by Devin Murphy
“Where was this?” I ask Dennis.
“Behind the gym,” he tells me. “Mr. Tanner turned the corner as Adler was hitting the block and it freaked him out because he thought he was trying to kill me or something.” He is smiling at me as he says this.
“What is this all about? You’ve got to stop this shit!” Neither of us says anything until I start the car again. “Where do you get these ideas from?”
“Online,” he says.
At home I make him pull up videos on YouTube for me.
“We put some of our stuff up here too,” he says with a sort of pride.
“For who?” I ask.
“For everyone. The whole world can see,” he says. “Check some of this stuff out.” He starts searching for videos and pulls up a clip from an old Indian yogi who lies down on a bed of nails and has an elephant press a massive foot down on his stomach. “You see how strong that guy’s stomach is?” His voice betrays a measure of excitement. Then he plays clips of guys BASE jumping off cliffs, shooting friends with Tasers, snowmobiles hitting ramps and flipping completely over in the air, men with shoddy-looking jetpacks shakily rising off the ground; the stunts are endless.
I watch the video clips with Dennis. There are infinite numbers of videos of people being flung around their lives for him to watch. He clicks from one to the next until it becomes clear to me that he has somehow taken this craziness as instruction on how he is supposed to live his own life.
When I drop Dennis off at Tom’s that Sunday, Dyla comes out to the car. She stands next to my window and looks inside. I can see a trace of the young woman I met sixteen years earlier. When we met, it took me a criminally long time to realize how beautiful she was.
“Did you hear he got detention?” she asks. “Have you talked with him?”
“Yeah. A bit.”
“You have to be tough with him. He doesn’t need another friend. He needs you to be his father. Tom can’t do everything.” At this, I want to swing my car door open so it slams against her kneecap. “He’s going to get hurt badly one of these days.” She puts her hands on my door and leans in toward me. “Are you doing okay?” she asks.
“I’m fine,” I say.
“Well, then, we’ll talk more when you pick him up next week.” She turns from the car and I start the engine. She says it under her breath, but I hear it as she walks away. “Stay off the roof.”
The phrase sinks into my ears and I feel how ridiculous I must seem to her.
Online-Meredith and I meet for a dinner date on Tuesday at a small Mexican restaurant. She told me she was forty-one, but when she walks in she looks older. She has brown hair and hasn’t dyed the thin strips of gray that start at her temples and wrap back into her ponytail. She’s a large woman, much shorter than me but my weight at least. Her right shoulder slumps a bit forward and down like she’s been injured. We talk about our kids, and eat slowly. I tell her about my son floating upside down in the pool with a broken arm. How I have nightmares of the water rising to his chin, flooding his mouth, filling his lungs.
Meredith must have sensed something wanting and vulnerable in me when I tell her this, as later, when we are about to leave, she leans over her drink, polite and without making eye contact, and places her hand on top of mine.
We go to my hotel room at the Fairfield Inn. She follows me in her car. Inside my room she goes to the bathroom and I can hear her peeing through the door. When she comes out she turns the lights off and we get undressed before we even touch each other. As she walks to the bed her breasts hang down heavy. She slips under the covers. I get in the bed and lift myself on top of her. When I kiss her she tastes like a lime margarita, salt around the rim. I let my body lean on her and I am surprised by how warm she feels. I put on a condom but am still half flaccid. I have to cup my penis in my hands and rub it against her until I’m hard enough to slip inside. When I do I shut my eyes and hide my face in her neck and the pillow. After we finish she lies with her back facing me and starts talking again.
“My daughter, Steph, wants a tattoo. She keeps asking me, and I told her I’d wring her neck if she gets one. Then I told her to draw what she wanted on herself for a month to see if she really liked it or not.”
“That’s a good idea,” I say.
“Yeah, well, that’s what I thought. Now she’s covered in pen marks. She’s always drawing on herself. She does little butterflies, and turtles and stuff. You know, stuff she’ll hate in five years.”
“What about this?” I say, running my hand down her side to the small of her back where there is a little tattoo outline of a bird in flight.
“Well, like I tell her, I know what I’m talking about. She wrote a line from some poem on her forearm the other day, and I’m worried because this one has lasted all week. ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust,’ it says.”
“I’m not sure I know what that means,” I say, thinking that this is something I could do. I could travel around my territory spending time with lonely women, finding bits of comfort to keep me from starving.
“I’m not sure she does either,” Meredith says. “What does she know of fear?”
“‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust,’” I say aloud while watching the side of Meredith’s face. She has small lines spider-webbing out from the corner of her eye, and looks nervous and tired all at once. I run my hand over her tattoo again. “At least she’s not jumping off buildings.”
“Oh, he must get his wild side from you,” Meredith says.
“I don’t know about that.”
Her hand runs over my forearm. “Haven’t you ever done anything wild?” she asks me, and taps a fingertip against the faint dent below my eye where Lenwood Murry broke my eye socket in a childhood fight.
“I will show you fear as a long empty life,” I say to her.
She lets her forehead fall on my shoulder like this was some old intimacy we had.
As we lie there I remember something that happened when I was Dennis’s age. I had gone into the cemetery across the street from my parents’ house with my brother, Lewis. The trees there were mostly black spruce, so the ground was covered in needles that felt soft beneath our feet. We had talked about hunting for opossums, and when it got dark that night we went out with flashlights. Lewis seemed to know what he was doing and after an hour of walking around the dark woods with our beams of light scanning the ground, gravestones, and canopy we saw a set of eyes reflecting back at us. Lewis put his light on it and it hissed at us showing four large fangs and a head full of long whiskers. I’d never seen one before. Its white face angled back from its pink nose and curved up into limp triangular ears that hung forward. I didn’t even think about it when it happened, I just did what Lewis told me. With the opossum frozen in Lewis’s beam, I ran toward it, bent down, and rapped it on the top of the head with my clenched fist, and then jumped away.
“Jesus, it worked?!” I heard Lewis say, his laughter breaking into surprise.
I looked down at the prehistoric-looking opossum lying motionless on the ground. Lewis’s flashlight beam was shaking from laughing so hard.
It had never occurred to me this was something he hadn’t done himself. I put my own light on the opossum and reached down and grabbed its hairless cord of a tail, thick like a rope of cartilage. I lifted its motionless body up. Lewis’s beam of light steadied on me as I held it like a fisherman holds up his catch for a photo. That’s when I saw the slow shifting of three little babies on the animal’s back, and dropped it on the ground. Lewis jumped back from me and watched until the opossum rolled over and started slowly walking away.
The story became a demi-legend throughout my school days, and it was a small privilege to have such notoriety. The truth was, I was filled with regret over going along with what my brother said, for hitting that opossum’s head, and then dropping those harmless animals.
In the morning Meredith gets up before I do, and wakes me after she showers and dresses.
“Yo
u going to come through town again soon, sailor?” she asks, leaning her knees on the bed, which sinks to her weight.
“Yeah,” I say, and she leans over me and kisses my lips, then gets up and leaves the room.
My brother, Lewis, is an actual sailor, having gone into the navy and then spending his whole adult life as a merchant marine. I wonder if he’s gone around the world seeking comfort with strangers like the sailor stereotype. I stay in bed looking at a dull watermark on the ceiling. I wonder who has been here before me, and where they kept their fear.
When I get home later in the week I drive to St. Francis to pick Dennis up from cross-country practice. The sports field spreads out behind the school. I park my car and walk around the building. There are ten boys running from the far field toward a man my age standing with a stopwatch. The man calls out times as the boys pass him and collapse on the ground after their last sprint. I don’t see Dennis in the group when the boys start walking toward the building behind me.
“Where is Dennis?” I ask one of the kids I recognize as someone Dennis used to spend time with.
“I don’t know,” the boy says.
“Was he at practice today?” I ask.
“Umm—he’s not on our team,” the boy says.
I immediately feel foolish again, this time for having been duped by my son. I turn to my car and call his cell phone and then my house to see if he’ll answer. Then I call Dyla’s. Tom picks up.
“He isn’t here,” Tom says. “Should we be worried?” he asks.
“No, no—he’s probably on his way to my place and I missed him,” I say, then walk to my car.
I’ll show you fear in an empty field.
I drive to Dennis’s friend Adler’s house, where I’ve dropped him off before. In the car I remember all the dark thoughts I used to have while Dyla and I were still married. Dyla would take Dennis out and they’d be gone too long after going out for ice cream or for a playdate. Drunk drivers. Semis not paying attention. My head a swarm of losses. I’d keep myself busy doing work on the house, or inventing some project to keep that possibility away. Sometimes I’d fast-forward through the initial phone call, the finding out, the grief, the years of recalibration to what my life would look like. I know it was some sort of perverse daydream but a similar feeling rises back up in me as I pull up in front of Adler’s house.
No one answers when I knock, but I hear people in the backyard. I walk around the house and open the wooden gate. I’m about to call out hello, but I hear a bunch of voices start yelling as soon as I latch the gate shut behind me. When I turn the corner, I see that the yard is filled with teenagers. About thirty of them are circled up with their arms linked at the elbows. I walk toward them without one of them looking at me. Over their heads, in the middle of the circle, I see Dennis and Adler brawling, both topless, wearing makeshift boxing gloves made out of Ace bandages and athletic tape. They are striking each other cleanly in the face, and I’m amazed they are each withstanding the other’s punches. I push my way through the link of bodies and wedge myself in between the two boys. My arms are spread out and my hands are pinned against the boys’ chests like I’m timing their pulses.
“Vhat are you doing?” Dennis says. When I turn to him I see him talking through a mouth guard. “Dad, what are you doing?” he spits out. There is no fear in his eyes, which are bulging out, and his chest heaves up and down with each breath he takes. “We’re not done yet,” he says, furious at me now, his eyes wild. I look at Adler who is leaning into my other hand. His eyes are also testosterone wild. He has on maroon shorts with a little gold emblem of the Wolf of Gubbio on the right leg.
There are little red lights on the phones some of the kids are holding. I know that despite what they record, this moment will become a thing of folklore among these kids. It will become like the story of St. Francis and the wolf, converted into myth, and this story will grow, swell, and swallow what really happened until it settles like pond specks at the base of who my son is, and the type of person he can one day look back on as being—fearless, full of grace, wild, unabashed, and holy.
“Dad! Dad! Get out of our way,” Dennis yells.
I’m not sure what it is in his voice that makes me look at him just then. I look right into his life, what it will be, and the odds that it won’t be so much different than mine. This thought strikes me with an incredible empathy for him, as I know such moments of story-making are the only art some of us are given.
I put my hands down to my sides and step back from the boys like a referee.
“Okay,” Dennis says to Adler. They hunker down, cock their arms, and let their fists fly at each other. And as I watch I think of the ancient-looking opossum I caught when I was a kid, pink like new and gray like old. A creature who must have instinctually known how to carry its children on its back.
11
Lewis Thurber, 2007
When he wasn’t working, Lewis Thurber woke at 6 A.M. regardless of what time zone he was in. Sometimes he heard his name being called like a heavy whisper and would jolt awake. In Pattaya, Thailand, he walked down to the marketplace to eat tilapia and bean sprout spring rolls for breakfast, dipping the rice paper shells into small Styrofoam dishes of sweet red chili sauce until he was full. There was a stall that sold English newspapers and bitter dark coffee that he drank a quarter cup of before topping it back off with powdered creamer and sugar until it became thick and granular. In another stall he thumbed through the boxes of pirated DVDs and bought them to watch when it got too hot in the afternoons.
After leaving the market, he wandered the city. Blaring music and raging drunks spilled from the go-go bars, so he took the long way around the golf course to the Amari Nova tourist hotel and sat by the pool. Being white, Lewis was never questioned by the doorman as to whether he was staying at the hotel. A row of metal tables with round glass tops and wide canvas umbrellas were already opened and cocked toward the sun. In the shade he held the paper open to block out anything beyond the page, and read it cover to cover. When he finished he dived into the pool and did laps until his shoulders burned. He screamed under the surface so his words gurgled up the side of his head in a violent stream of bubbles. Then he flipped and floated on his back, taking deep breaths to settle back into his body. When he dried off he left the hotel and walked the beach, where the sky was blue and saturated with the sharp glow of the sun, then around the city until the heat was too much.
He had set his life to this schedule since getting off his last ship—a Dole banana cargo ship from Puerto Barrios, Guatemala, that ran up the western seaboard of the United States before heading for Asia and then back. He worked as a second mate for five months. On his bridge watches he was responsible for plotting the ship’s course and prepping the navigational charts. He studied the navigation charts and liked to find where he was on that space. I am here, he thought. He did this enough that he began to think the world around him was a map that he could zoom out of for perspective. He’d rise over the physicality of his existence and the tide of emotions he’d spent years building levees against. It calmed him and made his troubles feel smaller. I am here. He’d pull out a larger chart. I am here. I am here.
Between watches he performed cargo checks to see if the cargo container’s nitrogen systems were running properly. Each container had the oxygen sucked out and nitrogen pumped in to control when the bananas would ripen. One of the nitrogen compressors broke on his last crossing, and the bananas inside spoiled in the heat and the stench got so bad that Lewis used the crane on the superstructure to dump the three tons of rotten bananas overboard where they fanned out in the ship’s wake.
He spent the last ten days wandering through Pattaya, its market, and into the park with its giant statue of a globe with a dog and a woman nursing her child sitting on top. Boyet, a Filipino crewmate who was his guide to the subculture here, told him the statue was a testament to the fact that women and dogs covered every inch of this place. Men were known to come from far and
wide to act as deviant as they pleased, in a way they would never be permitted to anywhere else on earth.
Lewis believed Boyet was right about the statue. The bars were filled with young girls, and every afternoon there were mongrel dogs with dark earthen-colored coats sleeping beneath almost every parked truck. When it got cooler, they came out from the shade to beg or steal food. The female dogs knew, from a lifetime of being kicked, to jump out of the way and keep their distance. They tottered off with their sagging nipples swinging beneath them like dark raisins. The males were harder to come by, as they were too aggressive to sit and beg. So most were killed, run down by cars that swerved to hit them—something Boyet had said was reasonable, as there were never any cold winters to naturally kill them off.
One morning, while sitting on the patio of the room Lewis stayed in a mile outside the downtown area, and watching a pirated version of the documentary Blue Earth on his laptop, Lewis watched the dog he named Nipples dodge cars across the street, crossing over to his side of the road. She lived under the shed on the golf course. The dog’s whole body was covered in greasy cowlicks, and she had bubbled-up black scars crisscrossing her upright triangular ears. She came closer now than she had before, so he went inside and got the bag of beef jerky he had been luring her with all month. He walked back outside and lobbed a strip of the mangled meat onto the grass. Nipples hunched forward and loped back toward the road after swallowing the meat whole. He threw her more until she was on the lip of the patio. Then he flung another piece inside the door to his room. When she went for it, Lewis pushed the door shut between them and locked her inside.
He sat in front of the glass on his patio as if his room were a zoo display. The noise from the movie on the laptop crashed behind him. He tapped the glass, holding jerky in his hand, and part of him felt bent, perverse.
Nipples paced the far corner of the room with one side always touching the wall like a rat. She pivoted at the bathroom and again at the corner of the kitchenette where the slab of faux marble met curls of peeling blue wallpaper. Lewis slipped inside, blocking the opening to the door in case she tried to bolt. He flung another piece of jerky toward her and sat on the bare mattress of his bed. She grabbed it and resumed her stride as she chewed. He held the next piece in front of him.
