Thomas Pierce - Hall of Small Mammals - Stories

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The nature hike the next morning is a success. Flynn is waiting at the tent when Ryan returns; his legs are bramble-scraped but he’s happy. Did he see any wildlife? No, no wildlife. Did he see any plants? Yes, they saw a few plants. Flynn has trouble understanding what exactly Ryan enjoyed about the expedition, but he doesn’t want to spoil the effect with questions, so he lets it go. That afternoon, after lunch, Ryan isn’t able to go on the canoe trip, as expected, so Flynn finds a tub of toys in the shed behind the director’s cabin. He takes out the soccer ball and tries to get Ryan to kick that back and forth across the field. But Ryan isn’t interested.

“Basketball, then?”

“Nope,” he says. The boy is satisfied to sit in the rocking chairs on the dining hall porch.

“What are you thinking about?” Flynn asks.

“I don’t know,” the boy says.

He’s inscrutable, his large eyes blinking and looking but not conveying any secret meaning. Flynn wonders if some fathers instinctively know what their sons are thinking, if there exists between them some kind of private language, little symbols and gestures that only the two of them can decode. Who are you? Flynn is tempted to ask.

One of the cooks comes outside on the porch and says Ryan can ring the dinner bell if he wants. Ryan takes the cord like it might shock him, then gives it a gentle tug. “Needs more than that,” the cook says gruffly; Ryan pulls harder. The sound is immense, a physical presence, a peal felt in the bones. The boy is smiling, and Flynn is hopeful.

John Price finds Flynn at dinner. Does he want to smoke a cigarette? They go out on the porch with the other fathers. They struggle to keep the matches lit in the breeze.

“So you never told me what you do for a living,” John Price says.

Flynn tells him about the treatment center. How you can’t understand addiction until you’ve seen someone fight one.

“I got a sister-in-law who used to do cocaine,” John says. “Even at Thanksgiving.”

“Did she get help?”

“Maybe, I don’t know. My brother never talks about it anymore, so I guess she did.”

Flynn opens a new pack and offers up cigarettes. Almost everybody accepts. They use the first butt to light the second because of the breeze.

“My kid’s up for his Second Truth Bead this week,” a father says.

“Mine too,” John Price adds.

The others perk up at that.

“The Second Truth is about what happens when you die.”

“That’s not what I’ve heard.”

“What’d you hear?”

“My son told me it’s about how the universe got started.”

“Was it with a bang or a whimper?”

“The Big Banger. That’s what my oldest daughter calls God. I think she does it to get under my skin. She’s a Unitarian now.”

“Does that make Satan the Little Whimperer?”

“You guys don’t know shit. The Second Truth is about the end of the universe, not the beginning.”

“So enlighten us. How does it end?”

“The earth goes up in flames. God already tried drowning us once, so the next time he’ll smoke us out.”

“Bring it on,” says a father with smoke sneaking out his nostrils.

“If it wasn’t for these Truth Beads, my kid would have dropped out years ago. He’s obsessed. If I ever found out what they are, I’d just tell him so we could be done with it.”

“Anyone else think it’s bullshit we don’t get to know these Truths? We do half the work.”

“If you ask me, I think the whole process is bullshit. Why is it the Head Guides get to decide who’s ready for those beads? Grasshoppers didn’t use to be this way.”

“It can be a little clubby,” John Price admits.

“A little?”

“We’re just in it for the camping trips.”

“Us too. I wanted my son to stop playing his stupid computer games.”

“Has it worked?”

“Not really. He’s got some kind of portable thing. Miracle he never trips.”

“I wanted my son to feel like he’s a part of something,” Flynn says.

“Even if what he’s a part of is a little cultish? I’m sorry, guys, but it is, right?”

“It is, yeah.”

“A little bit.”

“My boy’s alone most afternoons,” Flynn continues, “and that gets him into all sorts of trouble.”

“What kind of trouble? Because there’s trouble and then there’s trouble .”

“I don’t know,” Flynn mutters. “Typical kid stuff, I guess.”

“My boy used to trap squirrels so he could drown them in the pool.”

“My kid used to shoot a crossbow into the neighbor’s yard, and one time he put an arrow in her leg. She’s almost eighty! God, that was awful.”

“Alex, he’s my stepson. Years ago we caught him with a hammer standing over his little sister’s crib.”

“My son likes fire,” Flynn says. “But I think he does it for the attention.”

“My kid Gene had a fire thing for a while. He almost burned down the garage.”

The camp director pokes his head out the door and asks them to come inside for announcements, and they look at each other like, Is this guy for real? Flynn smiles at his new friends.

That night in the tent, Flynn lets his son fall asleep first. He takes Mookie the bear out to the car and hides him under a piece of luggage. He’s stripping down for bed when he sees his son’s eyes on him.

“Just try it without the bear,” Flynn says.

The boy closes his eyes.

But Flynn has not won this battle, not yet. In the morning, the bear is back on its T-shirt throne. Flynn is undaunted. The dew sparkles with sunshine and, Flynn imagines, with promise. Ryan goes off to the art shack for leather making. The camp isn’t really designed for earning beads — that’s what the weekly meetings are for — but he might be able to earn a bead of skill this morning.

Flynn crosses the field, and by the time he reaches the edge of the woods, his boots are soaked. He has offered to help build the sweat lodge. John Price is there with a cup of coffee and a cigarette. The camp director, a giant ring of keys jangling from his belt, introduces a special visitor, a man with a long brown-and-gray ponytail down his back. His name is Henri, pronounced the French way, though he has a distinctly southern accent. He says he’s one-sixteenth Cherokee. He has a certificate in Native American studies. Sweat lodges are used as a means of purification, he says, of the body and the spirit. Sitting in a sweat lodge can help you reach a deeper level of consciousness. Sometimes the spirit travels.

Henri asks for volunteers to gather the firewood and rocks. He asks for more volunteers to cut down and strip small saplings. He distributes hatchets. He uses string and a stick to sketch out a circle with a ten-foot diameter. He instructs everyone to be as silent as possible. He’s tapping on a drum. John Price rolls his eyes at Flynn. They jam the saplings into the ground and bend them toward the center. Henri sends John Price and Flynn to collect grasses for the floor of the lodge, and if they find any sage, even better.

They move through the trees, hunched like hunter-gatherers.

“Where did they find this guy anyway?” John Price asks. “Do you think they just Googled hippie and bullshit and this guy was number one on the list?”

Flynn’s not sure. Will John Price try it out, though?

“Sure, why not?”

Their arms are full of green grass and dead leaves. “So,” John Price says, smiling, “I finally got it out of my son last night. The First Truth.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. He was on the verge of falling asleep. I feel a little guilty about it. To be honest, I thought it was kind of anticlimactic. But I suppose that’s the way it is with these things. There’s a reason the Catholic Church only wanted priests reading the Bible, you know? You want me to tell you what it is?”