Shotgun Lovesongs: A Novel

by Butler, Nickolas

  And there, standing four-legged and yellow-furred in the middle of my living room, was a coyote—the front door still wide open behind it. I froze. The coyote lifted his head, appraised me, lifted one white-socked paw to scratch the air between us.

  I couldn’t tell you how long we remained that way, sniffing each other out, but at last I had the presence of mind to say sharply, “Go on now, shoo.” I had been afraid my voice wouldn’t work.

  And he did, turning slowly, like a scolded dog, and went right back out the front door in what turned into a jaunty lope, before breaking into an outright run in the strip of lawn that separates my house from the driveway, before entering the meadow, where I saw his white-yellow back occasionally popping up over the tall grasses and wildflowers. My hand shook as I shut the front door. Then, I actually locked the door—something I rarely do, but I did. I sat down, I sat down, I sat down. I stared at my hands. I felt alive, every fiber of me vibrating, every atom energized, my blood rushing.

  I live here, I have chosen to live here, because life seems real to me here. Authentic, genuine—I don’t know, viable. I suppose maybe everyone feels this way—but maybe not. I don’t know. What did Chloe think about New York? It’s true—that city throbs, every day, all day, time fusing like a weld: late night and early morning, dawn and noon, lazy afternoons and late nights and early mornings all over again and people never leave that island, they live seventy, eighty, ninety years in one small apartment. They’re in love with the very idea of being marooned.

  But I was never in love with New York, or any other city for that matter. None of the cities I ever toured in. Here, life unfurls with the seasons. Here, time unspools itself slowly, moments divvied out like some truly decadent dessert that we savor—weddings, births, graduations, grand openings, funerals. Mostly, things stay the same. There is Henry in his fields, waving his ball cap at me from atop his tractor. There is Ronny, on Main Street, kicking a stone with his cowboy boots, both hands in his pockets. There is Beth, sitting with the kids outside the Dairy Queen, wiping ice cream off their faces with a wet paper napkin. There is Kip, standing outside the mill on his cell phone, waving his hands like some eccentric conductor who has lost his orchestra. There is Eddy, outside the post office, his white short-sleeve dress shirt tucked in tight against his grand belly as if his gut were a great gust of wind billowing out a spinnaker, buying a red plastic poppy from an old Vietnam vet.

  And in the fields as it is in the forests: the springtime prairie fires and tire fires and shit-spreaders slowly spraying the fields with rich, rich manure. Sandhill cranes and whooping cranes in the sky big as B-52s and all the other myriad birds come back home like returned mail, making the night sky loud as any good homecoming party. And then summer comes, the green coming in such profusions that you think maybe winter never even happened at all, never will come again. Long days, languid days and the VFW Post #88, all neon brewery signs, all open windows and screen doors and sweet, smoky darkness. And Kip’s mill, throwing long shadows over the whole town. Pigeons and mourning doves cooing there in the cool dewy dawns, bursting off to seed blue skies with the first early-morning traffic, as the farmers arrive to sip their scalded, gas-station coffee, come to eat stale doughnuts, come to bitch politics, taxes, the price of commodities, and everything in between. Late-night softball games at rural diamonds behind crossroads taverns where the sodium-nitrate lights bring in billions of bugs and moths, and wives and mothers and aunts sit in stands checking their cell phones and filing their fingernails, pretending to look on with even a halfway interest in the proceedings. And in the backyards clothes pinned to lines snap in the cooling-down breezes that signal autumn’s arrival, that elegant season, that season of scarves and jackets, that season of harvest and open night windows and the best season for sleep. When in the fields everything waits to be sown, the pale yellow corn, dry as paper, and then the soil turned over once again and left to rest until next year. The October air filled with corn dust enough to make each sunset a postcard, with colors like a benign nuclear explosion. And then snow. Snow to cover the world, to cover us. Our world left to sleep and rest and heal underneath those white winter blankets. The forests that in October threw hallucinogenic confetti at the world now withdrawn, bereft, composed, and suddenly much thinner, looking like old people who know their time has just about come. Winter: make like the bears and stay in bed, hibernating, growing paler, reading Russian novels and playing chess through the mail with distant relatives and exiled high school friends. Winter: strap on a pair of skates like two knives and carve a frozen pond with your footsteps, slap a frozen puck with a long hockey stick, then stand still, catching your breath, sweating out there in subzero temperatures. Winter.

  Leave your front door open here and a coyote strolls in. But it could’ve been a bear. Once, Henry and I got stoned down by the creek. And as we passed a joint back and forth, an eagle landed in the boughs of a huge cottonwood just across from us. And we saw him and we were happy for his company. Then a crow landed on a huge rock in the middle of the creek and you might have thought it was his pulpit. And we were happy to see him, too. Finally, a seagull, blown about as far off course from any saltwater sea as could be, set down on the peak of a tall white pine. Three such different birds, and they formed a kind of quorum, evenly spaced along the water before us. We waited, watched, said nothing as they began talking to one another. First the eagle gave his high whistling sound, then the crow’s gruff caw, then the garish squawk of the gull. Back and forth they went, never leaving their perches, never interrupting one another, each in turn—How could it have been anything other than a conversation? We watched, listened, and I could not tell you how much time passed before finally, the gull rose up off the white pine, made three lazy pirouettes in the air, and then skimmed the surface of the river with one wingtip before disappearing over the trees. Like a ribbon-dancer, showing off.

  The wolves, the bears, the phantom elk and bobcat and cougars. The geese in their uniform squadrons and the ducks and wild loons. But the deer remain my favorite. That pasture that I watch, their families moving through like nomads or refugees or better natives—I’ll never know. I have fallen asleep in their bedding-down places, the places in the pasture where they have laid the grass down flat, warmed it with their bodies and fallen asleep dreaming of, dreaming of what? Other Wisconsinites, I know, think of them almost as vermin, a pestilence, some kind of creature that is nothing but an inconvenience, a species that daily commits mass suicide by walking into oncoming traffic, a creature that harms crops, that ruins gardens, whose population has grown to the point of infestation. But I’ve never believed any of that. We’re the reason there are so many deer. It’s not their fault. Maybe there are too many of us: too many people driving cars, eating too much corn, building too many houses, crowding out the wolves and coyotes. I love deer.

  Leave your door open in the big city and you’ll wake up with no furniture and no clothing. Leave your door open here and a coyote comes in looking for a handout.

  This is my home. This is the place that first believed in me. That still believes in me. This is the place that birthed the songs on that first album.

  * * *

  I called Henry. Beth answered.

  “Hey Beth,” I said.

  “Lee?” she asked. “Leland? That you? Everything okay?”

  “Um, yeah, Beth. Things are good, real good.”

  I was embarrassed. Embarrassed to be hardly thirty years old and getting a divorce. Henry and Beth have been together forever, it seems. I’ve never seen them fight. They don’t even seem to bicker. That great house of theirs, their great kids. Everybody always outside playing or working on something. I’ll drive by their farm and they’re all on their front lawn sitting at a picnic table, eating dinner, passing platters of I-don’t-know-what, natural as can be. Or Henry in the fields, in his pole-shed, in the milking parlor, out beside his herd: delivering calves, administering shots, his hands cleaning their teats—rubbing rust
-colored iodine onto that pale pink skin. The Browns live life so easily, it seems. For years now I’ve been envious of Henry. Married to a beautiful woman, doing exactly what he wants to be doing. Out there, under the sun, connected to everything. If he’d let me, I’d invest in their operation. I’d sink everything I had in their farm. I’d quit music to learn from him, turn my place into a little organic farm. I’d grow carrots. Acres and acres of carrots. Pull them out of the earth, big and orange and sweet as candy. Run a big hose out there into the field and wash off my long, sweet organic carrots and eat about two dozen a day.

  But just then, on the phone with Beth, still faintly buzzed from that single beer and the drive west, everything in my life felt discombobulated and frankly, depressing. I hadn’t been able to stay married for even a year. I couldn’t make her love me. And to make matters worse, I’d abandoned my hometown and all my best friends to act like a big shot in New York.

  “Where are you?”

  Also, my whole life, I’ve been at least halfway in love with Beth. I’ve never admitted that to anyone. In fact, until that moment, on the telephone with her, I don’t know that I’d ever admitted it even to myself. But it’s true. Or I think it’s true. I can’t easily tell anymore, can’t tell you the difference between love and loneliness, homesickness and weakness. What the hell do I know about love?

  “I’m over at my place.”

  “It sounds so quiet though,” she said. “All I remember from New York is horns and sirens and bass. How’s Chloe?”

  “She’s great. She’s filming something in Prague right now, actually.” A total fabrication. I had no idea where she was. I had a suspicion she harbored a fetish for musicians and was chasing her next husband. Even before we started falling apart she’d started talking about some rapper from Cleveland, listening to his music incessantly, making me listen to it. The day before I left I got a phone call from an industry friend saying, “You in Cleveland? Because I just saw Chloe backstage.…”

  “Is Henry there?”

  “Hey, you okay?”

  “I’m fine, Beth.”

  “Lee, I’m confused. Are you in New York or Little Wing?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Here there, or here here?”

  Deep breath. “Here here.”

  “Lee,” she said gently, “are you guys okay?”

  My kitchen is toward the back of the house. The windows there look out on the creek below, a descending ridge covered in sumac and red pines that I planted when I first bought the place. Down there, the creek runs gray and blue reflecting the sky and its surface is decorated in red, orange, and yellow leaves that float along like star-shaped badges. I love my kitchen.

  I sat at the breakfast bar, on a stool, the telephone to my ear. Why haven’t I made coffee yet? My head pounded, blood surging through my ears and eyelids.

  “We’re getting a divorce.”

  I heard her breathing change. The phone shuffled between her hands. Did you ever love me? Could I make you love me?

  “I’m so sorry to hear that,” she said. “We liked Chloe.”

  “Well, turns out she didn’t like me that much, I guess.”

  “Can you come over for dinner? Now that you’re back. You’ll have to come over. We need to have you over. For dinner.”

  With Beth, I suspected I could have spent one hundred years in bed. Kissing her nipples. I still remember the shape and color of your nipples. Would we have had children together? What would their names be? Who would they look like?

  “Um. So is Henry around?”

  “Yeah, let me find him.” A pause.

  Is the telephone cradled in her neck? In her hand? Down on the counter?

  “I love you,” I whispered.

  Nothing. Not even static. Not the dry rub of skin.

  I whispered again, “I love you.” You’re throwing yourself off a fucking cliff now. What the hell are you doing? Don’t fuck up their lives too.

  And then the sound of Henry clearing his throat before picking up the phone. I imagined a red handkerchief in his hands, wiping away black motor oil and grease. Perhaps Beth standing behind him, filling a chipped coffee mug and placing it in his hands.

  “Lee? That you? Long time no hear.”

  Henry’s voice—the voice of an old friend—like finding a wall to orient you in some strange, dark hotel room. The world is still out there. Henry is still out there. Real as a fencepost.

  “Hey buddy, good to hear your voice.”

  “You all right? Beth said you were back in Little Wing. Where’s Juliet? Where’s my favorite Juliet?”

  Henry is handsome enough to be an actor. I doubt he knows that, or would even care, but it’s true. I’ve met and known a lot of actors by now, and most of them are five and a half feet tall with a look in their eye hovering somewhere between vacant and crazy. They’re all handsome, but they’re about as genuine as plastic. The first time you meet Henry you think, Here is a capable man. His hands are big and dry and they come for your hands like warm mittens. He’s not quite as tall as I am, maybe about six foot—but he’s broad as an ox, with friendly deep brown eyes. And his skin, no matter the season, is a couple shades darker than a Ritz cracker. At Kip’s wedding, Chloe pulled me aside and said, “If I wasn’t already so in love with you, I’d be scheming a way to steal your friend away from that wife and farm of his.” Then she licked my earlobe. I’ll say this, there were warning signs that we weren’t going to make it, me and Chloe, but she was a pretty decent lover.

  “Tell you what,” I said, “meet me at the U-Haul lot in Eau Claire and I’ll give you the whole story.”

  “Wait a minute, you’re already unloaded?”

  “No,” I said, “but I didn’t bring back much either. Won’t take me long.”

  “Hey Lee?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You sure you’re okay?”

  “Meet me in two hours.”

  * * *

  This whole mythology started to grow around those first ten tracks. Where I’d recorded them, how I’d recorded them, the heartbreak, the drugs, the alcohol. Most of it isn’t true. Those first ten tracks, that album, Shotgun Lovesongs, it just sort of came out of me. I was tired, I guess. Tired of failing, tired of moving around the country, the globe, touring. Moving from city to city where no one knew who we were, who I was. Singing to people in Germany and France and Belgium, wondering, Do these people even understand a goddamn word I’m singing? And when the last band broke up (as they always did), coming home, feeling like the biggest failure in the world. Thinking about jobs—about real jobs. About giving up.

  Music is a crazy thing to do. It doesn’t make any sense. Most musicians are just barely scraping by, trying to find gigs here and there, more than happy to play a wedding or a bar mitzvah. Most musicians have no insurance, very little income, and not much of plan as to how they’re going to break on through. But I understand them; they’re obsessed, in love with music, in love with playing music alongside other people, with making an audience happy, with receiving that applause adulation that comes at the end of a good night, like a whole town suddenly deciding to adopt you, and anyone in that audience willing to host you for a night, feed you, lend you fresh clothing and give you money for a cab or bus ride home.

  When I was a kid, lying in bed, I’d hear these riffs, these words, and then I could see them, layering on top of one another, and I saw the way they were supposed to fit and gel. I suppose back then, most of the things I was hearing in my head were echoes of Bob Dylan or Neil Young, permutations of their work. But even then I was learning, building my own sound, my own style. I still don’t sleep well at night because I’m afraid if I don’t get out of bed and write shit down, it will vaporize and I’ll never get it again. I’d rather stay up until dawn writing down a bunch of nonsense that never works than find myself well rested but unable to piece back together something that, who knows, might have been good. Most of the drawers in my house are filled with scraps of pape
r on which I’ve written incoherent ramblings, tiny poems or images that I wanted to plug in to some future song. Beside my bed is a yellow legal pad so covered in ink it looks like a box of pens must have exploded there.

  Now, here I was. Back in Little Wing. And getting a divorce. I still didn’t entirely understand. The wedding had been beautiful, the honeymoon lovely (St. Bart’s, where I ate lobster every day and befriended a cabinet maker named Jimmy who’s going to come up here someday to redo this whole kitchen), and then we were back in New York, out at dinner one night, and Chloe just sort of looks up from her cell phone and she’s another person I’ve never met.

  “I’m not sure this is working out,” she said. She often resorted to clichés, a hitch in her vernacular I credited to too many poorly written scripts.

  “Not sure what’s working out?” I said, ready to fucking throw my napkin at her face, depending on what she said next. Never have I chewed food the way I chewed my food in that moment. Afraid to throw up, afraid of my jaws clenching so tight I’d break something. I knew what was coming. I hadn’t seen it coming, but once she’d said what she said, I knew exactly what was coming.

  “Or maybe not,” she said, nonchalantly, pushing a single leaf of lettuce around her plate. Her fork made a high sharp noise on the porcelain of the plate, like a nail dragged across old steel. “I’ve never been married before, you know?”

  She said been the way I knew she delivered a line. A certain affectation, a certain stress, making a throwaway word mean everything in the world. Making been sound like a prison sentence, a crime, a war-torn country, a past life. I knew that in two weeks she was bound for Vancouver, a movie shoot. We’d planned on renting a condo there. I was excited to try writing music in a new place. Not Wisconsin, not New York, but someplace altogether different.