Tiny Americans

by Devin Murphy

  When he walked in the bar, the bottom of his bike shoes click-clacked against the olive-green faux-marble floor. A distorted mirror panel rose above the shelf with glasses, and the warped reflection made Lewis’s eyes water. Two older men, each with blue mesh baseball caps curved in tight at the corners, sat at the far end of the bar. The men wore faded denim bib-and-brace overalls. A frumpy woman with teased auburn bangs, wide-waisted Dickies-blue slacks, and a V-neck T-shirt that showed off the tops of her enormous, low-slung breasts, stood behind the counter. Lewis sat on a stool. The cracked leather felt hard against his sweaty bike shorts. His bike clips clanked against the foot rail.

  “Hello,” he said.

  The three people didn’t turn toward him.

  With his spandex suit and tight neon-green jersey, his gray hair helmet-molded to his scalp, and the clip-clop of a rotund Baryshnikov, he was surprised they weren’t gawking at him.

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” Lewis said, raising a finger to the bar.

  The woman didn’t look away from the two men. None of them were talking.

  The old man closest to him had what looked like a gin and tonic in front of him. Lewis imagined his finger dipping into and stirring the ice cubes in that drink. Licking his finger. Sucking on it. Then came that old desire to slip his skin and run wild through the night, inhaling booze, palming the cold sweat off of the glasses, blacking out, and shoving into strangers, wanting to sleep with or fight them.

  “Excuse me,” Lewis said again.

  She turned and walked toward him. Her reflection curved and swelled as she walked the length of the mirror.

  He wanted to order a cold beer, a six-pack of cold beers, but he knew that was Fat Lewis talking, Fat Lewis craving calories he burned over the last three days of biking. “May I please have a water and a can of tomato juice?” He even hated his order.

  “We don’t have tomato juice.”

  “That there will do fine,” Lewis pointed to the little cans of tomato juice sitting next to the chrome coffee urn behind the counter.

  “We don’t have tomato juice,” the woman said again. Her eyes were pinched, and even in the dim light, Lewis could see the shadow of a sickness beneath her skin. Cancer. ALS. Scurvy, for all he knew, as her lips didn’t part when she spoke.

  “Well. Do you serve any food?”

  The two men at the end of the bar were looking at him now. Hard faces. One mustached, the other lined with deep-set wrinkles brimming with salt-and-pepper stubble along the jawline.

  “Register’s broken,” she said. Light from the red Budweiser sign found little puffs of space in her hair and swirled there as she shifted in front of Lewis.

  “Well, can I pay for anything in this fine establishment?”

  “There’s a little shop a few miles up the road you can spend money at.”

  The men at the end of the bar were unflinching. The woman’s gaze sharpened.

  “A few miles up is all,” she said. Her lips stayed locked together.

  “I have cash.”

  “Just a few miles.”

  “Well. Thanks for the hospitality,” Lewis said, suppressing his urge to demand a bag of chips from behind the counter and yell, You’re a bunch of cracked-brain yokels.

  He eyed the fun-house mirror image of the bar, these out-of-the-way people, and the twisted version of himself. He liked what he saw, this other version of himself. At all other moments of his life, he would have turned and walked from the bar. He could see himself doing it and it made him angry. That was what Fat Lewis who ate three candy bars a day would do and he knew it. So he pulled a flip phone from his jersey’s zipper pocket at the small of his back. There were no reception bars. There had been none all day. He tapped the phone on the bar and pretended to dial. He made a show of putting it to his ear.

  “Yeah, Connor. Yeah, it’s me,” he said to no one. He kept his eyes locked on the three people in the bar. Do it, he urged himself. “I’m at that dump you told me about in Natrona.”

  All three of the strangers turned toward him now.

  He paused, surprised by what he was doing. But he liked the oddity of the moment and knowing that in these wide-open spaces there was still room for him to be a different person. He could not only change his body but how he acted.

  “Yeah. The place is crawling with mice like you said. Go ahead and file your health inspection report with the state.” Lewis grinned at the closemouthed bartender. “Okay. Bye.” He clicked the phone shut, peeled his wet bottom from the seat, eyed the two wet crescents of sweat left behind, and click-clacked out.

  In the parking lot he sat by his bike for a moment and let his nerves settle. He’d surprised himself with his fake call and was happy to have done so. As an act of owning what he had just done, he didn’t start pedaling away. He stood where he was and ate another peanut butter burrito, washed it down with a pint of water, then sat back on his bike. His undercarriage was raw and sore from where the seat pressed into his bottom. He started biking farther north. The road was lined with meadow foxtail and white clover.

  At any moment, he expected a truck to come up the road and run him down.

  It was strange how quickly he thought of using his brother’s name in the bar. He had not talked with Connor for years now, but as he strained to pedal up the next hill, the clear vision of his brother as a boy came to him. He and his brother were inseparable as children. They were tyrannosaurs, bent at the waist, elbows tucked to their ribs, forearms swatting at everything as they careened through the dining room. They dug shovel-blade-deep holes in the backyard looking for arrowheads; split rocks with hammers, hunting for trilobites. They tied D batteries together with lengths of twine and lassoed each other’s feet. Taped the same twine to the doorway of their sister’s bedroom and tied it to an alarm clock and pretended it was a trip-wire bomb, jumping out of her closet and making exploding noises as she toppled.

  Lewis could see how there was a false summit to the hill ahead, but the peak would not be much farther beyond that. He had not thought of his own childhood in years but so much was sitting there now for him to find. He and Connor were headless horsemen, Zulu warriors, Union soldiers, and Blackbeard during the golden age of piracy. They gathered facts: tallest mountains, longest rivers, first pilots to fly an airplane. They shared these facts with people at random. Sang a song that named the fifty states but could not finish, trailing off after distant Idaho.

  He cleared the false summit and felt the sting of remembering how he and his brother knew more than they should have about their parents’ marriage. They had heard their fights and lovemaking and noticed how palpable with worry one seemed to make the other. Connor suspected they communicated in secret ink, their own complex, hidden code the kids had yet to break. He and Connor had hunted through their parents’ room with a mail-order cipher wheel, looking to crack secrets open. They had kept busy to avoid the tension thick between their mother and father.

  He and his brother were wild together. Their energy endless. Their memory together as children was fuel enough to fire him over the crest of the hill, where exhausted, he coasted downhill at faster and faster speeds so that the wind howled over his thoughts of such a long time ago.

  Miles from the yokel bar, he rode with the noon sun into a valley with a large gable-roofed house, a corrugated sheet barn, and a flat-roofed building with a sign painted on the side that read “Bookstore.” When he got closer, there was a split rail fence running the length of the property with a posted sign on every third post.

  He’d felt good about what he’d done at the bar, and the idea of not being such a rule follower made him want to crack the day open in new and interesting ways. He rode onto the gravel driveway and leaned his bike against the fence and began walking up toward the house. The bookstore building was locked.

  “Didn’t hear anyone pull up,” a woman’s voice said behind him. She wore wire-rimmed glasses and a paint-stained denim smock. “I can open that for you if you like.”

 
; “Oh, hello there. I don’t want to trouble you. I thought I’d take a breather.”

  “No trouble,” she said. “You on a pedal bike?”

  “Yes. At least until I get run over.”

  “Well, that’s impressive. Don’t get many of you. Or, any of you, to be honest.”

  She pulled a key from her pocket and worked it into the lock. When the door swung open she hit a light and he could see the inside was full of bookshelves, each almost seven feet tall, and two books deep on musty shelves that bowed under the weight.

  “Whoa,” Lewis said. “This is unexpected.” The musty scent and old joy of bookstacks settled over him. He’d been a voracious reader ever since he broke into his father’s storage unit looking to steal fireworks as a kid and found a lifetime of his father’s reading materials.

  “I guess it is,” the woman said.

  The first shelf he looked at was full of coffee table books of famous painters. The next shelf had French novels. Down the line were contemporary poetry, gardening, political and law books, anthropology, phycology, and row after row of what seemed to be a random scatter of fiction and nonfiction. There was a reference shelf. He scanned the spines. One was Living with Diabetes. He let his finger touch upon it but moved away from the shelf.

  “This collection is amazing.”

  “Thank you.”

  “How can you keep a bookstore way out here?”

  “Mostly for our own use. Though we like the idea of running a bookstore. Which is funny, because we almost never open it. People drive up, see the door shut, and turn around. Happens I heard your feet on the gravel and took a look.”

  “I’m glad you did. This place is heaven.”

  “Glad you like it. You a book lover?”

  “Yes. For my whole life.” In one of the books he found in his father’s storage unit, he’d read about books being condemned as “poisonous weeds” during the Cultural Revolution in China and after that, reading took on an immediate sense of illicit knowledge and excitement.

  Lewis was eager to talk to this woman. He had been eager to talk to someone in the bar down the road too. “Too much time sitting and reading,” he said, and slapped his open palms hard against his gut. There was some truth to that. He’d been a poor eater most of his life. Food as a crutch, he’d been told. He’d been a nervous, then angry kid, and that carried over into adulthood. Anger at his father and then fear to let anyone else close enough to hold such sway over him. He kept from getting close to anyone by staying in constant motion, jumping from ship to ship and ocean to ocean for most of his life. At sea he’d cloistered himself away with books, and recently, since he’d gained his top licensure, with the responsibility of running a ship stressing him out, he started eating junk food.

  “Well, you feel free to look around as much as you like. Yell up to the house if I can help you with anything.”

  “You don’t mind leaving me here?”

  “Well, it doesn’t seem like you can get very far with very much, to be honest, so you’re welcome to park it as long as you like.”

  “Awfully nice of you. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” She walked out and left Lewis to wander among the books.

  In the back of the room was a yellow sheet for a curtain that he pushed aside and found a low-ceilinged room with no windows. There were white plaster walls, lined with bookshelves of antique, leather-bound books. There was a handwritten journal starting from 1762 of a man named Jacque La Véredrye who was exploring Alberta and living among the native tribes of the plains. He had drawn pictures of the village and faces of the people he lived with. He recorded their day-to-day lives. He wrote about his own life as the son of a French-Canadian trapper who trained him to come to the mountains of the West, but with his immediate fascination with what and who he found on the plains, he wanted to capture the essence of the lives of natives instead of taking anything from the land.

  Lewis felt bad that he hadn’t kept such a record of his life aboard ships. An active accounting of every thought and feeling from a life adrift. Something like the accumulation of the weekly letters his father had been sending him. There had been times when he’d get back from a long shipping and piles of such letters waited for him. Over the years, Lewis could never bring himself to write back, and the letters asked less and less about Lewis, and became a sharing of his father’s inner life. A written path of doubt plowing through one broken man.

  Lewis read well into the first volume of the journals in the shed and decided to buy it as a gift for his father. A stand in of at least someone’s full accounting of making a way out in the world.

  Hours passed. It was exciting to find this spirit laid down on parchment in the middle of an odd and lonely state in the West. After half a day of reading he felt like he had known this author his whole life. As he read this other man’s histories he felt something inside of him emerging from a chrysalis. He imagined himself as an early explorer on the Alberta plains, not an isolated man bending toward fat, who had run so far from his family.

  He had gotten lost in his father’s storage unit books like this as a boy. He wanted to know what his father was looking for in all those pages. At first Lewis found the text dry, too abstract in their arguments and thinking, but his father’s margin notes, often written in red marker, often messy to read, were fascinating. There were years of the man’s thoughts, his inner life, that Lewis pored over until the payment on the storage unit ran up. Then the books went in his basement where they had water damage, and most were ruined outright or lost to the mold that ensued. All that red ink blurred. His father’s thoughts bled away, only to be replaced by his letter writing.

  His father’s most recent letters came with another round of invitations to his cabin in Montana. His last injury settlement payment was due and he was flying Lewis’s brother and sister and their kids out. The letters gave a date of their visit.

  His father also wrote, Please come. If you can’t, please tell me where I can come find you. I’ll travel anywhere in the world.

  The vulnerability of that last letter made Lewis aware of how he’d hidden so much of his past life away but how it still circled in his head in dark eddies. How he pretended like the past didn’t matter. After reading of his father’s plea, Lewis had laid his head down and covered his face in his arms to muffle the hot choking sobs. He thought of himself in Montana, face-to-face with his father, of what he would say. He thought of his father leaving when Lewis was a boy. But what can you do about such betrayals. You let them sink all the way into your bones to stay with you forever, and move on.

  Lewis did not know how many hours had passed when he heard the woman call out. “Hello. Are you still here?”

  “Hi. I’m back here.” He started to shuffle to his feet but his legs locked up.

  The woman stood in the doorway at the curtain.

  “Sorry. I got caught up back here. These books are wonderful.”

  “The same thing happens to me.”

  “Can I buy this one?”

  “Of course. It will be the first book we’ve sold all year.”

  “Great.”

  “It’s getting late, and you’re a bit of a way from anywhere.”

  “That’s okay. I’m camping, so I can pull onto a field up ahead.”

  “You’re welcome to camp on our land for the night, if you wish.”

  “That’s kind of you. I’d really appreciate that.”

  “No problem. I’m Holly.”

  “Lewis.”

  “Let me show you around, Lewis.”

  Lewis was hesitant to put down the Alberta journals of Jacque La Véredrye that he bought.

  Holly led him to the back of the house. She pointed to a tall hill to the east.

  “The stars are right on top of you back here. You can bring your bike around and use the hill for your campsite.”

  Lewis retrieved his bike, pitched his bivy sack tent, and changed from his biking clothes to a pair of lightweight short
s, a T-shirt, and sandals. He heated up a package of noodles on his Coleman stove and ate the last of the peanut butter burritos he’d made that morning. He wanted a candy bar. Sugar of any kind. He’d been addicted to it for years, and now he was trying to pedal free of it before it warped his body beyond repair. He was trying to pedal into the past when he was young and healthy and had a family.

  When he’d eaten, the sun began to dip in the west. He walked to the house to ask if he could fill his water bottles.

  “This must be our wandering bard,” a middle-aged blond woman in a green short-sleeved, V-neck jumper said.

  “I guess that’s me. I spoke with Holly earlier. I’m Lewis.”

  “Lewis. I’m Katherine, Holly’s wife.”

  “Nice to meet you Katherine. Mind if I fill up my water bottles?”

  “Not at all, I can even top the offer of tap water if you’d like to share a glass of wine.”

  “I’d love that,” Lewis said, dismissing the inner critic of his calorie and sugar intake. During his previous shore leave that had been delayed because monsoons made havoc on the ship’s itinerary, he stayed in Damascus. There he’d spent his first few days hiding between the sheets in his hotel room from sunup to sundown, bone-tired and only waking with the enchanting calls of the muezzin. Once he was rested, he began taking marathon-length walks around the city, down every dead-end market lane, and using the minarets to keep his bearings. He tried talking to people in the stalls, but buffered by yet another language, he remained isolated and went days without speaking a meaningful word to anyone.

  Lewis and Katherine sat in wicker chairs on the veranda of the wraparound porch, each drinking a glass of cold white wine and watching the sunset. Holly came and joined them with her own glass and a new bottle of wine. Her free hand reached out, and she dragged a fingertip across her wife’s knuckles. Lewis was drawn to these women, struck right away by their ease with each other, and he envied how they’d made a place for themselves and for having each other.