by Devin Murphy
It took me a moment to realize that what he wanted to show me was right next to him and not in the yard. There was a large brown tarp spread out over the ground. Lewis kneeled next to it and yanked it back, letting it fall loose behind him. There must have been two hundred empty soda and beer cans and liquor bottles. They were tucked close to each other at an angle facing Tiny’s house. Each bottle was loaded with various sizes of larger fireworks. The whole thing looked like an organ in some hobo church.
“Jesus!”
Lewis took a key from his pocket and let it dangle in front of me. “It’s the key to dad’s fireworks storage unit I stole. I’ve been setting up for the last three nights.” He crawled below the firework organ and rooted around behind a bush. When he came back, he had his bow and four arrows in his right hand, and in his left was one of Mom’s handheld blowtorches. I’d seen her cut through strips of steel with it.
“We’re going to get him!” Lewis said.
“What does that mean?” I asked. Lewis started adjusting the trajectory of the fireworks the tarp had misaligned. “This isn’t funny.”
“You going to be a waste of skin your whole life?” Lewis spat at me. There was a wild and quick anger in his voice when he spoke. “We have to do this,” he said.
“Why?”
“Our mother let other men touch her,” Lewis said, pointing the charred chrome end of the torch at me.
“She didn’t let Tiny touch her,” I said.
“No, Dad told me,” he said.
“Dad wasn’t there.”
“No. He told me that before he moved. He said, ‘Your mother let other men touch her.’” The words oozed out like a yeasty blood clot that had been sealed away until now. Lewis’s eyes were welling up, and he was gnashing his teeth so the tendons in his neck were popping.
“What would Dad do if he saw what Tiny did?” he asked.
I’m not sure what else we whispered to each other in the dark, his sternness pushing through my fear, until he convinced me to stand twenty yards away from him with the bow and arrow. On his mark, I set the forked tail of the arrow against the bow’s string and drew it back. Lewis wanted me to shoot it at Tiny’s back door. In both our minds it was a clean shot that resounded through the house and left the arrow shaking at the end. But when I let it go, the string slapped a slice of my forearm skin away and the arrow wobbled ten yards ahead of me and landed sideways.
“Try again,” Lewis whisper-yelled as I dropped to my knees and realized how bad the cut on my inner forearm hurt.
After I missed with two more arrows, I watched as Lewis threw a rock against Tiny’s porch. Then he threw another, and a third. On the fifth stone, the back door opened and Tiny walked out. He was shirtless and wasn’t wearing glasses. I fell forward on my chest trying as hard as I could to blend into the ground.
The first firework shot red and orange out of the woods and went over Tiny’s house. Lewis was running the blue-lit end of the blowtorch over the tops of all the bottles. The wicks were simmering orange before they ignited, and firework after firework started bombarding Tiny’s house. The forest sounded like an angry god. Pop-pop-pop. Echoes rebounding. Pop-pop-pop. Sizzling streaks of fire cut the gray smoke. Each breath pulled in the scent of burned powder, which scratched the back of my throat. Missiles of color exploded and slowly fell over one another. White, yellow, and red, and each large explosion was broken by a dozen whistlers and Roman candles raining onto Tiny. Smoke and bursts of orange sparks clouded my vision, but I could still see Lewis’s white eyes, flared nostrils, and corded neck. His feet were planted wide apart, and he appeared to tremble either from nerves or the strange lights splintering the dark.
Tiny stood unflinching on the porch as an arsenal was going off all around him. Lewis was dancing around the firework organ, wholly caught up in the wondrousness of his fiery creation. I could see him moving through the trails of smoke rising in the darkened woods.
Tiny didn’t look scared as much as frozen. A giant firework could have hit him in the head and he wouldn’t have moved. Lewis’s aim sent explosions on and right before the porch, and whistlers were bounding off the house and ricocheting off the roof. We might kill him or burn down his house, I thought. Lewis danced as if that was exactly what he had come to do.
My brother made a guttural roaring ahaa sound as the last of the fireworks were shooting off, and I saw Tiny’s head snap toward Lewis, as if he’d just woken up. Tiny took one step forward and then was off the porch and running. The echo of the fireworks were drowned out by my thrashing heartbeat hammering in my ears. I yelled for Lewis, or, I tried to yell. I hoped I’d given some beat of warning as I grabbed the bow and the last arrow and sprinted directionless back into the dark woods to save myself.
Tiny chased us down the gorge to the river. I heard him crashing downhill behind us—heavy breaths and sticks breaking. My clothes kept catching and tearing on branches and a bramble bush scratched the right side of my face. Lewis passed me as we ran down the ravine and was moving so quickly he couldn’t stop and he launched himself into the river—splashing and running across the rounded-smooth rocks, struggling toward the other side. I turned in time to run along the trail on the bank. Behind me, I heard an even louder splash. I jumped off the trail and started climbing up the ravine wall, lost a shoe, and kept pulling myself up between the trees—moving branch by branch, some breaking and splintering pieces of bark taking scraps of skin from my hand. I tucked in beside a tree and looked down.
Tiny was in the water. He lumbered forward, and his right leg rolled on a rock and he slipped. The river consumed his gigantic body. When he came back up he made a wild gasping sound. Lewis’s shadow was climbing up the other side of the hill in the trees and brush. My heart was pounding, and I hid farther behind the tree and watched as Tiny slowly spun around in the water. I could make out every detail of his body in the moonlight, the matted-down hair up his arms and across his pillar-size chest, tucking under that epic, now dripping beard.
“I hate you!” I heard Lewis scream from the opposite hillside.
Tiny turned toward Lewis’s side of the ravine. I was too petrified to move in case he would see me.
“I hate you!” Lewis’s voice rang out again.
Lewis sounded crazy with meanness. Tiny started walking upstream, his legs lumbering against the soft current. He stumbled forward but set his feet to hold himself upright. I had no idea what he would do if he caught one of us and the mystery of what was in his head made my stomach gurgle up into my throat. I could taste the words our father had said to Lewis, and suddenly understood why he looked so blank and broken as our father pulled out of our driveway to leave. Your mother let other men touch her. My shoulder blades dug farther into the tree, and for a moment, I was overwhelmed by the very real sense that I might be terrified for the rest of my life.
I turned so the tree was still hiding most of my body. My chest leaned into the knotted folds of bark, and I kept an arm ringed around it as I stepped out of its shadow.
I laced in my last arrow, held the bow in front of me, and pulled the string back.
“I hate you!” I squeezed out of my locked chest as the taut string snapped loose from my hand.
The arrow wobbled loose ahead of me but hit a sapling and was lost in the brush before it made it to the river.
Tiny turned up toward me, and through the dark I saw his wet hair against his forehead. He was outlandish and hulking as he scanned the hillside.
Lewis screamed again.
Tiny turned toward him.
I screamed.
Lewis and I echoed each other as Tiny stood in the water and listened to the banks yelling at him.
In the water, Tiny looked mystified by the strangeness of what was happening. Part of me felt bad for him.
I stopped screaming. Lewis did not.
Lewis screamed in short staccato-popping rhythms the same phrase over and over again. He was showing me how to purge everything that was bottled up, and
having also screamed I knew how it felt, but Lewis was still full of so much more than I could comprehend.
It was Lewis who scared me most when I turned back up the hillside, digging into the dirt with my fingers and the tip of the bow. The dirt was cool and the pine needles on the ground pricked the outer layers of my skin. Every few steps I slipped as the dirt ravine wall got steeper and I reached for a root or branch to pull myself up.
There was no moon as I breached the gulch, just a tree-lined street that I had never been on and did not know where it led. I took a right and ran over the smooth blacktop. I ran as far as I could and then started walking when I realized the street no longer followed the river. I kept walking toward the direction I thought our house was, looking for anything that was familiar. But all the houses seemed different to me in the dark than any of the ones I stopped in front of and collected trash with my mother. I tried to look into all the darkened windows as I walked the streets until morning, feeling the tears in my clothes and scrapes in my skin as if I was molting something—shedding who I had been.
4
Catrin Thurber, 1986
Years ago, before things got really bad, Terrance skipped work on a Wednesday and we took the kids to Wendt Beach on Lake Erie. We must not have paid attention to the weather, as it was one of those cool, gray days, with a low sky, that randomly break up the warm summer months. The wind at the far end of the beach was picking up plumes of sand that looked like giant tan feathers. The feathers dissolved in the distance and came blowing down the empty strand, scrubbing our faces, so we had to squint and walk with our heads down. The waves were only slowly lapping at the shore early that morning, but it looked like they had been pounding in overnight and had washed a large swath of driftwood all the way up the beach against the high grass dunes.
Jamie wanted to go home immediately, but the boys were already chasing each other along the shore. Terrance and I spread out one blanket and wrapped a larger one over our heads and shoulders with Jamie tucked in between us.
Lewis and Connor were running back toward us and falling into the wind. Their shaggy hair was pulled back off their heads and shimmying wildly. Lewis tripped and dug his hands into the sand to crawl forward. They were laughing, and Jamie started laughing too when Terrance told her, “You’ve got a great seat to watch your brothers blow away.”
When the boys reached us, they crawled under our blanket. Connor was sitting on my lap. Lewis was draped across Jamie and Terrance, and his feet were touching mine. We tucked the blanket in under each of us so that it draped over our heads like a tent.
“I don’t think this wind is ever going to stop,” Jamie said.
“I can do a rain dance if you want something else to happen,” Lewis said.
The wind sounded hollow, and we all stopped talking as if we’d mutually decided to sit and listen. We were the only people on the beach, but the wind searched for us, and it wrapped that blanket tight around our bodies as if we were the only people in the world.
Later in the morning, when the wind died down, I had Terrance go back to our station wagon and get some of our tools. He brought three hammers, a box of six-inch nails, and a screw gun with screws. We each made a pile by pulling gnarled logs and branches off the sand drifts toward the middle of the beach. Each arthritic piece was smooth, water-varnished, and a soft brown with a deep reddish brown at the knots. We worked on one pile at a time, nailing and screwing the driftwood logs together, making tripods and four-corner bases by lining up whatever joints we could. From there we built up and outward with the thinner branches until it got top-heavy, tipped, and resettled. Then we kept adding more knotted wood, binding the random scraps until the logs bloomed up like an ancient tree.
We worked our way from pile to pile down the beach making the sculptures. Terrance was showing Connor how to carve shapes into the wood with the hammer’s claw. Jamie and Lewis pushed one of the wood sculptures over. It caught in the sand and stood there in a different shape. Then they pushed it over again and again until it was in the lake. It was buoyant and bobbed on the surface.
When it got warmer that afternoon the boys went in the water. They leaned against the floating wood and started kicking their legs to push it farther out.
“Boys, that’s far enough,” I yelled to them. Connor dropped off the log and swam back with those wild overhead strokes that always exhausted him. Lewis kept kicking the wood tangle in a slow arc back to shore.
Connor got out, his suit matted to his skinny legs. “I’ll dry myself off,” he said, and spun himself around in quick circles, his arms flailed out. “I twirl—I twirl,” he yelled.
When Lewis swam ashore, Terrance walked toward the boys with a towel but they started running away. Their father chased them among our sculptures, which looked like giant freaky spiders climbing out of the surf. They weaved between them and called to me and Jamie to help, which we did, and all of us chased one another through the obstacles we’d made. We yelled one another’s names until our voices settled on the blowing sand and were carried away on the wind.
5
Lewis Thurber, 1986
My mom stood in the middle of the Greyhound station. She kept checking that the departure time hadn’t changed. My ticket was all the way to Kalispell, Montana, where I would call my father from a pay phone and he’d come get me. He’d been writing and asking me to come visit him for years. And now there had been some trouble between me and my mother. Me and the people at school. Everyone wanting to shape my life. In my bag I had a stack of college applications my guidance counselor forced on me because to everyone’s astonishment I’d aced the verbal SAT section. Prior to that no one thought much of my grades or potential. They didn’t know about the storage unit of old books I grew up reading. But in my bag I also had enlistment papers for all four branches of the military. I knew my mother wouldn’t sign any one of them and I thought perhaps I could get my long-lost father to do so.
My mom was so nervous seeing me off she couldn’t stop blabbering. She talked so much I didn’t really think to tell her how I was feeling. Maybe that’s an excuse though. I knew I hadn’t been easy on her. That I’d been giving her a tough time lately. I didn’t tell her I was terrified of going to Montana. Of seeing my father.
We waited in the black bucket chairs with the pay-by-the-quarter TVs attached.
“When you went to kindergarten you took the bus to school,” she said. She reached over and held my hand. “The bus driver at the time was a grandfather type named George, who was famous for yanking loose baby teeth from the kids he picked up. Apparently, everyone knew he did this, and any kid with a suspect tooth would open their mouths and present it to him as they stepped onto his bus.
“‘What about this one,’ they’d choke out with their mouths opened wide. ‘Hummm, we’ll let that one set for a while more,’ George would say, unless the tooth was ready. Then, he’d reach his fat fingers into those kids’ mouths, feeling for the exposed socket beneath the roots, and yank them out.
“‘A nice one you got here,’ he told them, and held it up for the child to inspect.
“When I first heard about George I imagined some total creep with a pile of baby teeth in his apartment and thought someone should call the police on him. I asked a woman who stood with me in the morning with her kids about him.
“‘Oh, George is a harmless old sweetheart. He even has a paper towel roll next to his seat so these kids can sop up their blood, which I guess is kind of gross,’ that lady said.
“George’s bus wheezed to a stop at our corner, and I watched you march up the stairs, and like that, you were gone for the day, already living your own life, in a world where the bus driver pulls teeth, and there are any number of unaccountable oddities in wait for you. God, I was so scared for you then.”
I looked over and saw her face was blotchy and red. She must have felt a warmth flushing up her neck as her fingers kept tapping at her throat. Her eyes kept blinking the way she did when she was trying n
ot to cry.
“I feel the same way now,” she said.
She had my hand, and I know she was being honest, which pierced me somehow, and I felt everything that was messy or hurt between us well up in me. I’d been so scared about seeing my father that I let my guard down around my mother, who I saw all the time. I turned away from her because I felt exposed and raw in the face of how much love she still had for me.
“Every day you got on that bus I’d say some version of a prayer, or at least a small meditation, where I asked the oddities to be kind to my kid until I could see you again. I feel like asking that now.”
I had to go wash my face in the bathroom after she told me this, and when I took a minute to think of how she must be feeling, with me starting to really go away from her in life, it felt like she had set some deep hook in me, and I didn’t like it. I was already full of such corroded hooks.
When I walked back to where she was sitting, she was rifling through my bag.
“Mom.”
“Making sure you packed everything you need. Underwear and all that.”
“I did.”
“Well. I’m your mother. I’m going to mother you right till you get on the bus.”
And she did. She was glued to my side and kept holding my hand and squeezing my shoulder.
When I finally hugged her and marched up the wheel well onto the bus, I sat by the window facing her. She stood without moving behind the big bus station window. Watching her, I remembered how we went to Kmart when I was little and she bought me a twenty-eight-inch aluminum Easton baseball bat. Then we went to the baseball diamond at the park. She pitched our one ball to me, and if I hit it she’d run after it and back to the mound. If I missed she’d run back to the backstop and get the ball. Our game mostly entailed her running, and she seemed to enjoy it as much as I did. I waved as the bus pulled away. I could see she was still trying not to cry and felt all her heavy energy radiating out to me.
