In Western Counties (5 page)

Inside, one dog yet barely alive, entrails hanging from his belly to the dirty floor, and chained to an old cow stanchion trembling with fear. Aida came to it, her hands on its sides gently. She freed the dog, but it only leaned into her. She carried it back to the truck, its eyes searching. She drove down the driveway, her eyes on the rearview mirror. She looked back at the gravel path before her. An Escalade had just turned into the driveway and was moving toward her. It pulled to the shoulder, and she saw the driver roll down his window. She recognized him as a pharmacist. Saw his breath in the early morning cool.

“Officer Battle,” he said, looking embarrassed. He saw the dog beside her in the truck, the pile of money. “Didn't know you fought dogs.”

“Wilson,” she said, “you have any morphine on you?” His name came effortlessly, from some fathoms deep inside her. She let the words come up.

He startled. “He in bad shape?”

She fingered the pistol beside her, was irate inside. “He's damn near gone,” she said.

“Don't waste the drugs,” he said, waving his hand. “Bullets are cheaper.”

“That right?” she said.

She pulled the pistol out, leveled her wrist on the window frame, and put two bullets in each of his driver-side tires. The dog startled, shook. Wilson stared at her. “Morphine,” she said.

He rode in the bed of the truck to the veterinarian's office. She made him carry the dog in himself.

“You fight another dog,” she told him, “I'll do more than ruin your vehicle.”

He nodded, walking into the back of the building with the wounded animal.

She went back to her house, pulling the F-150 into her driveway. Blood on the bench seat and a bag of money. She folded out of the truck, every nerve inside her body bent and charged. Just then two fawns burst out of her browned garden and she pulled the pistol from the small of her back and aimed at them, but they'd already bounded into the safety of a nearby copse of birch. She tried the front door, but it was locked. The keys in her hands jingled together and it was difficult for her to fit the metal inside the lock. Pushing against the door, she began sobbing. She was breaking and there was no one for her. Finally the door gave way and she allowed herself to lay right down in the doorway. She had the sudden desire to own a dog, a pet, some kind creature to comfort her. She fell asleep that way and lay there until the afternoon sun was hot enough to induce sweat. Then picked herself up and went inside, closing the door. Leaves had collected in the threshold.

The answering machine was blinking on the kitchen counter and she went to it, pressed the button. It was the lieutenant. “Battle. It's LT. Look, got a strange report of Doctor Wilson showing up at the vet's office holding a dead dog. Said you'd dropped him there? Said he had two flats out by that farmhouse you and Lombard visited. You remember …” But the tape had run out, his voice stopping abruptly. The machine said, “Message two.” It was the lieutenant's voice again. “Damn machines. Look, I know you're retired and everything, Battle, but I need you to call me on this one, all right? I sent Lombard out there this morning to check on things and no one was home. That kid Kruk might be mixed up in something and he wasn't around, though his red Dodge truck was. So if …” The machine cut the lieutenant's voice off again and then said, “You have no more messages.”

It was red
, she thought,
how could I have forgotten a red Ram
?
A red Ram. A red goddamn Ram.

She reached into the cupboard for a coffee mug, staring out the window the whole time. The driver-side door of the truck was open. She filled the kettle with water and put it on the stove to boil. She went outside to the truck where the money was still on the seat. She eased into the truck and tried to turn on the radio but did not have her keys. She went into the house and found the keys beside the answering machine, looked out the window. The truck door was still open. She went outside and then sat on the bench seat again, turning the keys in the ignition. The radio warbled on and she sat that way for some time, listening to country music until night set in. Inside the house, a whistle was blowing and the kitchen windows were foggy with steam. The stovetop was everywhere wet with water that had sputtered out of the kettle.
What was I doing? What a mess. What a mess.
On the kitchen table was a bag full of money.

* * *

In Duluth, Aida found Bethany beside the great lake, watching freighters go slowly by. It was the first day of November, and Bethany had a cashmere scarf knotted around her face.

“It's the only thing that can touch my face,” she said. “So goddamned expensive, but it's the only thing that feels good.”

They sat on the gray, weathered seat of a park bench. Aida kicked a duffle bag toward Bethany's right shoe.

“I'm not dumb, you know,” Bethany said after a while. “I want you to know that. You probably think I am … but I'm not. I went to college. I was just no good with men. Could never say the right thing, so … I just stopped talking. I thought I'd won the lottery with Bret. You should have seen him with those dogs sometimes.” She wiped her nose with the back of her hand gently. “Especially in the mornings. They'd hop up onto the bed and be licking at his face and I can hear his laughter.” She threw a stone into the lake. She thought about him again and shivered uneasily. He had not been a good man; he had duped her. She unzipped the duffel bag, tilted her head.

“Should be enough for whatever surgery you need,” Aida said. Then, “I took fifty already. That number seemed about right. Too bad about that house, though. Who knows if she had any kin. Seemed like a nice enough place there, near the creek and all.”

“No,” Bethany said, “I hope it gets burnt to the ground. All of it.” Then, “You didn't remember me at all, did you?” She moved her fingers lightly over the scars on her face. “Are they that bad? The scars?”

Aida shook her head, her teeth cold in the wind. “I got an appointment at the Mayo hospital down in Rochester, but I don't even know if I can stand to go. Don't know if I care to hear the bad news.” She paused. The air smelled fresh, a suggestion of snow not too far away, but also of other things: diesel, fish, sawdust. “No,” she said, “they aren't that bad. But no. I didn't recognize you. Not even sure I filed a report for that day. If I think back to it, I can't even remember driving back to the station that day. Just … whole days gone. Whole days.”

“I'll go with you,” Bethany said, looking at Aida. But Aida never acknowledged the words and maybe the wind had come across the lake and swooped them up because the redheaded woman sat still, regarding the expanse of water ahead of her. Her lips moving very minutely and Bethany realized that she was talking to herself as if no one else was around.
Whole days, whole days.

They sat together, the wind sweeping their hair into their faces. Out on the lake the freighters moved slowly and whitecaps were building, crashing against the piers and riprap. Above them, abandoned grain elevators rose into the blue sky and pigeons circled. They watched a three-legged dog trot through a field of rusted trucks, its black nose in the air, sniffing the freshwater breezes.

Read on for an excerpt from

Nickolas Butler's bestselling novel,
Shotgun Lovesongs

Available from St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 2014 by Nickolas Butler

 

We invited him to all of our weddings; he was famous. We addressed the invitations to his record company's skyscraper in New York City so that the gaudy, gilded envelopes could be forwarded to him on tour—in Beirut, Helsinki, Tokyo. Places beyond our ken or our limited means. He sent back presents in battered cardboard boxes festooned with foreign stamps—birthday gifts of fine scarves or perfume for our wives, small delicate toys or trinkets upon the births of our children: rattles from Johannesburg, wooden nesting dolls from Moscow, little silk booties from Taipei. He would call us sometimes, the connection scratchy and echoing, a chorus of young women giggling in the background, his voice never sounding as happy as we expected it to.

Months would pass before we saw his face again, and then, he would arrive home, bearded and haggard, his eyes tired but happily relieved. We could tell that Lee was glad to see us, to be back in our company. We always gave him time to recover before our lives resumed together, we knew he needed time to dry out and regain his balance. We let him sleep and sleep. Our wives brought him casseroles and lasagnas, bowls of salad and freshly baked pies.

He liked to ride a tractor around his sprawling property. We assumed he liked feeling the hot daylight, the sun and fresh air on his pale face. The slow speed of that old John Deere, so reliable and patient. The earth rolling backward beneath him. There were no crops on his land of course, but he rode the tractor through the fallow fields of prairie grasses and wildflowers, a cigarette between his lips, or a joint. He was always smiling on that tractor, his hair all flyaway and light blond and in the sunlight it was like the fluff of a seeding dandelion.

He had taken another name for the stage but we never called him by that name. We called him Leland, or just plain Lee, because that was his name. He lived in an old school house away from things, away from our town, Little Wing, and maybe five miles out into the countryside. The name on his mailbox read:
L SUTTON
. He had built a recording studio in the small, ancient gymnasium, padding the walls with foam and thick carpeting. There were platinum records up on the walls. Photographs of him with famous actresses and actors, politicians, chefs, writers. His gravel driveway was long and potted with holes, but even this was not enough to deter some of the young women who sought him out. They came from around the world. They were always beautiful.

Lee's success had not surprised us. He had simply never given up on his music. While the rest of us were in college or the army or stuck on our family farms, he had holed up in a derelict chicken coop and played his battered guitar in the all-around silence of deepest winter. He sang in an eerie falsetto, and sometimes around the campfire it would make you weep in the unreliable shadows thrown by those orange-yellow flames and white-black smoke. He was the best among us.

He wrote songs about our place on earth: the everywhere fields of corn, the third-growth forests, the humpbacked hills and grooved-out draws. The knife-sharp cold, the too-short days, the snow, the snow, the snow. His songs were our anthems—they were our bullhorns and microphones and jukebox poems. We adored him; our wives adored him. We knew all the words to the songs and sometimes we were in the songs.

***

Kip was going to be married in October inside a barn he'd renovated for the occasion. The barn stood on a farm of horses, the land there delineated by barbed-wire fences. The barn was adjacent to a small country cemetery where it was entirely possible to count every lichen-encrusted tombstone and know how many departed were lying in repose under that thick sod. A census, so to speak. Everyone was invited to the wedding. Lee had even cut short the leg of an Australian tour in order to attend, though to all of us, Kip and Lee seemed the least close among our friends. Kip, as far as I knew, didn't even own any of Lee's albums, and whenever we saw Kip driving around town it was inevitably with a Bluetooth lodged in his ear, his mouth working as if he were still out on the floor of the Mercantile Exchange.

Kip had just returned to Wisconsin after about nine years of trading commodities in Chicago. It was as if the world had just gotten small again. For years, decades, our whole lives, really—we'd listened to the farm reports in our trucks on the AM radio. Sometimes you'd even hear Kip's voice during those broadcasts as he was interviewed from his office down in Chicago, that familiar self-assured baritone narrating fluctuations in numbers that dictated whether or not we could afford orthodontia for our children, winter vacations, or new boots, telling us things we didn't exactly understand and yet already knew. Our own futures were sown into those reports of milk and corn prices, wheat and soy. Hog-bellies and cattle. Far from our farms and mills, Kip had made good, manipulating the fruits of our labor. We respected him just the same. He was fiercely intelligent, for one thing, his eyes burned in their sockets as he listened intently to us complain about seed salesmen, pesticides, fertilizer pricing, our machines, the fickle weather. He kept a farmer's almanac in his back pocket, understood our obsession with rain. Had he not gone away, he might have been a prodigious farmer himself. The almanac, he once told me, was almost entirely obsolete, but he liked to carry it around. “Nostalgia,” he explained.

After he returned, Kip bought the boarded-up feed mill downtown. The tallest structure in town, its six-story grain silos had always loomed over us, casting long shadows like a sundial for our days. Very early in our childhoods it had been a bustling place where corn was taken to be held for passing trains, where farmers came to buy their fuel in bulk, their seed, other supplies, but by the late eighties it had fallen into disrepair, the owner having tried to sell in a time when no one was buying. It was only a few months before the high-schoolers began throwing stones through the windows, decorating the grain silos with graffiti. Most of our lives it was just a dark citadel beside a set of railroad tracks that had grown rusty and overgrown with milkweed, ragweed, fireweed. The floors had been thick with pigeon shit and bat guano, and there was a lake of standing water in the old stone basement. In the silos, rats and mice ran rampant, eating the leftover grain—sometimes we broke inside to shoot them with .22s, the small caliber bullets occasionally ricocheting against the towering walls of the silos. We used flashlights to find their beady little eyes and once, Ronny stole one of his mother's signal flares from the trunk of her car, dropping it down into the silo, where it glowed hot pink against the sulfurous darkness, as we shot away.