Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives (18 page)

Long ago, writes Kate McGill, one of the town’s early settlers, in
The Beginnings of Marlette,
this “had been the home of the Sauk Indians, later of the Chippewas. But the settlements at Detroit had driven them back until in 1854 only a few scattering bands remained. Through the primeval forests, guided only by the blazed trail of the woodsman surveyor, came the hardy pioneer, to hew out for himself a home and fortune in the new land.”
⁴

The Irish and Scots in Ontario, Canada, “loaded their guns, sharpened their axes and came to investigate,” floating over the Huron. Rumors had swirled of “tall timber and fertile soil that was almost free for the asking,”
⁵
and gradually the immigrants made the area their own. A century and a half later it feels like the town that ate Gilbert Grape by day; driving through by night, particularly during the winter, you feel like an extra in the movie
Fargo.

Brittany Dunn, age twenty, wouldn’t be anywhere else. “I’d rather live here than in the city,” she says. “It’s more laid back,” says her grandmother, Janet Allen, who moved the seventy miles from White Lake for the “peace and quiet.” “You’ve got your own space,” continues Brittany. “In the city you’re, like, on top of each other, neighbor to neighbor.” I was sitting in a pizzeria opposite Marlette’s only Chinese restaurant, with four generations of the Dunn family: Janet, Lora Dunn Bartz (Janet’s daughter), Brittany (Lora’s daughter), and Ciannah (Brittany’s very well behaved seven-month-old baby), as well as Thomas Bartz, Lora’s husband. “Doesn’t it get boring?” I ask.

“No,” says Lora. “It doesn’t get boring. It’s like a journey if you have to go to the mall or something. It’s like a day’s worth of traveling.” She says this as though it’s a good thing, allowing her poker face to give way to a wry smile.

This vast expanse of land, both fertile and fallow, wild and tamed, was her son’s playground. To a city dweller like me, Tyler’s outdoor hobbies make him sound like a character from a Mark Twain novel. Tyler Dunn, who was eleven when he died, loved trapping critters, hunting, catching fish in the creek behind the house, four-wheeling and dirt-biking in the summer, and sledding in the winter. “When children are demonized by the newspapers, they are often described as feral,” wrote George Monbiot in the
Guardian
.
⁶
“But feral is what children should be: it means released from captivity or domestication. Those who live in crowded flats, surrounded by concrete, mown grass and other people’s property, cannot escape their captivity without breaking the law. Games and explorations that are seen as healthy in the countryside are criminalized in the cities. Children who have never visited the countryside live under constant restraint.”

By this definition, Tyler was semiferal. He was free to roam and explore and engage with the natural world and was trusted to do so with precious few constraints. The Dunns lived three miles down a dirt road off Highway 53, which runs straight from the interstate into Marlette. Several miles from the nearest traffic light—or even streetlight—and surrounded by fields, he was safe to do “his own thing” and have his parents check in on him occasionally.

Yet the call to the wild was always competing with the call to the screen. Like Jaiden, his favorite TV show was
Duck Dynasty,
with
Sponge-Bob
and
Family Guy
close runners-up. But it was gaming that really had him hooked. When he accompanied his parents on errands, he’d take a computer game with him. At home, he’d keep to himself, texting friends on his mother’s phone. And he loved video games. Particularly Call of Duty, which morphs modern warfare into entertainment. Mark Twain never had these distractions; if he had,
Huckleberry Finn
would, no doubt, have turned out quite differently, if Twain had got around to writing it at all.

“Whenever he came to my house, it was just a weekend of Call of Duty,” says Brittany. “That’s all I heard on the TV.” “Then he came over to our house and he just raced cars,” says Janet, referring to a different video game. “That’s because you didn’t have Call of Duty,” explained Lora.

T
YLER HAD A ROUND
, almost perfectly spherical face, crowned with a crew cut. To look at his pictures from infancy, it’s as though he never really lost his baby fat—he simply grew into it and developed a character that suited it, with a slight dimple in his chin, a button for his nose, and full cheeks that an overly familiar adult might just lose their fingers in. He was, by all accounts, a happy kid. When he was in fifth grade, his class was across the hall from sixth-grade teacher Luke Reynolds. Whenever Luke saw Tyler they would fist-bump. “I don’t know how it started or why,” says Luke. “But that’s what we always did. We wouldn’t even say anything. Just bump, smile, and keep walking.” The next year, Luke was
his homeroom teacher. “He was just a very easy kid. There were never any discipline problems. He always seemed pretty content.”

With a willing audience at home, Tyler was happy to be both the jester and the butt of the jokes. Brittany moved away to live with her boyfriend, leaving Tyler with his mother, two other sisters, and Thomas, who was technically his stepfather, although he’d always been present in Tyler’s life. Janet tells how he’d “wiggle his butt like a worm” to the “girly songs” when he was smaller. Another time, at Brittany’s graduation, he allowed his sisters Ashley, fifteen, and Tiffany, seventeen, to duct-tape him to a tree. “He was only there for a few minutes,” insists Brittany. In one picture that regularly resurfaces on Facebook, he stands bare-chested with a big smile and a bra made out of two coconut halves that Ashley had worn to a Hawaiian-themed birthday party a year or so earlier.

Tyler came by those full, fleshy cheeks honestly. Lora, his mother, bears a resemblance to Roseanne Barr, and Brittany shares his features. When I asked them what he liked doing, their first response, as a chorus, was “eating.” “He loved food,” said Lora. “Junk food.” “Grandma used to make these little crabbie patties,” recalls Brittany. “And those hamburgers. He’d eat those. Nobody else could get one.” “Actually, he did take a bunch one day,” Janet says, recalling Tyler in the act of a flattering transgression. “There was a bunch in his pockets.” “Saving them for later, probably,” said Brittany.

One of the rare moments of disagreement between them came when I asked if he was spoiled. “Yes,” said Brittany and Janet, as one and without hesitation. “No,” said Lora, somewhat unconvincingly.

“Yes he was,” repeated grandmother and granddaughter in disbelief.

Brittany took up the case and ran with it. “He was the only boy out of three girls, he’s the youngest, he’s the baby, yes he was spoiled,” she said, with an air of resignation rather than resentment. “‘Mom, so-and-so’s picking on me,’” she said, imitating Tyler. “And then the girls would get in trouble. Tyler never did anything. Never had to do his own laundry. He was spoiled.” Lora looks down at her pizza with half a smile, refusing to admit an indulgence that she is pleased others have noticed. “He wasn’t spoiled,” she mutters.

But he could be sedentary. When he was doing something with a clear goal, like fishing or hunting, he was engaged. But exercise for its own sake—competitive sports, for example—was of little interest. “I don’t know if he was so into the gym thing,” said Lora, when I asked what he liked doing at school. “He’d rather sit than move.” If there was work to be done, he’d find a way to avoid it. When the men in the family went to fetch wood one winter, Tyler was found in a ditch, making snow angels.

B
ECAUSE ALL THE OTHER
children who died that day lived in cities, towns, or suburbs, they were almost certainly oblivious to the fact that hunting season had just begun. In this part of Michigan, around November 23, you couldn’t avoid it. Deer hunting had started only a week earlier, on November 15; pheasant shooting had started on Wednesday, November 20. In late fall, churches in Marlette advertise evenings for “deer widows,” and men bond in search of prey and tall tales.

“Tradition here in the Thumb is that the opening day of pheasant-hunting season and deer-hunting season, you can just about close all the schools because the kids are going hunting,” the Sanilac County sheriff, Garry Biniecki, told me. “You go and try and get a seat at the downtown restaurant in Sandusky, and you’ll probably have a hard time because there’ll be this mass army of orange,” the color of hunting uniforms worn to identify people so they’re less likely to get shot. “It’s an exciting time.”

With the exception of Tyler, hunting season didn’t particularly excite the Dunns. Apart from his paternal uncles, none of his immediate family hunted. And although Tyler enjoyed field sports, there is little evidence he was particularly good at them. He had never, to anyone’s knowledge, successfully shot a living thing. He only had a pellet gun and an air-soft gun of his own. He loved to fish in the creek behind the house, but he didn’t have an awful lot to show for it. “Sometimes he’d catch something about this big,” says Brittany, bringing her thumb and forefinger close together to indicate the trifling size of his haul.

One winter, Darren, her boyfriend, took Tyler trapping. “They trapped for muskrat and things like that,” explains Brittany, barely concealing her disgust. “You put a trap in the ditches. You catch ’em and then you skin ’em and then you cook ’em. . . . Yeah. Nasty. It’s gross. Real nasty. . . . He liked that.” But for more regular hunting trips, Tyler turned to his friend Brandon (not his real name). Brandon lived about a mile away (which in these parts qualifies as “round the corner”) toward town, on a dirt road off Tyler’s dirt road. Brandon, age twelve, would sometimes come down and pick up Tyler on his preteen hybrid—a go-cart with a monster truck body and a motor—and they would roam the neighborhood on it together. They’d been friends since kindergarten. They weren’t inseparable; both had other friends they liked to hang out with, and they occasionally fell out. Once, Lora told Tyler he could no longer play with Brandon after Brandon abandoned him in town and went off with another friend, leaving Tyler crying as he called his mom to come and pick him up. Their friendship also had a brief hiatus when Brandon moved to Colorado with his mother, Connie, who went there to care for her sister, who was “possibly dying of terminal cancer.”

But they were close. Rifle through Tyler’s school pictures and Brandon will appear episodically. Connie brought Brandon back to Marlette to stay with his father, Jerry, for the 2013 school year. Jerry, who was separated from Connie, owned a trucking company. He had always played an active role in Brandon’s life, and Connie encouraged that. Not long after Brandon returned, the two boys were having play dates again.

Jerry often took Brandon hunting and occasionally trucking, too. And if Tyler was over—he spent more time at Brandon’s place than Brandon ever did at his—Jerry would take both of them. Jerry’s truck runs, ferrying milk and sod around the Midwest, usually took him away for eleven hours at a time. When the boys went with him, he’d give them some money to help him out. Tyler loved it. Sometimes Jerry would have them sit up front in the truck with him; at other times they’d be in the back playing video games.

On Thursday, November 21, Jerry had taken the boys hunting. Tyler had slept over at Brandon’s on Friday night, and on Saturday the boys
were scheduled to accompany Jerry in the truck down to Springfield, Ohio—a more or less straight run 260 miles south and back—to drop off a load from Michigan Peat. When Lora checked in with Tyler on Saturday afternoon, he asked her to bring his bike to Brandon’s on her way to town. She dropped it off around two p.m., but the boys never did go biking because it was too cold: eighteen degrees, with winds gusting at over twenty-five miles an hour.

Shortly before Jerry was about to leave for Ohio, the boys said they wanted to stay home and play on the computer. Jerry left them to it. According to Jerry’s later interviews with police, he made this trip as often as three times a week, and Brandon took care of himself fine. He would leave at one p.m., while Brandon was in school, and be back by one a.m. the following morning, when Brandon was in bed.