“You hear that?” he’d say, not so much asking as telling. “You hear that tone, that note? I swear to god, that color over there, that pink color. When that pink color starts to really blush, it’s like this note, I can’t describe it, this sweet high note. And you hear that, that orange? Not that marmalade orange, but the peach one? You hear that? Oh, man! I can’t wait for the blues! The blues and the purples! And then that last long, low black note—that reverberating bass note that says, ‘Go on now, good night. Good night, America, good night.’”
I never knew what he was talking about, but I tried. I tried to listen, tried to hear that sunset music he was talking about. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t hear it. Those guys, they listened to music all the time. I’d come over to Henry’s parents’ house—this is back in elementary school, middle school—and those three would be down in the basement, listening to Henry’s dad’s old records, anything they could get their hands on. And then Lee joined a record club after seeing an ad in the back of a magazine: Ten albums for only a penny! A penny!
Even in elementary school, in middle school, Lee was the first person I knew who owned a Walkman, and he carried it everywhere—out to the playground during recess or walking home from school. He even tried to sneak it into church, and tried to listen to it while we watched all those educational film strips at school, even during lunch. He listened attentively to all the cassettes—and later CDs—that older kids gave him, like contraband. Gangster rap and metal and early grunge. Public Enemy and N.W.A giving way to Anthrax and Metallica and then Nirvana, Stone Temple Pilots, and Soundgarden. He wore nothing but flannel for years and years. Flannel and torn blue jeans, Chuck Taylors covered in cryptic little poems and epitaphs.
Up on top of the feed mill, the sunset almost entirely washed away now by a sea of black and blue. “I didn’t hear it,” I’d admit to them. “I didn’t hear it at all.”
They’d laugh at me. Laugh and laugh. And Lee would say, “You’re not listening. Look, I know you’re trying to hear, but you’re not listening, man.”
A few times he tried to make me listen to this album Kind of Blue, but that didn’t help at all, because much as I tried, I just couldn’t find anything to listen to—there weren’t even any words to grab on to, nothing at all, just these spaces of lonely trumpet and mellow piano notes, but so many spaces of almost nothing at all.
* * *
Felicia used to ask me after we were married, “Why did you want to come back here? What is it? We had everything we ever needed or could have wanted in Chicago. Why come back? What for?”
I don’t know that I ever found the right way to answer that, but I suppose it all comes back to those nights and mornings, those guys. Feeling like we were apart from everything we’d ever known and maybe better than the place that made us. And yet, at the same time, in love with it all. In love with being small-town kings, standing up on those bankrupt towers, looking out over our futures, looking for something—maybe happiness, maybe love, maybe fame.
And when I found some of those things along a Gold Coast, along a Miracle Mile, inside a Loop, the only thing I could think to do was to come back home, out of exile, to show those boys—now men—Look. Look what I did. Look at who I am now. Look at me.
That’s why I came back. Except that now I’m the only one going back up there. I’m the only one climbing to the top of those silos. Looking at sunrises that just make me wish that I was back in bed with Felicia. Or back in Chicago, waiting for the taxis to begin waking the city up.
R
ATOP THOSE BULLS, I never thought about anything except hanging on. My life was lived in eight-second chunks, and most of the time, a lot shorter than that. I miss it. These days, I don’t know what to do and sometimes it feels like no one will let me do anything. Truth is, I don’t want to drink because I want to get drunk, but, maybe, if I had a drink, I could bend things, you know? Like how the world looks? Or even time? My life now, it stretches out before me like a highway to nowhere. One of those prairie highways where you can be driving eighty, ninety, a hundred miles per hour and the only way you can tell you’re flying is the sound of the engine burning and the way the gas needle starts to lean toward that big old E quicker and quicker. But there ain’t anything to measure yourself or your speed against. No trees, no buildings—if you’re lucky, you got a string of telephone wires, but most of the time, nothing.
Most days I wake up and do a hundred pushups just because. Because what the fuck. Because on the teevee is the same old shit. Old news recycled into new news and all the same old problems all over again and I’m supposed to care, or get worked up. Here’s what I’ve gleaned: more and more people, less and less planet, and everything keeps getting hotter and hotter. That about sums it up, far as I’m concerned.
People like to tune the teevee to something they think I’d like, usually a documentary about nature. Or the West. Or horses. Makes me feel like I’m at a nursing home or something, some well-meaning nurse coming into my life telling me what kind of teevee to watch like I can’t use a remote control myself. I think they do that because they don’t know what to say to me anymore, because they’re sad for me, or because they think I’m sad. And most of the time, guess what? I ain’t. I ain’t sad. I’m just bored stiff. I’m so goddamned bored that watching a documentary about The Wild Horses of Colorado gets me to thinking about one thing: if I was a wild horse, I’d bolt right off and just keep on running.
I want to break out of here so bad and I don’t even know where I want to go. Maybe Anyplace, I guess. I know they think I can’t take care of myself, but I sure as hell can. I’m not a smart man—I know that—but I ain’t dumb. And the way things are, it’s like I’m in a cage. People forget, I think, that I’ve ridden more bulls and more horses than I can count, that I’ve gotten in barfights from here to Boise and all the way down to Baton Rouge, that before my accident, I used to walk into a bar, any bar, and go up to a girl and there was a damn good chance I was going to make her my friend for the night. Easy as pie.
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
OUR 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 hand
s 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.
Shotgun Lovesongs: A Novel Page 6