by Devin Murphy
“For shit-sure,” Lewis said. “Help me out of here.”
I grabbed the waistline of his shorts when he jumped up and folded his stomach over the lip of the plot. His foot made a sucking sound where it got caught in the mud. “I lost my shoe,” Lewis said. When he was out we both stood over the hole and looked into it. “Should we say a prayer?” He jabbed my arm and started running again, his muddy sock loose at the toes and slapping the ground with each step.
Our father had given Lewis the high-tension bow-and-arrow before he left. It was something Lewis and I never spoke of, but I remembered every second of that day and played it over and over, looking for clues I’d missed. Our father had already said goodbye to me and Jamie and was in the driveway of our house talking to Lewis, who looked like a quickly deflating balloon. His shoulders were sagging with everything Dad said. The bow was in his left hand, and the tip was scratching the blacktop. From the porch where I had ducked behind the bushes, I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Then our father got into his powder-blue Oldsmobile, open duffel bags full of his clothes overflowing from the back seat, which was also stuffed with tools, files, a bison skull, a stack of hardcover novels without their dust jackets, and heaps of philosophy books he’d stolen from the Olean Public Library.
After years of fighting, dealing with our mother’s sloppy drinking, and his own failed attempts to stay sober, our father pulled away and went west. He told us he’d accepted a job running power lines for Alberta-Montana Power Company near Kalispell. He closed his firework store on the interstate and moved the contents that hadn’t sold into a storage unit. And that was it. He left.
Lewis had this crazy-pale face as he walked back toward the house.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Dad got a better-paying job,” he told me. His voice didn’t break when he said it, but he didn’t look at me. Then his body twisted around like he was trying to find a way for those words to settle so he could believe them.
“Why now?” I asked.
“Don’t worry about it.”
“What do you mean ‘don’t worry about it’? How can I not worry about it?” I said, but I knew from Lewis’s glare that I was once again earning my new nickname.
“You’re a waste of skin,” he’d told me a few months earlier. From that, he worked out his random furies on me with “Skinboy,” which had taken the place of my name.
“Leave me alone, Skinboy,” Lewis said as he turned and pushed me away from him. I tripped over a discarded birdhouse and fell back on the grass in our cluttered backyard. Jamie was watching us from the backroom, where she’d set up an architect’s desk for painting. Jamie had a new group of friends she’d been spending more and more time with. But whenever she was home, she was in that room painting. She was good, too. She had been working on a painting of a woman’s body in white clothes floating above the gravestones in a cemetery. The woman seemed to be lifted up by her breastbone so her hair fell back to the earth. The only thing not painted yet was the woman’s face, which I expected to be happy or transcendent. I could tell Jamie was listening to us through the open window. And though she usually yelled at Lewis for hurting me, she said nothing. From the grass I watched as he disappeared into the house, which was a maroon color with curls of dried paint that fell in chips like dandruff.
“I want to go where Dad’s going,” I said to Jamie.
“Me too,” she said through the window.
The only time we consistently saw our mother was one night a month when people in our town put their large trash items on the curb for the sanitation department to pick up the next morning. Our neighbors would drag out old Whirlpool appliances, ironing boards, and whatever else the weekly garbage truck couldn’t take. On those evenings, our mom loaded us into her rusted-over, white 1970 Chevy Caprice station wagon, with its vinyl side panel, and we’d slowly cruise the streets picking through the refuse.
I’d get this fishbowl feeling as she slowed down and parked in front of those houses. Each home gave off a sense of neatness and order that seeped into their lawns. I always felt like they were looking out their windows at us, which made me want to pull my lower lip over my head and swallow myself whole. That’s probably why Jamie never came with us. But my mom and Lewis were unfazed by what other people thought as she gingerly picked discarded rabbit-ear antennas, steel rods, sheet metal, chicken wire, aluminum siding, large bolts, coffee cans, aluminum fruit jars, and every scrap of metal or iron and tossed them in the back of the Caprice.
She’d walk from lawn to lawn on the sidewalk while Lewis and I took turns inching the car along beside her. I was so young when we started doing this that on my turns I’d nudge the gas pedal and brake with my tiptoes. I wasn’t big enough to see over the steering column, so I navigated through the line of sight between the dashboard and the top of the enormous steering wheel. When we had to cross an intersection, she’d get back in, drive across, and we’d start down the next block.
I was always getting stabbed by the jagged metal edges of the things we collected on our rounds. If she needed help lifting anything, my mom took a pair of my dad’s worn work gloves and tossed them onto my lap. I’d wiggle my fingers in the extra space of each finger sleeve, and that extra room would knot up or twist against what we were lifting so it looked like I had a man’s hands that had been pummeled by a hammer. We’d toss what we found in the back, where it would shake the suspension and clank against everything else. Once, after doing this, my mother ran her hand up the back of my neck so her palm feathered up my hairline. It shocked me that her hands were not rough or calloused. Even with her bandanna and frayed clothes, she was a woman whom men always found attractive. She had an accent, which men found exotic. They would ask me or Lewis, when she wasn’t looking, “Where’s she from?”
Tiny, the neighborhood vet who lit the bonfire at homecoming, had asked once, and ever since he’d call out, “Hello, German Lady,” whenever he saw us. Tiny was a pack rat. I heard Lewis say there was medicine that could help cure him, but people in town always talked about Tiny like he was a news story, and I’m not sure what about him was really true or what Lewis was just repeating. I know that he probably had a glandular problem that made him so large, that his Grizzly Adams beard covered half the A on the 1960s letterman sweater he wore everywhere, that the line of gunk around the bifocal cut of his apple-size glasses was solid and yellowish-brown. The police were in the habit of arresting him for one day each fall. They’d claim he broke some sort of county ordinance. And then the city would bring out a backhoe and garbage truck to clean up his yard. His blue Suburban with both bumpers and three doors held together by rope and duct tape was filled to the roof with trash that burst out the windows.
Sometimes, Tiny’s blue Suburban and my mother’s station wagon would end up on the same street, trawling opposite sides of the road until they’d meet toward the middle. Then I could see how Tiny’s whole face scrunched up each time he manically blinked, and how that lifted and dropped his beard like a curtain over the middle button of his sweater. “Hello, German Lady,” he said.
We tried not to talk to Tiny. There was something mangled-up in his voice, and even though I didn’t recognize it at the time as being lustful toward my mother, it made me not like him. If Tiny was close, I’d get out of the car and help my mother and Lewis. I took the odd protective energy I was feeling and focused it on trying to claim all the best trash before he did, as if we were in some twisted arms race. I’d place extra value on useless things for the sake of competition and insist that we add what I’d found to our pile. Then, all of a sudden, it dawned on me that I was in a stranger’s yard. I’d look up and see neighbors tucked behind their curtains looking at us. I’d look around and see my mother, Lewis, and Tiny, and wonder if we were all in need of some medication to make us better.
Once, in the middle of that summer, my mother, Lewis, and I were driving around town, and she was trying to get Lewis to start calling me Connor again.
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“Skinboy is not a nice name for such a sweet boy. I don’t like it,” she said. She looked at me through the rearview mirror. “You know, when you were really little I’d hear you through the door singing these nursery rhymes. I’d peek my head in to tell you to sleep, and you’d be humming and singing with your eyes shut. You’d be breathing heavy but still singing. I hear that still, you know, hear you singing. It’s a good sound to have in my head,” she said. “Maybe if I sneak in with Lewis and we hear you sing in your sleep, then he won’t call you such an ugly nickname.”
I knew she would never find out because, even if she was at home, she was always so loud at night, clopping around with big heavy steps, falling into walls, and crying or singing her own self to sleep.
That night, we found a pile of twelve-foot steel rebar poles on someone’s lawn. We each took an end of one and tried to slide them into the back of the Caprice. The poles wobbled in the middle, so Lewis stood between us and supported them. We struggled to get three into the back. None of us saw Tiny park in front of the next house. I jumped when I realized he was on the other side of the pile. He bent down next to the pile of rebar and wrapped his arms around it, letting his fingers dig into the ground and burrow underneath the poles, and lifted the whole pile.
“Hey, we found those first,” Lewis said. My mother put her hand on his shoulder, which he shrugged off, but she’d quieted him.
The rebar must have weighed well over a hundred pounds, but Tiny’s face didn’t strain at all. He spun so the tip of the pile facing in front of him was aimed at the back of our car. He walked forward so the pile slid right on top of the three poles we’d put in already. As he shimmied the poles farther into the back of our car, the wheel well dipped closer to the street.
“Wow,” my mother said, “thank you.”
Tiny brushed the rusted metal dust off his sleeves and stuck out his hand toward my mother. His forearm was the size of my waist.
My mother lifted her hand to shake his.
But instead of stopping, he reached his hand toward her chest with all his fingers together and facing up. Then he flicked his hand underneath my mother’s left breast.
“What the—” my mother spit out as she jumped back and slapped his hand away.
Lewis shot toward Tiny, and I saw his foot heave back behind his body, winding up to kick. My mother reached out and blocked Lewis’s chest so his kick missed Tiny’s kneecap. I watched without knowing what to do as Tiny turned back to his Suburban.
“You can’t do that!” Mom yelled.
“I hate you,” Lewis screamed, and I could hear the start of tears and something horrible in his voice before he choked it back. My mother stood behind him and draped her arms over his shoulders—scarfing him in a hug.
I waited in the car as my mother led Lewis to the back seat. She put her hands on his cheeks and whispered something to him I couldn’t hear. As she walked around to the driver’s seat, Lewis looked at me and whispered, “You’re a pussy, Skinboy.”
I sat quietly as we drove away, our mother turning the car on a wide sloping angle so the seven feet of rebar protruding from the back wouldn’t scrape against anything.
At the end of those gathering excursions, we drove all the way to the old warehouse in downtown Buffalo that had been converted into lofts. We helped her drag everything into her studio and added to the piles of metal from our previous trips that lined the scuffed drywall. She’d splattered the walls in bright purple and pale orange paints. There was an old couch and mattress in the corner and workbenches covered in canvases, squeezed tubes of oil paints, and plastic liquor bottles everywhere else. We never stayed long. If we met other people in the hall she ushered us out quickly after introducing us as her sons.
“She’s probably ashamed of you two creeps,” Jamie told me.
The studio was a place our mother went to disappear. There, she lived a life other than the one she lived with us. There, she would take the materials gathered and arc weld gigantic abstract sculptures. When she came back to us with new work, I pictured her bending into the shower of molten orange sparks bouncing off the dark faceplate of her helmet—the blue-tongued coalescence of metals drawing her closer to something that only she’d seen among the junk piles. I’d study the beaded melding points of her work, how each joint somehow balanced heavy materials in intricate and subtle curves that she’d spray-paint vivid colors so the whole thing looked like electrified raw minerals geysering from the earth.
She displayed her work, in craft fairs or galleries, but most of her sculptures never sold and ended up hidden by a seven-foot wooden fence in our backyard. One of those sculptures had three twelve-foot strips of curved iron balancing against each other on a pivot that kept them moving like waves. One day, I bent one of the tips of the metal wave down so it bowed into the grass and launched gravel twenty feet in the air when it sprung back.
I wanted to knock down our fence so people could see we had a sculpture garden and not a junkyard. Or better yet, I wanted to be able to pick the fence up over my head and place it around my family at various moments of my choosing, showing only what I wanted to, controlling how we were perceived.
I’d lift the fence up and show my mother wielding the blue flame. Then I’d slam the fence down around her gathering trash. I wanted to take my fence and lock it around Tiny so no one in my family would ever see that son of a bitch again. I’d slam it around my mother in our front yard that summer after someone spray-painted TRASH WHORE on the sidewalk just before the Fourth of July parade. She tried to clean it by pouring gasoline on the concrete slabs to burn it off, but the match lit a flame that shot ten feet over her head.
“What’s she doing?” I heard Jamie gasp from where she stood next to Lewis at the living room window. Our mother had come inside crying and told us about the graffiti. She went outside cursing something in German that I didn’t understand, and seconds later the street shot up in flames.
From inside the house, we could hear people driving past, honking and calling our mom a nut as she dolloped more gas onto the corner like a magician whose trick had gone horribly wrong. As I watched her, I had the image of insatiable orange flames spreading across the leaves on the ground—each leaf igniting at the stem, burning bright orange and touching the next leaf, and the next, until I could hear someone’s voice saying, “Your mother burned down the neighborhood.”
The next night, after sorting through what she did and did not want from our most recent scavenger trip, our mother loaded me and Lewis into the Caprice and drove us to the back of the cemetery, where the north and west borders met and dropped off a sloping ravine into the Allegheny River. She backed up to the cliff, next to the tree with the No Dumping sign screwed into it, opened the back hatch of the car, and had us help her toss the contents off the hill. I heaved the ceramic tops of toilet bowls, moldering boxes of old National Geographic magazines, and a box of rusted lighting fixtures.
Lewis pointed to the sign on the tree so our mother would see.
“You’re too young, and I’m too foreign to get in trouble,” she told us. “We’re the perfect team,” she assured us as glossy photos of African elephants, South American jungles, and outer space fluttered down the gorge.
At the bottom of the ravine, there was a small path that ran along the river. Lewis and I had walked it many times. It was another place where we went to shoot off fireworks. Lewis taught me how to lick my finger and pass it back and forth through the Zippo’s flame. It was there we’d watched whistlers shoot off orange into the night and we swore the sparks floated downstream on the water.
It was that trail Lewis would bring me to three nights later. He led the way without telling me why we were walking. The water was brown but still clear enough to see the waving algae coating the rocks, rounded and resting on each other under the surface. Kingbirds and finches flew from tree to tree in the canopy over our heads. Some of the trees shot out of the ravine at odd angles, searching for light.
; “I found something,” Lewis kept telling me when I asked where we were going.
He led me between the side of the ravine and the winding river. I knew we’d passed the strip mall parking lot from the industrial dumpsters on the upper edge of the hillside. We went another few miles until I wasn’t sure what street we would have found if we climbed the hill.
It was getting dark when Lewis said, “Let’s climb up here.” He pointed to a small water runoff cut into the slope of the ravine. He started up first. His feet kicked scree and clumps of dirt onto me. After fifty feet of climbing we had to use the tree branches to pull ourselves up the rest of the way, from branch to branch until the grade wasn’t so steep and it curved slowly into a wooded area. “Crouch down.” Lewis was now running ahead of me with his body bent over his legs like he was falling. I did the same thing as best I could but fell twice. I followed him along the lip of the ravine until he dived into a pile of leaves ahead of him. “Down,” he said, and I dived in after him.
We army-crawled another twenty feet until we came to the back of a house closer to the road. The porch light shone on the yard. The porch was covered in cords of wood and black and white garbage bags heaped on top of each other. There were wooden pallets strewn across the yard loaded with mounds of old plastic toys, reams of used and moldering papers, TV antennas, and ironing boards.
Then I saw the blue Suburban.
Lewis grabbed my wrist so I couldn’t slip back down the hill. I hunkered lower into the dirt slope behind the house. “I saw his car when I was biking home the other day and followed him here. I saw the river ran behind his house and I knew we could find it from the trail.”
“Okay, now can we get out of here?”
“Wait. I’ve got to show you something.”
We army-crawled the crescent moon-shaped swath of Tiny’s backyard.
“Here. Come here,” Lewis called. Fifty yards from the house, his yard started sloping into the ravine, and we rested our stomachs on the lip of the decline. There was a clearing in the junk piles and a straightaway to Tiny’s back porch.
