Tiny Americans

by Devin Murphy

  As I watched him I could already see myself sweeping the plaster shards into a dustpan. Then I’d keep cleaning. All the deepest cupboards and closets. I felt a desperate need for him to pick me up the way he did when I was little, with one of those huge hugs where he spun through the room with me in his arms.

  When he slammed the bottle down on the counter, he grunted and swung around like a giant animal. He froze and his hazel eyes widened on me as I watched the redness flush his face.

  “Jamie!” he said.

  I wanted to break all his fingers so he wouldn’t be able to hold a bottle. I didn’t want to stop there either. I imagined my mother’s fine fingers in my hand as well, bending them back until the bones crunched and her own bottle dropped, and that image settled onto my brain like an itchy scab.

  Late that December through January, during a stretch of heavy snowfall, my parents avoided each other entirely. Our mother spent almost the entire month at her studio and, since his relapse, our father became even more regimented with his daily tasks for us. He had us excavate and build elaborate snow dens that we packed into solid ice by dumping buckets of water on top. He cleared the snow in the backyard, laid down a couple of blue tarps, and set large boards on their sides to form an enclosed rectangle that he flooded to make us an ice rink. My brothers hip-checked each other off the ice into the surrounding snow. Once, Lewis sent me flying into a snowbank. Before I could get up, I remember my father lifting me to my feet and wiping the snow off me.

  “I’m sorry about that,” he said. Then he bent down and hugged me for a long time. “I’m sorry.”

  As he hugged me I felt as safe as I ever had.

  The next day, our father tied a toboggan to the back of his Oldsmobile and dragged the three of us behind the car through the cemetery’s iced-over gravel roads. My brothers and I held on to the person in front of us as we flew over the ice and snow, occasionally felt the grip around our waist loosen, and then let go, looking back to see whomever it was tumble out of view, a white rooster tail kicking up in our wake.

  “Today we do birds!” our father said in late February, a library copy of Birds of North America in his hands.

  Struggling through a deep hangover from another lapse, he marched us through the cemetery, hunting for the lift and twitch of purple martins and listening to the foreign language of birdsongs that floated on the air.

  Then he wanted us to feed the birds in our backyard, so we built birdfeeders in our garage.

  “I don’t like doing this wood stuff,” I complained while sawing a flat board along the lines he etched with a pencil for me to follow.

  “Well, you’re going to learn it anyway. That way you won’t have to depend on anyone else to do it for you.”

  At the height of our production we had eight birdfeeders mounted along our backyard’s fence. There were ruby-throated hummingbirds, starlings, sparrows, goldfinches, jays, and a few birds of prey ranging over from the creek and tall cemetery evergreens to our yard. The birds flitted from the feeders to our mother’s intricate sculptures on the lawn. One of those sculptures had three twelve-foot strips of curved iron secured on a pivot that kept them moving like waves.

  Toward the end of winter, my father scattered fresh acorn squash and pumpkin seeds out for cardinals, and when those ran out there was always a fresh spray of store-bought seeds and sunflower hearts sprinkled on the new snowfall. After heavy snows we had to clean the feeders so the seed wouldn’t rot. We scooped out the wet and fetid pulp with our hands.

  “You have to do this all the time. The birds are depending on you once you start feeding them,” our father told us. His words echoed in my head when I went out early one morning into a light snowfall. I’m not sure if I heard him or sensed him nearby, but when I turned back to the house I saw him up on the top deck. He was standing there naked and looking out at the cemetery. He didn’t see me, and I immediately moved back to the house in a quiet panic so as not to disturb whatever it was he was doing—watching over the birdhouses, hiding from our mother, or waiting for the cold to truly, finally wake him.

  In March, our father decided to make a woodpile in the backyard and started splitting logs in an attempt to get back in shape. He took up jogging and jumping rope and stuck with those for a few weeks until the snow melted and he tired of both. Then he started having a few glasses of red wine with dinner because “it’s good for your health,” he said. Then he started buying the wine in gallon jugs and boxes with aluminum pouches stuffed inside that would deflate as he siphoned them down. Soon, the woodpile diminished, and he spent the time he’d been working out sitting at the kitchen table listening to a police scanner that a trucker who stopped by his store had sold to him. He sat for hours raptly tuned in to the garbled calamity of other people’s lives.

  By the middle of March, there had been a lull in his ventures to the library to get new books on how to entertain us, and he rarely left his radio chair if he wasn’t at work. When we got home from school, he looked at us as if he were overwhelmed by our presence.

  “Each of you go find me a spider in the house,” he said, like he’d spent all day behind the counter of the shop thinking this up, as if idle time were the worst thing we could have on our hands.

  “Why do we have to do this?” Lewis asked.

  “So you’ll know where they’re at,” our father said. He placed his open palm on the band of sunlight filtering into the room. Every inch of his calloused palm and fingers shone. Then he snapped his fingers into a fist. “Got it,” he said. “The light. I got it. It’s for you.” He lifted his hand over Lewis and pressed it onto his head. “Now you have it. Now you’re full of light to go into the dark and hunt spiders.”

  “I don’t want to do that,” Connor said.

  “Well. Want in one hand and shit in the other, and see which one gets full first. Now go on.”

  That April my father tried to rally and finally did go back to the library for more books. We tried simple things, like going into the backyard and walking in the cemetery at night to watch the stars. We timed thunder and lightning to track a storm’s encroachment. We went looking for mad March hares, and saw how they stood on their hind legs and boxed each other in the early morning. He woke us up once to watch the sunrise and came to us again to watch the sunset that night. “That’s all the time you get in a day, to do what you want with your life,” he said. “Did you use it to the best of your ability?”

  On our way home, we cut the stems of pussy willows, which Connor called “fuzzy berries” and swung in front of him as he walked as if he were blind.

  “They’re the first life of spring,” our father told us. “They need to appear before everything else because their pollen is carried by the wind and if they bloomed later, the full spring foliage would block the spread of the seeds. Do you see? It all makes sense.”

  Late one night in mid-May, we were driving with our father. My brothers were in the back seat dropping pebbles through the floorboard. From the passenger seat, I couldn’t see over the dashboard when we hit what our father described as a red flash. He got out and stood behind the Oldsmobile. The headlights were still on, but we couldn’t see what he was looking at. Then he bent down and picked something up, and when he got back into the car he said, “Look at this.” He sat back down and lowered a dead fox into my lap by its tail.

  The fox molded against my legs. Its eyes were open, and its tongue hung out against my jeans. It took my everything not to scream, and I shut my eyes and felt my brothers’ hot breath as they leaned over my shoulders for a better look.

  “She’s beautiful,” our father said.

  The lower half of its muzzle was covered in a pure white fur that flowed down its throat and widened at the chest. The tips of its ears and tail, and all four legs, were glossy black, and the rest of it, from the crown of the head until the tail turned black, was a soft orange. The car filled with an overwhelming musk smell, and when I touched it there was a slick residue of filth on it.

/>   “I’ll show you guys how to mount it in the morning,” he said, and put the fox in the freezer when we got home.

  “We’re not the kind of people who keep unskinned animals in our refrigerator,” my mother screamed from the kitchen. She woke us all up that night when she got home from her studio. Her voice was heavy and mean, and made me spend the rest of the night wondering just what kind of people we were.

  In the morning the frozen foods were still pushed to both sides of the freezer, but the fox was gone.

  During a late May storm, it was raining so hard we were all inside together, and my brothers got each other so whipped up wrestling that they broke a lamp.

  “What does it feel like right before you have a nervous breakdown? This has to be it; this is the feeling. You kids are driving me nuts,” our mother shouted, lifting her body off the couch, and shuffling us toward the foyer door. “Put those jackets on, all of you, jackets on and outside with yourselves. Get out. Go play in the yard,” she was pointing to our eight birdfeeders in the rain.

  “It’s coming down pretty bad,” our father said. He’d been reading a library book about St. Augustine at the kitchen table and listening to the police scanner.

  “Shut up, Terrance,” she snapped at him. Then she turned back to us. “Go and stand out there for a bit and soak it all in.”

  The torrential rain was erupting the already-standing puddles in the grass, and as soon as we were in the middle of the yard our clothes were soaked through and slapped tight to our skin. The rain on our heads sounded like the magnified and pulsing heartbeats of a forest.

  “A bunch of wet puppies,” she said as she shut the door.

  The three of us stood there looking accusingly at one another through the veil of rain, then at the closed door of our home, with the sad, sunken figure of our father watching us from the big picture window in the living room, and our mother looking out from the small window above the kitchen sink, where a waterfall over the windowpane blurred her face.

  “Today is flowers,” I can still hear our father yelling to us the next morning before we went out to find forget-me-nots, Queen Anne’s lace, and goldenrod. My brothers made weapons out of sticks and pegged each other with rocks and crab apples. Later they sought me out to show me what they had found while I was collecting caterpillars. Connor held a jar forward with a perfect leaf-green praying mantis perched on a twig and spun it in front of my nose to admire how precise a creature it was.

  When my brothers tired of the mantis, I took the mason jar to the back steps of our house and studied it before opening the jar and letting it go.

  “Tonight you are to become bat detectives,” our father said one June evening, handing us each a flashlight before he made us spend the night in a tent in our backyard, where the only sounds we heard were our parents hollering at each other.

  “Be completely honest, and tell me—” our father screamed like there was an ax cleaving in half everything that was holding him together. Now I understand that his world was unraveling, that his marriage offered him no steady footholds and the natural world was the one place he felt centered, whole. In that year during which we had felt the strength of the rain, charted the sun’s course across a clear sky, and dug our naked fingers into the numbing snow, he had been trying to show us a path to seek refuge and a different language that might heal us, save us.

  “Tell me—” our father screamed again.

  I didn’t hear our mother’s answer, so I didn’t get the context of what they were fighting about. I tried to distract my brothers and lull them to sleep by pretending we really were outside to sleep beneath what we were told would be “a healthy swarm of bats.” But they knew better; we had been pushed away from my parents for years because of such fights. Fights that ripped us clean of our flesh and left only raw notes of nerve ends, such that we could not bear looking at one another any longer. Our vulnerability was too painful to see.

  The next night, I stayed in the garage studio and my brothers opted to sleep outside again. And the night after that, too. For a week my brothers didn’t come back into the house. Together in that darkness, they must have finally caught up to me and what I already realized—that our parents were to be counted among the alcoholics, the toxin-fueled, the lost. This one secret of the world, we knew.

  2

  Connor Thurber, 1984

  We grew up within biking distance of the city park in Olean, which sits in Western New York’s Southern Tier, at the crossroads of the Rust Belt and the northernmost foothills of Appalachia—me; my older brother, Lewis; our sister, Jamie; Lance and Brian Borgowitz (twins); Levi Smith; Jack VanderCamp; Jessie Roberts; Samuel Bergman . . . a whole slew of us. The park had basketball courts with these tectonic cracks that made the surface too uneven to play on, a baseball diamond with crab apple–size stones littering the infield, and a wide strip of tall conifer trees that walled off a quarter-mile gravel track. The field inside the track is where we would play football.

  We were a bunch of white kids with mostly immigrant names. Our grandparents or great-grandparents moved here to work the steel mills, bought houses, and had families until Lackawanna Steel faded in the late fifties. In the early eighties, what was left for us was the strip mall on State Street with a full regiment of military recruitment offices. Our grandfathers, fathers, and older brothers had signed their names to contracts, and we knew we, too, would end up sniffing around those doors once we turned seventeen. There was no talk of not joining the military—only of which branch.

  A lot of us had fathers and older brothers who had gone into an army that had either taken them away for good or delivered them back to the same spot coiled too tight for domestic life. They took jobs with the sanitation department, worked the third shifts at the Cutco or Zippo factories, ran firework shops, or were long-haul truckers we rarely saw. Some moved west for better jobs. We wore their moth-eaten Buffalo Bills gear, pulled from boxes in basements and attics, their names etched on the flaps in the looping black letters of our mothers’ handwriting.

  Playing football in their old sneakers and cleats stripped us of all our insecurities. We were beaten free of timidity and varnished in deep-muscle bruises. Getting hurt was our continuous initiation. There was the frump of air knocked out of our chests, nut shots, concussions, chipped teeth, the red specks of blood on the wet scabs, and skin torn open like split grapes so we could see the mystery of our stewed-tomato insides. We thought our fathers would be proud of how tough we were becoming.

  That field and those games became our collective fallout shelter to hide from our home lives. We each tried our best to silently smash our worries away, leave them turned up in clumps of mud we scarred the grass with. And though nothing was ever so clear, our mere presence day after day was our unspoken attempt at saving one another.

  With the exception of the annual circus that came through town, the only time the park was not ours for the taking was in the fall for the high school’s homecoming party. The fire department would spend a whole day making a house-size mountain of wooden pallets. Then they’d drive two trucks onto the grass and park on both sides of the woodpile. That night, as it got dark, everyone from the high school would come to the park. The firemen were in charge of soaking the wood with five-gallon red plastic drums of gasoline. They’d let an alumni, a half-mad giant Vietnam vet named Tiny, light the fire in his 1960s school sweater, and he’d go around the outer edges of the wood and light wadded-up tips of newspapers to set the wood aflame.

  The only fire we’d ever seen that was larger came from Charlie Rutkowski’s family-owned gas station that blew up on a January evening and sent an incendiary cloud of smoke about a mile into the sky. Mr. Rutkowski was dejected even though his insurance paid him off what Charlie called “a shit ton of money.” Charlie Sr. didn’t get another job and sold the land to a Dunkin’ Donuts franchise. He spent the rest of his life either mowing the lawn once a day, or shoveling in the winter, slow scoop by slow scoop, as if he was hoping t
ime would hurry up and dismiss him from something.

  Lewis and I liked fireworks, liked setting them off. Lewis supplied the whistlers. When our father’s firework shop shut down and he moved out west, the supplies were put into a storage unit with his books and forgotten about by everyone but Lewis. On weekend nights, Lewis and I and our friends roamed around in small packs, forming and re-forming at the park. Lewis divvied up what fireworks he brought, and everyone took their lighters and scattered. You could see in the darkness little flickers of Zippos or match tips breathing orange for a moment, then the screaming trail of sparks shooting off into the night. I did my best to aim them at whomever I thought I could hit. Most whistlers would take some schizophrenic path through the air and fade out somewhere over the baseball diamond. Direct hits would smack the skin like a wasp sting and leave welts. Both Lance Borgowitz and Charlie Rutkowski had whistlers fuse to their shirts and burn holes the size of volleyballs in the cotton. Most of us had a whistler brush by our heads at least, which was part of the manic fun. Being close to something scary that we could feel on our skin.

  Lance Borgowitz’s father was in prison for murder. That left Lance and his twin brother, Brian, alone with their mother, who couldn’t control them. The roof of their ranch-style house was warped from the weight of year after year of snow. Where the roof dipped to the ground over their living room window it was propped up with long four-by-fours dug into the dirt. We joked how their house would tumble down when the Borgowitz boys threw each other through the supports. When that actually happened, we teased Lance and Brian about the slide of rubble slipping out of their bedroom wall to the front yard like a spiky tongue.