Shotgun Lovesongs: A Novel (2 page)

Ronny dried out in the hospital over the course of several months, often restrained in his bed, and we came to the hospital to hold his hand. His grip was ferocious, his veins seemed everywhere ready to jump right out through his sweaty flesh. His eyes were scared in a way I had only seen in horses. We wiped his forehead and did our best to hold him down to the earth.

Our wives and children came to visit him too and he liked that. It forced him to mellow. Our children brought crayons and paper to the hospital and drew crude portraits of him, the colors always happy and beside his head a glowing sun or a leafed-out tree. Sometimes after the children left we would find him clutching their art and bawling, other times, holding them tenderly, studying them and touching their work like sacred artifacts. He saved those pictures and later hung them in his apartment.

After a period of time he came out of the tunnel and we took care of him as best we could because he was ours and he had no other family; both his parents had passed away when we were in our midtwenties—carbon monoxide poisoning at their cabin up on Spider Lake, near Birchwood. Ronny was Little Wing’s orphan.

He had been a professional rodeo. He was tender with horses, brutal with cattle. He knew ropes and even before the accident he’d suffered any number of vicious injuries and insults to his body. There were times when he came over to our house for dinner that my children would ask him to list off his broken bones. That inventory took some time.

“Let’s see,” he’d say, pulling off his tired cowboy boots. “Well. I had all ten toes broken, I know that.” Next he’d pull off his holey socks. What toenails he still had were yellowed and the dirty milky color of quartz; they seemed to grow in defiance of his flesh. “Some of these toes were broken twice, I think. An angry brahma is going to come down wherever they want to come down, see, and sometimes that’ll be on you.” Ronny would pick up our son, Alex, and set him on his back on the living-room floor and then pretend to be a bull, crashing down gently on the little boy’s body, tickling his ribs, armpits, and toes. “In Kalispell they wanted to take both pinkie toes, but I escaped the hospital before they could put me under. Had a girl there who I called and she was waiting outside with the engine running.…

“This scar here,” he said, indicating his pale right ankle, “a bull named Ticonderoga come down on it and snapped my leg in two.”

My kids thought this was the best game in the world—seeing how many garments they could get Ronny Taylor to shed, how many broken bones he could remember, how many nasty scars their little fingers could trace.

But the drunken fall had ended his rodeo life, and we were sad for that. He had dropped out of high school to rodeo; he had no trade and no skills.

Lee paid for his medical expenses, his apartment, his food and clothing. We weren’t supposed to know any of that, but we had grown up with Rhonda Blake, who worked in one of the Eau Claire hospital’s medical records departments, and she told Eddy Moffitt one night at the VFW. She had been shaking her head and smiling kind of winsomely and Eddy went over to her, bought her a drink, and asked what was going on.

“You know, I could get fired for saying something,” Rhonda said, “but the thing is, something like this. People ought to know. I never heard of a good deed like this. Christ, I could lose my job, but truth is, it’d be worth it.”

And then she told Eddy that Ronny hadn’t had insurance. That the bills had been well over a hundred thousand dollars.

“One day,” she said, “we get a delivery from New York City. An envelope from some record company to Ronny’s attention. And sure enough, a goddamn check for a hundred and twenty-three thousand dollars.”

She drank her beer fast, her eyes wet.

“It was just so sweet,” she said, “I couldn’t keep it to myself.”

Eddy told us all this story one night after a high school football game. (Us versus Osseo.) None of us had children old enough to be in high school yet, but when you live in a town as small as Little Wing, Wisconsin, you go out to the high school football and basketball games. It is, after all, something to do, cheap family entertainment. We all stood underneath the bleachers, some of us sharing a pouch of Red Man chewing tobacco, others passing a bag of sunflower seeds, listening to Eddy as the crowd thundered its support right above us, boots stomping the wooden bleachers, the rickety metal scaffolding shaking loose rust. From overhead, aluminum cans and crumpled-up hot dog wrappers rained down. We crossed our arms, spat, tried to imagine what a check for a hundred thousand dollars even looked like.

Lee was already our hero, but this only deepened our love for him, grew his legend. We all went out the next day and bought ten more of his albums, each of us, even though we had duplicates at our homes. And that money we spent was precious too because so many of us were just scraping by; it could’ve been plugged into savings or used for groceries. Still. We mailed them to relatives and distant friends, donated them to libraries and nursing homes.

Ronny never saw a bill; Lee’s lawyers took care of all the logistics. Ronny would be taken care of forever. Ronny did not seem to know that he had a patron in life, or, maybe he did, I don’t know. All I know is that Lee never talked about it, and neither did Ronny. Then again, it was only right. There were countless posters of Lee in Ronny’s apartment, and they had been there well before the accident and surgery. Most had gone a little faded with sunlight, greasy with kitchen smoke. They had adorned those shabby walls
long
before Lee became famous. Ronny had always loved him the most.

*   *   *

The invitations to Kip’s wedding were heavy with paper and ribbon and glitter. We carried them from our mailboxes and vehicles into our houses carefully, reverently, as if they held priceless, exquisite news. We vaguely knew the woman he was marrying. Felicia was from Chicago and now worked as a consultant from their new house just outside town. Exactly what or with whom she consulted, we didn’t really understand, though Eddy claimed that it had something to do with pharmaceuticals. She had come out to the VFW a few times with Kip, always beautiful, her makeup and hair and nails all perfect. We remembered her for her high heels, which she wore all through the winter, her toenails a sharp shiny red. She was plenty nice, but there was something in her manner that seemed to indicate to us that our town was just a temporary place for her, a kind of layover, and that we were layovers too. Layovers to later be flown over one day and waved to. Flyover friends.

We scanned the invitation, surprised to see that Lee would be playing a song during the ceremony. He had not played songs at any of our weddings, and though we had all wanted him to, none of us had even thought to ask him for that kind of favor. We hadn’t really thought of him attending as a performer, just as our friend.

Not long after the invitations arrived at our houses, Lee came home from Australia, as run-down and misspent as we’d ever seen him. We let him be a few days, like we always did, and then my wife, Beth, invited him over to our farm for dinner and a bonfire. He always seemed to like playing with our children and the fact that we didn’t have cable television, that in fact our
only
television was an ancient model inherited from my parents that looked more like a gigantic piece of wooden furniture than something that might actually connect us to the outside world. We owned a newish record player though—I collect old vinyl—and he always blushed as he passed it and noticed one of his LPs underneath the needle. Our kids knew all the words to his songs.

The kids squealed that night as they saw the headlights of Lee’s old truck come down our driveway toward the house. They ran in circles and galloped, singing out all his trademark lines with gusto.

“All right, all right, all right!” Beth said, laughing. “Enough. Now you’re gonna give Uncle Lee some room. He’s tired, all right? He just got home from Australia. So don’t pester him too much.” Shooing them away from the front door, she checked her reflection in the mirror, pursed her lips, and ran her fingers quickly through her hair.

He came to the door carrying a bouquet of carnations that were obviously bought in a hurry from the IGA. Beth took the flowers and they hugged. He had grown skinny over the years and his hairline was quickly receding, though he let the strands grow long. He had a beard and his forearms were scattered with tattoos.

“Hey buddy,” he said, grinning at me. “Good to be home. Missed you a ton.”

Lee always gave good hugs. I felt his rib cage against my own, his long arms around me. The smell of tobacco in his beard and in his hair.

“We missed you too,” I said. Then the children attacked him and he fell to the floor in mock defeat. Beth and I went to the kitchen and brought the meal out to our old dining-room table, where there were candles already lit. Beth went to the turntable and flipped his record, placed the needle in the wide black groove at the edge.

We heard Lee groan from the entryway as he stumbled toward us, dragging Eleanore and Alex, his arms underneath their armpits, and shaking his head. “Let’s listen to something else, huh?” he said. “I’m so friggin’ tired of myself.”

*   *   *

We watched him eat, wolfing down the food; it made us happy to feed him. We drank wine and listened to jazz and outside the windows the autumn leaves were loud and dry on their branches. Snow was not inconceivable.

“Heard you’re playing a song at Kip’s wedding,” I said, after some time had passed.

Lee leaned back in his chair and exhaled. “Yeah,” he said, “I guess I am. Got a text from him one day out of the blue. I was so surprised, I didn’t give my reply much thought. Maybe I should’ve.”

“You okay with that?” Beth asked. “Singing, I mean. For Kip of all people?”

He shrugged. “You know, I like Kip just fine, but it’s not like we’re close. He’s more like an acquaintance at this point than a friend. But I came back, you know, to see you all and—I don’t know—to support him. Old time’s sake and all. He’s done some good things. The mill, for one. I think he’s a good thing for this town. Anyway, I’d rather be here than the outback.”

“Oh,” Beth said, putting her chin in her hand and smiling, “your life’s not so bad.” She traced something on the surface of the table with her other hand.

“No,” he said. “My life is good. Very good. But I get lonely too. For people I can trust. People who don’t want anything from me. It, it changes you after a while, you know? And I don’t
want
it to change me. I want to be able to come back here and live here and just be who I am. With you guys.” He exhaled deeply and took a long sip of wine.

We followed his lead, raising our wineglasses to him, and they made a sound like dull chimes. Then there was a silence. Just the children’s feet swinging beneath the table and the wind in the desiccated corn stalks and tree limbs outside, and Lee smiled again and poured himself another glass of wine and we could see that his teeth were already stained purple and that he was happy.

“I wish I had your lives,” he said at last. “You know?”

I kissed Beth’s hand, then took it in my own, looked at her. She smiled at me, blushing, then looked at the floor.

Lee rose from the table then, pressed his knuckles into the small of his back, and stretched like a cat, before collecting our plates and walking them to the kitchen sink. Beth followed him, wineglasses clutched in her long fingers, and I watched for a moment as they stood close beside each other, cleaning, him passing her wet dishes that she dried with a towel. His hands soap-sudsy, then hers too, both of them swaying back and forth just a little with the jazz. It made me feel good, to have everyone together, to have him back. I took a roll of newspaper and some matches and went out into the darkness to light a bonfire.

The wind carried cold and the stars were all out, the blue-white throw of the Milky Way grand overhead. I went to the woodpile and carried a load of logs to our fire-ring in the backyard, then broke up some kindling and lit a match, blowing carefully against the tender new flames. I have always loved bonfires.

Lee came out of the house at some point, and I sensed him behind me.

“Want a joint?” he asked.

I looked around, though we had no neighbors for hundreds and hundreds of yards. “The kids in bed?” I asked, rubbing my hands for warmth, blowing into them, the smell of alcohol still there, faintly.

“Beth’s putting them down now,” he said, grinning. We were silent a moment. “I needed tonight, man,” he said finally. “Needed to be with you guys. Just to, you know, have a little room to breathe. Eat some good food. I can’t tell you.”

There were rolling papers in his hands and he passed me a plastic bag, heavy and pungent even through the plastic. He pinched the buds into the paper and licked it along its edges. He always made great paper planes.

“Wanna just share?” I asked.

“Why not.”

So we stood that way, our faces red and orange before the fire with two different fragrances of smoke swirling around us, and overhead the heavens very slowly spinning and strange beautiful lights arcing down to earth every so often.

Lee started laughing at one point, shaking his head. I touched the flannel of his jacket and said, “What is it?
What?
”

“I’m dating someone.”

“Yeah? You’re
always
dating someone.”

“Not like this,” he said. He looked at me and raised his eyebrows. The smoke was big in our lungs, sticky and good. We passed the joint between us.

“So, who is she? Come on now.”

I choked on the smoke when he told me, coughed into the night before beating a fist against my chest. Lee was dating a movie star who appeared regularly on the glossy pages of at least three different magazines lying around our house. She was famously elegant, unfathomably beautiful, undeniably talented.

He nodded his head at me, still smiling.

“And what’s she doing with a bum like you?”

“A guy’s entitled to get lucky every now and again,” he said, shrugging his shoulders, though I could see perfectly clearly that he was in love with her.