* * *
We make a pit stop in a small town. My father tells us to pump, he’ll pay. When the tank is full, my brother parks the Jeep in front of the entrance to the station. My father comes out a moment later, dangles a bathroom key at us, disappears around the corner.
He’s gone awhile before one of us goes to check on him.
I knock on the door, call his name. He’s fine, he says.
I return to the Jeep, reclaim shotgun.
“Well?” my brother asks.
I shrug.
Looking at the entrance to the gas station I realize a change in our position. My brother has moved the Jeep over a few spots. We are suddenly in a separate reality, nearly identical to this one, except all that’s different is where we park here today. As if my brother has been given the choice to change one thing in the whole of time, and this is it.
“You moved the Jeep?”
“You noticed.”
My father turns the corner, slips into the station to return the key.
“You think he will?” my brother asks.
A moment later my father comes out, takes over my seat.
He informs my brother that it’s time for him to learn how to drive on a highway.
“You sure?” my brother wants to know.
“Are you?” my father responds.
After an hour on the road my father tells my brother to merge onto I-235S for Oklahoma City. From the interstate he points out a gap in the skyline. We all look to the city, transfixed, our heads gradually turning to keep our eyes pointed downtown. There are several yellow tower cranes and hoist elevators poking out from between the buildings. He has my brother pull off the highway, drive a half mile. Soon, on the passenger side, we approach a fenced-in lot where three months ago, our dad reminds us, a Ryder truck filled with ammonium nitrate fertilizer sheared the facade of the Alfred P. Murrah building. Posted on the fence that surrounds the site are notes, photos, signs, real flowers, fake flowers, toys, American flags, teddy bears. We square the block. My brother drives slowly. As I listen to my father, I imagine a hundred and sixty-eight corpses being fished out of the rubble. Where once stood the Federal Building, there is now a vacant lot—a prison yard, my dad thinks, for an angry mob of souls.
“Can you feel it?” he asks us. “Can you?”
“Feel what?” my brother says.
“I’m not sure I’ve ever been this close to evil.”
We make our way back to the interstate, take the Ralph onto I-40W. The rest of Oklahoma seems ominous. We pass oil fields, see pump jacks nodding like horse heads. At one point we come upon a stretch of white hundred-foot wind turbines, their blades turning with the patience of a rock. If not for their sleek geometry I might have thought they were prehistoric, that the wind generated from their rotations, and not the other way around.
We make a big deal about it when we pass from Oklahoma into Texas. We are getting closer. We can feel it. My brother drives us into the sunset, racing the day to the horizon, stretching time. We’ll even gain an hour once we hit New Mexico.
* * *
It’s past dark when we pull into a diner in Amarillo. My father wants coffee and pie. Inside, he walks straight up to a waitress. Slender, athletic, with plastic-looking legs, she points him to the bathroom. He starts away from her, turns back, says something. We can tell by her smile that she’s taken with him.
“What’s that?” he asks when he arrives at the table.
She is setting down our order. “Coffee and pie on three,” she says.
“That better be decaf,” he tells us.
We snicker behind the heavy mugs, pleased with ourselves for having gotten something past him. He winks at us.
“Is this heaven?” he asks the waitress, putting his hands behind his head.
“I ain’t that pretty,” she says.
He stays a step ahead of her. “I was referring to the enormous Cross we passed a few miles back. Must’ve been two hundred feet tall.”
“Quite a sight,” she says. “Where y’all coming from?”
“Where’re we going to is a better question.”
She looks at me and my brother as if to play hard to get. “Well?” she asks.
“New Mexico,” I say.
“Albuquerque,” my brother says.
“You running from the law? Y’all look like a gang of desperados.”
“It’s not the law we’re running from,” my father says.
He gives a sad half smile, shows her his bare ring finger.
She looks over at us kids again. We keep our heads down, embarrassed by his honesty but also playing up the story. She turns back to my father, holds him in her gaze. He looks at her. We do too, all of us disarmed. Her green eyes are edged with a hazy blue border, and her hair, dirty blond, is pulled up in a too-tight ponytail. The two of them exchange sweet smiles. They are locked in.
She reaches for my father’s hand, puts two fingers on his wrist. She keeps her eyes on the wall clock. Under the table my brother taps my knee. I lean into his shoulder. From the caffeine my fingertips tingle, palms sweat, heart races. Watching her take my father’s pulse is thrilling.
A half minute later she says, “This one might be in heaven.”
“Nothing there?” my brother says.
“No heartbeat?” I ask.
“More like a hammer,” she says.
My father slaps the table with approval.
“Shame y’all won’t be staying long in Amarillo.” She pouts, walks away.
Back on the road my father drives. My brother is in the front seat. I sit behind him. We pass around the restaurant bill on which the waitress wrote her name, her number. “Luck comes in streaks,” my father says. He lets the piece of paper fly out the window. We share his confidence as we cross into New Mexico. We relax into our seats, feel the triumph of the day. It’s the dead of night. The moon has risen. Too soon, though, the coffee wears off. My eyelids grow heavy. I want to stay awake for Albuquerque. I want to complete the drive as a team, as one of the boys. I crack my window to keep sleep at bay. But it’s hopeless. I soon find myself staring past the stars into the darkest night, sinking into the sky, knowing that in my first unthinking moment, tomorrow will have already begun.
* * *
I wake to the smell of cigar smoke. I am sprawled out on the backseat. I sit up. We’re pulled over on the shoulder of the road. The first light of day is behind us.
“Where are we?” I ask.
“Just east of Albuquerque,” my father says.
“How long have we been sitting here?”
“Little while.”
My brother wakes up. “Why aren’t we moving?” he asks.
“This is how I want us to see our new home for the first time,” my father says. “Roll your windows down.”
We do.
“Listen.”
I hear nothing. Not the low hum of power lines, not the whoosh of tires, not the chirp of birds, not a train whistle blow and stop, blow and stop. Just off the road shadows begin to appear. Night recedes. From out of the darkness there is dirt, bramble, distance. The air is dry. How different this place is from Kansas—that’s my father’s point. The seasons in New Mexico are not as pronounced. The temperature gets a little cooler or hotter as the year goes on, daylight lasts a little longer or shorter, there’s less vegetation—fewer signs. Life in the desert is found in the testimony of small changes. It is nearly a secret.
“You boys ready?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say.
“Hell yes,” my brother says.
My father starts the Jeep, slips into first, veers onto the road. He shifts a gear. The engine revs. “Giddyup,” he shouts. He punches the clutch, bottoms out the pedal. We get going, gain speed. My brother and I stick our heads out the window, gaze forward, take in the air, the change, the wind. We are birds in low flight. We are kids again, the three of us, just like he’d promised. My father points ahead. “Look.” To the west the land swells alo
ng the horizon. My father lets out a battle cry. My brother and I whoop like Indians. Mountains emerge, red as stirred embers.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For his assuring presence, advocacy, and enthusiasm, I am indebted to my agent, Bill Clegg. For the light their brilliance has shined on these pages, I am grateful to my editors at Scribner, Nan Graham and Daniel Loedel. I am likewise indebted to Bella Lacey at Granta for her superb dusting of my prose. I will forever count myself fortunate to have studied with the ever-generous teachers at Syracuse University, namely Dana Spiotta, Arthur Flowers, Mary Karr, and George Saunders. A thank-you is also in order to my workshop—Alex, Annie, Caitlin, Jessie, and Oscar—and to the many other students at SU next to whom I had the privilege of learning.
To Jude, thank you for being such a razor-sharp reader.
To Rivka, thank you for your support, kindness, and wisdom through the years.
To George, thank you for helping me realize the ambition to be my best self. Oh, yes, thanks for the ice skates, too.
Most importantly, to Justine, my first reader and my last, thank you for being such an inexhaustible champion of this book (and of me). Everything I’ve ever written I’ve left unfinished, but for: I love you.
A Scribner Reading Group Guide
One of the Boys
By Daniel Magariel
This reading group guide for One of the Boys includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.
Introduction
A twelve-year-old boy, his older brother, and their father leave their Kansas home after framing their mother as an abusive parent, only to find real abuse in their new home in Albuquerque. The boys go to school, join basketball teams, try to forge a new life, but their manipulative, increasingly drug-addicted father keeps them from attaining anything like normalcy. He becomes more unstable, more controlling, more violent. And soon the brothers’ only hope for survival is each other and their willingness to defend themselves against the father whose love they once thought made them a family.
Topics & Questions for Discussion
1. None of the members of this family—either of the brothers, their father, or their mother—are given names in the novel. Why do you think Magariel made this choice? What is its effect?
2. Convincing the narrator to commit more seriously to the ploy of taking photos that would incriminate his mother, the boy’s father tells him, “I thought you were one of the boys” (page 5). Why do you think this is the line that gives the book its title, and why does it motivate the brothers to go along with their father’s plan?
3. Given that the three main characters are male and the title of the book seems on the surface to be an affirmation of masculinity, do you think there are ways Magariel is in fact undermining these notions? Is there a lens through which to consider the story as pro-women or even feminist?
4. What role do the setting and landscape of Albuquerque play in the novel?
5. The narrator remarks, “For the most part I liked it when my father was high” (page 37). How do you make sense of this? What does it reveal about growing up in a household with drug-addicted parents?
6. The boys’ father makes the boys look at each other and tells them, “This is your brother for life. You are his last line of defense” (page 51). How do the brothers protect each other from their father? And what does it reveal about their father that he, the one who abuses them, gives them this advice?
7. The narrator remembers a plot of his and his brother’s to hurt their mother by making her fall down the stairs. They tell her afterward, “We hate you.” Their father then consoles her saying, “They didn’t mean it, come back inside” (page 57). What does this powerful memory reveal about the dynamics of abuse and the way family members can be turned against each other?
8. What is the significance of the moment at Janice’s house, when the father’s shorts are rolled up and his balls revealed to be “dangling against the sofa” (page 78)? Does it suggest something about his lack of control, the degree to which his power may ultimately be a pose?
9. What do you make of the mother’s betrayal when she encourages the boys to forgive and trust their father again after everything they’ve been through? How do you think the father was able to win her over? How are abuse, enabling, and manipulation related?
10. After being confronted with their lack of options, the narrator reflects about his father, “Our dad was an act with a single end. His trajectory: down, down, down” (page 127). Does this feel accurate to you? How can someone so self-destructive still be so charismatic and seductive?
11. How do you interpret the recurring motif of the father’s asking the boys to “be his eyes”? Is it connected to the narrator’s claim, trying to excuse his presence in his father’s room during his attempted escape, “I’m an extension of you” (page 139)?
12. In one of the story’s final moments, the narrator opens the door to his brother and the officer waiting outside. When he does so, his “eyes filled with water, and light rushed in” (page 155). What do you make of the image of light coming into their dark home near the book’s conclusion? Does it provide any reason to be optimistic about the boys’ fate?
13. Magariel makes the striking choice of ending the novel by going back in time to the first days of the boys’ trip out to Albuquerque, when they were still hopeful about their future. What do you think this accomplishes? How does this epilogue change your experience of the book as a whole?
14. Magariel has said that there is an autobiographical component to this novel, that it is an extreme version of certain aspects of his life. Does knowing that affect the way you view it? Why do you think he made the decision to tell this story as fiction?
15. One of the Boys is a very short novel, covering a relatively small span of time. How did its length affect your reading experience? Do you think it was easier to digest the violence and harrowing nature of the story because of its quick, short form?
Enhance Your Book Club
1. Read another very short novel about a fractured family confronting questions of abuse, We the Animals by Justin Torres. Discuss how the two novels are similar or different.
2. Be “the eyes” of someone in your book club. Look out a window and describe what you see to your partner, then discuss what the experience is like.
© LUCAS FLORES PIRAN
DANIEL MAGARIEL is originally from Kansas City. He has a BA from Columbia University, as well as an MFA from Syracuse University, where he was a Cornelia Carhart Ward Fellow. One of the Boys is his first novel. He lives in New York.
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SCRIBNER
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 by Daniel Magariel
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First Scribner hardcover edition March 2017
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Magariel, Daniel, author.
Title: One of the boys : a novel / Daniel Magariel.
Description: New York, NY : Scribner, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016028665| ISBN 9781501156168 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501156175 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501156182 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Fathers and sons—Fiction. | Brothers—Fiction. | Abusive Parents—Fiction. | Children of drug addicts—Fiction. | Albuquerque (N.M.)—Fiction. | Psychological fiction. | Domestic fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Family Life. | FICTION / Coming of Age.
Classification: LCC PS3613.A73985 O64 2017 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016028665
ISBN 978-1-5011-5616-8
ISBN 978-1-5011-5618-2 (ebook)
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