Shotgun Lovesongs: A Novel (7 page)

My grandpa lived there for two years before he died. We used to visit him on Friday evenings in the old hotel’s tall-ceilinged dining room. The room was dimly lit, and what light did enter the space seemed to pass mostly through ancient, warped windows, the glass thicker at the bottom of the pane than at the top. I imagined another time when candles and kerosene threw a different kind of golden light onto linen tabletops. We ate poached cod, mashed potatoes, peas, dinner rolls. My grandpa picked fish bones from his dry mouth and set them on the rim of his plate. It always took him a long time to remove the bones from his mouth, as if he had swallowed a hook himself. There was a bar in there too and rumors that once upon a time,
way way back,
the hotel had been a brothel. Sometimes you would see an old man or an old woman at the bar, peering around for a bartender, saying in a sad, confused voice, “All I want is a taste, just a little taste.” But the bar had been bereft of bottles since the flophouse evolved into a nursing home.

The old hotel finally came down in 1988, when I was nine years old. By then, Grandpa was gone, buried in the cemetery just outside of town along the Little Wing River where it is dammed up, where the water grows green with algae in the summertime and thick with ice in winter. We call that stretch of the river Lake Wing, and in summertime occasionally we’d go out there on water skis, though the “lake” was hardly more than a pond, and our circuits were confined to tight nauseating circles behind a smallish outboard motor better used behind a sixteen-foot aluminum fishing boat, the water so silty and thick with lily pads and algae you could almost walk on it with a pair of snowshoes.

No demolitions expert was needed. A sweep of the building was made to ensure no senior citizens had holed themselves up in a broom closet or stairwell; then, when the hotel was confirmed to be totally and finally vacant, the biggest excavating machine I’d ever seen rolled right down Main Street, its steel-fanged bucket held at the ready. The volunteer fire department kept a steady stream of water aimed at the hotel as the excavator began gnashing at the old bricks and wood. Families came out for the demolition, laid blankets on the sidewalk, packed picnics. It was a Saturday in October, the air dry and cool. My mother handed us cold fried-chicken sandwiches wrapped in paper toweling. We drank warm apple cider from a thermos, ate potato salad, baby carrots, pickles. Dad was a volunteer firefighter, and that was the first and only time we’d ever see him in action. In his uniform, underneath his fluorescent yellow helmet, he looked so official, so heroic, so brave.

Mom elbowed us gently. “Isn’t your father handsome?”

Along the sidewalks, the hotel’s former inhabitants looked on, chewing their tongues like jerky, looking defeated, depleted. I don’t know where they went after the building came down, though I suspect many ended up in Eau Claire, just north of Little Wing. It made me sad to think of them, most of them likely to be separated into different institutions, like elementary school children whose parents all suddenly decided to take jobs in new cities or neighborhoods, and the kids, shuffled someplace new without a say in the world.

When the old hotel was finally gone there was nothing but a new hole along Main Street, a gap between the pharmacy and hardware store where only a pile of rubble lay. We pushed a red wheelbarrow down Main Street and spent afternoons collecting the leftover bricks, though, at that age, we could only fill the barrow up halfway before it became too much to push. Then we brought the bricks back to my father, who paid us a dime for each one we scrounged. He built an outdoor fireplace with those bricks, a little grotto of fire we congregated around in warmer months, a place where we could toast marshmallows or roast hot dogs.

*   *   *

Sometimes we took girls up to the top of the feed mill, but mostly, it was just us. Just the four of us: Lee, Ronny, Henry, and me. Nights, it was better than any telescope, better than the planetariums we visited with our middle school or high school teachers. Because on top of those old wood and cement grain silos, we found narrow places to lie on our backs and stare at the stars, to drink beer, to talk big, to dream. Our town, Little Wing, down there, not much to see and always shrinking, not even a stoplight blinking against the night, and everyone, all of us, putting it down, talking about leaving, going somewhere, going anywhere but here. The sense that staying in town meant we were failures, meant we were yokels—who the hell knows what we thought back then on those nights.

Henry and I, we preferred mornings. Dawns, sunrises. It’s funny—but I suppose he was already becoming a farmer back then, getting up early, helping his dad with the family dairy operation, working on old engines, listening to all the retired or bankrupt farmers after church. And it wasn’t many mornings, but there were a handful, when we’d climb up those steel rebar stairs all the way up to the top of those grain silos and wait there, the air cool and blue, our breaths just barely visible. Maybe a thermos of coffee between us, or a stolen bottle of brandy or blackberry schnapps from our parents’ liquor cabinets. And there must have been a morning or two when we didn’t bring anything, just hugged our knees, blew hot air into our hands, waited for the sun to come, the day to begin warming. At the time I didn’t think much of it, but I suppose looking back, it was mostly me who called Henry, mostly me doing the inviting. We didn’t talk much on those mornings. Just sat and looked out, as if we were waiting for a ship.

I’ve never been to the Grand Canyon, to Yosemite or Yellowstone, to any of the places you hear people talking about—spectacular places, I mean. But, even without having been to the Grand Canyon, I imagine a sunrise there has to be something bordering on a religious experience, all that ancient red, orange, and yellow rock lighting up in their striated layers, all those majestic deep purple shadows.

I wish you could see a sunrise from the top of those grain silos, our own prairie skyscraper. I wish you could see how green everything is in the spring, how yellow the corn’s tassels even a few months later, how blue the morning shadows are, and creeks winding their own slow paths, the land rolling and rolling on and on, studded here and there with proud red barns, white farmhouses, pale gravel roads. The sun emerging in the east so pink and orange, so big. In the ditches and valleys, fog collecting like slow vaporous rivers, waiting to be burned away.

I really can’t remember who I was back then, that teenage version of myself, what I was thinking. I guess, like everyone else, I was restless. Maybe I was lonely. Maybe being up there, at the top of those grain silos, maybe I thought I could see something, my future, some spot on the horizon where I’d land, some future version of myself, some girl I hadn’t met yet, my future wife. I don’t know. But it felt good I guess. Maybe it even felt like something
artistic,
something
thoughtful,
the kind of thing that our old high school art teacher, Mr. Killebrew, would never guess we had in us.

Lee and Ronny preferred sunsets, moonrises. Some westbound freight train roaring through the night below, never stopping, its cyclopic light to cut the night, its whistle the loudest thing in the world, and high on top of those towers, feeling wobbly-kneed, as if the train might shake the building to the ground. Those two: always high, always singing “Idiot Wind” or “Meet Me in the Morning,” hurling their beer bottles out into the night, out at the passing trains, listening for a
crash,
listening for police sirens that never came, the voice of authority telling us to “Get down goddamn it!” But no—the entire town always too mild, too asleep, dozing in front of blue-faced televisions as Johnny Carson charmed everyone into a satisfied snore.

But sunsets. That was how I first understood that Lee was different from us, that he was maybe even destined to be famous. Because in the ten or twenty minutes before the sun was totally extinguished in the west, he always demanded our complete silence. And I don’t know why, but we listened, we acquiesced. And we’d sit there, sipping our dads’ beer, looking out on that chameleon sky, and we’d listen to Lee. Listen to him hold court.

“You hear that?” he’d say, not so much asking as telling. “You hear that tone, that note? I swear to god, that color over there, that pink color. When that pink color starts to really blush, it’s like this note, I can’t describe it, this sweet high note. And you hear that, that orange? Not that marmalade orange, but the peach one? You hear that? Oh, man! I can’t wait for the blues! The blues and the purples! And then that last long, low black note—that reverberating bass note that says, ‘Go on now, good night. Good night, America, good night.’”

I never knew what he was talking about, but I tried. I
tried
to listen, tried to hear that sunset music he was talking about. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t hear it. Those guys, they listened to music
all the time
. I’d come over to Henry’s parents’ house—this is back in elementary school, middle school—and those three would be down in the basement, listening to Henry’s dad’s old records, anything they could get their hands on. And then Lee joined a record club after seeing an ad in the back of a magazine:
Ten albums for only a penny!
A penny!

Even in elementary school, in middle school, Lee was the first person I knew who owned a Walkman, and he carried it everywhere—out to the playground during recess or walking home from school. He even tried to sneak it into church, and tried to listen to it while we watched all those educational film strips at school, even during lunch. He listened attentively to all the cassettes—and later CDs—that older kids gave him, like contraband. Gangster rap and metal and early grunge. Public Enemy and N.W.A giving way to Anthrax and Metallica and then Nirvana, Stone Temple Pilots, and Soundgarden. He wore nothing but flannel for years and years. Flannel and torn blue jeans, Chuck Taylors covered in cryptic little poems and epitaphs.

Up on top of the feed mill, the sunset almost entirely washed away now by a sea of black and blue. “I didn’t hear it,” I’d admit to them. “I didn’t hear it at all.”

They’d laugh at me. Laugh and laugh. And Lee would say, “You’re not listening. Look, I know you’re
trying
to hear, but you’re not listening, man.”

A few times he tried to make me listen to this album
Kind of Blue,
but that didn’t help at all, because much as I tried, I just couldn’t find anything to listen to—there weren’t even any words to grab on to, nothing at all, just these spaces of lonely trumpet and mellow piano notes, but so many spaces of
almost nothing at all
.

*   *   *

Felicia used to ask me after we were married, “Why did you want to come back here? What is it? We had everything we ever needed or could have wanted in Chicago. Why come back? What for?”

I don’t know that I ever found the right way to answer that, but I suppose it all comes back to those nights and mornings, those guys. Feeling like we were apart from everything we’d ever known and maybe better than the place that made us. And yet, at the same time, in love with it all. In love with being small-town kings, standing up on those bankrupt towers, looking out over our futures, looking for something—maybe happiness, maybe love, maybe fame.

And when I found some of those things along a Gold Coast, along a Miracle Mile, inside a Loop, the only thing I could think to do was to come back home, out of exile, to show those boys—now men—
Look. Look what I did. Look at who I am now. Look at me.

That’s why I came back. Except that now I’m the only one going back up there. I’m the only one climbing to the top of those silos. Looking at sunrises that just make me wish that I was back in bed with Felicia. Or back in Chicago, waiting for the taxis to begin waking the city up.

R

A
TOP THOSE BULLS,
I never thought about anything except hanging on. My life was lived in eight-second chunks, and most of the time, a lot shorter than that. I miss it. These days, I don’t know what to do and sometimes it feels like no one will let me do anything. Truth is, I don’t want to drink because I want to get drunk, but, maybe, if I had a drink, I could
bend
things, you know? Like how the world looks? Or even time? My life now, it stretches out before me like a highway to nowhere. One of those prairie highways where you can be driving eighty, ninety, a hundred miles per hour and the only way you can tell you’re flying is the sound of the engine burning and the way the gas needle starts to lean toward that big old
E
quicker and quicker. But there ain’t anything to measure yourself or your speed against. No trees, no buildings—if you’re lucky, you got a string of telephone wires, but most of the time, nothing.

Most days I wake up and do a hundred pushups just
because
. Because
what the fuck
. Because on the teevee is the same old shit. Old news recycled into new news and all the same old problems all over again and I’m supposed to care, or get worked up. Here’s what I’ve
gleaned
: more and more people, less and less planet, and everything keeps getting hotter and hotter. That about sums it up, far as I’m concerned.

People like to tune the teevee to something they think I’d like, usually a documentary about nature. Or the West. Or horses. Makes me feel like I’m at a nursing home or something, some well-meaning nurse coming into my life telling me what kind of teevee to watch like I can’t use a remote control myself. I think they do that because they don’t know what to say to me anymore, because they’re sad for me, or because they think I’m sad. And most of the time, guess what? I ain’t. I ain’t sad. I’m just bored stiff. I’m so goddamned bored that watching a documentary about
The Wild Horses of Colorado
gets me to thinking about one thing: if I was a wild horse, I’d bolt right off and just keep on running.

I want to break out of here so bad and I don’t even know where I want to go. Maybe Anyplace, I guess. I know they think I can’t take care of myself, but I sure as hell can. I’m not a smart man—I know that—but I ain’t dumb. And the way things are, it’s like I’m in a cage. People forget, I think, that I’ve ridden more bulls and more horses than I can count, that I’ve gotten in barfights from here to Boise and all the way down to Baton Rouge, that before my accident, I used to walk into a bar,
any bar,
and go up to a girl and there was a damn good chance I was going to make her my
friend
for the night. Easy as pie.