Tiny Americans

by Devin Murphy

  We showered together, slowly washing the salt out of each other’s hair with vanilla-scented shampoo. Then we walked to the zocalo, and through the town square to the water. When she hooked her arm around mine as we walked I felt like crying.

  In town, Jamie asked a passing woman to take our picture. She handed the camera over and the woman held it up to her face and adjusted it to frame the two of us in the backdrop of the sunset on the fish market. The direct sunlight was bringing out the full color of the woman’s clothing, as if this stranger in front of us was suddenly glowing. All of this had been necessary, all of it, just for this photo to keep us bound together—to mark the good moments that can liberate us from misery and offer hope. Hope we could come through even this, through anything. That whole trip had been an ongoing act of surrender—mercurial, but helping me flow back to my wife. The camera flashed, and Jamie said something with rolling r’s and she squeezed her arms against my hip so I knew she had asked the woman to take another photo, just to be sure.

  10

  Connor Thurber, 2005

  I don’t know what to do about my son. His friends have nicknamed him “Gonzo,” and I fear this has added pressure or given him license to act crazy. He’s just limped home with torn clothes and a three-inch gash in his thigh he got from his friend Adler running full speed behind a shopping cart with my son hunkered inside. Adler let go before the rattling cart’s wheels slammed into the raised parking lot curb and launched Dennis through the air, where he landed as planned in the ungroomed pine bush. I’m sure Dennis thought he was some kind of hero as he heard his friends gather around the bush that swallowed him, laughing, “Gonzo. Gonzo, are you all right?”

  I sit him on the toilet seat lid in my condo to clean the cut that will add to his growing collection of scars. I pat an aloe-soaked cloth on his left leg where it looks like someone has scraped a potato peeler over the skin. On the counter is a plaster cast of a deer’s hoofprint we made together when he was nine years old. Based on his bony shoulders, even if he has a late growth spurt like I did, he’ll probably still be scrawny and lean when he comes out of his teens. He’s fourteen now, my only child. He spends Thursday through Sunday morning with me and the rest of the week with my ex-wife, Dyla, and her new husband, Tom. He waits until he’s with me to try his stunts.

  Dyla made me pay to send him to a psychologist to see what “his cries for help” were all about.

  “Nothing, I thought it would be cool” was what he told me when I asked him what really made him do these things.

  “He’s a teenage boy,” was what Dr. Mujardi told me after I paid him 120 bucks for talking to Dennis for an hour. I want to believe Dr. Mujardi. That he’s a teenager and hasn’t evened the scales of broken bones and good judgment yet.

  “He’s not doing this stuff at my house,” Dyla told me. “He’s seeking attention from you, or showing resentment toward you.”

  She still knew how to hurt me.

  Dennis was eight when our problems started boiling over and consuming our home life. It’s hard for me to think of what sort of damage I’m responsible for in my son’s psyche that makes him want to jump off houses onto trampolines that launch him into pools. When he tried that stunt he overshot the water and broke his forearm on the pool’s concrete lip. His friends had to drag him out of the water, where he was floating on his back, his good arm holding the broken one to his chest, while he screamed the best he could between spitting up chlorine water. When he was twelve, he biked off the top bleacher of the high school football stadium, as if he thought he’d land gracefully or fly, and sprained his knee and broke his left thumb. I can’t even guess at all the other things he’s done that I’ve never found out about because he wasn’t hurt bad enough for me to know.

  Dyla asked me to leave soon after he turned ten. I had to work more and travel more to pay for both a place of my own and alimony payments. I can’t help but feel that soon after that, with my absence, something weight-bearing in him shifted. The thought makes me forget the pain of my marriage falling apart; all that gets eclipsed in the suffocating feeling that I wasn’t there for him. I’d become the kind of father I resented my own dad for being. It makes me think of his whole life so far as a series of miniature sections, of how he needed me in different ways and of how at every division I must have let him down.

  When my marriage ended, it gave me a haunting sense of vertigo and an overwhelming desire to still be loved by my ex-wife. I spent my work nights on the road, either walking around whatever town I was in, or writhing in the dark, pining away for a woman, or anything that could help distract me from the fear that I would spend the rest of my life alone. I eventually started going online to meet new women, but each attempt felt so weighted by my own desperation to fill this void in my life, I was always left disappointed.

  Then Dyla met Tom. Tom owned a contracting company and designed his own house. It’s gigantic. Dyla and Dennis moved in soon after it was completed. I had been traveling to the mid-Atlantic states during the week to sell ball bearings for a manufacturer out of the north suburbs of Buffalo. I worked for them right out of school for a spell, and they rehired me because I told them what I think any wise employer would want to hear: that I was young, which meant I had energy, and that I had a wife and a young kid, which meant the frivolousness of my single life no longer existed and I would be diligent in the tasks they gave me, because I had to be. It was the great shift of my life, from the world holding possibilities to it holding responsibilities. When the divorce was final, I worked even harder to keep myself busy, and with the efforts came more clients, more sales reps, and more time I needed to spend in my territory. Now I spend my days calling on large, bombed-out foundries and assembly plants, and eating dinners alone before trying to sleep in hotel rooms that all seem sad in the same lonely way. I travel Sunday night through Wednesday night. The rest of the week I’m around for Dennis, but it’s during my absence that he must soak up his need to fly, or retaliate against me in some way.

  A coworker invites me to watch a football game with him at a local bar. I used to love football, but now I don’t care for it, so I pass. I think of a friend telling me years ago about going to a Buffalo Bills game and seeing a stadium filled with fans standing up and cheering, all leaning forward, like the place was going to swallow itself. All that money, time, and energy.

  Instead, I sit alone and watch one of the shows Dennis likes, Jackass, in my hotel room in a La Quinta inn across from the Newark airport. It scares me that my son is emulating these quickly aging young drunks. The stars of the show stick toy cars up their asses and get X-rays to shock the emergency room doctors, and put their sock-clad penises into a snake cage until they’re bitten. It makes me uncomfortable because some of these daring acts remind me of my own unsupervised childhood and the self-inflicted violence of playing with my neighborhood friends. I look out the window, toward the airport. This part of New Jersey is all highways weaving in and out of New York City. There’s a large Anheuser-Busch brewery with a giant, red neon eagle floating above the bold red letters that spell BUDWEISER. It looks like a strange god looming over the area, red and royal against all the white lights and blackness.

  When my flight lands at Buffalo Niagara late Wednesday night, I walk along the side of the parking garage to get to my car. There is an industrial exhaust pipe blowing warm air on the side of structure. The exhaust is thick white, and I watch a group of flight attendants walk into the cloud and disappear. Random arms and heads emerge like they are fighting their way out, while being pulled deeper into the mist.

  When I get to my car I drive straight to Tom’s house in the new development of huge houses near Chautauqua Art Institute. I want to see Dennis with his mother and what their time together looks like. It’s past eleven when I park up the street from their house. Their place is two stories tall with an attached garage that juts out toward the street. Above the garage is a large strip of windows that looks into the living room. It may have bee
n the driving all over New Jersey for a week—the time alone—or the feeling of dread I got from that red Budweiser sign sticking out among everything else, I don’t know, but something makes me creep to the side of their house. I wheel the fifty-gallon plastic garbage bin against the garage wall, climb onto it, and balance my feet at the edges so my weight won’t buckle the lid. I reach up so my fingers grasp the edge of the asphalt roof shingles, then I grip the garage siding with the tread of my shoes and kick so I can pull myself high enough to fold my stomach over the garage roof and sneak up. I stay low so that the grainy texture of the shingles feels like hard sandpaper against my forearms as I army-crawl toward the large windows, where I peek into their living room, trying to find the fissure that snapped through my old life.

  Dennis is sitting on the couch watching television with Dyla. His feet are stretched out in front of him, and his shoulders slump off the back of the couch so his bird’s chest curves inward. Dyla has her feet tucked under her legs and looks like she’s about to fall asleep. She slowly runs her hand through her hair so it falls forward over her face. Then she rhythmically sweeps it off to the side and then back over her face again. I can see both youth and age on her face as she reveals it over and over. God, I want to touch her face at that moment. I want to stay here all night and watch them. I realize that this is exactly what I hope will be waiting for me when I am on the road.

  A flashlight’s beam shines up from the driveway. “What the hell are you doing?” I hear Tom say.

  There are no stars above me, just the black night—a slight glow stretching from the halation of the city. After a long pause, I look down at Tom and say, “It’s me; it’s Connor.”

  I crawl back across the garage. I lean my chest against the roof so my body is parallel to the edge and let my feet roll off the side, slowly letting my body hang down. My fingers scrape raw from the shingles. Tom holds the flashlight on me as I hang there, afraid to let go, unsure how far down I’ll fall. When I do let go, the shock of landing just a few feet below compresses into my knees and I fall back onto the blacktop. On the ground I feel foolish, like I’ve lost my last strand of grace. I feel a tic under my eyes, like they are trying to shut but can’t.

  “I wanted to see how he was,” I tell Tom, who puts the flashlight down once he’s convinced it’s really me.

  “Maybe you could call or knock on the door,” Tom says. “Is this something you do? I mean, do I need to draw the curtains at night?”

  “No. I guess I was a bit lonely tonight, and wanted to see him.”

  Tom looks at me for a moment. “I can understand that,” he says, then he stands there as if he’s drawn a line that I can’t cross, which of course he has to do. But he doesn’t push me, as if he’s made the decision not to belittle me even since he’s found me reduced to this. I drive home that night wondering if he’ll tell Dyla or Dennis about me, that above their heads the past tried to break in.

  My hands shake as I drive away from Tom’s house, and I pull my car over and get out on the southern side of Harmony Road where there are long and wide cornfields lit by the highway. Thousands of Canadian geese that I have been seeing flying overhead for the last month have congregated here. Each has that white chinstrap around their sable-black necks, the identical heave of gray-brown feathered chest, and wet, obsidian eyes. I walk toward the edge of the field where the geese are spread out like a field of dark, bulbous fruit, like rotting watermelons.

  At the edge of their mass I make a deep guttural sound and sustain it in a sort of panicked roar as I charge. The first dozen or so birds I approach twitch and do that fly-running thing to get away. I run farther, moving in manic spirals through the flocks. I stride over astonished geese until all I see is the disorder of rising birds. My growling echoes back with the thumping of hundreds of wings and a chorus of irritated honking. A few birds snap at my legs like snakes. I don’t stop running. I’m probably trespassing. I’m certainly causing duress to these animals, but I don’t stop. The dark bodies haul up from the ground and the sound of their leaping in the part of the field I sprint through sends the rest of them to flight. It’s as if the night lifts off the earth instead of falls upon it. I stop yelling and just run and listen. I feel the hammering of my heart, the sweat coating my skin underneath my clothes, and the thumping of all these animals lifting into the sky.

  I get almost all of them into the air and stop because I’m exhausted. The swirl of geese over my head is all consuming and small waves of slowly forming V’s start peeling off the swarm and fly away. I watch as the geese work their way back into some order. Then I walk back to my car, where in the distance I can see several other cars on the side of the road watching me. I can now hear the cornstalks crunch under my feet, but I can’t trace my footprints as the whole field looks churned over from my running and the abrupt departure of all those aerating wings. I know with the departing of the geese comes the freezing winds and heavier snow. I realize there is no hiding from winter. But I also know that somewhere in the middle months of the cold season, I’ll need some hope that it will thaw.

  The next day I pick Dennis up from school at St. Francis High. Dyla told me to do this on days he stays with me so he wouldn’t get so banged up with his friends.

  “Bye, Gonzo,” I hear one of the boys call to him as he gets into my car.

  “Gonzo, huh,” I say to Dennis as he settles in next to me. He shifts his hips so he can untuck his white polo shirt from his dark blue slacks. As I drive out of the parking lot, I have to stop for a sports team jogging past in gray sweatpants and maroon sweatshirts with the head of a wolf stenographed on their backs.

  “Which team is this?” I ask Dennis.

  “Soccer.”

  “Would you be interested in joining them?”

  “No, Dad,” he says, popping hockey puck–size earphones over his ears.

  “Well, why not? I know it’s not because you’re afraid of getting hurt. I think it would be good for you.”

  “I’ll pass,” he says, then starts drumming his hands on his legs.

  “Well, how about joining a band, taking music lessons or something?”

  He drums the whole drive home. But this is on par with our interactions, as I’m never sure what to do with him. There were whole days I remember spending with my own father, enjoying the warmth of his attention. My father adjusting the rabbit-ears TV antenna to get the Bills game on. Kool-Aid and Chef Boyardee lunches. Hot dogs for dinner. The buns pulled open with our thumbs. Ketchup and root beer smears on our shirts. Not necessarily talking and laughing, but at least being together. It’s those small moments I remember and want to build with Dennis.

  After a dinner, where the closest thing to communicating with me Dennis did was pouring salt onto the table and making circle designs with his fingertips, I go online to St. Francis High School’s webpage to see what sort of extracurricular activity I can sign “Gonzo” up for. The sports page briefly explains that they are called the Wolves because of the story of St. Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio. A giant wolf was terrorizing the people of Gubbio. Each time the people went outside of the gated city, they had to go in well-armed groups, because if a lone traveler met with the wolf, the wolf would devour him. The people asked St. Francis to intervene. Francis went and talked to the wolf, and the wolf told Francis that he was ravenous. So Francis made a deal with the wolf, that if he stopped eating the townspeople, they would feed him, and the wolf agreed. It was the courage to face your problems and the spirit of working together that they were trying to instill in their athletes.

  I scroll through the sports teams and see that the cross-country team has started their fall season. Maybe Dennis can run the crazy energy out of himself, I think.

  Dennis agrees to sign up for the cross-country team if I buy him the newest PlayStation.

  “My little wolf,” I say to him when I drop him off at school the next day.

  After I drop Dennis off, I go to a local coffee shop where I get a coffee and take a
table in the back of the room where I can plug my laptop into a socket.

  The sales reps I work with have suggested that I try to set dates up for myself on my trips, so I pull up a Yahoo! Personals site and input the area codes around the Delaware Water Gap, where I’m headed on Sunday night. Lists of bios of women, aged thirty-five to forty-five, fill the screen. I start an online chat with a woman named Meredith, who is a divorced mother of two and works as a purchaser for a fabric design company. She suggests we arrange to talk at the same time the next day.

  When I pull into the parking lot of St. Francis later that afternoon, Dennis is waiting for me outside the front of the building.

  “How was it?” I ask him as he gets in my car. He’s wearing the same clothes he had on in the morning.

  “How was what?” he says.

  “Your first day of practice.”

  “I didn’t make it today,” he says, reaching for his earphones.

  “Why not?”

  “I got detention, so I couldn’t go to practice.”

  “What did you do?” I ask, feeling a flush of blood hit my face. I’ll have to tell Dyla. “You better tell me, Dennis.”

  “Mr. Tanner got all upset over nothing,” he says.

  “What. Did. You. Do?”

  “I’ll show you,” he says with a smile on his face. He pulls the fancy new Nokia phone Tom bought him for his last birthday from his backpack.

  When I pull the car over to the side of the road, Dennis hits play and aims the little screen at me. It flashes on with someone filming Dennis picking up a cinder block and lying down on the ground with the block on his stomach. Then his friend Adler walks up with a hammer, and after Dennis nods to him, Adler swings the hammer over his head and drops it with all his strength onto the cinder block, which crumbles in pieces on Dennis’s body.

  “Gonzo, you’re nuts,” I hear the cameraman say, then the film stops.