Shotgun Lovesongs: A Novel (8 page)

I am a
man
. I’m a goddamned
person
. And I’m restless as hell.

I’ve tried running away. I try about three times a year. Mostly in the summer. I’ll wake up early as I can, pack a bag, buy some food from the gas station, and just start walking west. I suppose I could steal a car, but that’s not what I want. I’m not a criminal. I just want to disappear. At least I did before I met Lucy.

This place has some crazy kind of gravity. I know that’s a funny word to use, a big-sounding word, but I’ve thought about it. It must have some kind of power otherwise Lee wouldn’t have never come back—but he did. And Kip and Felicia. Not to even mention all them people who never left to begin with, people like Henry and Beth and Eddy and the Giroux twins. Hell, they didn’t make it as far afield as even I did when I was a rodeo. And, you know, it’s crazy, but it was on those mornings when I left town, trying to run away, I felt it most. That pull.

Walking on the gravel shoulder of County Y or X, old Highway 93 or Missell Road and enjoying the walk: the red-winged blackbirds and startled deer and the morning fog, and on those mornings I’d walk with sneakers instead of cowboy boots and I liked that, those shoes like two clouds beneath my feet, carrying me along.

One time, about two years ago, I figured I made it about twenty miles out of town. I knew I was getting closer to the Mississippi because the land changed on me, went all rolling, all sandstone draws and deep cool forests, and I didn’t make such good time in that country and the towns get fewer and fewer in between and I suppose it was about suppertime and who should pass me but Eddy Moffitt, heading back toward Little Wing. I heard him brake his Ford Taurus and then pull a U-turn and he came back behind me and at first I kept walking but then I stopped and sat down in the gravel and just listened to the insects in the trees and the sound of his engine until Eddy shut off the car, stepped out, and came over to me. He was wearing what he always wears in summertime: a short-sleeve dress shirt, a tie, and khakis.

“Ronny,” he said, scratching his head, “you lost?”

“No,” I said, spitting.

“Well, what are you doing out here?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “I just started walking.”

He patted his belly. “Hmm. Look, can I maybe buy you a cup of coffee and some dinner? I’m famished and you must be too.”

I think he knew what I was up to. Eddy’s like that. He’s pretty perceptive, sensitive—not all the time, but more than most people. I knew he wouldn’t let me be. So without saying anything I dusted off the seat of my pants, picked up my bag, and climbed into his car. What I wanted to do was start punching things—not Eddy—but
goddamn
it, I would have liked to punch out a window or a headlight or some damn thing.

Eddy put his hand on my shoulder. “Come on, let’s get something to eat.”

*   *   *

We ate at the last diner left in Little Wing, a place called the Coffee Cup, with a rotating carousel of pies and walls stained brown with cigarette smoke and grill smoke and white-and-red checkered tablecloths that stick to your hands and forearms like flypaper. I don’t ever eat there if I can help it because the food runs through me like my guts were a sieve. But Eddy opened the door for me and led me toward the back of the restaurant, where a line of five stools sit below a beat-up counter and dishes full of pink and blue and white packets of sweetener and sugar and little plastic cups of cream and glass bottles of ketchup, the grill directly ahead and the owner, Howard, back there, nodding at us as if he were exhausted with work, though we were only two of four customers in the whole place.

“Hey Ronny, hey Eddy,” he called, waving at us with his spatula. “Waitress’ll be right with you.”

We both knew, of course, that by
waitress,
Howard meant his wife, Mary, who I could see perfectly well, standing behind Howard at the far back of the building, blowing cigarette smoke out a tiny little dirty window.

“The Coffee Cup exists,” Eddy said, with a funny look on his face, “because of Midwestern guilt and Sunday after-church breakfast. In all my travels, only in the Midwest would someone spend their money in a place they hate simply because they feel bad for the proprietors. Also I suppose, because they know your name.”

“And, it don’t hurt to be the only spot in town,” I added.

Eddy raised an eyebrow at me. “No, it sure don’t. It sure don’t.”

By and by, Mary came around with a pot of burnt-smelling coffee and filled our mugs. Eddy ordered their roast beef with gravy and mashed potatoes.

“Howard!” Mary hollered toward the grill. “Roast beef?” Her voice made me jump. The café was quiet as a Monday morning church.

He shook his head.

“All out,” she said. “Dinner rush,” she said, eyeballing the ancient pressed-tin ceiling.

“How about the fried walleye?” Eddy asked.

She shook her head.

“Cheeseburger?”

“We can do that,” she said, and nodded. “Ronny sweetheart, you want anything?”

I didn’t, but I ordered a slice of banana cream pie anyway, because Eddy was paying, and because I like Eddy, and besides, I didn’t want to go back to my apartment, even if the restaurant smelled funny. Sometimes, you just want to be with another person, and even though Eddy had lassoed me back to Little Wing I knew it was only because he cared.

Mary moved off, toward the front of the café facing Main Street, where nothing stirred—no traffic, no evening strollers. She sat down at an empty table where a half-finished game of solitaire lay out and gazed through the window for a moment before standing, walking back toward the grill, and tossing our order at Howard, who clipped the paper above the grill and began to fry Eddy’s burger. The dining room filled with the smell of greasy meat.

“So,” Eddy said, “you just out for a walk today? Long ways from Little Wing.” He sipped his coffee, organized the sugar and sweeteners by color, stacked and restacked the little packages of jam and marmalade according to flavor.

I nodded, shrugged my shoulders. “I ain’t got a car.”

“You know anyone in town would give you a ride if you asked. All you got to do is ask. Hell, I know Henry or Lee, even me or Kipper, we’d drive you down to Chicago if that’s where you wanted to go.” He spit into a paper napkin and wiped at the counter. Muttered, “Filthy.”

I looked at the pinwheels spinning in my coffee where I added creamer after creamer.

“I know.”

“You bored, is that it? You want a job?”

I looked up at Eddy. Beyond us, at the grill, Howard was whistling a song I recognized from my childhood, something my grandpa used to whistle while we sat in the back of his car—“Magic Moments”—Perry Como, I think.

“I get it,” Eddy continued. “I do. They all treat you with kid gloves. And you, you’re bored to death. Right? You want to contribute. Let me think about it. Somebody must need some help. We’ll find something.”

He patted me on the back just as Howard strode up to us, holding two plates. “Who’s got the pie?”

I raised my hand.

Setting our plates down on the counter Howard sighed, “Slow as hell in here tonight.”

Outside, night had fallen and I could just hear the sound of the jukebox at the VFW spilling out into the street. Someone was playing Bob Seger. In the days and weeks that followed, I’d see Eddy around town, he’d wave at me from his car, or heading out of church with his family, but he never did call me about any work, and after a while, everything slipped back to the way it was, and I began to want to leave again, to run away from this little old town.

B

O
UR CHILDREN STOOD
on the front stoop with their grandparents, waving us good-bye, and there did not seem to be a trace of sadness on their faces. In fact, they smiled as we pulled away, and before we were even out of sight, they turned to go back inside our house, tugging at my parents’ old hands. It is a strange feeling when your children show no signs of missing you, and I must admit that in that moment, I wondered if going to New York City was the right thing, or whether perhaps we would have been more gracious simply sending our regards and a gift.

“He sent us the airline tickets,” Henry had argued one night in bed. “What’s our excuse? Our social calendar is too full? Besides, who else is going to take Ronny?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “his date maybe? He’s not helpless, Henry.”

“Come on,” Henry cooed.

I sighed in resignation. And it was true that I had never been to New York City and that I was excited to go. To see Central Park and Broadway and the Empire State Building and all the other places and things that no doubt were invisible to natives of the city. It is odd to think that such a thing as a skyscraper could ever become invisible to someone; I don’t know that it ever would for me. I know that sounds naïve, but there are buildings I always notice in town, no matter what. Kip’s mill, for example. Or the Lutheran church where Henry and I were married. Or the silo between our farm and town where people spray-paint their most important announcements:

BORN! WILLIAM CHRISTOPHER BURKE 6/1/11

8 LBS 9 OZ

Or:

I LOVE TINA

Or:

CLASS OF 1998 FOREVER!

I look at that silo every day on the off chance that its graffiti might have been refreshed overnight. My world is full of landmarks that I have come to love: an ancient burr oak in the middle of our alfalfa field, a glacial erratic in front of the high school, even the truckstop on the edge of town with its towering pole and oversized American flag. I always know when someone has died just by looking at that flag; I knew immediately, for instance, that the Swenson boy would never come back from Afghanistan.

Kip drove us all the way to the Minneapolis–St. Paul airport in his black Escalade. Henry was up front with him and I sat in the backseat with Ronny and his date, a woman named Lucinda.

“But you can call me Lucy,” she had said to me brightly as we shook hands there outside of our house, watching Henry and Kip wedge our luggage into the rear of the gleaming SUV. The bangles circled up and down her arm were too numerous to count.

“Lucy,” I repeated, studying her face.

In that Friday morning light, I suppose I would not have known her to be a stripper, had Henry not warned me beforehand. She was certainly attractive, her body working all the right curves and undulations, and I’d be lying if I said that I did not peek for a moment at her unmoving chest and deep cleavage. I knew it was no miracle bra—I had tried many after the kids and nothing, no invention yet devised can defeat the powers of time, gravity, and motherhood. Still, I could see that she was excited for the weekend and I wanted to be excited too. I thought,
It’ll be good to have another girl along for the ride
. Always, it seemed, I was the only girl, the only woman, amongst a pack of Henry’s bachelor buddies, with the exception of Kip, though his wife, Felicia, seemed to be away almost as much as Lee.

After his wedding, we had all ignored Kip for several months, which is difficult to do in such a small town. We did not return his telephone calls, we did not visit the mill, we did not invite him over for dinners or bonfires. On Main Street we did not pause to make conversation with either him or Felicia; instead, we waved briskly. Winter in Wisconsin is the ideal time to avoid someone because our garments grow ever larger, ever thicker, and we go about the frozen world insulated beneath knit caps and mittens, our feet clad in mukluks or boots. How many times after that wedding did I wave to Kip with a mittened hand, when beneath the crocheted wool only my middle finger waved? If Felicia or Kip had pulled me aside and asked why I hadn’t said hello to them at the post office I was well prepared to blame my winter cap, my earmuffs, a highly contagious case of strep throat.

But by mid-March Felicia had had it. She blew up one day in the grocery market: threw a gallon of milk onto the floor and accused us all of being backwater hillbillies. I suppose for someone from the outside it is understandable to mistake loyalty for ignorance. Why wouldn’t we want to sell out our best friends for a few pieces of silver? Still, in that moment I did respect her anger. Everyone in our town is so polite. Sometimes a little anger is entertaining, even invigorating. I wasn’t in the store the day she lost her temper. But word traveled fast through our little network. Wives starting calling wives who called their husbands who called their friends.

Apparently, Felicia had rushed into the store for a few quick items and somewhere in dairy she had said hello to a face who ignored her. And that was it.

“What I heard,” Eddy would report, “is that she played it cool for a while. But then as she was turning to go to the register, she just spiked that gallon of milk down on the floor and went off with a whole wheelbarrow full of f-bombs and other choice words and—this is from Dickie, who was working at the register that day—he said the best part was watching her step right through the slick of milk in her black high heels like it was a springtime puddle or something. He said that before she left, she grabbed a big ole honeycrisp apple off the shelf and walked right out without even paying for it.”

Henry is a good man, and forgiving, and so it was one night not long after her breakdown he invited them over for dinner. They knocked on our door sheepishly, impeccably dressed. I remember they wore matching red cashmere scarves, elegantly knotted, and they stood there, waiting to come in and carrying two bottles of wine, the labels of which I knew not to be stocked at the local liquor store.

Our house was a mess that night, I remember. I had been busy all day: buying groceries, volunteering at the library, and driving a great-aunt of mine to her doctor’s appointment, and Henry had been sequestered in the pole-building, working on a tractor that would soon roll through our fields tilling the earth. Spring is a nervous time for him, I know. He is eager to get back out into the fields, to make a go of things. So I didn’t bother him that afternoon while I prepared and cooked chicken marsala in our cramped and overheated kitchen. I did not hassle him to come in and pick up all the toys and magazines and candy wrappers that decorated our living-room floor. When Kip and Felicia arrived, our house looked like a grenade had just exploded inside the living room. The dining-room table had not yet been set.