Iowa Boy in July '02

The Upper Basin Chronicles

Chapter 19

Iowa Boy in July '02

The catbird in the mulberry tree woke Michael Murphy at 4:55 a.m. The Morus rubra was covered with fruit -- ripe, somewhat ripe, and not ripe. The catbird sang for his breakfast. His varied laughing, chattering song rose and fell. He seemed to converse with himself on the quality of the berries.

Ten-year old Michael kicked off the tangled sheet from around his right leg. He got up and leaned on the window frame, and against a gray dawn sky that was faint blue high in its summit. Clear day ahead, he thought. He pulled on the clothes he'd left on the floor last night, grabbed a clean pair of socks from his laundry basket, and quietly opened his bedroom door . No one else appeared to be awake. He glided down the stairs, placing each foot on the outside edge of the tread so the step wouldn't creak. Not a one did. In the kitchen, he poured milk from the plastic jug into a pint Ball jar, took three cookies from Grandma Teresa's cookie jar, and slipped out the kitchen door. On the back porch, he put one cookie in his mouth, and the pint jar and the other two cookies in his right hand. With his left he picked up his favorite tennis shoes. He opened and closed the porch door softly, and sat down on the back steps.

The air smelled sweet with a second hay cut drying for bailing this morning. Burt came out from his place under the porch, stretching and wagging, eager to say good morning. Michael stopped putting on his shoes in time to rescue the rest of the first cookie protruding from his mouth. He gulped most of that cookie, and tossed a piece of it into the yard for the dog. Burt liked cookies. Michael drank all the milk down at once, stood, and rinsed the jar in the drip bucket at the pump. (Grandma Teresa did not like flies around the back door.)

He put the other two cookies in his shirt pocket. His 20-inch bike moved easily from its parking place near the back porch. This was the bike he and his dad had added back wheel foot pegs to, making it as near to a real BMX bike as they could. Michael had good balance. He learned to pedal around the barnyard before his fourth birthday. He still got a kick out of hearing his grandfather say, "He can ride like the devil!" Yet, he could tell recently that this statement made both his father and his great-grandmother more nervous than it used to.

"C'mon, Burt!" he called. The dog followed him across the barnyard and out along the field road to the wetland. With the sky rapidly turning white and faint pink from its earlier gray, the catbird, left alone in the mulberry tree, ate more and sang less.

As he rode, Michael looked right and left along and among the corn rows, watching for make believe enemy fighters lurking there with their AK-47s and rocket propelled grenade launchers aimed at him. He wondered what it would be like to carry a rifle on his bike. Yeah, in a scabbard behind the saddle, just like the cavalry Grandma Teresa had seen when she was a kid! Did the kids in the Northern Alliance have bikes? He hadn't seen any on the evening news, but he saw that they carried guns. That much he did know.

With the Fourth of July just two days away, Michael wondered if the bad guys would try to bomb Des Moines, or maybe Cedar Rapids. He'd seen three men with beards, olive skin, and black hair in downtown Iowa City. They were walking ahead of three women in head scarves and long robes. That was the day after last Thanksgiving. People stared at them, even in Iowa City, a place his dad said some people who didn't know what they were talking about called, "the Paris of the Midwest." Grandpa Owen thought they would crash a plane into the Sears Tower in Chicago, or Comiskey Park on the Fourth of July. "The Cubs might not attract any bombers this year," he'd said with a shake of his head.

The pink glow in the east had gathered itself into a single bright patch in the northeastern sky as Michael paused above the Murphy's prairie slough. He could see a mallard pair and a line of seven half-grown ducklings on the water below. They paddled out of sight at seeing his silhouette on the horizon. Burt caught up with him in time to share the second cookie, a chocolate-chocolate chip. "They're hard to bake just right," Grandma Teresa always said.

Michael looked up at the twin white contrails of a gold American Airlines Boeing 767 streaming east toward O'Hare. Who was on that plane? he wondered. Would he be scared if he were flying today? Were there good guys riding shotgun on that plane?

"I hope so," he said aloud. "I would shoot them dead!" he said emphatically. For a moment, he imagined himself standing with his back to the cockpit door, gun drawn, crouched and ready as three dark haired, dark skinned men came running at him.

"Boof! Boof! Boof!" Michael barked with the triple report and kick of his imaginary automatic. The sun at that moment severed the edge of the horizon with a blade of orange light. Michael lowered his skyward gaze from the eastbound airliner to study the sunrise, an ever more complete, pulsing, glowing orange disc in a smoky summer sky. He tried to imagine the sun held still and the Earth a huge ball rolling toward it. For a moment he felt like he was falling forward.

Then, a diesel engine coughed in the distance. Michael remembered that his dad planned to teach him to cultivate today. He looked once more toward the distant aircraft, and the flint-faced air marshal with the smoking gun near the cockpit door. Where will he go today? Michael wondered.

"C'mon, Burt, time for breakfast," he said. Michael pushed the BMX to a roll, jumped into the saddle, then steered with one hand, and munched the third cookie with the other.

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Next week... "Thick River Alphabet Soup," Chapter 20.

The Upper Basin Chronicles, Chapter 19 was written and edited by John Gabbert.

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The characters presented here are purely fictional, and neither bear resemblance to persons living or dead, nor represent the views or opinions of Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota.