Shotgun Lovesongs: A Novel (29 page)

L

T
HE WHOLE TOWN CAME OUT
and there were not enough folding chairs, not enough room for the bystanders and gawkers to stand in. Many stood outside the mill, in the cold, peering in through windows already fogging with heat. Others gathered in the mill’s basement, which Kip had stunningly transformed into a dance hall of rustic elegance: where once dead mice and rats had floated in six inches of tepid water, now the huge stone space glowed a golden yellow beneath white Christmas lights and candles. You would have thought it was some kind of royal wedding, two houses of the American Middlewestern aristocracy merging. As big as Kip’s wedding was, Ronny’s surpassed it by far. And perhaps due in part to the prior evening’s excitement. Because despite frostbitten fingers and a bright red nose, Ronny insisted on getting married on schedule.

I had been among those urging him to lie in bed and recuperate. “Ronny,” I said, “Lucy will understand, I promise. You can get married next week, next month, next year. This is crazy. You’re lucky to be alive.”

For her part, Lucy sat so close to his hospital bed that she may as well have crawled into Ronny’s lap. She nodded her head. “Lee’s right, baby. I ain’t gonna leave you. Never ever.”

“Just get me out of here around noon,” Ronny said seriously. “I’ll stay here ’til noon. I’ll rest that long. But that’s it.” He pointed a finger at me, at Henry, at Eddy, Kip, and the Girouxs. “I’ll sign the goddamn paperwork myself if I have to. I ain’t no invalid.”

*   *   *

At noon, he was taken by wheelchair to the vestibule of the Sacred Heart Hospital, where Lucy’s aged Dodge Neon sat idling. His hands and feet were heavily bandaged, and when he rose wobbly out of the chair, we raced to support him.

“Gimme a break,” he said, “I ain’t dead. I been worse off than this. Just get me back to my place. Just get me the hell into my tuxedo.”

I rode in the backseat of the Neon while Lucy drove, her protruding belly rubbing the steering wheel, nervously glancing over at Ronny from time to time, holding his hand in hers, asking if the heat was too much. He waved her off, pretended to inspect the world outside his window.

“Baby,” she said softly, “baby, what
were
you doing out there last night?”

“I don’t know…,” he began, his voice trailing off.

“Baby.”

From the backseat, I watched them, their faces, her fingers in his hair, the road before us.

“I just got lost is all.”

“But what were you even doing out there? Why weren’t you home?”

“I don’t know. Lost track of time, I guess, and then I went out to take a leak, and when I turned around the bar had moved or something.” Ronny laughed, turned around to me. “Shit, maybe the bar got lost, too.”

I smiled at him.

“Baby,” Lucy said. “You’re going to be a dad now. You know that. You’re going to be somebody’s
dad
. There ain’t any more getting lost, all right?” She’d begun crying now, and pulled the car to the shoulder of the road. “You stick by me, you hear? We stick together now.”

He looked at her. “I wanted to be with you,” he said. “But I thought we wasn’t supposed to be together the night before. Tradition, or whatnot.”

She rubbed his face, his cheeks, with her hands. “After tonight, you don’t never have to worry about that no more.”

They kissed each other, straining against their seat belts. “You know, I could drive us the rest of the way back,” I said. And without saying a word they both unbuckled their seat belts, stepped out of the car, let me move into the driver’s seat, and then hurried into the backseat, where they spent the final miles holding each other as tightly as possible. I watched in the rearview for a few seconds before aiming my eyes away.

*   *   *

The ceremony itself was held in what would have been the main warehouse of the old mill, a cavernous room that still smelled vaguely of malt. There was no church organ, obviously, but Kip had spared no expense with the sound system, with a professional deejay to handle the soundtrack.

I stood at the front of the room, beside Ronny, holding the wedding bands that had come to him through his grandmother … His grandfather’s old ring, the one Ronny has been wearing for weeks, almost like the string a forgetful person ties around his finger as a reminder, and hers, this ring I rubbed between my thumb and index finger within the confines of my pocket, felt the softness of the gold, imagined all the places the ring had gone, all the fingers and objects it had touched. I felt the little diamond—this was the wedding ring of poor people, of middle-class America, it was a promise of things to come, not some gaudy galleria ring, some designer monstrosity like the one I bought for Chloe.

Waiting up front as well was Lucy’s younger sister, the maid of honor, a girl not yet twenty-one years of age. Her makeup already ruined with tears, she clutched a bouquet of flowers so severely that from several feet away I could hear individual stems breaking, could smell something that I imagined to be chlorophyll—the smell of freshly cut grass or shrubs. I imagined green stains on her palms, and possibly the puncture marks of thorns.

It was a nice, traditional Lutheran wedding. The same worn-out Bible verses you always hear at Midwestern weddings. The pastor spoke about time and patience and forgiveness, his voice warm and tired-sounding. Lucy’s sister pulled herself together long enough to sing a shaky rendition of “I Will Always Love You,” a selection that few of my own friends at the highest echelons of American popular music would have attempted on their best days. But thankfully she veered toward a more subdued Dolly Parton rendering, rather than going for a full-throated imitation of Whitney Houston.

Ronny and Lucy listened to the pastor’s words with rapt attention. Their voices hushed, serious when it came time to exchange vows, spoken with the right amount of thought and emotion. Ronny looked away from his bride just once, in order to reach back toward me for the ring.

After their kiss, a cheer rose up in the mill that was the loudest sound I’d ever heard in Little Wing, and from the little Lutheran Church off Main Street, you could hear the peals of bells tolling. Even with his bandages, Ronny joined Lucy in shaking everyone’s hand,
everyone’s
hand. And then the hors d’oeuvres, dinner, and finally: the party.

*   *   *

Most of the women had lost their heels and the men were sweaty as hockey players, with neckties knotted around their foreheads and plastic cups full of water and ice cubes. It was a dry wedding—no booze allowed—but no one seemed to care. The whole damn town was out on the dance floor it seemed, and they were
giving it,
leaving it all out there, letting it all hang out. Eddy on the floor doing the worm and Henry, displaying an especially prominent white man’s overbite, clapping his hands to music you damn well knew he’d never heard before.
But it’s got a beat! You can move to it!
And the groom: Ronny Taylor, looking like an original king of disco, with the kind of lithe body that might have given John Travolta pause. He was out there, cowboy hat on his head, hands perched snug on that belt buckle, kicking and strutting in new alligator cowboy boots and dancing with his pregnant bride, a woman who came equipped with her
own
set of moves. And even pregnant as she was, she moved
well,
showing her husband moves that promised much more than what was appropriate for public consumption.

And then the whole town was surrounding them, forming a kind of huge circle and everyone clapping, everyone cheering. Cheering for those two unlikely newlyweds, cheering with the kind of unrestraint that builds in a community buried by snow and kept mostly without sunlight from Thanksgiving to Easter. Children were there, up way past their bedtimes, out on the dance floor and moving exactly how the music told them to, moving without a care or inhibition in the world. Children, making sorties to the tables where the sheet cakes waited, melting. Running sugary fingers through thick frosting. Children, guzzling soda. Rubbing their sleepy eyes and going back for more, dancing in circles, dancing with their parents. Teenagers, sulking in the corners, checking their phones, looking up, wanting to join the action, but embarrassed to.
Look
: there are their parents, dancing, even grinding in ways that make the teenagers blush, moving in ways that made the teenagers say,
Oh my god
. Teenagers, sneaking off for cigarettes stolen from mothers’ purses, from fathers’ jacket pockets, smoking in the bathrooms or out by the train tracks. Kissing in the quiet spaces of the old mill, eyes big, eyes full of love and wonder and new ancient sensations. And the old people, sitting in chairs, watching, clapping, and in some cases, sitting almost catatonic motionless, only the smallest of smiles cracked on their wrinkled faces. Some of the old women rising to join the dance floor fun, but the old men, shaking their heads
no, no, no,
crossing their arms and crossing their legs, doing everything but sitting on the floor and locking arms together in solidarity.
Didn’t dance back then, and I sure as hell ain’t going to start now
.

And there was Kip, leaning against a wall, making a plastic cup of ice cubes sound like a half-dozen dice, a strange look on his face, a happy look. A look of accomplishment. He didn’t see me, but I saw him, saw him from where I was out dancing with our friends. I stepped away from the wild ruckus of it all and went over to him, wiping the sweat away from my face. What I needed was a roll of paper towels, a cold shower. But I was having too much fun, everyone was. Somehow, the sonuvabitch had pulled it off, had brought everyone together.

He saw me coming and stood up straight, as if I were a teacher coming to correct his posture. I saw his jaws crush an ice cube. He nodded, extended his hand, almost sternly. “Leland,” he said. I noticed he employed my full name, Leland. Not
Lee,
not
buddy
. That’s where we were at, he and I.

“Come on outside,” I said. “Let’s take a walk. I’ll buy you a beer.”

He shook his head. “No, I really ought to stay here.”

“Aw, come on,” I said. I put a hand on his shoulder, felt his body tense up. “Shit, man, let me say that I’m sorry. All right?”

He looked at me for a second without saying a word and then moved away from the dance floor. We went out into the cold together, like two men emerging from a sauna, plumes of steam rising off our heads like columns of smoke. There were others out in the winter night too, standing outside the mill, smoking cigarettes, looking at the stars, catching their breath. They nodded their heads in our direction, though I’ll say this, when they nodded, it was clear to me that they were nodding at Kip and not so much at me. What he had done was a rare thing, a good thing. The kind of thing that I suspect has been lost in America. Whole towns, whole communities getting together to celebrate, to have fun. No politics, no business, no Robert’s Rules.

Once, a long time ago, when I was first starting out, I was invited to a square dance up on Lake Superior in one of those small towns that seem to have lost their reason to persist. No downtown, no businesses, no working port or railroad tracks. And yet, at seven o’clock on a Friday night, a hundred people came out of the hills and forests and down to the old town hall, and I was the opening act for a bluegrass band and a contradance caller. There was a potluck and bowls of punch and Kool-Aid and coolers of soda and someone turned the lights down low and I played my guitar for an hour or so, played some Springsteen covers too, and they were polite and clapped, and no one’s cell phone went off and no one was distracted or talking. I was the only thing in town at that very moment.

After the set was finished, the bluegrass band took to the stage. The fiddle players rosined their bows, and the piano player lightly touched the keys, and the bass player made his big fat strings talk in a deep, low voice, and then they exploded—and the music they played was like a giant bucket of water poured over a great tree, fully leaved, the notes dividing and dispersing themselves down, gradually growing smaller and smaller, joyously running, bouncing, flowing down, down, down from leaf to leaf, as if racing one another. A one-child family suddenly multiplied a thousand, a million times over, each rivulet, each bead, each tear, a drop of sunlight and glee. And everyone started dancing, and soon the town hall was pungent with body odor, deafening with laughter, dense with the smell of wet wool and feet, and the whole town embraced me—
literally embraced me
—swung me into their square dances, and taught me their promenades and their steps and their claps and their calls. And I have to say, that was the first time I ever understood what America was, or could be. And the second night was the night of Ronny Taylor’s wedding, in Kip Cunningham’s lovingly restored mill.

America, I think, is about poor people playing music and poor people sharing food and poor people dancing, even when everything else in their lives is so desperate, and so dismal that it doesn’t seem that there should be any room for any music, any extra food, or any extra energy for dancing. And people can say that I’m wrong, that we’re a puritanical people, an evangelical people, a selfish people, but I don’t believe that. I don’t
want
to believe that.

*   *   *

Clearly, whoever wasn’t at the mill was at the VFW. The place was packed. Kip and I elbowed into the bar and no sooner had we got through the door than someone pressed cold glasses of tap beer into our hands and we stood close together, the door ajar, very cold air coming in, but feeling delicious all the same. Waylon Jennings on the old Wurlitzer.

“You did good tonight,” I hollered into Kip’s right ear. “That’s a hell of a party back there.”

Kip nodded his thank-you, but said nothing, sipped his beer. He had changed, I saw. Or maybe it was just my perception of him that had changed.
Something
was different. The Kip I’d always known, or thought I had known, would have made some self-aggrandizing speech, would have made everyone feel obliged to patronize his business, would have even passed the hat. But he had done none of those things.