Shotgun Lovesongs: A Novel (12 page)

“Hey Dad,” I said.

He sat in his chair, reading the
Eau Claire Leader-Telegram
. The television was muted, but I knew that Dad liked to look up from his paper occasionally to monitor the world, now and then turning the sound up to listen to the weather report, or sports scores. The rest of it depressed him to tears, he said, that’s why he would never move away from Wisconsin.

“Hey pumpkin,” he said, rising from his chair to kiss me. I hugged him fiercely. “You smell good,” he said. “What is that? Like some kind of expensive lavender shampoo? Burdock? What is that?”

I looked at him. “You have to be kidding me, right?”

“No, you should tell me what it is, so I can get a bottle for your mother.”

“Seriously. You’re fucking with me, Dad.”

He held up his hands in surrender. “I’m not screwing with you. I like the way you smell. See if I compliment
you
again.”

I slumped into a chair. “God, I love this house.”

He looked over the V of his newspaper and then settled his eyes on me. “You all right, kid? You look a little tired. How’s Henry? You guys still incommunicado?”

“Dad.”

“What? I’m not allowed to ask?”

“I’m just not in the mood.”

“Well, I don’t know what you birds call it these days, but I wouldn’t experiment too long. I think you might regret losing him.” He smiled at me, turned the pages of his paper, and then held them up again, like a blind between us. “Dads know these things.”

I sighed heavily. Mom appeared from the basement, where I could hear the washer, the water sloshing, the air already heavier and filled with the smell of soap. “Hot dish?” she asked.

After dinner I indulged them, revealing only the highlights of my recent employment history while also motioning toward brighter prospects on the horizon. Possibly graduate school in Minneapolis or Madison. Maybe a paralegal program in Milwaukee. It felt like a job interview, like my mom was actually interrogating me for a newly open position as her adult daughter. She smiled at me, took my hand, told me how proud they were. I kissed them both good night and went up the stairs to my room. Moments before I had feigned sleepiness, but now my body felt electric. The letter was sitting on my bed, Lee’s handwriting one rectangular smear of graphite. I lay on the bed, ripped open the envelope, and read.

He hadn’t talked to anyone since coming back. He felt like a failure for the band’s dissolution. He didn’t know what he was doing. He didn’t know about the new music he was making. He was lonely. He was considering giving it up and applying for college. He was thinking about a normal job. He was thinking about moving away. A telephone number was scrawled beside
PS
at the very bottom of the page, as if an afterthought.

I folded the letter and slipped it back into the envelope. I went to the bathroom, showered, and stared at myself through a smudged porthole of clean glass in the otherwise foggy mirror.

I was, he was, we were all in that peculiar rut of our midtwenties, when just enough of our friends or classmates had found some measure of success, so that it taunted those of us who hadn’t. Kip was down in Chicago and already he was living in a huge condo in the John Hancock building and had season Cubs tickets and a vintage Mustang that he drove along Lake Shore Drive and Michigan Avenue, the ragtop pulled back so that the quartz obelisks of the city’s skyscrapers swam above him. Eddy and Henry had gone down for a weekend and come back with tales of Brooks Brothers suits, five-hundred-dollar steak dinners, and Northwestern coeds who looked like runway models, ballerinas, or the heirs of a social stratum many castes above our own. Kip, I was told, served a martini to a young woman using her high-heeled shoe as a flute.

I dressed quickly, dried my hair, stuffed Lee’s letter in my pocket, and readied myself to find him. In the kitchen, I dialed the telephone number, holding my breath while I listened to the rings. I could hear my parents moving clumsily around the floor above me, like livestock.

“Hello?”

“Lee?”

“Beth? That you?”

“Yes,” I exhaled. “I got your letter. Want a visitor?” I noticed my fingers playing with the cord, winding it around my wrist and knuckles, until the fingers turned white.

“Yeah, come on over. Can you find it okay?”

“I’ll find it,” I said.

Mom caught me at the door, struggling to put on my winter boots.

“I thought you were tired,” she said, crossing her arms. “It’s almost ten o’ clock.”

“I know, Mom,” I said. “I just have to go check on something.”

She raised her eyebrows at me. “When should we send out the search parties?”

I stood and reached for the doorknob. “I’ll be home for breakfast.” I gave her a peck on the cheek.

“You need to take a shower to
go check on something
? And
perfume
?”

“Mom.”

“Watch those roads.”

I didn’t know what I was doing, except that I was curious, that I was also lonely, that I wasn’t constrained by anyone or any relationship, and driving in my rusty Pontiac in subzero temperatures, one headlight out, I couldn’t feel the cold. Cold, my dad always told me, is all psychological, all in your head. I could hear him: “People in Florida think that sixty degrees, fifty degrees is cold. The key is good socks and a good breakfast. But more than that, the key is being happy. And more than that, the biggest key is working hard.”

I ground my heel into the accelerator and drove through the night, out into the country. Lee had sketched me a map, indicating my parents’ house with an asterisk, or maybe a star, his own address with an
X
.

The night was bright with starlight and the searchlight of a nearly pregnant moon. I pulled onto the gravel driveway and a dog began barking. It sounded like the loudest noise in the world. I parked the Pontiac beneath an ancient oak tree and checked my reflection in the mirror. I could hear the dog’s claws against the ice and gravel, coming toward me. Too excited to be frightened, I stepped out into the night.

It was one of those giant old yellow-cream brick farmhouses surrounded by winter fields of stubble corn and snow. It can be difficult to find the front door of such houses, when in every direction the house faces fields and the infinitely straight grid of county roads. Those old American four-squares are inevitably wrapped in deep porches and always without a doorbell or mailbox. I noticed a few windows going from dark to light above me, and curtains being pulled aside at the bottom corners. Eventually, I found what I took to be the front door and knocked.

Lee answered, and I breathed a deep sigh, smiling at him. He smiled back as he motioned me in. “Shush,” he scolded the dog. “Come in or stay out,” he whispered to it. The dog wagged its tail and slipped into the house.

“Yours?” I asked.

“Naw,” he said, giving me a hug, “It’s Joaquin’s. He lives upstairs too. So you got my letter?”

I almost patted my back pocket, but instead nodded, unsure what else to say. “Show me where you live.”

An old woman padded out of the kitchen in a pink muumuu, her long white hair a cape behind her trailing down just above the backs of her knees. She wore tortoiseshell glasses and clutched a cup of what smelled like chamomile tea. She smiled at us.

“I made a bed up for you,” she said.

“Mrs. Cather,” Lee said gently, “this is my sister, Beth. Beth, Bea Cather.”

I looked at him, confused at first, and then catching on. “Pleasure,” I said, extending my hand. He nodded and winked at me, gamely.

She set her tea down on a coffee table littered with
National Geographic
s and took my hand in both of hers, and they were trembling, birdlike little hands, blue-veined, warm, and dry. She looked at my red-cheeked face with watery eyes. “Your brother plays beautiful music,” she said. “He’s the finest guitar player I’ve ever heard.”

“Oh, Bea,” Lee said, laughing, “come on, now, don’t embarrass me.”

“No,” Bea said, pointing a finger at him, “he’s too modest. Was he always that way? So humble, I mean?”

“Always,” I said, nodding theatrically. “Nothing is ever enough with Lee.”

“Well, I suppose maybe that’s a good thing,” Bea said. “Nothing more unattractive than a blowhard. My first husband was like that. He could spend all day telling you that his farts didn’t stink. Gets to the point where you just tune it out.”

“Yes ma’am,” I said.

“Well,” she said, “Leland said you might be tired from your traveling, so I made up a bed for you. It’s in the room next to mine. I didn’t want you upstairs, near all the boys. Those Mexican men, I tell you. Hard workers, all of them. And fine accordion players. But they all fancy themselves Casanovas too. If I was twenty years younger. Anyway. It is a
pleasure
to meet you. That brother of yours is an angel.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Good night, Bea,” Lee said.

“Good night, darling,” she called, mug back in hand, her slippers scuffling along the old wooden floor.

“Casanovas?” I asked.

“Uh, yea. Bea rents out the whole top floor to farm workers. So I share a bathroom with them—Joaquin, Ernesto, and Garcia. And they
do
like the ladies. It’s true.”

“Show me your room,” I said, hooking my arm in his elbow. We walked up the creaking staircase, past dozens of pictures of Bea’s family, her earlier past in black-and-white and sepia, then, with the passage of years, becoming more and more colorful, first in muted Polaroid hues and then the bold Technicolor shots of grandchildren, or perhaps great-grandchildren.

“Sister, huh?” I asked.

Lee blushed. “Well, I just didn’t want Bea asking too many questions.”

“But you
presumed
that I would sleep over.”

We stopped at the top of the stairs. Suddenly, he looked sad. “I’m sorry. I just … I just don’t know what the fuck is happening right now, and I heard that you and Henry were, you know, broken up. Look, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

“No,” I said, “it’s okay. Listen, it’s just good to see your face.” And then, I reached out to touch him, his chin and beard. Beneath the whiskers his face was gaunt, his cheekbones rising like two beautiful dunes of bone. “You’re not eating,” I said. I’d never touched him before like that. It was thrilling.

“Bea is trying to fatten me up.”

I let my fingers touch his lips. “Good.”

“Beth?”

I kissed him, gently, and he kissed back. The frequency of my world suddenly seemed to fuzz, my face so warm that I felt I was melting. Lee is tall, and so I had to rise up on my tiptoes, and I liked that feeling, of being next to a taller man.

“Come on,” he said, “I don’t want you to fall down the stairs.”

“Right.”

He led me down a central hallway and toward one of the bedrooms, where I could hear laughter, muffled voices, soft radio. “These clowns,” said Lee. “Every night.”

He opened the door of the bedroom a crack, and laying on the floor were what I supposed to be his three male housemates, sprawled around a Risk board, a clock radio beside the bed playing Top 40 hits. The smell of beer was in the room and I could see several open bags of chips, a few tins of nuts. They waved sheepishly up at me. At least two of them had teeth adorned with gold caps.

“Left to right,” Lee said, “it goes Garcia, Joaquin, and Ernesto. Say
hola,
gentlemen.”

“Hello,” they said.

“Hey, did you let Fernando in?” asked Joaquin.

“Yeah, he came in with Beth. Pretty cold out there.”

“You two want to play?” asked Ernesto. “We just started.”

“Naw,” Lee said, “I want to show her around.”

“Right,” Joaquin said, smiling a little too broadly. “Show her around.”

Lee rolled his eyes at me and shut the door. “Every night. If it’s not Monopoly, it’s Risk. Or Axis & Allies. They like war games.”

His room was spare, and I remember feeling a great sadness for him, as I looked at the little square of a space: a mattress on the floor, a red plastic milk crate holding some books, a lamp, a guitar, a card table, and a folding chair.

“Jesus, Lee. If you need some furniture, you could have called my parents. Or talked to Henry or the Girouxs or Eddy. Anyone. You’re living like a monk in here.”

He nodded. “I know. That’s the plan. Let me show you something else.”

We went back down the stairs, stepping gingerly. “Bea’s a light sleeper,” he whispered.

At the door we slipped on our boots, hats, and mittens. We helped each other into our parkas. Fernando the dog watched us from the top of the stairs, sniffing the air, but he declined to follow us out into the cold. We began walking away from the house, toward a barn and a collection of smaller, ramshackle buildings. A sodium-nitrate light hummed blue in the sky.

“Hold on,” I said, and tugging his arm I pulled him close to me and we kissed again in the cold.

When our lips separated, he leaned his forehead down and rested it on mine. I looked up at his eyes but they were closed.

“Beth,” he said, “I don’t know.”

“I don’t know that we have to.”

“I don’t know what I want right now. I wouldn’t be good to you. And Henry is my friend.” I could see that he was wincing and I imagined him, replaying our kisses, his letter, in his head. “I mean, I really care about you. I don’t know.”

“What?” I said. “What
is
it?”

He looked up at the sky and I saw him exhale deeply. “Come on,” he said, “I want to show you this thing.”

We walked past the barn, past a pole-building filled with antiquated threshers and discing machines, chains swaying gently with what little breeze blew and maybe just the tumbling of the earth through the heavens. He led me into a long, low building, and I recognized it as a chicken coop. As we entered, he flicked a switch on the wall and a single exposed bulb hanging from the ceiling slowly brightened. Inside the narrow space was a small piano, a set of drums, a guitar, and a few other instruments. Everything looked secondhand, like instruments left behind a century or more before by some ragtag gypsy troupe. He had tacked some old carpeting to the walls, littered the floor with hay.