Shotgun Lovesongs: A Novel (21 page)

He died, three years ago. I’m happy to say that he met our kids, that he had time to play with them, to hold them in the hospital after they were just born. I know he was proud of them, of Beth, of me. I think I can say that he was happy, coming over to our house with Mom, surveying my new equipment, nodding his head as I talked about improved crop yields or greater milk production.

But he didn’t have any friends. The telephone rarely rang for him. And I don’t think he desired friends either. I don’t think he was lonely. When I think about my dad, what impresses me is how dedicated he was to his farm, to my mother, to us kids.
We
were his life;
we
were his friends. When he sat down to watch a football game on Sunday, when he cracked a can of Walter’s Beer or balanced a plate of cheese and crackers on his chest and cheered on the Green Bay Packers, it was me who sat with him, who cheered with him. When he had high-fives to give, it was my little hand that he sought. When he felt like dancing, like singing, it was my mother who he grabbed to clumsily waltz or polka with in our kitchen. When he talked politics, it was with me, or my sister, pointing a steady and patient finger at us, saying, “I don’t care about left or right. It’s all nonsense. All I ask of you is this: Be kind. Be decent. And don’t be greedy.”

My whole life, thirty-three years, and it feels like I’ve never been
without
friends. They’ve always been around, always been there. And maybe my life, our lives, have been richer for it. Ronny babysitting the kids, or, hell, the days when Lee would come over for dinner and play guitar for my daughter, showing her chords, placing her little fingers in the right places. My dad never had that. As kids,
we
didn’t have that.

But I wonder now whether the reason my dad didn’t have friends, the reason he didn’t care to socialize, is that to be close to another man, to invite another man into your house, is to shake the dice. Because when it comes to men and women, to sex, maybe you can’t trust anyone, maybe everyone is an animal. You think you know someone, but you can never really
know
someone. You can’t monitor every shift in their eyes, every time your wife bends down to pick up a dropped spoon or stretches to unload the dishwasher. When I think now of all the times Lee visited us, it feels like my home was trespassed, that I was violated, lied to.

No, the safest thing is to become an island. To make your house a citadel against all the garbage and ugliness in the world. How else can you be sure of anything?

*   *   *

After Lee’s wedding I began painting again for the first time since high school. I can’t explain it, maybe it was walking around those museums or just talking to Beth, but I couldn’t help myself. In the back of my tool shed I hid an easel and a plastic shopping bag full of oil paints in their tubes, and a collection of brushes. After taking the kids to school, I’d go out to the shed and I painted in the dim light of that building. Other times I would carry all my supplies elsewhere in a backpack. Out, way out, away from any of the roads and far enough out that Beth would never think to follow me. Tucking a little folding easel beneath my jacket and wearing knee-high black Wellingtons, I trudged over the resting fall and winter fields. I’m sure there must have been mornings when Beth watched me from the kitchen window, asking herself,
Where is he going? What the hell is he doing?
Maybe she thought I was out there hunting arrowheads, or killing varmints with my .22 rifle. Maybe she just thought I wanted to be alone—which was true. Later in the afternoon, she never seemed to notice me at the kitchen sink, washing paint from my hands, or sitting at the dining-room table with a pocketknife, cleaning dried paint from underneath my fingernails.

I brought a little camping chair, and on the far side of a glacial ridge I sat and painted the creek that runs through our fields. I painted the cottonwoods and dead elms and poplars that line the creek like inverted buttresses. But mostly my paintings tended to be all sky—wide swaths of bruised purples and blues, foreboding whites and grays. I suppose I painted the sky because I’m not good enough to paint the things of the earth convincingly. When I finished a canvas, I built a bonfire so that I could incinerate the painting immediately. I’d throw the still-wet canvas on the fire along with our household garbage, old tires, or whatever other junk the farm produced. I hated most of my paintings and I was reluctant to tell anyone about my little hobby. So far, I’d painted only two pieces that I thought were decent enough to drive down to the St. Vincent’s store off Main Street, where I donated them both, telling Arnold the general manager that they had belonged to a great-uncle of mine who had recently passed away.

In the weeks that followed, I’d stop in at the St. Vincent’s store on my trips to Main Street for postage stamps or groceries, gasoline or toilet paper, to check on my paintings. Arnold had hung them on a beige wall over a hideously upholstered secondhand couch, and in a way, they seemed naturally gaudy together, two paintings and a piece of furniture so ugly they were inevitably destined for someone’s fishing or hunting cabin, but certainly not anyone’s
home.
I had told myself that if either of the paintings sat there over a year, I would come back to the store, buy them, and incinerate them too.

But then, one day, one of the paintings was gone.

I found Arnold at the register, where I paid for a Duke Ellington LP in decent condition.

“Hey, Arnold, who bought one of those paintings that I brought in? You remember?”

He made change, dropped it into the cup of my hand, shrugged his shoulders. “Must have sold over the weekend. I was gone, snowmobiling up near Hurley don’t you know. You’d have to ask Brenda. She was manning the tills. You want me to leave a note?”

“No,” I said, “that’s okay.” I left the store, looking at the blank place on the wall where one of my paintings had hung. I wondered who had been foolish enough to buy it.

*   *   *

The only friendship that ever mattered to my dad was my mom’s. They were best friends. You could see it, how much they cared for each other. How the love was there, how the love had changed, evolved into something different than what it was before we arrived, or even after we left the house, but was nevertheless still there, inside of them, inside the house they shared.

When I think about that, I think,
This is your fault
.
You didn’t know your own wife, your own best friend. If she felt she could have trusted you, you would have known this about her years ago. It wouldn’t have been this sudden tectonic secret, this bomb dropped on your heart
.

We think the world is steady, rolling through space beneath our feet, day and night, rain and sunlight. And then, one day, you just fall off the planet and drift away, into outer space, and everything you thought was true, all the laws that bound your life before, all the rules and norms that kept things in place, that kept
you
in place, they’re gone. And nothing makes sense anymore. Gravity is gone. Love is gone.

*   *   *

One afternoon in February, months after Lee’s little revelation, I drove into Eau Claire, drove to a bar that I used to frequent back in college. I sat at the bar, ordered a whiskey neat, determined that if a woman were to sit down next to me and smile at me, and if we were to start talking, and she were newly divorced or even separated … or if she were in town on business …

I sat at the bar all afternoon and into the early evening, drinking slow enough that I never quite got drunk, just tired. I sat and drank and stared up at a television screen watching hockey highlights, basketball highlights, football highlights. A few women did come up to the bar, but they sat together in little groups, talking to each other, laughing into their martinis, daiquiris, and light beers. They didn’t seem to notice me, even when I occasionally rose to walk toward the back of the bar where the bathrooms were. And standing there, over the sink, washing my hands, I looked into the mirror. I just stared at myself. I said out loud, “Now what the hell are you going to do, bub? Huh?”

Returning to my bar stool I remained invisible, and after paying my tab I went out into the gray evening cold and thought,
What a strange place to try and find love
. In the parking lot, my truck looked at me like a disgusted old friend who had waited there all along, so patiently. I drove home, took off my boots, and went into the basement, where I rummaged through my Craftsman tools, not sure what I wanted to fix or why, until Beth yelled down the stairs, “Henry, dinner’s on.”

But I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t hungry.

B

O
UTSIDE, THE DAY WAS WHITE
as heaven, and entering the bar, I had to pause just inside the door to let my pupils adjust to that box of darkness. There wasn’t any music playing, but above the bar was an ancient television mounted to the ceiling where Alex Trebek stood browbeating three nerds in turtlenecks:
Jeopardy.
The female bartender, oblivious to my entrance, was mumbling out answers in the form of questions. I peered deeply into the bowels of the VFW and thought I saw a hand back there, long fingers, waving. Felicia. I moved past a row of illegal slot machines, past the battered pool tables, past a collection of pool-cues standing in a corner, and then past the jukebox so old it seemed almost senile, repeating the same songs like so many shell-shocked war stories. Felicia was sitting alone in a booth, a pitcher of beer in the middle of the table near two glasses.

“Thanks for coming,” Felicia said. “I really didn’t know who else to call.” She poured beer into the glasses, offered a half-hearted toast, and then took a little sip. And then a bigger one.

I set my purse down inside the booth, removed my coat, and settled in. The beer was cold and the first taste didn’t set well with me, I would have rather drunk a coffee or tea, even hot chocolate, anything but cold, wheaty beer, but this was the VFW, and
no one
orders
tea
at the VFW. Across the table, Felicia was taking another long pull from her glass, a little foam collecting in the very fine invisible hairs above her lip. The foam only there for a second before she ran the back of her hand across the lip, like a little girl wiping away her runny nose.

“Kip and I are separating,” she said, and the statement just hung there a moment, ugly, awkward, and unbelievable. She shrugged, and then began crying, covering her face.

My first reaction was to collapse into the wall on my right, the one graffitied over with the names of Little Wing residents who drank there.
Is everyone getting a divorce?
I thought.
Has the whole world lost its freaking mind?
But I moved out of the booth momentarily and slid in beside Felicia, pushed the beer away from us, and handed her a Kleenex. I was unsure whether or not to touch her back in comfort, but then decided to, rubbing her shoulder blades and neck much as I might rub my own children’s bodies. Felicia blew her nose, loudly. It sounded like a foghorn on a soupy Lake Michigan day. The bartender looked up for a moment as if she had forgotten she had any patrons at all, then resumed her focus on
Jeopardy.

“He doesn’t want kids,” Felicia said, “doesn’t now, never did. I don’t know what I was thinking. I have no fucking idea what I was thinking. Marrying him. Coming here.” She looked up, held her palms out in surrender. “No offense, it’s not your fault. But I’m just—I’m fucking
pissed
. Ever since I came to this place, my whole life has just been one big shit-show.”

I shrugged. “Don’t worry—none taken.” I reached for my glass, the one without lipstick, and took a long drink. The beer was warming; it tasted better now, smoother. I glanced at the bar. “Hold on, okay? I’ll be back in a flash.” I slid out of the booth and moved back toward the sound of Trebek’s voice.

I leaned against the bar. The bartender sat on a stool, her thick arms crossed, and said at the television, “Who is Bart Starr?”

“Excuse me,” I said, “I’d like to order a few shots.”

The bartender held up a finger. “Who is Vince Lombardi?”

“Ma’am?” I said.

“Hold your horses, sweetheart. Today, they actually got a category I know something about.” She bounced a finger against her lower lip, then erupted in a triumphant smile. “Who is Brett Favre!”

“Ma’am.”

She turned from the television and said, “If there’s anything I know about, it’s the Green Bay Packers. Now. What can I getcha?”

“Two buttery nipples.”

The bartender, a woman who looked like she’d ridden a hundred thousand miles’ worth of back roads on the saddle of a Harley-Davidson, looked at me with two squinty eyes and said, “Darlin’, did I just hear you right?” She leaned warily against the back rail, against a rack of potato chips that made a noise suggesting that the contents had just been pretty well pulverized. Also behind her: cheese doodles, pork rinds, and bags of peanuts. And the monster jars: one of pickled eggs. Another of pickled pigs’ feet. The jars were dusty, as if they hadn’t been touched in decades, and it wasn’t hard to see why. She recrossed her arms, pursed her lips, and cocked her head at me. “Care to tell me how the hell I’m supposed to make one of those things?”

“Half butterscotch schnapps, then a little Irish crème, and a little Midori, I
think
.” It was a shot I’d always favored in college, and later on, at that fried-chicken bar where I worked as a waitress. I looked outside. It was a little past noon on a Monday. The kids were at school, Henry at home. When I left home he was reclined on the couch, reading a book about Lewis and Clark.
Henry can take care of the kids,
I thought. Already, the light outside seemed to be waning. The winter solstice had been three weeks before, so that the daylight was actually elongating with each new day; but still, it felt like Siberia, like we lived in some suicidal Lapland backwater. “Hell, make it three. You ought to have one, too. My treat.” I reached across the bar and extended my hand. “Beth.”