.

We nodded. “Party time,” we said with as much enthusiasm as we could muster.

We all went downstairs to the idling limousine. It was packed with most of our better friends as well as a few strange faces, among them a photographer, a young woman with two different cameras slung around her neck. She seemed to be capturing just about any moment of even the slightest interest with her elaborate Nikon, paying particular attention to everyone’s hands, where glasses of champagne, bottles of beer, and highballs of whiskey sloshed extravagantly.

“Yeah!” Ronny shouted, taking all of this in. “Yeah! Yeah!
Yeah!
Party tiiiiime!” The tight little crowd cheered reflexively.

We ducked into the limousine after Ronny and settled in as the stretch turned off Main and reoriented itself like a giant compass needle toward the golf course. The vehicle was loud with music that I didn’t recognize, and Lee leaned in close to me. “Don’t let Ronny out of your sight. Don’t lose sight of him,” he said. “Do you understand me?” I nodded, realizing that the limousine and the party had been a bad idea, that it was all a very bad idea, and now we were swept up into it; Lee had demanded that Ronny be invited, but now he saw the party as being a great danger to his friend. Lee sat rigidly, his fists clenched, jaw set.

“Get him something to drink,” Lee growled at me through the racket. “No beer, though, no booze.”

I reached for a can of Coca-Cola and popped the top for Ronny, who slugged at the aluminum can. “Yeah!” he said, coming up for air and wiping his mouth with his forearm. “Yeah!”

“Hey, hey, hey!” Kip called out now. “Hey!” He rapped a Swiss Army knife against his champagne flute. “I need to make an announcement, all right? Announcement time!” He reminded me of a Scoutmaster who could not control his troop. “Can everybody please shut the fuck up? Hey!”

“Speeeeech!” the mob called out. “Speech! Speech!” The group was mostly comprised of our friends, but in that moment, I felt that it was just me and Lee, with Ronny beside us. The photographer aimed her camera at us, at Lee, and the flash went off momentarily with light, blinding us. Perhaps not surprisingly, she seemed to only be interested in taking photos of Lee, and I could already imagine her cropping Ronny and me out of the image. I wondered if this was what fame was—a lot of strangers with cameras and then the subsequent blindness of some unexpected portrait. I thought about a middle school history class in which we were taught that some Native Americans thought that having their photograph taken was tantamount to their souls being stolen.

“Can’t tell you guys how much it means to me that you’re all here today,” Kip said, “helping me celebrate my big day tomorrow. I’m overcome, guys, I really am,” though he did not look overcome. His reddish brown hair was thick and long and greased up away from his tight calm face and the closely trimmed beard that followed his strong jawline, his smile utterly controlled and almost ironic. “Me and Felicia,” he said, “we’re so happy you’ve all welcomed us back into the community the way you have. With open arms. And that you’re excited too, about the mill. You know? It means the world to us. And
tomorrow
”—and here he paused with all the phony gravitas and dramatic flair of a seasoned corporate toastmaster—“we’re all going out to that big old barn to see a great wedding and to
par-ty heart-ty
.”

He was not finished with his soliloquy, but Ronny yelled, “Party time!” and pumped his fists in the close boozy air. Some of the group laughed a little uncertainly, but Lee threw an arm around his friend and whispered intently into his ear. I watched Lee’s lips move, though I could not hear his words.
You stick close to me, buddy,
I imagined him saying.
We’ll party hearty together, okay? You and me.

Nodding indulgently at Ronny, Kip moved on. “So listen,” he said, “I got you all a little present, okay? Some shirts. It’s not much, but hey—it’s something, right? I want you to put them on now. Because today, we’re like a team. A team of friends. You know? I want you to have fun. I want you to forget about everything else today, all right? Okay. So that’s it. I’ve said what I had to say. Now, let’s go have some
fun
.”

He reached into a black plastic garbage bag and pulled out a multitude of red Polo shirts all specially embroidered across the left breast with two crossing golf clubs and the date. Kip began passing them around. He even knocked on the Plexiglas window of the limousine and passed a shirt up to the driver. Then he passed one to the photographer. It appeared to be at least one, perhaps two sizes too small for her, and I averted my eyes as she gamely removed her button-down shirt to don the confining garment. Some of the assembled cheered at the frustratingly brief exposure of her stomach and bra. And then Kip tossed a shirt to each of his assembled friends. To everyone, that is, except Ronny Taylor, whose face drooped, almost imperceptibly, his hands empty and waiting. Lee noticed it immediately and handed his Polo shirt to Ronny.

“Here you go, buddy,” he said. “Kip must’ve just forgot about getting me one.”

But when Ronny looked back at his friend, his face was sad with knowing. Ronny paused a moment before he pulled off the shirt he was wearing, and we saw then the scars of his rodeo days, the meat grossly missing from an area near his shoulder, the crudely sewn stitches of some arena paramedic or small-town ER. His stomach, still admirably flat, was corrugated with muscle, and a tattoo over his heart in blurred blue lettering read
CORVUS
—
Lee’s stage name—along with a roughshod image of a crow perched atop a telephone wire. The tattoo, already almost ten years old, had been there before Lee was even famous, when we were all little more than kids.

“I still can’t believe you ever did that,” Lee said now, reaching out to touch his friend’s tattoo. He shook his head and smiled.

“I believed in you,” Ronny said with all the earnestness in the world. “I still do. You’re my friend.”

All eyes in the limousine were on them. Outside the long automobile, the world continued to move on—traffic slowly blurring by, the occasional tractor, an old farmer walking along the gravel shoulder, perhaps toward the bank or library downtown—but inside, life was a diorama of open mouths, unblinking eyes, and held breaths. Then Kip broke in. “You, Lee. Where’s your shirt?”

“I didn’t
get
one,” Lee said. He had a hand on Ronny’s knee. His voice was stern. “But don’t worry about it, chief. It really doesn’t matter.”

“But,” Kip began, and even as his eyes fell on what had to be Lee’s shirt,
right there,
on Ronny’s back, we could all hear in the falter of his voice that he wouldn’t push Lee any further. That even though everyone in the limousine was equally uniformed except Lee, who sat heavily against the limousine’s glossy leather upholstery in his omnipresent flannel shirt and torn blue jeans, Kip would not now challenge him. Kip rapped his knuckles against the glass of the limousine driver’s partition and we began to move faster still, the volume of that bass-heavy music increasing even as the giant vehicle picked up speed.