Shotgun Lovesongs: A Novel (6 page)

The song ended, but I did not let go of the hands of those two people I loved, and throughout the barn I could tell others had done likewise, clinging to their friends and family and the travelers who had come to witness this wedding inside a barn. Lee stepped away from the microphone, nodded once at Kip, and then kissed Felicia once more and sat down. Chloe kissed him softly on the temple and they looked to be in love.

Kip turned to his new wife and kissed her, and we all stood and applauded. Bags of rice were quickly circulated as the newlyweds strode down the center aisle and out of the barn, and we all threw our white confetti at them, rice clinging to the bride’s veil, her hair, her well-tanned cleavage. We went outside then, into the fresh air, and there was a reception line. I noticed that Chloe and Lee had ducked away to an outside corner of the barn, near the foundation of an old stone silo, where they stood smoking cigarettes and looking elegant almost despite themselves. Beth and I greeted Kip and Felicia, who could not have been more gracious on this day that was hers.

Dinner was served on vast, long tables that had been erected out in a nearby field. We drank wine and chatted, ate pheasant and gnocchi and greens and fresh, warm bread. There were toasts, silverware chiming against glasses; at several points the bride and groom stood and kissed deeply, eliciting yet more applause and catcalls. Everyone was happy. Even Lee seemed pleased, and Ronny high-fived him repeatedly, singing: “Dar-ling so it goes, some things are meant to be-ee-ee!”

The gloaming had set in as we leaned back in our folding chairs, overfull and sipping more wine than we needed. Waiters cleared the dirty plates and set out cups and saucers for coffee. Their arms moved swiftly over our shoulders as they decorated the tables with fresh plates of cake, new spoons, little pitchers of cream, small bowls of sugar. There was cake frosting smeared across Ronny’s face. Beth removed the icing with a fingernail and licked it off playfully. Lee produced a pack of cigarettes and shook some loose. He lighted three cigarettes in his mouth, then passed one to Chloe, and one to Beth. My wife took the cigarette, smiling, and inhaled deeply. She held the smoke for a long time in her lungs and then breathed out, a jet of gray smoke departing her lips. I leaned back and considered her.

“You don’t smoke cigarettes,” I said, my brow wrinkled more than I might have liked.

She shrugged and smiled at Chloe. “It’s a good night for a cigarette.” They touched wineglasses and laughed. Ronny and I accepted cigarettes, too, and we all smoked, watching the stars poke through the darkening blue wool of night.

A strange whooping sound came over the trees and fields then, at first almost imperceptible, but then more persistent.
Whoop-whoop-whoop-whoop-whoop.
We turned in our chairs to scan the fields. The horses were restless, whinnying, their teeth huge and white in the gathering dark. Suddenly, a helicopter came into view over the treetops, bending great boughs and upsetting every leaf, it seemed, within a mile of us. The grasses of the fields danced madly. The helicopter had a spotlight and it scanned the partygoers, many of whom had now raised their middle fingers. Finally, the light settled on Lee and Chloe. We saw a man lean out of the chopper with a camera. Lee tossed his cloth napkin onto the table and strode off toward the barn.

“I’m sorry, you guys,” Chloe said loudly and to everyone, “I’m just so
sorry
.” And we saw that she meant it.

The helicopter hovered over our table for some time and the tablecloth snapped like a sail where it was not weighted down by silverware or ceramic plates, the fabric flapping loose over our knees. Ronny rose from his chair now and stood up on the table, his cowboy boots sharp and gleaming on the white cloth. He was wearing a belt buckle from a rodeo he’d won in Missoula.

“LEAVE MY FRIEND ALONE!” Ronny screamed. “LEAVE HIM THE FUCK ALONE!” He was crying. We pulled him down.

The helicopter hovered another few moments before finally circling the barn once and absconding. Evening was now draped dark over the barn, little candles burning everywhere and in places, lanterns too. Some had been blown out by the aircraft, and the wedding-goers went around with lighters and matches, gamely relighting as many wicks as they could. We heard Sinatra playing from the barn and took our drinks in with us. Ronny was still upset.

We found them in the basement, sitting in a corner, Chloe on Lee’s lap, running her fingers through his thinning hair. He looked older, just then. I handed Lee a brown bottle of beer, and he took it from me, tipped his head back, and sipped. But he would not look at us. We stood there awhile, in silence, our arms crossed.

“It’s not your fault,” Beth said to him finally. “We know you didn’t want this.”

“I don’t want this,” he said vaguely. A moment passed as we waited for him to finish. Then, “Maybe I need some air,” he finally said.

We followed him outside, into the pasture, and Chloe and Beth removed their heels as we continued. I loosened my tie. We went to the horses, their eyeballs still big and wild. Ronny was talking to them up ahead of us, his voice low and soothing. And then he was singing to them, his voice like a ragged lullaby, and we stopped to watch him. He sang: “Shall I stay, would it be a sin, if I can’t help, falling in love with you.…”

He touched the horse in front of him then, his gnarled rodeo hands soft on the velvet of the horse’s muzzle, the muscles of its great breast. His mouth was near the horse’s ear, he was singing to it. We sat in the grass, watching him, listening to his sweet warble.

*   *   *

Lee moved to New York not long after the wedding, and we saw him less and less. The packages still came, and sometimes letters, but the time between his visits became greater and greater. Grass began to sprout in his driveway. In time our children stopped asking about him. But we still listened to his albums, and my daughter even began to play the guitar. She had taped a photo from
Rolling Stone
to the wall near her bed. In the photo, Lee is on stage somewhere in the world, a spotlight shining brightly on his sweaty face, his eyes closed in concentration, his mouth nearly wrapped sideways around the microphone. In his arms, the very guitar he had once forgotten to bring to a wedding.

It was hardest for Ronny, but we tried our best to fill the void Lee had left. I drove Ronny to his doctor appointments and to the grocery store. We cooked for him, and there were nights that he watched our children. He was very tender with them. They sat in his lap and on the arms of chairs as he read Dr. Seuss to them. Frequently they corrected his pronunciation. Sometimes they read books to him.

One Saturday afternoon I walked the long walk down our gravel driveway to the mailbox. Spring had come, and the ditches were full of meltwater, the fields and trees timidly green. I had just finished changing the oil on one of the older tractors. Plowing and planting would begin soon. I reached into the mailbox and there was a thick envelope from Lee’s address in New York City. The paper was expensive and our address and names had been written in calligraphy. I opened it.

He was getting married to Chloe. Inside were four airplane tickets and a hand-tooled note:

Henry, I miss you like hell. Come out and see us.

Make sure Ronny gets his invitation.

And tell him to bring a date.

Love, your best friend, Lee

L

T
HE DAY AFTER
K
IP’S WEDDING
they came down the driveway like tourists on safari, big cameras aimed out the windows of rented Jeeps, gawking behind expensive sunglasses. The first one actually got up to my house before I noticed, before I grabbed a shotgun and came out onto the porch in my boxers. They didn’t know that the gun was unloaded, that I’d run out of shells months earlier. It’s a beautiful gun, my Ithaca. A pump-action with ornate scrolling and nice bluing to the steel. I bought it as a gift to myself after
Shotgun Lovesongs
first went platinum. It seemed fitting enough.

“Get the
hell
out of here!” I screamed, pumping nothing into the chamber. “Go on! Go before I call the police!” In truth, I knew it would take the police a half-hour or more to get to my place—part of the beauty of the Ithaca. They retreated, sending gravel flying into the air and kicking up a plume of dust. I watched their heads bounce against the ceiling of the Jeep as they raced back up the driveway to the road. Two more trespassers came down the road that morning until finally I’d had enough and towed Ronny’s taxidermied bull to the mouth of the driveway, where I left it with a cardboard sign draped around its neck that read:
NO TRESPASSERS! THIS MEANS YOU!

Chloe found it all somewhat amusing, in the way that I now know she finds so much in life amusing. Nothing ever seemed to upset her. Those weeks at my house, that time after Kip’s wedding, they were some of the happier days of my life. Chloe, walking barefoot around the house in one of my old flannel shirts. Or the two of us, building a fire beside the creek at night so that after we finished skinny-dipping, we could warm ourselves against the autumn chill. Sometimes we’d go to Henry and Beth’s house and cook for them in their kitchen, and standing at the stove I’d watch Chloe on the floor, playing checkers or jacks with the kids. But most of the time I wanted her to myself. Wanted to show her my world, make her fall in love with Wisconsin.

Cell phone reception is spotty at my house, so I’ve always insisted on a house phone, which is mounted to the kitchen wall. My Internet connection is also hit-or-miss, oftentimes only a minor upgrade over dial-up. Chloe would insist that we drive or walk to the tallest nearby hill, where we’d stay for an hour or so while she checked her email or talked to her agent back in New York and I’d sit beside her, combing her hair with my fingers or warming one of her hands in my own.

Some nights we would get bored and drive to the VFW and sit at the bar and shake dice in an old leather cup or just watch a football game on the television, and on those evenings it was not uncommon for a young woman or a middle-aged man to tap on Chloe’s shoulder with a single finger and then produce a magazine for her to sign or even just a cardboard coaster from the bar. But no one ever asked for my autograph anymore and that was exactly the way I wanted it to be. What was more surprising were the evenings when no one said a word to us, when the bar was dead, when we sat on our stools with perhaps one or two geezers and simply played cribbage or euchre and drank Manhattans or brandy old-fashioneds, and in those times I felt that maybe we could actually stay in Little Wing, that Chloe might come to love Wisconsin.

One night we were driving back to my house, and as she sat close to me on the bench seat and we held hands, I said, “Do you think … do you think you could ever see yourself living here, with me?”

She snuggled closer against me, into my right shoulder. I could smell brandy on her breath and I knew that she was closing her eyes to fall asleep.

“Chloe?”

“It’s so quiet here.”

“But isn’t it nice? No one bothers us, we’re just like normal people. We have normal friends here…”

“Oh, Lee,” she said. “Let’s be quiet now, can we?”

“No, come on. We should talk about this.” Behind everything I was thinking,
I want to marry you
.

“I don’t know, baby. I haven’t wanted to be normal in a long time. I like my life. I like New York. Everything is in New York. Everybody wants to be in New York.”

I couldn’t say,
I don’t want to be in New York
.

“Besides,” she yawned, “think about it: we’re busy people. You tour. I’m on location. New York just makes sense. It’s easy to fly out of. The media is all there. Projects are there. People like you and me, Lee, we don’t live in small towns.” She kissed the palm of my hand. “You know?”

*   *   *

When I had nowhere else to go, I came back here. When I had nothing, I came back here. I came back here and made something out of nothing. I could live here on next to nothing; there is nothing to spend money on, no one to impress. No one here cares about anything other than your work ethic and your kindness and your
competence
. I came back here and I found my voice, like something that had fallen out of my pocket, like a souvenir long forgotten. And every time I come back here I am surrounded by people who love me, who care for me, who protect me like a tent of warmth.
Here,
I can hear things, the world throbs differently, silence thrums like a chord strummed eons ago, music in the aspen trees and in the firs and burr oaks and even in the fields of drying corn.

How do you explain that to someone? How do you explain that to someone you love? What if they don’t understand?

K

T
HIRTEEN, FOURTEEN YEARS AGO,
we used to go up there with a backpack full of pilfered beer, maybe a joint or two or three. I never smoked, but they did—Lee and Henry and Ronny. We were always up there, especially during summer, when there was nothing else to do. The feed mill was closed then, derelict, and it always seemed to be on the brink of being razed, but then someone would put up a big stink, hold a town meeting, maybe even throw a fundraiser—a pig roast, a bake sale, raffle off a new Ford pickup—and the mill’s sentence would be stayed. The taxes would get paid and there would be rumors of some out-of-town messiah come to save the day, some corporation come to breathe new life into those old beams and bricks and stones. Other buildings, beautiful buildings, were demolished: the old depot, the original post office, even an old opera house; a four-story hotel that in later years became first a flophouse for migrant workers, bikers, Vietnam vets, then later, something like a nursing home. The building so old it lacked an elevator shaft. The most feeble of the building’s occupants were always lodged on that first floor. On soft spring evenings, crisp autumn afternoons, many of them sitting on the elevated front porch, an architectural remnant of the American Old West, the frontier. They rolled wheelchairs out there or sat on the porch swings, rocking, watching the sporadic traffic on Main Street. On the Fourth of July, those geezers clutched small American flags in their trembling hands, waved them at the morning parade, and in the weeks and months that followed, still waved them at pedestrians, at funeral processions, the after-church crowd rushing home for Sunday football, until the red, white, and blue fabric faded and frayed at the edges.