Shotgun Lovesongs: A Novel (25 page)

“Right, Harvey. Obviously I’m sorry about your loss and all but, I mean, we met just that one time, and he seemed, you know, like a very nice man and all.…”

“Harvey Bunyan. You gave him your card.”

“Well, right, but…”

“Look.” She lowered her voice. “Thomas was our only boy. He worked in Chicago. Commodities, same as you. Went to Northwestern. Smart boy. Put himself through school on the GI Bill and then one day he gets called up, and next thing we know he’s gone. And Harvey, well, he just won’t accept it.” She paused. “I’m asking you, could you please just meet us for lunch. Forty-five minutes. We’ll buy. I think he’s lonely. Like I said, you remind him of Thomas. You must be a very nice man.”

Denise stood in my office doorway, a look of concern on her face.

“Where exactly are you guys?”

*   *   *

We met at Giordano’s, a famous pizzeria stuffed with tourists. They were standing by the door, Harvey and Edith, two people older than my own parents, looking stiff in their Rockport walking shoes, pressed pants, and windbreakers. Harvey looking older and more frail than what I’d remembered, constantly parting his thinning hair with thick fingers, his wet eyes darting all over me, the restaurant’s frenetically decorated walls, the crowd of patrons, and the young servers. Edith: plump, with thick, wobbly forearms, thin lips, and a gigantic purse dangling off her meaty elbow. I decided just to relax, to while away the hour, to humor them—two harmless old people and me, some ghostly reminder of their poor son.

We ate pizza, sipped Coca-Cola. They asked about my work, where my office was, nodded appreciatively, Harvey squinting up at me, looking all around the buzzing room. “Sure is busy here,” he said. Edith talked about their little farm, about wanting to sell, about buying an Airstream and driving the highways of the American Southwest. I imagined her arms growing pink with sunburn, a streak of zinc oxide down her nose, her eyes hidden behind gigantic drugstore sunglasses. And Harvey: forever distracted by the memory of their farm, complaining about the cost of gasoline, traveling everywhere with a frown and arms crossed over his chest.

“You
do
look like Thomas,” Edith said. “At first I didn’t see it. But now. You rub your hands together the same way he did, you know, when you get impatient. And your ears are the same.” She patted Harvey on the arm. “Sonuvagun.”

“Well,” I said, “I’d like to pick up the check, if you don’t mind. It’s my pleasure. Really. And you’re my guests.” I
had
invited them.

“Oh,” Edith said, rummaging through the cavern-land of her purse for her billfold. “We won’t hear of it. Now.”

“No, no, no,” I said, deftly handing my credit card to the passing waitress, who scooped it up like a baton in a relay. The hour had passed more quickly than I would have expected. “Really, this has been a nice surprise. A nice break for me.”

When we stood outside the restaurant about to part ways, I was surprised to find Edith giving me a long hug, her body pressed firmly against mine, the sweetness of her cheap perfume almost overwhelming. And then Harvey, never really making eye contact, presenting his dry, old hand, shaking mine, saying, “I’m sure that if you could have, you and my boy’d have been good friends. He was just like you. Strong. Smart. Polite.” He settled one hand on my left bicep, and I felt his grip there. He could not look at me and I heard his voice failing, the traffic sounds suddenly too loud, too frenetic. I wanted to shut the city off, to pause every action. Then Harvey stepped away from me and Edith took his hand in hers. They looked lost in the city, cowering almost, their shoulders slumped yet somehow proud, grave smiles etched on their faces. I peered down at my cell phone, unsure what to do with my own eyes.

“So, when’s the wedding?” I asked.

“Tonight,” Harvey said. “My sister’s daughter.”

“And when do you guys head back home?”

Pedestrians pushed between us. Suitcases and rolling luggage, cell phone squawkers and joggers.

“Tomorrow,” they said in unison. Then Harvey: “Tomorrow morning. We’ll try to hit the road early.”

I nodded.

“Well, look,” I said, not even thinking about what I was going to say, to offer. “Maybe you might like to come on over to my place tomorrow morning before you go. I’ll make you breakfast. That way you won’t have to spend money on some expensive big-city brunch. I live in the John Hancock. Come on over. I’ve got a great view. You can tell me more about Thomas.” It felt good, felt right. Those two lost geezers. I’d never done anything like that before, or since, really, maybe until now.

Their smiles slowly grew radiant. I wrote my address down on a scrap of paper, and waved them good-bye before Edith could cover my cheeks in any more lipstick, or my clothes in the scent of her perfume.

*   *   *

They
did
come to breakfast the next morning, stayed on until just past noon. We drank two pots of coffee and Harvey paced around my condo, staying a cautious distance from the floor-to-ceiling windows. Edith, sitting at my dining-room table, showing me photographs of Thomas from a small album she kept in her purse. He
did
look like me. It was unsettling. The same hair, eyes, face, build. In the photographs, he even seemed to favor the same brands of clothing I wore, clutched the same bottle of beer I would drink. In many of the photographs he stood in the very same Chicago bars and restaurants I often visited.

“Did you have other children?” I asked, not looking at Edith, already aware of what the answer would be.

“No,” Harvey said from across the room.

She closed the album and placed it carefully back inside her purse, then seemed to settle very deeply into her chair and for a count of three seconds or so, closed her eyes tightly, pursed her lips, and then exhaled.

*   *   *

You pour everything into a child, all your love, all your attention, all your hopes, all the promises of those kinfolk who preceded you, and
you just don’t know
. It isn’t like anything else in the world. Except faith, I suppose, and I’m not a very religious person. But when you invest in stocks or commodities, you can hedge your bet, you can put your money in a dozen different places, or a thousand. You can diversify your hopes and fears, and in the end, sure it’s a crapshoot, sure it’s a gamble, but I’ve always known that I could get a return. That I could get
something
out of it.

Twice a year I got a greeting card in the mail from Harvey and Edith. Once at Christmas, and once on Thomas’s birthday, which happens to be only five days away from my own. The greeting cards are inscribed with Harvey’s bold, neat cursive. They never say much. The same farmer-gripes I might hear from Henry or the Giroux twins—not enough rain,
too much
rain, crop loss, diesel prices, an expensive hip replacement, et cetera. Sometimes, Harvey sent me pictures of their farm, the photographs clearly taken on a disposable camera and the quality of the film vague and overexposed. I’d see a field of seedlings, rows and rows of tender green, or a purple sunset over a field of pale, dry corn. Snow up to the windowsills of their house or a cardinal at their birdfeeder. There was never any explanation for the pictures he sent me, no pattern or theme. Just his life. The same pictures he would have sent Thomas perhaps, when the young man was stationed in Iraq, or even back in the States, at some fort in the humid American South.

“Remind me who these people are again?” Felicia would ask, examining their address on the outside of the card’s envelope. “How do you know them again?”

How would I even begin to explain it? That I met an old man one time, at a gas station in the middle of nowhere, that I gave him my business card and then months, years later, he and his wife came to visit me one time in Chicago? That I look like their dead son?

“Oh,” I’d say, “they’re just old family friends.”

“Well, should we invite them to the wedding?” she asked me on more than one occasion.

“No. They’re all the way down in Illinois, near the Iowa border. Harvey’s a farmer and he doesn’t like to travel. I wouldn’t want to bother them. We’re not that close, not really.”

“Are you sure? They seem to really care about you. I mean—they send more cards than your parents do.”

“No, trust me. It’s okay.”

*   *   *

And then, a few months ago, there’s a note. But it isn’t written in Harvey’s cursive. This is a softer script, more elegant, more curvaceous, the indentation of the pen less severe. And walking back from the mailbox I read the news that Harvey had died. That he’d had a bad accident with a piece of farm machinery. That Edith had found him out there, in one of his fields, that there was nothing for her to do, no more time, that he was gone too.

And I’ve thought, as I’m thinking now, why
hadn’t
I invited them to the wedding? Of all people—why
not
them? Who would have been more proud? Who had given of their time and faith more unwaveringly? Who had actually loved me, like a son? And what had I done? Telephoned them? Not once. Written? Maybe once a year. Visited? Never.

How proud would they have been of me? Of Felicia?

*   *   *

How can I be a father? How can I be trusted? What have I ever done but fail? Fail with Felicia, fail Leland, fail poor old Harvey. And now, this business. God. Who am I?

The sun is rising. Soon, the day’s first customers will begin to trickle in. Lee used to hear music in sunsets—jazz. I don’t know about that. And the sunrise? I don’t think sunrise has a musical sound. To me, it’s like a beautiful woman yawning as she first wakes up, or maybe, I don’t know, a baby. A baby opening her eyes. Maybe both. Either way, I feel less and less that I deserve another day, another dawn like this one.

R

W
E WATCHED THE BLIZZARD
come creeping across the Doppler radar on the teevee like some kind of alien invasion: a huge blob of white stretching from Oklahoma all the way to Ontario, but the brunt of the storm aimed square at us, right at Wisconsin. On the teevee there were pictures of what lay behind in the blizzard’s path: streets buried in Iowa City, Iowa, and telephone lines down in Lincoln, Nebraska. Cattle frozen to the fucking ground in Pierre, South Dakota, and a forty-car pileup outside of St. Louis, Missouri. The weather woman wore a very yellow blouse as she told us the storm was set to strike on Saturday, January 5—the day of my wedding to Miss Lucinda Barnes.

The Friday afternoon before the wedding, Lee drove me into Eau Claire, to the men’s clothing store inside a little strip mall off Hastings Way, near the Army Navy store and a closed-down Chinese restaurant shaped like a red pagoda. We went there to pick up our tuxedos, to make sure everything fit just right. Lucy wanted me and Lee to wear tuxedos that matched, but I insisted on choosing my own wedding suit. For one thing, I planned on wearing a new pair of cowboy boots and a turquoise bolo my dad had bought on a family trip to Albuquerque. I smiled into the mirror, checked myself out.

We ate lunch together at Lee’s favorite fried chicken restaurant right down the road—Chicken Unlimited—the last business left alive alongside an old highway that got bypassed a long time ago. We sat on red stools and ate French fries, fried chicken sandwiches, and cheese curds. We sipped root beer, and he read me articles out of some old copies of
Sports Illustrated
.

After lunch Lee drove us to the bowling alley. Lee is a straight-up
shitty
bowler—he really is. He scored a 101 and I got a 215. But it was fun. The bowling alley was sort of abandoned, and we supposed that was because the blizzard was coming, and people were at the grocery stores stocking up on food and whatnot.

“Christ,” Lee said, “you’d think a hurricane was brewing the way people are acting. This is
Wisconsin
.”

“Lucy’s worried about the wedding,” I said. “She’s worried people won’t be able to drive out to Little Wing, or their planes’ll get delayed over Minnesota.”

“Ah, well,” Lee said, “the important thing is, you’re getting married. Right, buddy? I’ll be there. And Kip and Felicia. Eddy. The Girouxs. Beth and the kids.”

“And Henry.”

Lee nodded, spun a bowling ball in his hands. “Yep. Henry, too.”

“Maybe we ought to head back,” I said. “We don’t need to bowl two games. Let’s get home.” Outside, the sky was going gray.

*   *   *

Lee drove slow back to Little Wing, taking back roads and glancing up at the sky through the windshield.

“Gettin’ dark out there,” he said.

I wondered what Lucy was doing just then, wondered if her hands were resting on top of her stomach, if the baby was kicking her. I remembered my own parents, wished they were still alive, wished I could see them on my wedding day.

“Well,” Lee said. “Your last hours of bachelorhood.” He looked across the bench seat at me. “Any last requests?”

There was already a fresh layer of snow covering everything. The sun had turned in for the day. Lee turned on the headlights, though it was barely four in the afternoon. He was a good driver, slow and deliberate.

“You know what I wish?” I asked.

“No.”

“I wish I knew why you and Henry ain’t talkin’.”

Lee looked away from the road for a second, toward his driver’s-side mirror; not a car or snowplow or salt truck in sight, I knew. It was just us out there on those roads.

“Because, Lee, it just don’t feel right. Something’s wrong. You two are never ’round each other no more.”

It was true. I couldn’t figure it out, but something had come between them like a wedge, and when we all got together, them two seemed to push each other to opposite sides of the room. They didn’t joke anymore. They didn’t get together like they always used to, so close they might be horses in a stall, their shoulders rubbing, talking to each other behind cupped hands, laughing in a way that made you wish they’d include you.

“Is it money?” I asked.

“No,” Lee said sternly. “We never talk money.” He looked at me to let me know he was pissed, and not just at Henry either. “You know that.”