Tiny Americans

by Devin Murphy

  John walked past me, ahead of the Jeep about thirty feet on the flat surface and kneeled on the ground like a limp ladder, his crunched profile fully lit by the headlights. I saw him reach up and push the goggles off his face, his outline trembling ahead of me—green, lit, deflated.

  Sitting in the envelope of light coming from the Jeep, his buzzed hair looked like something with swaying bristles on the bottom of the ocean, light moving through it. His hands were shaking at his side until he brought them to his waist and unhooked his belt buckle, pulling it away from his body like a lawn mower cord. The leather belt snapped as it sprung out of the last belt loop. He kicked his sandals off and pushed his pants down around his ankles. He tripped sideways, lifting his legs out of his pants, but stepped right back into the center beam of the headlights. He brought both his hands to the neck hem of his T-shirt and pulled it over his head. He held the T-shirt in front of him—crumpled in his hands it looked like a massive raisin—and dropped it at his feet. Then he pushed his boxers down and stepped out of them—closer to me.

  The image, I knew instantly, would be in my head forever—grotesque and terrible. It looked like a large shark had taken a mouthful from his midsection and now something hideous was climbing up his side. His torso was deeply road-rashed. The skin bubbled up and fused into discolored pink and white cords weaved together. The divot of his thigh muscle along the right quadriceps sunk close to the bone. His penis leaned to the left, as if trying to fall away from the monstrosity of his sheared body. If I were to paint him, I would have had to use a sponge to blotch and texture the wound. He spread his arms out to the side so his palms were facing me.

  I kept facing him, even though all I wanted to do was turn away. I shut my eyes to the green light searching out the contours of his truth in the dark. I swatted at the side of the goggles looking for some button that would turn everything though the lenses black—or off. My hands gripped the steering wheel harder than they had on our descent, as if I were trying to cement myself to it, so I wouldn’t have to touch anything else.

  I got out of the Jeep and walked toward him.

  I’m not sure why he chose that moment to tell me, or what specific fear had been conquered in the Jeep, but when I got to him, he looked up at me and said, “It was full of watermelons.”

  “What was?” I asked.

  “When I got hurt. The little boat that exploded along the ship’s hull and blew right under the crew-mess chow line. The explosion knocked me through a galley wall into a whole room jammed full of watermelons.” His eyes were fixed on the road. “They had a whole room full of these pallets of watermelons that they were going to give to the crew at a picnic. I have no idea how they got so many over there, but that’s what one of the rooms that got hit was full of. Watermelons. It was a piece of that galley wall that took out my ribs.”

  He made a hollow popping sound with his tongue as he knocked his fist against his right side.

  “There was red pulp and seeds all over the deck and dripping down from the overhead,” he sort of snorted out a laugh. “I never passed out either. For a second, I felt an unbelievable pain. Then I stopped feeling anything, and watched as things went to hell, sitting with all that fruit until someone gave me a shot of morphine.”

  He’d never told me anything more than what the recruiter who came to our apartment had. I knew he was hurt during a terrorist attack on a US naval ship, but that was all.

  “Where’d they get all those watermelons from? I never stop thinking about them.”

  I listened to him talk and stared at his open side, raw like the punched rind of a watermelon. I imagined what John’s scars would look like when he was older.

  “It was so goddamn random,” John said.

  The sound of the land around us filled the night with slow rhythmic pulses.

  “On the USS Comfort they kept me on a morphine drip. I kept waking up in these half-crazy stupors imagining I was loading up the ship’s one-hundred-and-thirty-millimeter guns with watermelons and blasting those things all over the desert. I could actually see the seeds once they landed and scattered all over, dropping into those little crevices in the sand.

  “I think I dreamed about watermelons growing in the desert the whole time I was in the hospital, my imagination trying to explain where they came from.”

  The glow from the headlights shifted our shadows on the hillside below us. He kept talking after we climbed back into the Jeep, but it was too much for me. I shut my eyes, letting my eyelids coat everything blue until it was all gone. I wanted to scream so loud that I’d silence John and even knock him down and blow him off the rocks. I wanted to be alone again, and I tried to imagine driving myself home. But even with my eyes shut, there he was beside me in the Jeep, the desert spreading out around us as we made our way back east; our topic for the return trip, not blue or anything so abstract, but the simple question of how we would go about “surviving together.” As we crested the watershed of the Rockies to the east, we looked down on all that history we shared, all that history that sat there, waiting for our return.

  7

  Connor Thurber, 1995

  The new house is a quarried-sandstone ranch built in the late fifties on a wooded acre with a serpentine creek cutting through the backyard. The great room has a pitched ceiling and three walls of high windows that flood the cherrywood floors with light. You and I loved it as soon as we went up the driveway. You liked the open, well-lit layout, and I liked how the lushness of the property made it seem like there were no neighbors. We both liked the idea of our son, Dennis, playing with his dog in the large yard, climbing trees, collecting pine cones, catching crayfish.

  We offered pizza and wine to friends who helped us move, and by the end of the first day all the couches, love seats, and boxes were inside. We set up Dennis’s room first so he’d have a comfortable place to sleep, but that night he slept in our bed anyway, a hot, wiggling creature kicking us awake. The curled dog twitched at the foot of the bed. After years of living in temporary condos without enough space, this felt like finally arriving at what we wanted.

  Early the first morning a quick thumping sound wakes me. I ease the boy’s arm off my shoulder and walk down the hall into the great room. Dust motes glow in the first orange rays of sunlight. The dog’s nails clack-clack-clack behind me. I walk to the sliding door to let him into the backyard. Only 360 mortgage payments to go. Thirty years of our life here. Our son growing and us growing older. It’s strange, scary, and overwhelming all at once. I walk from room to room looking for what made the noise, and it’s nice to watch the light spilling across these new floors.

  The dog scratches at the door. I let him in—clack-clack-clack—then stand studying the yard and the trees, the steeples of the Egyptian Coptic and Lutheran churches across the stream near the highway, until I hear a crunching from down the hall. The dog is gnawing on a bird in the center of the boy’s room. Feathers and blood spread around his paws.

  “No. No!” I yell, jumping for the dog, who is a gangly black-and-white Newfoundland puppy who mistakes this for play and dodges by me and runs into the hall, trailing black feathers. Before I corner the dog in the kitchen, he devours the rest of the bird—bones, feathers, feet.

  “What? What?” I hear our son say from the hall.

  The boy is looking at the masticated bird wing and all the blood in the center of his new room. He wears pajamas with teddy bears on them, and his stuffed rabbit hangs by the ears from his tiny hand. I scoop him up and palm the back of his head so he’ll rest on my shoulder.

  The next morning, another thump, like a piece of fruit hitting the floor. The dog gets up and runs to the door to be let out. I go out first and walk around the perimeter of the yard. The grass is wet and cool in the webbings of my bare feet. I pass the cracked patio that needs mud jacking to level the concrete and the rusted AC unit that needs replacing. I don’t know how to do either task. At the base of one of the large windows is a dead grackle. I pick it up by the tip
of its long tail feather and study the black pupil of its pale yellow eye. Its iridescent black neck hangs crooked. I carry it to the stream. The dog scratches at the glass door and wags its tail at the sight of the bird. At the stream’s edge, I fling the bird into the fast-moving center and watch it float away on the surface before dipping under.

  Another bird crashes into the window later in the day. This time, Dennis runs to the window, puts his forehead and hands against the pane, and looks down into the brush outside. When he looks at me, I notice the oil from his skin has left prints on the glass.

  I give that bird to the stream, too.

  Through the first week, enough birds crash into the glass that I take a five-gallon bucket and walk around the house collecting them in the morning before the dog is let out.

  I read online that hanging CDs threaded by fishing line from the eaves can catch the sunlight and scare the birds away, so with a ladder I hang a dozen around the house.

  “That looks so awful,” you say. “What will the neighbors think? It looks like we’re crazy people warding off evil spirits.”

  But the CDs help. Still, that first month the dog comes in with feathers sticking out of the corner of his mouth, and the thumping of something hitting the glass at high speed wakes me at dawn.

  Then, on a Saturday morning, you call from the backyard. You’re holding Dennis. He’s crying and pointing to the ground.

  “What? What?” Dennis says.

  A mockingbird is doing circles on its side by thrashing a wing into the dirt. Its little chest is heaving. Dennis is ruddy with tear-glossed cheeks, and his hand opens and closes in an attempt to clutch the bird.

  Perhaps it’s because of our son watching, but I bend down and cup the bird’s still-warm and delicate body in my hands. Both the bird’s wings flitter against my fingers. I release my grip to see if it will fly, but it hops off and falls to the ground.

  “No, Dada,” Dennis wails.

  A feeling of foolishness sweeps over me. That familiar wave of uneasiness descends out of the endless blue sky.

  “That was smooth,” you say.

  Everything in me goes numb except for a hot, dark presence in the back corner of my mind, a place I try to avoid.

  “What am I supposed to do?” I ask you.

  “Let’s take it inside and see if we can fix it. Let’s at least try,” you tell me.

  For the next week, the bird lives in a cardboard box on the kitchen counter so the dog won’t get it. Dennis peeks through the holes punched in the top and side, and every evening sprinkles seeds down to the bird.

  Every morning, I wake to the bird singing at the first light, a long, trilling sound followed by high-pitched squeaks. The box is alive, and it’s early when I sit next to it and imagine giving this animal to the river when no one else is around, but I admire the little bird’s full-throated heave, how it jumps and tries to work its speckled wings.

  Its morning song spreads through the airy house, gifting away the silence. I have seen every sunrise from the great room since moving in. The boxes are all unpacked. The paintings made and framed by my mother and sister as gifts are on the wall. The dog has established a routine of where to sleep throughout the day. There are 359 more payments to go, and I have to clean the chimneys, spray for mold in the crawl space, and work my way down an endless list of tasks you have written out for me, but there is this birdsong. Life in one place doesn’t seem as scary as it had felt to me on that first morning. Time moves fast, and with the birdsong in the house, I am more aware of the rustle of living creatures. I look for the starlings, finches, jays, even squirrels. The sound of the stream babbling and the bullfrog’s deep moans coming from the evening fog. Short-horned crickets. Tulips opening in the heat. The world is as new and alive to me as it surely is to our son. Newly opened fringes of discovery.

  The Encarta disc suggests letting the rehabilitating bird wander on a string to get used to hopping and flying short distances after its neck or wings recover. The three of us go to the backyard and watch as the bird takes a few hops into the center of the yard. In the sunlight, the white-streaked, brown feathers are ablaze. Other birds sing in the trees. Then the little bird jumps up and flies halfway across the yard. The fishing line around its leg unspools and the boy laughs.

  “Look at that,” you say, and you do a fake little clap to get Dennis excited.

  Then a hawk drops straight down on top of the rehabilitated bird and pins it to the ground between its talons. One reddish-brown wing stretched out shields the bird.

  When the hawk flies upward, the fishing line pulls taut and becomes a living kite in my hands. It flies in tight circles above the yard, hovering like an apparition. I pull the line, and for every foot I take in, the hawk takes half a foot back. The fishing line falls in tangles at my feet and Dennis bends down and grabs the loose coils so the two of us are tethered to the hawk.

  Dennis is doing a pained dance next to us, his body lithe with the discovery of its growing range, which is the deepest sort of beauty, and I feel all my love spilling down into our son as I pull the line in.

  “What are you doing?” you yell at me.

  “I don’t know,” I respond, and in that moment a surprising feeling sneaks up on me and I realize I mean that I don’t know what I’m doing with the hawk, but also with the boy at our feet, with this house, and even with you. I mean for the statement to stand for all of this, and as I keep pulling, it feels I have confessed something I didn’t know I was hiding.

  When the hawk is a few feet over my head, it still hasn’t let go of the mockingbird. The hawk thrashes as I hold the wild bird there like I’m Adam in the Garden, about to give the creature its new and eternal name. I reach for its legs, and the hawk strikes my forearm with its beak, breaking the skin. Then I let the line go; the hawk rises over my head and trails the fishing line, which unspools off the ground, through our little boy’s grip, cutting its course over his soft pink palm and loosening a fine track of blood from the heel to the webbing. His little cry of pain cuts me in half. Only when the boy cries do I really notice he’s holding the line too, and I see the last of the dangling teal thread slice from his grip and drift away.

  I snatch up Dennis. You open his wounded palm and press one cuff of your shirtsleeve into the cut. With the cuff of your other sleeve, you squeeze the cut on my arm and we stand in our yard staunching the blood, listening to the birdsongs and the babble of the creek harmonizing, which now feels like the pulse of a world I might finally be coming to know.

  8

  Terrance Thurber, 2000

  Terrance’s accident made the local papers. He was working on a circuit breaker forty feet off the ground between the Chevrolet dealer’s show lot and the Pizza Factory in Kalispell. He had rerouted the power grid so he could work on the local transformer. There was a checklist of things he’d gone through and marked with a red Bic pen before he climbed the steel ladder to the high retention wires. He had done everything right too. Alberta-Montana Power Company would check it all several times afterward. It was someone at the main power switchboard, thinking that the diversion was a mistake, who put it back to its normal current flow. Terrance had already started working when the power was sent back toward him. He heard a humming. It got louder, bigger, and the few fine hairs above his knuckles on his right hand stood straight up before everything crested into him.

  He felt as if he’d been sliced into millions of thin biopsy cuts that rattled against each other, until everything inside his body pushed against everything on the outside. His eyes bulged like overfilled balloons, and his world went teal blue—then red from his blood rushing to his head as he hung upside down from a harness. Then everything went black when he passed out.

  The head of his hammer pressing against the outside of his lower thigh got so hot it burned the shape of itself through his thermal Carhartt pants and into his skin. The dealership filed a claim because his screwdriver shot fifty feet out of his tool belt and punctured the passenger-s
ide door of a new gunmetal-gray Tahoe truck in the lot. A witness was quoted in the Hungry Horse News, saying he looked like an “epileptic fish flopping above the road.”

  He wasn’t sure for how long, but for a while before he woke up, he was conscious of who he was but not of his body. He felt the bones in the top of his right foot first. They were floating there by themselves like the bare spines of a Chinese hand fan. Then he felt how those bones connected to his ankle, and there was only his one foot. He felt it wholly, as if it supported the weight of the world like Atlas. When he started to think about his leg, his shinbone ached, then his knee. In this way, as if he were the God of himself, creating one small piece at a time, he reassembled his body until he became aware of being in the hospital bed. He felt holy. Except for the sharp pain in his groin, gravity did not apply to him, and he was ascending to something.

  The room was empty when he woke. His left leg was in a stirrup. It felt like something was resting on the outside of his skin—a teal-blue fear trying to get in—or the outer layer of himself had been burned off and everything was nerve-end sensitive.

  Helen walked in five minutes later with a cup of coffee and a bag of yogurt-covered pretzels. She didn’t look up at him until he asked, “Am I okay?”

  She made a guttural ugh sound and dropped the coffee on the floor. The puffed-up, subtly bruise-colored skin under her eyes made them squinty, and she looked like a haggard version of herself. She had stopped sleeping several weeks before, after she’d lost her job as the secretary to a high school principal. For some reason, she had torn every sheet of paper she had filed away in half, and she could not answer Terrance’s or the principal’s questions about why she had done that.

  When she dropped the coffee, Terrance wanted to touch her face the way a blind person would, with hungry fingers trying to find something. He wanted to push the stray strands of her bangs behind her ear, but all her hair fell loose as she leaned over the bed and sunk her face into his neck. Her highlighted brown hair covered his eyes. She stayed like that for a long time. “I thought you were going to die,” she said. Then she pushed herself off him and ran out of the room to get a doctor.