Sprout

by Dale Peck

  sprout

  or

  My salad days, when I was green in judgment.*

  DALE PECK

  NEW YORK BERLIN LONDON

  *Um, that’s a quote. Duh.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  This is the first part!

  Psst

  We must’ve made a wrong turn at Albuquerque

  What else would I do with my summer vacation?

  Now I gotta cut loose

  The margarita was the only virgin in the house

  Rural gay boy, party of one

  There’ll be no dirty parts in this chapter, so don’t get your hopes (or anything else!) up

  Attendons: entendre!

  This is the second part!

  Wake-up call

  Like that girl in the pink coat in Schindler’s List

  Welcome to the jungle

  We know the sound of two hands clapping, but what is the sound of a hormone?

  The hole story

  Everyone’s a clitic

  Cave Canem

  Liquid courage

  No good deed goes unpunished

  The nidus and the nodus (no really, look ’em up)

  This is the last part!

  He’s gone

  He’s still gone

  Homily to honesty

  Imprint

  This book can only be dedicated to

  Lamoine Wiebe

  in the hope that he’ll always find his way back home.

  Salt the earth with serpent’s teeth . . .

  —Ovid

  This is the

  first part!

  . . . (picnic, lightning) . . .

  —Nabokov

  Psst . . .

  Ihave a secret. And everyone knows it. But no one talks about it, at least not out in the open. That makes it a very modern secret, like knowing your favorite celebrity has some weird eccentricity or other, or professional athletes do it for the money, or politicians don’t actually have your best interests at heart. I.e.:

  Hollywood actors marry for love, not money, fame, or hiding the fact that one (or both) of them is gay. Sure they do.

  Professional baseball players—and cyclists, sprinters, linebackers, oh, and bodybuilders too—never “knowingly” use steroids. Uh huh.

  War is fought for the sake of freedom or democracy or self-defense, and not because it happens to make some people very, very rich.

  Right.

  And I was born with my green hair.

  “Weird eccentricity” is redundant, by the way—an example of what my writing coach, Mrs. Miller, calls “the devaluation of meaning.” Eccentric is no longer enough on its own; you have to add weird to get people to pay attention, even though weird doesn’t actually change the meaning of eccentric. Just restates it. Or prestates it, or whatever. Emphasizes it, in case you miss it the second time around.

  Greenback dollar. Greenbacks are dollars, doofus.

  Twelve midnight. Dude, midnight always happens at twelve. Ditto twelve noon.

  Specific example. Prior history. Unconfirmed rumor. Redundant, redundant, redundant.

  You might’ve noticed how I steered the conversation away from my secret, yet managed to allude to it with my digression on redundancies. I’m slick that way—you’d better watch me.

  And oh yeah: green hair, along with which comes a (pretty unimaginative, if you ask me) nickname: Sprout. More on that later.

  But first:

  We must’ve made a wrong turn at Albuquerque

  My dad and I moved here four years ago, when I was twelve. Long Island to Kansas. Fifteen hundred miles, most of it on I-70. We drove it in twenty-three hours, pausing only for food—McDonald’s, Cracker Barrel, more McDonald’s—and gas. There was no reason we didn’t stop. It’s not like there was anything waiting for us in Kansas. It was more like we were trying to get away—or he was trying to get away, and I was his hostage. I’m not even sure Kansas was our destination, or if it’s just where my dad ran out of steam. Maybe it’s just where he realized he couldn’t run away from his memories.

  A few days after sixth grade ended, he woke me up and told me to pack.

  “How much should I pack?”

  “Pack everything you need.”

  There was something edgy about his voice, out of control.

  I glanced at the clock. 6:53 A.M. I wondered if he’d started drinking already. I sat up, tried to slow things down.

  “Well, how long are we gonna be gone?”

  My dad looked around my bedroom. The only room I’d ever called my own. It took him maybe five seconds to take it all in—the posters, the dresser and bed, the clothes strewn on the floor—and then he turned back to me and said:

  “Pretty much forever.”

  He rented the second-smallest-sized U-Haul and we packed our stuff in until it was full. Anything that didn’t fit we left behind. Somehow all the things that didn’t fit belonged to my mom: her clothes, her dressing table with the big circular mirror, every single dish in the kitchen. I took her picture though—the framed wedding portrait that had hung in the same spot for so long that the paneling had changed color beneath it. Or, I guess, stayed the same color while the rest of the walls faded. The picture had faded too, yellowed a bit. My mom’s skin and dress both had an ivory, kind of sickly tone to them. But maybe that’s just projection on my part: it’s hard to look at the past and forget what you know about the future.

  Her eyes stared out at me, bright, focused, fearless. They looked into the days ahead as though they were filled with nothing but health and happiness. I could almost understand why my dad ignored it with each trip to the U-Haul, but I took it anyway. Wrapped it in a sheet from my parents’ bed, which my dad also didn’t pack, and slipped it into the soft space between two sofa cushions. I took her jewelry box too, and her favorite book.

  I’m not going to tell you the title, though, because that’s mine alone.

  During the drive my dad kept talking about how we needed “space.”

  “Distance.”

  “Fresh air.”

  “A fresh start.”

  “Country living, Daniel. That’s what we need.”

  “Good country people.”

  I let him talk. I’d brought a dictionary into the cab of the U-Haul, and I thumbed through it at random. Rhumb, foramen, collogue: the line followed by a ship sailing in a fixed direction; an opening, an orifice, a hole; to speak flatteringly or feign agreement. Sometimes the words had some kind of association with what my dad was saying but usually they stood alone, bricks of meaning without any mortar to hold them together. Just like the words that came out of my dad’s mouth.

  “It’ll be different, Daniel. You’ll see. Everything’s gonna change.”

  Even after we set up camp in the Trail’s End Motel, we continued driving. Only this time, instead of following a single endless ribbon of highway, we crisscrossed Reno County. Hutchinson is the big town, with about 30,000 people, and over the course of a week it seemed we drove each and every one of its streets, west to east, north to south, even the alleys. Eight miles to the east was Buhler, the moon to Hutch’s earth. The only thing that stood out was the school, not so much because of the way it looked (like, bricks) but because my dad said,

  “I guess that’s where you’ll be going.”

  It wasn’t until these words came out of his mouth that I realized he was doing more than getting the lay of the land. I suppose it should’ve sunk in sooner, but the whole trip was so unexplained I hadn’t really pondered what it meant. What the consequences might be. But all of a sudden it was clear: that ochre brick building, rectangular yet amorphous, was going to be my new school. One of these dusty streets would bear my new address. Long Isla
nd, the ocean, my friends—my mom—were all just memories now.

  In a way, it was almost as though all we’d done was move across the country, like half the kids I knew who’d lost one or the other parent after their families split up. The difference was, all those other parents showed up again, sometimes for a visit, sometimes to take you back—sometimes when you didn’t even want them to.

  But my mom was never coming back.

  For whatever reason, living in town didn’t suit him. Actually, the reason was pretty clear: too many people. For all his talk about friends and neighbors, good country folk and the salt of the earth, what my dad really wanted was to be alone. And so we ventured into the countryside, careened down two-lane highways or bumped and juddered over dirt roads, the trip made that much louder by a couple of boxes of dishes I’d tossed into the backseat right before we left Long Island. Their rattling had a dense, almost solid sound, as if the plates and cups and bowls had broken into tiny pieces and settled in a single mass on the bottom of the boxes, but I was too afraid to unfold the lids and check. I kept my eyes trained on the unpaved roads instead. They fascinated me. In Long Island, all the roads were, first of all, streets, and they were also, you know, paved. Dirt roads belonged to movies set in other countries, other centuries. Yet here they were, their washboard ridges shaking our suburban car to pieces, as if to punish us for disturbing a quiet pastoral afternoon.

  The Arkansas River ran through the southern part of the county (that’s pronounced R-Kansas by the way, as in: Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kansas). We’d crossed other rivers that’d given their names to states, the Ohio, the Mississippi, the Missouri. By contrast, the Ark was small and shallow, rent with sandbars and fringed with stunted, scared-looking trees. The land around the river was almost entirely carved up into wheat farms. It was late June, remember. Harvest was almost over, and the stubbled fields were golden in the sun—them good ol’ amber waves of grain—but still, I preferred the real waves we’d left behind. You know. Water.

  The wheat didn’t appeal to my dad either. He turned the car around, aimed for the northwestern corner of the county, where the land was drier, hillier. The unplowed pastures were mostly empty, or dotted with Herefords destined for grocery stores and chain steakhouses, although one of them, surreally, was filled with ostriches.

  “Good meat ostriches,” my dad said as we drove past the flock, or herd, or whatever you call a group of ostriches. The big gray birds regarded our car with level, malevolent gazes, but before I could ask him when he’d ever tasted ostrich I saw the sign:

  GOOD MEAT

  OSTRICHES

  Only later would we learn that the dryness of this part of the county was an illusion—that the water table skulked a few feet below the surface, and bubbled up each swampy spring. But summers come fast to Kansas. By the time we got here the land was hard and brown, and pearly spikes of prickly pear cacti glinted amid tangles of withered grass. Where there was water, streams as thin as untied shoelaces, a line of ubiquitous cottonwoods huddled over the shallow trickle like pigeons converging on a dropped pretzel.

  Of course, I didn’t know they were called cottonwoods then. But when we drove over a tiny shaded bridge I could see their leaves, heart-shaped, shiny as plastic, and their bark, rough and jagged as granite (rough and jagged: I know, Mrs. Miller, I know). Only later did I learn that if you separated the thick gray bark from the trunk that its underside turned out to be reddish brown and smooth as the inside of a walnut shell. That September we met a woman at the State Fair who sold paintings made on sheets of cottonwood bark. Nature scenes mostly. Little bitty trees painted on little bits of trees. I thought that was a little sad—I’ll take the real thing over a painting of it any day—but my dad bought three. Hung them in the living room next to the front door, in the place where my mom’s picture had been in our house on Long Island.

  It was with money from the sale of our old house that he bought eleven and a half acres about eight miles north of Hutch. Our property wasn’t as barren as some of the other plots in that part of the county. In fact it was covered in trees. Covered’s a bit misleading. It implies woods, forests, wilderness, whereas our catalpas grew in orderly if slightly tattered rows. They’d been planted orchard-style in the 1920s; according to Mrs. Miller, they were to have been used (what is that tense called? anterior conditional? future subjunctive? bass ackwards?) in the making of pickle barrels, but something, either the pickle maker or the pickle-barrel maker, went bust in the Great Depression. I think that’s Mrs. Miller’s idea of a joke—they were probly supposed to’ve been fenceposts—but no matter what the real story is, they were never cut down, but left to grow and flower and fall and seed themselves, until, at least to the glancing eye, they gave the illusion of nature. But if you peered through the underbrush (equal parts ragweed, marijuana—er, hemp—and itch ivy) you could still see the perfect lines stretching north, south, diagonally.

  Mrs. Miller calls it “a composition of balanced tensions”: the regularity of the planted trees juxtaposed against the chaos of their splayed limbs and vibrant, vibrating leaves (alliteration, ahem). I tended to think of the trees in a more metaphorical—mythological, ahem, ahem—kind of way. It was as if my neighbors on Long Island had been transformed by a Greek god into beings of bark and sap instead of flesh and blood. This cottonwood had a hollow trunk, just as the boy who’d lived down the block had a tubular prosthetic arm. That dead hackberry was laced by vines, just as the brown-haired girl who got on the bus after me had worn braces on both legs. A slanting but sturdy mulberry was the bent back of the old Italian woman who walked every day to the grocery store with her trolley, or dolly, or whatever you call those little cages on wheels that old people use to carry their stuff in. The old Italian lady’s cart was red; the mulberry was covered in five-leaved creeper that turned crimson in the fall.

  But the myths I thought of most, at least when I was in the forest, were the ones in which women get turned into trees. Not just women, but mothers. Mothers of sons usually. Adolescent boys who always find their way to the shelter of the maternal limbs. Deep within its trunk, the trapped spirit groans with the desire to communicate her love, but all her son hears is the creak of wood. The tree showers fruit on him, but all the son does is take a bite from the apple or orange and curl up for a nap, and sometimes—because life is like that—the son ends up cutting his mother down, and the woman who gave birth to him is turned into a table or a bed or maybe just logs for the fireplace, the maternal body warming its son in death just as it had in life.

  I suppose that’s where the story breaks down for me. Eventually I came to love our forest. Even on the coldest winter days I trekked through the trees for an hour or two after school, and during the summers I sometimes even spent the night there, curled up in a sleeping bag on the bug-infested remnant of the sofa that had sat in our living room on Long Island. But no creaking or cracking of tree limbs, no cawing or gnawing or patter of paws ever made me feel anything other than alone when I was there. During our first months here I pretended the constant creaking of the trunks was like our gossiping neighbors back on Long Island.

  I hear the mother’s got

  The old man’s been hitting the

  Do you think the boy is

  Wait, where’d they

  If I was silent long enough, I thought the trees would forget I was there and reveal their secrets to me. But as time went on I realized they never would—not because I wasn’t listening hard enough, but because they weren’t actually saying anything. The only thing I heard was the echo of my own thoughts, obsessions, fears. The trees weren’t trapped souls: they were just trees, and the most likely reason they’d been planted was to cover the barrenness of the prairie. To limit the vista, create places to hide. To shelter a lonely widower and his only son so they could nurture their grief while they hid from the world.

  Or at least that’s what it felt like. Because after my dad bought the trailer and moved as much of our stuff in as would fit a
nd threw out the rest (the aforementioned sofa and my mom’s easy chair, the antique writing desk my grandmother had given her as a wedding present and a half dozen other pieces of furniture, not to mention boxes and boxes of books, clothes, knickknacks, and plain old junk) he never left. I mean, sure, he went to town to buy groceries and stuff (by which I mean booze) but he made no effort to get a job or meet people, just lived off the proceeds of the sale of our Long Island house.

  “Life’s cheap out here, Daniel. With a little budgeting, I can get by till you go off to college.”

  “And then?”

  My dad reached for whatever he was drinking that day.

  “There don’t always have to be a then.” He poured, drank, swallowed, grimaced. Left his hand on the bottleneck. “Hell, there ain’t really a now, so why should there be a then?”

  And he poured, drank, swallowed, and grimaced again.

  You might recognize my dad’s words as a tautology. Circular reasoning. The unsubstantiated assertion that there won’t be a then is based on the equally groundless claim that there isn’t a now, when, clearly, there is, whether or not my dad chooses to sober up and face it. Mrs. Miller taught me you can get away with these kinds of logical fallacies when you put them in dialogue, which transforms them from rhetorical errors to idiomatic expressiveness.

  I.e., poetic license.

  I.e., lies.

  There were a lot of lies in our life, and if I end up telling a few, it’s only because I’m repeating what I heard.

  What else would I do with my summer vacation?

  Mrs. Miller drills me on grammatical issues like tautologies and redundancies and the like because I am my school’s representative for the statewide essay contest held each year in Topeka between the fall and spring semesters. (Man, that was a boring sentence. Glad I finally got it out of the way.) Buhler High is small even by Kansas standards—not quite five hundred kids in all four grades—but Mrs. Miller’s had four winners and three runners-up in fifteen years of teaching, which pretty much makes her the Bob Knight of the Kansas essay-writing circuit. Even to be selected as our school’s representative is an honor, since I’m only a junior, and there’s a $2,500 scholarship at stake, as well as a traveling silver cup that gets displayed in the cabinet along with the handful of dusty trophies that commemorate various football and basketball and tennis and track victories that took place in the distant past. In Mrs. Miller’s “considered opinion,” I could be the first person to win the cup two years in a row. All the other teachers in the state, she added proudly, hate her.