Tiny Americans

by Devin Murphy

  Terrance went to see what he had caught in the critter cages he’d set up—his grandfather had taught him to trap, too. When he found a baby raccoon in one of the cages, the animal was swaying back and forth and climbing upside down in a frenzied motion of circles. It was making high-pitched staccato squeaks like an engine stuck in some high gear. Terrance opened the cage to release it, and as it scurried into the trees he hoped he’d never see it again.

  Walking back to the cabin, he heard Helen screaming on the porch. From that morning, all through the next month, when Terrance was working with his bones in the woods, he heard her screaming. It became a part of her morning calisthenics. Terrance knew it frightened all the animals in the valley. He tried not to let it bother him. He focused on the bone statue he was building. The creature was eight feet high and had 154 bones, from nine different animals.

  He’d started drawing where the bones would go to support the skeleton when he was in the hospital dreaming his own bones back to life. He had since studied charts of the human skeleton. At the taxidermy shop in town, he studied the charts of animal bones. He had learned how museums framed their skeletons, but he wanted his sculpture to be more organic, the way Catrin’s steel sculptures always looked like they were stemming from the earth they stood on. He used a papier-mâché system with plaster and strips of old white sheets he bought at a local Salvation Army. He dipped the strips of sheet in a five-gallon bucket of plaster and used the strips to make joints that held the bones. When the plaster dried he wound the joints tighter with thin rope or chicken wire for extra support.

  For the bone creature’s hands, he used six-point mule deer antlers. The hands connected to the metacarpal bones of a horse, bound by plaster at the elbow joints to a horse femur. The bulbous end of the femur, where the stifle joint had connected, was stuck into the groove of a moose’s shoulder plate.

  The spine was the hardest part. He let the river clean away the tendons from all the skeletons he had, so the individual vertebrae fell apart from each other. He fed the length of a steel rod through a garden hose and wove the tip of the hose through each open ringlet of spine. For ribs, he connected the humerus and ulna bones of wild turkeys and kept them bent in at the joint like curled fingers. The statue had six ribs on each side, and there was enough room between rib tips for him to kneel between and set the vertebra bones.

  Helen did not know what he was doing. It seemed important that she not know. This was his own thing. A project that could keep him straight even while she was slipping. It kept him out in the fresh air, where he felt healthy and alive.

  The buffalo skull with the black bear’s jaw melded to it was the last thing for him to mount on the sculpture. He had to hook a wire from the top of the skull to each shoulder to keep it on steady. Once it was secure, he brushed off the new snow, stepped back from it and looked up at what he had made.

  It looked like a monster emboldened to dance among the trees. He thought about what the muscles of the animal he’d created would look like and how they would curve around the bones as he had them laid out. None of it seemed like something a god would sit down and take the time to figure out. As he walked around it, he wondered what a blue shock would do for the bone marionette he’d created. He considered burying his settlement money right underneath it.

  He heard Helen screaming from the deck of the cabin. He sat in the snow at the base of the sculpture and looked at its right foot. He worked his way up, one bone at a time, making sure he had forgotten nothing. He studied the linkage of bones. He shut his eyes and let his mind run over the bones he’d felt in his own body.

  Helen screamed again. He let her dirge stretch out and disappear across the valley of his mind. If they were lucky, this place would let them purge his teal-blue current and her deep sadness into the woods. The woods could absorb her wanting children. The woods could absorb the limbo of regret over the kind of father he had been and the broken connections to his own three children.

  He wanted to help her. He wondered if his three distant children would ever forgive him for leaving. Maybe they would come out for the summers with whatever kids they might have and give Helen a makeshift family. He would write them this week and tell all three about the settlement money. How he could pay for them to come. How he could send them each a third. They could forgive him. He could forgive himself. They could get horses. There could be dogs. There was life yet. He was constructing a life deep in the forest. It was new life from old life—old bones. That was something he could do for her. He could scramble what they had and lay it at her feet until it made a family and she felt she had something to care for, and sleeping could have mercy on her.

  On the way back to the cabin he saw Helen’s footprints in the freshly fallen snow. He followed them out of the woods. In the clearing, they had been windswept and disappeared.

  He kicked the clumps of snow off his boots by slapping them against the porch banister. Inside the cabin the bedroom door was open. She wasn’t in bed. Under the bed in a shoebox were Polaroids of his old life with his children. Some nights when he could not sleep he reached in and took one picture out at random and held it by the corner he had yanked it from the camera and shook it into focus. In the middle of those nights he would try to imagine himself back into the image, imagine pulling those children closer. He wanted to reach into the box now but he listened for bathroom noises. Helen had been taking multiple showers throughout the day lately. She’d once told him she needed a shower to fully wake her up and start her day. Now he was afraid she didn’t like what was happening and kept trying to start again.

  When he didn’t hear any water running, he walked to the bathroom, but the door was open. Fingernail clippings clung to the bottom of the wastebasket by the door. Half a dozen opaque crescents.

  At the front door her parka was still on the hook, and her boots, though wet, were still on the floor.

  “Helen,” he called out in the cabin. No one answered. He opened the front door and stepped onto the porch. The wide clearing extended in front of him to the forest sloping up the mountainside. The lone road cut a line through the center of the field where he’d plowed with his truck. “Helen.”

  At the far end of the snow-covered open space he saw a herd of mule deer moving along the wall of pines and larches. He followed their movements until he saw her. She was lying naked on her side with her back to him. He took the porch steps in one bound. The closer he got to where she was, the more the woods seemed to recede before becoming a solid wall of conifer trunks.

  A blank cloud of terror drained the color out of everything as he ran. As he got closer he saw how the light pooled between her shoulder blades. The deer were trying to move faster through the snow. For a moment he thought about running right past her and into the deeper woods, where he would be clear of her. Then he noticed the deep blue veins on her mid-thigh. They were dead-thing-colored, and that color blue filled his head, blanketing everything like the sky. His last steps were through snow up to his hips, and he lunged forward, crawling to her like a wolverine. The weight of his body pushed snow against her bare back, and he pulled her into his lap and arms, so she was facing him. Her hair was covered in frost. Her body shivered violently. The dark patch of her pubic hair puffed out against the white snow between her legs. She was limp and amoeba-like. He wanted to crack open his ribs and drape himself over her like a jacket. The deer were still marching along the line of trees. Their wet, sable eyes fixated on him leaning over her as if he were in some skewed nativity.

  “Helen!” he yelled into her face. The sound of her name fanned out. The deer all jumped, and he heard them crashing away. “Helen.” Her eyes were open wide like he’d scared her. Her head was cold when he put his hands against her and red where her cheek was resting in the snow. She looked like an alcoholic Eve—and though his first wife’s drinking sickened him, here Helen was beautiful if no less tragic. The last of the deer were passing them about fifty feet away.

  She watched him. Then
she looked beyond him into the woods.

  He lifted her, and she felt lighter than he expected, like part of her, the part he knew, had escaped into the deeper parts of the forest and was now gone.

  When he brought her inside, the cabin smelled like burned apples; it was warm compared to her skin against his arms. In the foyer, the creak and pop of the bones of the cabin settling in broke through the uninterrupted sound of her breathing against his shoulder.

  He put her in bed and wrapped the heavy blankets around her. He lay on the covers with his arm and leg over her to keep her warm. Her dark outline made him feel as if she were scratching out from under a thick layer of ice.

  “What were you doing in the snow?” he asked. “What were you thinking?” He no longer knew what to do with her, and it frightened him. He held her until he felt her body warming up. He wished he could tune in to what she was thinking like a radio and listen without her knowing, so he could understand what she needed from him.

  He went to the bathroom and started the bathtub running with warm water. There was a film of soap in the curve at the base that ringed the whole basin. He had not cleaned the cabin since his accident. He kept his fingers under the water to make sure it was warm but not hot, the way she liked it.

  He went back into the bedroom. He flung the blankets back and led her to the tub. He held her arm as she lifted herself over the tub wall and sat down. She leaned her head back until it was under the water, which was clear, and he looked at her naked body. He knew every part of it—had both longed for and hated it. He knew the cluster of freckles above the knob of her left ankle that disappeared when she had a tan. She dunked her head underwater again. When she popped back up, her eyes were raw, and he knew he couldn’t help her.

  He hated when she smoked but went to her purse and grabbed her lighter and cigarettes. He sat on the toilet next to the tub and put a cigarette in her mouth and lit it. She held it in her lips, and he watched the tip breathe red. Her knee was sticking out of the water, and he wanted to put his hand on it but didn’t. Her silence seemed like she was falling into some chasm he could not comprehend. He took the cigarette from her lips and put it back to her mouth when she wanted another drag.

  He had sat on that toilet with her leaning over him the time he lanced a cyst on his scalp. It had been there his whole life that he could remember, but in bed she kept running her hand over it and saying it was getting bigger. “I’m taking you to the doctor,” she’d say. “It’s a tumor!”

  She’d done that enough that he found himself running his fingers through his hair to find it, pushing the bump that felt like a hard pea under the skin. He held the tip of the needle under the flame from his Zippo lighter and jammed it into the bump until it scraped his skull. When he pulled out the needle and started to pinch the cyst, she sopped up what came out with a paper towel.

  “That’s gross,” she said. “It’s like black pus.”

  He squeezed and ran his thumb over the area where the bump had been until it felt like a tiny, deflated balloon. She held the paper towel in front of him and smiled because he had wanted to see what was inside. The darkened paper smelled pungent and human.

  He passed the cigarette back to her. She had used his toothbrushes, picked up their used condoms off the floor, stuck her finger in his ear, tickled his armpit, cried on his shoulder that she’d also hit and bit and screamed into. He remembered all those things; time was stacking them, and each left some impression on him because unlike his first wife, his children, those drinking days, he never forgot anything with Helen. Now the memory of her bluing skin somehow became linked to all his other bad memories, and he wondered if that was what her episodes were like, and if each was a new tributary, some minor river pulling them apart.

  As he sat on the toilet breathing in her smoke and steam, he felt truly powerless to help her, to find something he could do for her. He sat there breathing in the smoke, her naked body, and the memory of his own black blood.

  “So, what are we going to name it?” Helen asked, and pointed to the corner of the bathroom, toward the woods Terrance had been working in. Her voice made it sound like he had done it all for her.

  He looked down at her and thought maybe it was defeat that really brought people together. He stepped into the tub and sat behind her. He let the warm water fill the space between his clothes and skin and sagged down so she could lean against him and he could hold her up.

  9

  John Parks, 2000

  I had packed the Land Rover and Thule roof rack for an escape, a full break from the world, and while doing it, had imagined going without her. There were full blue water jugs and red plastic gasoline cans, a tent, mosquito net, folding chairs, tarps, rope, a rusty machete I’d gotten at the flea market, sleeping bags, books, maps, water filters, tools, mess kits, pots, a Coleman propane camp stove, and a lamp with a box of extra propane tanks. I had a telescope, rain and beach gear, dried and canned fruit, an ax, fishing poles, guidebooks for identifying fish, waders for surf fishing, and tackle boxes I’d slowly assembled, adding lures and weights from every gear shop across the county. There were liquor bottles and two ice chests. There was an air compressor to let air out of the tires so they would grip better in the soft sand, and then fill them up again for harder surfaces. I had winches, cables, binoculars—things I’d bought at REI, North Face, L.L.Bean, and West Marine. There was enough to start my own crisscrossing line around the globe. I was in full-blown daydream mode when Jamie came out into the garage and tossed a box of her favorite candy in the back, Mamba fruit chews, which she ordered by the case online.

  We crossed the border in San Luis, Arizona, and during our first several days of driving we passed soon-to-be ghost towns with their turquoise-, red-, and green-painted taquerias filling the air with the scent of fresh tortillas. We stopped at a roadside restaurant, sat on Naugahyde seats, and ate flank steak covered in hot mole sauce that we squeezed fresh limes over for breakfast. We bought Cokes from a faded red vending machine, and when we finished those, Jamie wanted an orange soda from the illuminated cooler behind the counter. She was thirsty from our dusty drive, during which we kept breathing in the fine dirt in the air until it crusted at the corners of our mouths. The woman behind the counter poured the soda into a plastic bag, put a straw in, and twisted the bag around the straw so she could keep the bottle for the deposit. Jamie drank from the sack of orange fluid like it was some kind of neon IV bag.

  After eating, Jamie drove and I watched each weedy road disappear into the shimmer of the surrounding desert. We drove in silence, passing acres of poor, red soil webbed with cracks and deep ridges full of long scratchy blades of grass that swayed, bent, and cast shadows, but were worthless to everything but stray horses. At the edge of the small towns on the map, we passed shacks made of scrap metal and rotting lumber with corrugated sheets of tin and frayed brown tarps for walls tucked away in the trees. Feral hounds dug in the ditches. Men with tooled leather cheeks and thick black mustaches scissor-trimmed into neat little tents for their upper lips, and old women with faces as etched and furrowed as the landscape drank something steaming hot out of aluminum cans in the blue morning light.

  I’d been careless with the water at the start of our trip and it gave me rotgut. When Jamie pulled over I dug little holes in the sand with the heel of my boot, squatted over them and left splatters of my own excrement along the road like sloppy cairns marking our way home. It was while squatting over one of those pits that I caught my wife staring at me from the driver’s seat. Her sharp gaze was leveled on my hands pinching at the double roll of flesh at my abdomen and the eggplant purple scarring running up my side.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Nothing.”

  I really looked at her then, and maybe it was the golden cast of the light narrowing her eyes, or maybe she was concerned by my frequent stops, but it felt like she was in some way disappointed in me.

  We kept driving south along asphalt and dirt path
s, then no roads whatsoever, stopping only when I felt sick again. I’d run off into the dark scrub brush that Jamie said looked like giant wooden spiders crawling over the dunes. In the hard, sunbaked sand everything was quiet, foreboding. When I was done I shut my eyes to feel the sun on my face and let the ticking of the radiator lead me back to Jamie.

  In the town of Guaymas, a group of boys were playing in the surf with a giant piece of Styrofoam that must have been used to pack an industrial refrigeration unit or something. One of the boys was wearing a blue mesh basketball jersey with cracked white numbers on the back, a dull two and eight faded at the sides. All the other boys were naked as they swam around the floating Styrofoam, clinging to it and riding it back to the shore where little dollops of it broke off. Their skin, wet and glossy as river mud, glinted as they danced wildly on top of their pontoon before crashing into the water. Jamie took pictures of them, then folded her arms under her breasts and watched.

  “They’re having fun,” she said.

  “What are they saying?”

  “They’re just roughhousing,” she said as their voices washed ashore.

  We left Guaymas and drove farther south to Zihuatanejo, where we picked up enough food and water supplies to last a month, and kept driving south until we hit a long stretch of open, undeveloped coast that had wide beaches and sand dunes off the bluff. I let air out of the tires and we drove along the high-water mark until we found a good place to set up camp on a wide mound off the beach. There was plenty of driftwood for fires scattered like creeping mantises along the sand knolls. I set the tent up as Jamie explored the area. When I finished I found her standing on a rock in a tide pool. The base of the rock had barnacles around it that latched on at high tide. Her silhouette reflected off the surface. I looked closely at both visions of her then, as if I could see her inner life running its secret course.