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.
“I’m bringing her to Kip’s wedding,” he said, a moment later. “I can’t wait for you guys to meet her.”
“Jesus, Lee, I’m—shit, I’m just really happy for you,” I said, though there was something in my chest that snagged like jealousy. “I’m so happy for you,” I repeated, staring into the fire, past the flames to where the coals were throbbing, the palest, brightest orange. I wondered what it would be like to t
ouch her body, to be with a woman that beautiful. Then I shook my head, shook away those thoughts and was back alongside Lee, happy and proud of him.
Strange, I thought to myself right then, how his life was like my own and yet not at all like it, though we came from the same small place on earth. And why? How had our paths diverged, why were they still even connected? Why was he then in my backyard, on my farm, the sound of almost two hundred cows, faintly in the background, mooing and lowing? How had he come back, this famous man, this person whose name everyone knew, whose voice was recognizable to millions in a way that made it impossible for him to be a stranger in so many places?
It was difficult for me to look up at the night sky and not think of Lee and his fame. All over the world at that very moment there were people no doubt listening to his music. I watched him take a final drag on the joint before flicking it into the fire. He was incandescent.
* * *
Ronny frequently stayed over at the old schoolhouse when Lee wasn’t on tour. They played music together, Ronny on the drums, banging away, Lee smiling appreciatively at his damaged friend. They rode on Lee’s tractor together under the sun. Lee made Ronny breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The two of them would sit on Lee’s huge porch, just being quiet. They watched the bats swooping in the night against a backdrop of stars. They listened to the owls. Watched deer grazing out in the fields.
Lee was careful about Ronny’s sobriety. They would sit together in their Adirondack chairs with mugs of coffee or hot chocolate, and that was good and enough. When he was with Ronny, Lee was clean, or mostly clean. And if they went out to the VFW in the evening to watch a Packers game or to eat a hamburger or share a paper boat full of cheese curds, Lee kept Ronny close, ordering his friend Coca-Colas and paying rapt and sincere attention to his friend’s sometimes convoluted observations and conversation. Prior to Ronny’s accident, none of us had fully understood the alcoholism that had almost killed him, but it seemed that alcohol had become his closest companion while traveling for the rodeo. After an event was over, sprawled out in some motel bathtub icing his purple-bruised body, he would grow drunk on cheap beer or rotgut vodka. Drinking became his lover and his lullaby, his needle and his pillow.
* * *
Lee had had an entire bull killed and taxidermied and then mounted to a platform on four sturdy tires. The two friends would roll the dead bull into one of Lee’s fields and then spend the afternoon taking passes beside it on Lee’s tractor, a lasso in Ronny’s hand, expertly twirling over his smiling face and then thrown out into the field, where it never failed to snag the impassive creature’s two shining horns.
“All his muscles still remember,” Lee would say, shaking his head in sadness. Then, “I ought to buy him a horse.”
* * *
The bachelor party was a mess. Kip had rented a stretch limousine and bought us all matching Polo shirts to wear for the day. We were to spend the day golfing. Thirty-six holes. He had rented out the entire course and the clubhouse. There was a rumor of strippers. But Kip had not invited Ronny, and Lee was irate. I wasn’t surprised. Kip had a way of moving too fast, of talking too fast, of barely listening, and he’d always been that way; he and Ronny had never quite meshed and maybe none of us ever really meshed with Kip. But certainly not Ronny, who would just stare at him, even when we were young, and say things like, “Now Kip, who gives two shits about advanced placement history? I mean, really. There’s a party at the quarry this weekend. That’s what I’m focused on. Focused on getting laid.” When I imagined the party we were invited to, I pictured his colleagues from back in Chicago: suit-and-tie men, martini men, expense-account men who’d gone to good universities and drove nice cars. These men would own their own sets of new golf clubs and spiked golf shoes. Their hands would be office-soft. Perhaps Kip had not invited Ronny to protect him, or because he was too embarrassed. But I also knew that none of those excuses would fly with Lee, whose love for Ronny was almost righteous.
Ronny had marked the date of the wedding on a calendar that hung from a magnetic hook attached to the side of his refrigerator, and in the preceding months, he asked Lee and me regularly when the bachelor party would be.
“Got to have a bachelor party,” Ronny would say. “You just got to. It’s the last hurrah. Right? The last hooray.”
It made me sad to think that Ronny himself might never be married.
Lee and I went to Ronny’s apartment on the day of the bachelor party.
“Did you get an invitation?” Lee said, looking anxiously through the mass of mail piled up on Ronny’s kitchen table, mostly junk: coupons, political propaganda, credit card offers; no bills were ever posted to Ronny’s apartment.
“Nope,” Ronny said, “probably just lost in the mail. I know he wants me there.”
“Oh, no doubt, bud,” said Lee, seething with anger, “no doubt. Hang on there, buddy, okay? I got to make a phone call real quick.” He eyed me seriously and I knew to watch Ronny, to keep him entertained. I turned on the television and flipped the channels until we found a nature program about a herd of Montana buffalo.
“You can use my phone!” Ronny yelled, but Lee was already down the stairs and outside. I watched him from the window as he paced the sidewalk and shouted into his mobile. He looked like a man who needed something to kick.
A few moments later Lee came back up the stairs, his face red. “Hey buddy, look, no problem, all right!” he said, reentering the apartment. “I just talked to Kip and he explained everything to me. Your invitation, turns out, just now came back to him in the mail. He had the wrong address or something, I guess.”
Ronny was watching the television, buffalo grazing on an endless expanse of prairie. “But I don’t understand,” he said. “Why didn’t he just bring the invitation over himself? I wave to him every day when I walk by the mill.” Ronny shook his head at the illogic of it and chuckled good-naturedly.
Lee exhaled. “I don’t know, buddy. It’s a good question.” His fists were clenched. He looked outside. It was a beautiful October day. The sun bright and clear, the autumn leaves a cool inferno across the land. In the air: the smell of overripe apples, manure.
Not long after that, a limousine pulled up outside Ronny’s apartment and blared its horn six times. Lee looked at me and I saw then, noticed for the first time, that he was a powerful man, that he could get things accomplished with a single telephone call. I saw that he was used to getting his way, he was not accustomed to disappointment.
Ronny turned from the television, his face bright with excitement. “Party time,” he said, grinning, and he gave us hard, loud high-fives. My palm hurt.
We nodded. “Party time,” we said with as much enthusiasm as we could muster.
We all went downstairs to the idling limousine. It was packed with most of our better friends as well as a few strange faces, among them a photographer, a young woman with two different cameras slung around her neck. She seemed to be capturing just about any moment of even the slightest interest with her elaborate Nikon, paying particular attention to everyone’s hands, where glasses of champagne, bottles of beer, and highballs of whiskey sloshed extravagantly.
“Yeah!” Ronny shouted, taking all of this in. “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Party tiiiiime!” The tight little crowd cheered reflexively.
We ducked into the limousine after Ronny and settled in as the stretch turned off Main and reoriented itself like a giant compass needle toward the golf course. The vehicle was loud with music that I didn’t recognize, and Lee leaned in close to me. “Don’t let Ronny out of your sight. Don’t lose sight of him,” he said. “Do you understand me?” I nodded, realizing that the limousine and the party had been a bad idea, that it was all a very bad idea, and now we were swept up into it; Lee had demanded that Ronny be invited, but now he saw the party as being a great danger to his friend. Lee sat rigidly, his fists clenched, jaw set.
“Get him something to drink,” Lee growled at me through the racket. “No beer, though, no booze.�
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I reached for a can of Coca-Cola and popped the top for Ronny, who slugged at the aluminum can. “Yeah!” he said, coming up for air and wiping his mouth with his forearm. “Yeah!”
“Hey, hey, hey!” Kip called out now. “Hey!” He rapped a Swiss Army knife against his champagne flute. “I need to make an announcement, all right? Announcement time!” He reminded me of a Scoutmaster who could not control his troop. “Can everybody please shut the fuck up? Hey!”
“Speeeeech!” the mob called out. “Speech! Speech!” The group was mostly comprised of our friends, but in that moment, I felt that it was just me and Lee, with Ronny beside us. The photographer aimed her camera at us, at Lee, and the flash went off momentarily with light, blinding us. Perhaps not surprisingly, she seemed to only be interested in taking photos of Lee, and I could already imagine her cropping Ronny and me out of the image. I wondered if this was what fame was—a lot of strangers with cameras and then the subsequent blindness of some unexpected portrait. I thought about a middle school history class in which we were taught that some Native Americans thought that having their photograph taken was tantamount to their souls being stolen.
“Can’t tell you guys how much it means to me that you’re all here today,” Kip said, “helping me celebrate my big day tomorrow. I’m overcome, guys, I really am,” though he did not look overcome. His reddish brown hair was thick and long and greased up away from his tight calm face and the closely trimmed beard that followed his strong jawline, his smile utterly controlled and almost ironic. “Me and Felicia,” he said, “we’re so happy you’ve all welcomed us back into the community the way you have. With open arms. And that you’re excited too, about the mill. You know? It means the world to us. And tomorrow”—and here he paused with all the phony gravitas and dramatic flair of a seasoned corporate toastmaster—“we’re all going out to that big old barn to see a great wedding and to par-ty heart-ty.”
Shotgun Lovesongs: A Novel Page 2