Tiny Americans

by Devin Murphy

  As soon as the bus turned out of sight I felt better. Somehow lighter. I watched the lights out the window for the first leg of the trip. I’m not even sure I was thinking of anything all the way through Erie and onto Cleveland, where the interstate did this crazy ninety-degree left turn right in the middle of the city. The bus climbed an elevated byway, and I looked down at the stadiums and city buildings and felt the full magnitude of the trip I was on and who I was going to see come crashing down on me again.

  When my father left us, he returned west to the mountains of Montana where he grew up. I didn’t know it at the time, but my mother was damn near drinking herself to death. My father had been trying to keep up with her, but slammed on the brakes and peeled off from our family in what he claimed was a panicked attempt to save himself. Since then, the West has always been looming in the distance as a place you could disappear, or reinvent yourself, or whatever it was he had done. He had been sending me weekly letters since he left, and though I never wrote him back, I allowed them to construct some sort of life for him, that I always longed for myself.

  I tried to think like I was going to glimpse some new place for my life on that sixty-three-hour bus ride. But on the bus, a dreadful tiredness set in as we passed through Davenport and Des Moines, Iowa; Omaha and Grand Island, Nebraska. I kept thinking of the man who left us. Of the shed full of fireworks and books he left behind. How I’d burned through both and felt no closer to him. I kept feeling more and more anxious. I went to dig out my list of applications from my bag to have something to read and saw they’d been rearranged. My file of military enlistment forms was missing. All that was left was the navy form, which I had taken out and put with the college applications I intended to throw away. I remembered my mother going through my bag back at the station and I felt a sudden fury with her for trying to steer my life, like she’d done such a good job with her own. It made me want to escape from my family and never make a decision to please another person again as long as I lived.

  So, in Cheyenne, Wyoming, still furious, I got off the bus, and instead of getting on the transfer, I walked through the snow and dark and checked into a Motel 6 off the highway. I can’t explain exactly why I did this, but I remember feeling like I was far enough away from my mother and not yet close enough to my father that I could really think about what I wanted to do for myself without their influence. I was feeling brave as I tossed my bag next to the bed, but that passed as soon as I sat down and realized my bus had probably already left.

  I spent that night and all the next day in my room watching TV. Sort of scared of the world outside the door. Sort of feeling a bit crazy for what I’d done. I called my mom and told her but felt immediately ashamed of seeing myself as some sort of coward. Maybe for not going on with the trip. Or not wanting to go back. Not wanting to face anyone.

  “Oh, Lewis,” she said. “Just come home then. Get the next bus and come on home.”

  But the next morning, instead of getting on the bus I walked around the town. When I got back to the motel and paid for another night, there was a message from my mom.

  “Your father will come get you. Tell him exactly where you are. He’ll drive out.”

  I called her back and told her no. I didn’t want that. I’d get a bus home. But I didn’t plan on doing that either. I stayed in the motel and the next morning wandered the town and ended up in the local library to get out of the cold. I stayed inside and started looking at the newspaper rack and in the locals section I started reading the job ads.

  That’s where I found the ad for doing ranch work off Dead Hawk Highway.

  Joe, the ranch manager, had posted a vague description of the work in the newspaper and I was the first person to call. He drove down to meet me. After we talked, he made a few background-check phone calls using my social security number and then hired me on the spot. Part of me wondered if he felt sorry for me, or knew I was in need of some sort of help. Whatever his motive, he drove me to a Girl Scouts ranch. The job offered a cabin to live in, which gave me someplace to spend my time until I figured out what to do with myself, or turned eighteen and could sign away my own fate.

  When I first arrived and started working at the ranch, I spent my time off staring out my cabin windows, absorbing the white loneliness of that mountain field. It was too cold to go anywhere even if I had a car, and that trapped feeling got me so cooped up, I longed to wander off on the snow-covered mountainside and disappear. After I’d called my mother to tell her what I was doing, but not where I was, she told me she’d take care of my diploma. The only thing in the cabin to occupy me was a bunch of old books about how to be an outdoorsman that categorized all the trees and animals.

  There was a book called Pertaining to Sparrows written by a woman who must have loved those birds more than anything else in the world. She wrote about the sparrows’ predators as if she were afraid of such birds herself. She described a small falcon called a kestrel, with its rusty blue-gray cap and lightly spotted breasts, and the way it beat its wings before swooping down on smaller birds or insects, making a shrill killy-killy-killy noise. There were other books that spoke of the migration cycles and showed pictures of Steller’s jays, purple martins, rock wrens, goldfinches, and grackles. I sat looking out that frozen window trying to imagine all those birds returning, calling to each other through the canopy of the subalpine forest. Shee-e-e-e, C-Ough—C-Ough, killy-killy-killy.

  During the days, the only way I could settle down was to keep my hands busy, and keep my mind focused on plowing the road, or cleaning the facilities center. Then we started rewiring the electricity in the camper cabins, installing a new furnace for the activities center, building new partitions for the horse barn, and by May, I had passed the dregs of winter immersing myself in any project Joe had for us. If I was lucky, I would have worked hard enough during the day to be exhausted enough to sit contently on the deck at night. I could ease back into the rocking chair and let the night settle around me—listen to the new language of daily work, silence, and the wind carrying the sounds of life off the mountain.

  In the summer, the older Girl Scouts kicked out the screens of their bunkhouse at night and wandered the open fields at the back part of the ranch. They often walked down the dirt road my cabin was on to get to the horse pasture. I could see them in the dark. They moved like timid deer—taking quick dashes ten yards at a time and stopping to assess the night around them. They betrayed themselves by laughing when one bumped into the other. I kept my porch light off so I could see the stars. The girls never paid attention to my cabin tucked along the tree line or me sitting on the deck as they lined up along the fence of the pasture, stepping on the first plank to lean over the top and coo to the horses. They waved carrots and apples they hoarded from the mess hall. I liked watching them—the slow saunter of the horses approaching and nuzzling the girls; their movements breaking the stillness of the night, fireflies touching the space around them like thin blue flames.

  By morning, the girls made their way back to their bunks, and the horses were slick with dew and honey-colored in the pasture. The bear grass bloomed like fists of light pounding up the hillside, and by afternoon, rainstorms darkened the sky and struck the ground with lightning before blowing over and leaving a calm I have only felt in the mountains.

  My boss, Joe, rented the horses from an outfit called Sombrero that let them free-range in the mountains during the fall and winter. The horses were all starved and half-wild by spring, when they came to the Girl Scouts ranch. Joe had us wait by the horse trailers when they arrived to send back the ones we thought were too sick. If we could fit a dime between its protruding ribs we wouldn’t let it off the trailer. The ones we kept had to spend two weeks being retrained by the wrangler girls.

  So when a wrangler called first thing in the morning from the stable and said an old horse had died, Joe said, “You fellas misjudged one,” and we had to go out in the rain to dispose of the dead horse before the campers saw it.

 
Joe drove us to the pasture. The pasture ran along an incline with a large cup of earth surrounded by lodgepole pines with rainwater pooling over the roots. My coworker Kurt said that later in the summer the rain washes away the topsoil down to the clay, “and the clay gets slicker than snot.”

  Kurt and I took the tractor into the pasture. It was slow going—the wheels hardly caught in the mud. In the trees lay a dark brown quarter horse. Its head sloped downward enough to show a row of yellow headstone-shaped teeth embedded in the gums. Its unfurled tongue lay on the ground like a dull pink ladle.

  “We’d be better off letting the mud swallow the damn thing,” Kurt yelled over the engine noise.

  The other horses were in the open part of the pasture. But the one they called “All-But” watched us through the trees. “All-But” had everything but one eye. The eye he had was a piercing cloudy blue. That blue eye was on us as Kurt tied a sheepshank knot to bind the dead horse’s back legs together. He hooked a chain to the knotted rope and looped the chain on the back of the tractor where I stood as Kurt drove. He eased the tractor forward slowly so he wouldn’t tear off the legs. When the chain was taut, he leaned on the gas, and the old horse pivoted from the pot of earth it died in. Once we got it out of the trees it slid easily over the wet mud. As it dragged over jagged rocks, I noticed chunks of the hide and meaty patches of the horse’s side were left behind it. Joe held the gate open for us so none of the other horses could get out.

  “Drag it as far into the woods as you can, and toss some brush cover over it,” Joe said. He had on a mesh baseball cap and the beads of rain ran down the back of his neck. The cold did nothing to change his posture or his directness. He seemed like he’d done everything a hundred times. I admired this about him. Kurt drove past the horse barn, toward the woods, away from the little girls’ cabins.

  We untied it in the woods at the end of the camp’s property. The hide had been scraped raw, and the last ten yards of mud we moved it through were blood-smeared. This high up, there was too much bedrock to bury it, so we used jigsaws to cut away at the surrounding trees’ lowest branches and piled them over the horse until we could no longer see how mangled it was. Part of me felt we should have lit the pile on fire.

  I rode on the back of the tractor as we returned the way we came. The rain washed the copper-red blood marks and clumps of horse hair away from the trail. There were already turkey vultures flying in wide spirals above the slope we left the horse on, the black finger of their beaks tracing the mountainside. The birds cut through the sky like they were scrolling something on the mountain’s thermal updrafts—a language of nature’s precision, its cycles of wind, that I was hoping would tell me how to start my life over.

  The rattlesnakes on the mountain hide in the tall buffalo grass. When Joe hired me, he told me I was to kill them with a shovel and bury the heads right away. “Heads still bite,” he said. “Them things probably won’t kill you, but one of them little girls would be in real trouble. They don’t have the bone density to deal with something like that.”

  Joe’s from Oklahoma and he talked in short, slow clumps of dialect-ridden words I had a hard time understanding. His job came with a large house that sits off Dead Hawk Highway at the start of the ranch. His wife homeschooled their four beefy-looking kids. The kids followed us around when we worked in the barn. I’d seen the whole lot of them stand contentedly silent without talking for hours as we worked. It was actually comforting to be around, like they had something figured out that I hadn’t yet.

  Kurt is a master electrician who had worked on and off again with Joe for years. Kurt was in his midforties, had a sand-colored mustache and splotchy, beef-liver-colored cheeks. Joe told us what to do, and Kurt helped me do it right, half-jokingly calling me a “puny bitch of a man” every time I screwed something up.

  “I’m from Cackalacky,” Kurt told me when we first met. I had never heard the word, and he could see that on my face. “North Carolina,” he said. When he gave me my first tour of the ranch, he showed me everywhere I could “take a dump.”

  He drove by a caravan full of campers pulling into one of the winterized group cabins. Skinny-legged girls piled out and started unsynchronized stretching routines before hauling out sleeping bags and plastic coolers. There was a mother barking orders while she patrolled the grounds where Kurt had shoveled and piled firewood. One of the little girls slipped on the ice and took a pretty bad fall. Kurt stopped the truck. He got out and helped the girl up. She smiled at something he said as he guided her over to the group mother. He was smiling as he got back into the truck.

  “There’s a few groups that visit in the winter. But most of the kids get dropped off in the summer on Friday afternoons by their parents and stay in the cabins for a week. They get marched around by camp counselors from activity to activity. Wait till summer. All you’ll see is girls, girls, girls, in short-short-shorts. They all wear these little identical sashes, and believe me, they can break some shit. You’ll be amazed at the damage those little girls can do, and we’ve got to go around fixing it. And here are the two rules you’ve got to follow: Knock and then pound on the door, yelling ‘Maintenance’ every time you have to go in a building so you don’t get fired for walking in on them. You’ve got to do that even though you’re there to fix clogged toilets and broken sinks, chase out bull snakes, or do whatever else you can to chase off the wilderness so they can play camper. And the biggest rule to abide by is one that I just broke: anywhere there are little girls, you better get your man berries somewhere else. We ruin the campground facade.”

  The three of us make up the whole work crew of the 750-acre ranch. We do the work to layer a nice face on a hard mountainside. The ranch used to be called Dead Hawk Ranch when an oilman used it for hunting, then he sold it to the Girl Scouts, who named it Bright Sky.

  Kurt came to work every day wearing a mixture of brown or dull-green, sand-colored camouflage clothing. At first I thought he was some innocuous thug, but on his lunch breaks he studies Mandarin, which will be his seventh language. “I get that stuff,” he told me. “Languages come easy to me.”

  Once, while we were eating lunch together I asked him what branch of the service he had been in.

  “Contractor.”

  “Oh, you ran electricity for support buildings or something?”

  “No, contracting—like soldiering. I was soldiering. I was an interpreter.”

  “When was the last time you were deployed?”

  “A year ago.”

  “I bet you’re happy to be away from that.”

  “I miss parts of it,” he said. “Liked the work. Commute sucked.”

  “Where’d you get your military training from?”

  “I’d rather not talk about that,” Kurt said, and started slowly crunching on his chips.

  His forearm had two dark blue bands tattooed into it. After a long beat of silence I asked him what the tattoos were all about.

  “They mean something different to everyone,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said. We ate again in silence. “You like it here, then?” I finally asked.

  “Yeah. I like working outside. Doing something different all the time’s nice too. I like seeing all these little girls having a great time. They get to have fun here. I like that. Seems important.”

  On an early June night Joe’s truck horn woke me at three in the morning. I stumbled out of bed in time to see Kurt sprinting out of the truck and running toward my cabin. “Lewis. Lewis—wake up. One of the girls’ cabins is on fire,” he said. I put my pants, boots, and Buffalo Bills baseball cap on and ran outside with him and jumped in the back. As Joe pulled out of the driveway the truck tossed up a rooster tail of dirt rising behind us in the dark.

  As Joe’s truck got close to the crest of the hill, we could already see a giant plume of smoke towering upward. We were the first help to arrive and saw the camp director standing in front of a mountain of flames waving for us to hurry. A group of pajama-clad girls lingere
d in the trees in front of the burning cabin. Three counselors were each carrying a coughing little girl out of the front door.

  Kurt ran toward them.

  “We’re missing one more,” one of the counselors called to us.

  Then one girl broke out of the back door of the burning cabin. Her nightgown had ignited from the bottom hem and flames rode up her backside, chewing at her hamstrings and lower back. The tips of her long hair curled up in red cinders and puffed into flame. She ran toward the back woods emitting this impossibly high-pitched primal scream.

  The sound of her voice hummed in my bones.

  Joe sprinted toward her, tackled her, and rolled over her to smother the fire beneath his body.

  There was a little cloud of smoke around Joe’s shoulders as he carried the girl to the field. “Get me some blankets,” he yelled to us.

  I ran into the next cabin, which had been evacuated, yelled, “Maintenance” out of habit, and pulled blankets off the first two empty bunks. When I got back to Joe, Kurt was staring at the burned girl. Joe and I wrapped the girl in the blankets. She didn’t make a sound cradled in Joe’s giant arms, but the smell of damp, burned skin made me dry heave. When the firefighters arrived I helped them find the hookups to the water systems for the fire engine.

  The helicopter that arrived tilted its nose toward the high grasses to search for a place to put down that was clear of the treetops and fire’s reach. It made about a dozen circular passes overhead.

  “Land already,” Joe yelled, as the helicopter tentatively descended between the dark trees. We loaded the burned girl into the helicopter. Then I watched it lift up and fade away in the dark valley below us, the red tail rotor light winking on and off until it curved behind a distant mountain. Joe and I loaded three other girls into ambulances. Kurt was standing in front of the husk of the cabin, watching it burn. The firefighters ran hoses so they were spraying the cabin from two sides, which began to taper the flames.