Tiny Americans

by Devin Murphy

  Jason McKillroy had a skin-pigment issue. He had bleached white and brown blotches of skin that pixilated where the blotches met like swaths of freckles. Jason was easy to like, but you could never keep your eyes from running over his face and seeing how the lobe of his left ear was a tanned-leather brown and the lobe of his right was sugar white. When we played shirts and skins, there was the momentary silence as he revealed his Holsteinesque torso, and we’d all told or heard the jokes speculating about the odd hide of his penis.

  Football was everything to us then. One night after one of our games, we went to Samuel Bergman’s trailer to watch the Bills, who had lost all ten games so far that year. When we got there, Samuel’s mom wouldn’t let any of us in and told us all to go home because we were filthy. She didn’t even want Samuel to come inside. I remember the look on his face, like he’d hated her for everything that ever hurt in the world. We all walked to his backyard and hunkered under the trailer’s back deck. The wet snow dripped through the wooden boards and fell on us where we sat in the cold dirt. Samuel snuck in the back door and ran an extension cord and radio out so we could at least listen. The game had started by the time he turned the radio on and the announcer was screaming, “Greg Bell to the twenty! To the fifteen—ten—five—touchdown!” and we all joined in and screamed, “Let’s go, Buffalo! Let’s go, Buffalo,” like we were some wild and beautiful family, cracking our elated fists against the underside of the deck.

  Samuel’s mother came out, and before she could say anything from the doorway, Samuel started screaming at her from under the deck, “We’re not in the goddamn house, so leave us alone—leave us alone—leave us alone!”

  His mother stood there for a moment before she went back inside, leaving us in the mud, the cold making us shiver.

  Our beloved Buffalo Bills. Each of us knew as much about that team as the friends we were huddled up under the deck with. We had cheered for their players, Darryl Talley, Joe Ferguson, Greg Bell, Byron Franklin, Jim Haslett, and prayed they’d win just one game for us. We knew everything about them. Samuel was the only one among us who had ever been to the stadium to see a game. His father had taken him three years before. He described the whole crowd standing with everyone leaning over the seats in front of them so it looked like the entire place was swallowing itself from the upper decks inward.

  The Bills’ legendary lineman Fred Smerlas allegedly used to chew worms during games to gross out his opponents. My classmate Peter Verdino tried it and stuck a night crawler in his mouth during a huddle, but vomited on his shirt before he made it to the line of scrimmage and had to sit out the rest of the game because no one wanted to touch him.

  Levi Smith was another guy in our group. He would fight anyone he got the chance to. He’d pull his own shirt off, then lift the shirt of whomever he was fighting up over their head hockey-style so it pinched their arms to their torso, and he’d punch their faces until they bled, passed out, or both. It was a cocky, no-one-back-down mentality, and even among friends there was an eagerness to prove yourself to the pack that was maddening. Everybody was feigning alpha status. But Levi tried the hardest.

  Jessie Roberts had the perfect family. His parents were still together, and his father had steady work as an accountant at Cutco. He had a big-breasted older sister named Rochelle, with long blond hair who drove a 1980 Subaru DL 4WD Wagon that he would get once she went to college. There was something very wholesome about his family life that we all wanted to be near, but we also hated him for it.

  Jack VanderCamp was the oldest of us, about to turn eighteen. He was nicknamed “the Shark” because he once had an erection while doing the backstroke in front of everyone at a coed gym class. He had a scar on his abdomen from a bicycle wreck that embedded the uncovered metal end of the handlebar in his body. The scar looked like a white ringworm rash made of bubbled-up ham fat. Jack, even though he was blessed with a fluid athleticism on the field, always looked saddled, burdened like the world was about to fall on him. Girls loved him for this.

  A few years earlier, Lewis and I had followed him and our older sister, Jamie, into the cemetery across the street from our house. From a distance, we watched him pull off her clothes, then take her breasts into his mouth. Even up until that point we were still going to tease Jamie about it later.

  Then Jack bent Jamie backward over a headstone so her hair was swaying toward the ground and her feet were flailed out in front of her. He stuck his hand between her legs and started moving his fingers in and out of her like the pistons of a large machine.

  I went silent, but Lewis started mumbling, calling her a slut in short breaths like he couldn’t breathe and ran off toward our house. I wanted to run after him, to keep running, but he seemed so mad I was scared to go near him. I thought of running the other way, but my fingers dug under the grass like talons that kept me perched there snooping on my sister alone—a moment neither Lewis nor I would ever mention again.

  In the winters when we were younger, we would throw snowballs at cars. One fall, a few of the guys dropped a pumpkin off a train bridge onto the windshield of a stranger’s passing car. They could only describe the sounds of what happened next as they ran for their lives. On a long summer night, as eight of us were feeling very brave, we flipped a jade-green Studebaker. We let it fall on its side, then we pushed on the engine’s covers so it fell onto its top, which slammed down, gave a few ticking sounds, and crunched in under its own weight.

  Everyone called Shawn Nowak “Idiot Is Here.” He had bragged about using an access ladder and climbing to the top of the town’s enormous mushroom-shaped water tower and spray-painting swear words on top to insult low-flying airplanes. No one believed he had done it, and dismissed him entirely when he was caught telling different groups of kids that he’d immortalized different swear words up above. Though months later, when a city worker went up to check the tower they found SHAWN NOWAK WAS HERE scrawled in red paint from end to end of the tower. The police were called and they drove right to Shawn’s house.

  When word of what he’d done got out my group of friends immediately took to calling him “Idiot Is Here,” whenever he walked into a room.

  When I was alone with him once, I asked him what happened when the police arrested him.

  “They never arrested me. I was too young.”

  “I heard you went to jail.”

  “No. The officer who came to my house kept telling my mom how dangerous what I’d done was. How I was up on this huge rounded globe without any rope. He was really worried about me. Kind of a nice guy, actually.”

  “Were you scared when you did it?”

  “It was dark. I lay on my stomach and slid along from letter to letter. My sneakers sort of held tight to the sides. It wasn’t until after that cop came and I went back to look up at how high up I really was that I got scared. I felt like an idiot. That’s why I figured it was fine people called me that. A good reminder to never do something so stupid again.”

  I imagined the feeling of climbing rung by rung up through the dark, stomach-stuck to the downward curve, one deep, looping graffiti letter away from slipping off the edge with nowhere to land.

  One day we found out Jack VanderCamp’s father had been stabbed and killed at a bar in Tennessee. His mother had told Todd Hornick’s mom about it, and Mrs. Hornick told everybody. None of us ever mentioned it. We were silent about our poverty and our tragedy, as talking would only cast light on the ragtag settlement we were, left in the debris of failed families.

  Yet we continued to gather, straight-backed, slump-shouldered, and all smiles as if birthed from cold milk into easy lives—so eager to be friends that I had grown to love them for all they were to me, and all I could not find elsewhere. I had even become accustomed to our violent, cruel sort of football and loved the wild feeling it gave me. I kept that feeling locked inside me and tried to bash it out with the help of my friends. That was our ritual. But when Lenwood Murry showed up drunk off of cheap cordials he stole from his
stepfather’s bar, the Tavern, the rules of what we had been doing changed for good.

  Len would frequently steal enough alcohol from his stepdad’s bar that the rest of us could get blackout drunk. And though we might tackle each other when we were drunk, we never played drunk. Our football games were the only sacred thing we had, but Len started forcing himself into the games and after would start his bullying, pushing everyone around. I could hear it in everyone’s voices that they wanted things put right.

  The shag of Len’s bangs brushed back off his gorilla forehead and revealed the fold of bone above his eyebrows. He had facial hair where the rest of us had soft fuzz, like on the happy trails hanging off our belly buttons, like bleached yarn. When Len went to tackle me I saw his dark eyes shadowed by that glaring forehead ridge. He picked me up, lifting my whole body on his shoulder, and drove me back into the ground. Then he palmed my chin and slammed the back of my head into the grass.

  “You fuck,” I murmured, trying to push his massive body off me. That’s when he slammed his knee into my ribs so hard I knew that that yellow-blue meat color would set in and slowly waterfall off my rib cage.

  He let me up, saying, “Watch your mouth.”

  “That was a cheap shot, you fat slob,” I said.

  Then he exploded. I hit a nerve, or more likely he had been waiting for the smallest provocation. He ran forward and drove his shoulder into the ribs he’d just kneed and planted me back into the dirt. I tried to elbow him in the temple, but the force of his body on mine knocked the wind out of me. I could see the cauliflower bumps of his back teeth and smell the adrenal sweat, staleness of old cigarettes, and sweet liquor on his breath as he sat on top of me and started pummeling his fists into my face. He landed enough solid punches that my right eye swelled shut.

  He was swearing in a tirade over me as he ripped my shirt down from the hem of the neck so it hung off me like a shoulder cape. Then he grabbed my shorts by the waistline, gripping my underwear as well, and pulled them down around my ankles. He pulled my clothes off my legs as the group pulled him off me. I lay there on the ground in the rag of my shirt and my tattered old sneakers.

  When I looked down to the small salted slug of my exposed penis, I tasted blood running down my throat. I stared at the circle my friends had formed around me for what felt like a long time. Then, realizing how badly I was hurt, I started crying, letting big bloody snot bubbles pop from my mouth and nose, and I bawled big inaudible whimpers as if I were a creature about to die. I cried for every sadness I ever held on to.

  “Get lost, you puss,” Len said.

  I rolled onto my hands and knees and my whole world narrowed to the red drip-drip-drip falling from my lip.

  “Too far,” Shawn Nowak said.

  “Fuck you, Idiot Is Here,” Len said.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Levi Smith yelled.

  “Fuck you, Levi.”

  There was a chorus of welling anger directed at Lenwood as I limped away. My nakedness could have easily been theirs, and they knew it. Len screamed again, “I’ll take you all on!”

  Something in my legs was shaking as I walked away from them. Some fear or hurt or hatred that I couldn’t hide. I held my right hamstring and quad to muffle a spasm. When I hunched over, my penis rested on my forearm and blood splattered on my feet.

  When I looked back, Len stood in the middle of them all. They had circled him in solidarity of each other, in mutual protection. He stood flatfooted with his giant body swaying. He turned slowly. The swath of his stained T-shirt between his shoulder blades was wide as a billboard, and his hands were stretched out in front of him like a wrestler’s. Everyone who was looking at his back would step closer, only to jump back when he swiveled toward them. In this way they danced around him like hungry but timid wolves. Then Len struck out, grabbed Jeff Malone by the shoulders, swung him around his hip like a Hula-Hoop, and launched him ten feet away. Jeff’s head thudded into the dirt, and the circle shifted to enclose Len again.

  “I’ll take all of you,” he yelled.

  The circle pinched tighter. They were bloodthirsty, each wanting to tear something from Len.

  By the time I was halfway to the trees everyone was pushing at Len; anyone who got close to him he sent flying. When he yelled, “I’m going to hold the next person who touches me solely responsible,” I turned to watch.

  What happened next is as clear in my mind now as any other benchmark of my life. My brother, Lewis, charged from somewhere outside the circle that formed around Len. He slammed his body against Lenwood’s back and wrapped his arms around Len’s throat and head. Lewis’s face was fire-hydrant red as he locked his legs around Len’s hips and squeezed his whole body into him.

  Len spun with Lewis on his back. Lewis, who rarely said a word but would run and run and run until he passed out from heat stroke, had his eyes shut as Len’s face went purple and he fell to his knees.

  Jessie Roberts then ran forward and kicked Len in the head. When Jessie pulled back his leg, Len caught him, and bit into Jessie’s shinbone. Jessie screamed while Lewis continued to choke the air out of Len, who was now gnawing on Jessie’s leg.

  The fight ended with Len out cold on his face. Lewis didn’t open his eyes until he must have felt everything in Len spill into the grass. When Lewis stood up, there was something holy about his face. For a moment I thought Len was dead.

  Then Lewis walked out of the circle and started in the direction of home, Jessie started to crawl away, and everyone else started peeling off the circle and heading off too. No one came looking for me where I was hiding in the trees.

  Len lay on the ground.

  The Buffalo Bills finished that year with a 52–21 loss to the Cincinnati Bengals and ended their season with a 2–14 record. I watched the last game by myself at my house. The sense that the Bills would disappoint me every year of my life set in, but I was too invested by then to shed them.

  My desire to belong to the group of boys soon crested. Every time I looked in one of their eyes I had to swallow the shame of their seeing me so helpless. None of the boys told anyone else anything. But we all knew of the others’ failures. Our mothers and sisters and girlfriends would blab and we’d hear. Not saying it ourselves was our only badge of courage, and to hold it all in and smash your way through was our bylaw. But that night with Len, I had failed. I had shown the ugly truth of the sad state we all were really in. In my nakedness and tears, I had unearthed the feeling that we were all being trapped by something we couldn’t see, something that could take us at any moment—possibly our own brutality.

  Jason McKillroy was killed in a car wreck before he even got out of high school. Fifteen of the twenty-seven of us joined the military. Each seeking money, or discipline, or some, I suspect, more violence. Most joined the army and a few joined the marines. Charlie Rutkowski, marines, was the first to be killed in action. His father spent the whole day of the funeral mowing his lawn. To all our surprise my brother, Lewis, signed up for the navy. I always figured he did that to get as far away from his family as he could. So when he ended up clear on the other side of the world, I was happy for him. It was only years later that I became angry with the military for poaching among the poor and taking my friends and family away.

  I know at least three of those fifteen never made it out of their first tour in the service. Jeff Malone got a bullet lodged in his spine and lost the use of his legs after a friendly fire accident at Camp Lejeune. The rest have not had large or tragic enough events happen to them for news of their lives to reach me. I’m glad for that, as any one of their names brings it all flooding back, and I’ve tried to forget them all.

  I went to Buffalo State like my sister, Jessie Roberts, and his sister, Rochelle. Jamie, who went through enrollment a few years earlier, helped me apply for financial aid. I did my best to start a new life. But I was always thinking of Lewis, especially during the bombing of Iraq, and what it was like for him being on decks of destroyers that were firing fourteen
-inch guns toward the shore from six miles out at sea. I hoped that cracking salvo would be loud enough to bang out whatever screaming I knew he had deep in his heart.

  When I think of those football games, I still see everyone circled around my naked body. I still feel the shame of my helplessness, like an inflamed and itchy scar running through my chest. And when the barometer drops, I feel the broken bones in my eye socket and find myself thinking of Lenwood Murry.

  I waited there in the trees that night, like a wounded animal, until Len woke up. Everything was quiet; the cicadas had not yet started their soft songs. Grass had indented the side of his muted face. There were already a few stars. Part of me wanted to reach out and help him up, to leave a bloodied handprint on his shoulder. A mark of solidarity. I’m sure at that moment Len felt as if he, too, were all alone; must have known, as he hunched to his knees, that despite our games, despite the intimacy that comes from breaking bone and skin, we all truly are.

  3

  Connor Thurber, 1985

  The cemetery across from our house on Sandalwood Avenue was another place Lewis and I frequently spent time shooting off fireworks and arrows, hunting among the gravestones for where they landed.

  “Can’t kill the dead twice,” Lewis said, pulling an arrow from a skewered plot.

  We played an insane sort of bicycle tag on the gravel path through the headstones that left us both road-rashed and bejeweled with gravel. When it got dark we ran among the slabs and howled to hear our own voices hitting the open air. Once, Lewis was running ahead of me and hurdled the face of a thick marble headstone and disappeared behind it. When I caught up to him, I saw the pile of dirt he’d missed and found him on his hands and knees in the open grave.

  When he stood up, his head was the only thing not underground, and there was a splotch of mud on his forehead.

  “Is it scary?” I asked.