Sprout

by Dale Peck

  In fact she didn’t have to look that far. All the teachers at Buhler hate her too. But that’s getting ahead of the story.

  . . .

  It played out like this:

  Shortly before the end of sophomore year, a tall, thin (well, thinnish) teacher with not particularly natural-looking blonde hair approached me in the hall. Wispy bangs had been tortured with repeated applications of curling iron and hairspray in clear violation of the Geneva Convention; a pair of oversized square-framed glasses rode so low on the bridge of her nose that I had to resist the urge to push them up; her pleated khaki pants had been ironed so viciously that the creases had turned white. She carried a couple of pieces of paper in her right hand, which she used to fan her face in the un—air conditioned hall. Something—ketchup maybe, raspberry jelly?—stained the corner of the top page. The stain winked at me as though it had some kind of Rorschach significance, but the teacher was fanning the pages so rapidly I couldn’t get a good look at it, or them.

  “You are”—she stopped fanning long enough to push the glasses up her nose—“Sprout Bradford?”

  I thought it was a little pretentious to say “You are Sprout Bradford?” instead of “Are you Sprout Bradford?” so I said, “I are Sprout Bradford!” in my best half-hick, half-retard voice.

  Behind her square frames, the teacher’s eyes rolled. They were gray and large and . . . and skeptical. No one had ever looked at me skeptically before. I’d never earned anything more than garden-variety doubt. It made me feel grownup. A little scared, but grownup.

  The gray eyes floated to the top of my head.

  “Well. At least I understand one thing now.”

  I scratched my scalp. The dye job was fresh, so my fingertips came away green, and I wiped them on my pants. Like most of my clothes, they already had a liberal smattering of green: stains, smears, and smudges; flecks, flakes, and drops (one of which turned out to be a pea, and which I flicked off as discreetly as I could).

  “Look, uh, Miss—”

  “Mrs.”

  Like that helped. “Look, Mrs.—”

  “Miller.”

  I must’ve pulled some kind of face, because she smiled, kind of grim, but kind of proud too.

  “You’re not the only one with a reputation.”

  I resisted the urge to scratch my head again. “Um, yeah. Right. Well, look, Mrs. Miller, I gotta catch my bus. So if I’m not getting detention . . . ?”

  Mrs. Miller’s detentions were famous: thousand-word essays on the history of wheat; dramatic monologues on the Homestead Act of 1846; or just copying the complete definition of the verb to be from the dictionary—by hand, in crayon, using a different color for each letter.

  Mrs. Miller turned the paper towards me. She held it by the corners, using just her fingertips, as though it were a slightly offensive photograph still wet from its chemical bath.

  “Did you write this?”

  By now you can tell Mrs. Miller liked the superfluous gesture ( just as I’m kind of fond of anachronisms, what with the paper dictionary and non-digital photography and words like “fond”). It was pretty clear I’d written the paper—um, duh, she’d looked down and seen my name on it—but I’d written it for Mrs. Lentman’s sophomore English class, which made me wonder how Mrs. Miller, who as far as I knew only taught seniors, got a hold of it. The paper was called

  Quit Whining!

  or,

  Holden Caulfield Could Learn a Few Things from Huck Finn

  and I suddenly remembered: the red stain was strawberry compote, which, when spread liberally on toaster waffles, ranks seventh on my dad’s list of favorite hangover cures. Fortunately I like it too, so it works out all around.

  The sound of Mrs. Miller’s tapping foot brought me back. We were standing on carpet, so she must’ve been wearing really hard-soled shoes. I looked up at her.

  “Did it suck so much the teachers are passing it around?”

  “On the contrary,” she said (except she pronounced it au contraire). “Unlike most people your age, your irreverence has a considered, mature quality to it.” Matoor, she said, in that pseudo-classy soap-opera-y kind of way. But at the same time she leaned in close to me, and a gap opened between two buttons of her blouse. The lace on her bra matched her collar, except it was pale purple. Lavender, I guess you’d say, although that makes it sound a little, um, sexy? Just thinking that made my face turn about the same purple as her bra, and, what with my spiky green hair, I must’ve looked like an over-cooked stem of asparagus (which, btw: gross).

  When Mrs. Miller gave me the paper back, I saw that Mrs. Lentman had given me a B+. She took off a half step for the strawberry compote, and another half step for a couple of green fingerprints on page three, but the last deduction was for “unconventional interpretation.”

  “Lesson one, Sprout,” Mrs. Miller said to me with a twinkle in her gray eyes, “know your audience. The Catcher in the Rye is Sharon’s favorite book. You bash it, she bashes you. Strictly between us,” she added in a stage-whisper (except it came out entre nous), “I always thought Holden Caulfield was a simp myself.”

  Because Mrs. Lentman had been “criminally tardy” in bringing my “linguistic prowess” to her attention, Mrs. Miller suggested the two of us meet during the summer to get a head start—the contest was only seven months away, after all. First I was like: state essay contest? and then, when she explained what it was, I was like, state essay contest? Because the truth is I’d never thought about writing as anything besides something you did for school. It wasn’t like my secret dream, I mean. I didn’t have any dreams beyond getting the hell out of Dodge, which makes me about as unique as a playlist on the average cheerleader’s ipod. And I didn’t actually need the scholarship because my dad had set aside some of the money from the sale of our house on Long Island for my college tuition. And then, well, the idea of meeting once a week over the summer with an English teacher who wore sexy underwear beneath prim blouses didn’t exactly thrill me. I mean, I’d just turned sixteen. I’d graduated from my learner’s to an unrestricted license, and had worked out a deal with my dad to have the car on Saturdays. (“Dad, I won’t get a tattoo of a teardrop on my cheek if you let me have the car on Saturdays.” “Sounds like a deal, son.”) I was thinking pool parties, ultimate frisbee, the new video arcade in the mall. But the truth is I didn’t have anyone to invite me to pool parties or ultimate frisbee (which is for losers anyway) and, being jobless, I didn’t have any money for the arcade. But there’d been that wink. And, you know, the idea I was good at something. You show me a teenager who doesn’t like to be flattered and I’ll show you a teenager who’s got a steady source of sex. Since it seemed pretty clear Mrs. Miller wasn’t going to let me catch my bus till I gave her an answer, I told her it’d be up to my dad.

  Mrs. Miller looked at my hair one more time.

  “You mean, Mr. Sprout?”

  Something about the way she said it told me she was a little curious about Mr. Sprout.

  She was punctual, I’ll give her that. She showed up at my house at 11 A.M. the first Monday after school let out. I heard her pulling up the driveway and went out to meet her in an attempt to head off the whole Mrs.-Miller-meet-Mr.-Sprout scene, but my dad, who has been known to say “Is that you, Sprout?” when I walk past him in the living room in the morning (as though anyone else might be in our house at 8 A.M.) decided that today he was taking a paternal interest in my welfare, and followed me outside.

  “This is my dad,” I said to Mrs. Miller. “He’s drunk.”

  “I am drunk,” my dad raised his glass, guilty as charged. “Nice to meet you,” he said, and went back inside.

  I got in the passenger’s seat and waited. Mrs. Miller was staring slack-jawed at my house. You might think she was staring at the invisible figure of my dad, but I was pretty sure she was just staring at the house. Most people stare at my house when they see it for the first time.

  She stared at it.

  After a minute
or two she closed her mouth with an audible click. Then:

  “Is that . . . kudzu?”

  “Kudzu, grapevine, Virginia creeper, morning glories, bindweed, and ivy, both English and itch. Oh, and my dad planted sweet peas this year, but they haven’t come up yet.” I had the list down pat.

  Mrs. Miller managed to tear her eyes from the trailer, looked around the yard.

  “And the—?”

  I nodded my head yes, she was seeing correctly. “Stumps.”

  A nervous smile flickered over Mrs. Miller’s mouth.

  “Stumps.”

  She turned and looked at me. There was so much hairspray on her tortured bangs that when the tips tapped against the lenses of her glasses they actually clicked.

  “Stumps?”

  The house first:

  The day after we moved here my dad left me to arrange the furniture however I wanted while he returned the U-Haul. After the taxi brought him home, he didn’t come inside to see what I’d done. I was particularly proud of the pair of dining room chairs I’d balanced on two coffee tables and draped with an old sheet to make a tent, blinkily lit from within by a couple of strings of Christmas lights; since we didn’t have a dining room anymore (or, for that matter, a dining room table), it seemed as good a place as any for them. Instead he just walked around our trailer, taking liberal sips from the long-necked bottle of hooch he’d brought back from town. I followed him from window to window, wondering what he was doing. After about the tenth revolution he suddenly stopped, turned, headed into the forest. He had the air of a man setting out on a long journey. Part of me wondered if I’d ever see him again. A larger part wondered what was for dinner. Not that we had anything to eat off of. My ears hadn’t deceived me: every single dish I’d packed in the backseat of the Taurus had smashed to pieces.

  He was back an hour later, covered in dirt, his arms full of plants. Not just any plants: vines, which draped over his shoulders and tangled in his legs and trailed behind him for dozens of feet. It made me think of when you take your first bite of cup-a-noodles and you get a big glob of ramen plus like a foot more spiraling off your spoon. Or maybe hunger made me think that. At any rate, magnify that image by fifty (and paint it green) and you sort of know what my dad looked like.

  I.e., he looked like the Wild Man of the Forest.

  I.e., he looked crazy.

  Suddenly I was a little less hungry.

  Since we didn’t have a shovel (we’d had a shovel, on Long Island, two in fact, but neither made it into the U-Haul: yup, Christmas lights but no shovel, that’s my dad) he used a stick to dig a shallow trench around the trailer, into which he planted the vines he’d taken from the forest. It was only the next morning when he was more or less covered by a rash that we realized some of the vines must’ve been itch ivy. The rash went away but the vines didn’t. Now, four years later, our trailer is covered in a shimmering green cocoon more than a foot thick. The only opening in the foliage is for the front door—although copious amounts of itch ivy still make getting into and out of our house a bit of a risky undertaking. At least in spring and summer anyway. Come winter, the leafless brown strands look like a fisherman’s net tangled around a beached whale. People tend to have two reactions when they see it, one of which is “Cool!” and the other of which is:

  “Weird.”

  Well, most people say “weird.”

  In fact, only one person ever said “cool.”

  Mrs. Miller’s eyes floated to the top of my head, as if wondering what kind of man would encase his house in bright green vines and let his son walk around with bright green hair. She shook her head—click click went her bangs against her glasses—a little amused, a little perplexed, a little scared.

  “Your father,” she said carefully, “is very, very weird.”

  And now the stumps:

  One time my dad and I were driving on the western side of the county. I forget why. Sometimes my dad liked to drive. Sometimes my dad liked to take me with him when he drove. Sometimes I didn’t manage to sneak into the forest before he found me. This must’ve been one of those times. So:

  We drove past a cottonwood that’d fallen over. The big bristly ball of roots was open and exposed, a dense, knotted tangle like a virus magnified a million times. It had been out of the ground long enough that the dirt had washed off and the bark had fallen away and the sinewy wood had gone almost white. My dad slowed the Taurus as he looked at it, then just stopped and stared. Finally, he said,

  “Son, that is an amazing sight.”

  “Tolutation,” I said. “The action of ambling or trotting.”

  From the corner of my eye I saw my dad glance at the dictionary, but he didn’t say anything. Just pulled the car off the road before we got rear-ended. We must’ve sat there for like a half hour while I made my way into the U’s, until finally a woman came out of the house with a cordless phone in her hands, which she waved threateningly.

  “What’s she gonna do,” my dad said, “throw it at us?”

  “I think she’s gonna call the cops.”

  “Oh right.” My dad pulled back onto the road. He looked both ways first, though. He might be crazy, but he’s a considered kind of crazy. Careful.

  A week later the stump was in our back yard. My dad cut the trunk off about two feet above the rootmass, which was a good six feet in diameter, and brought it home on the back of a rattling flatbed trailer he’d gotten who knew where. With the help of a couple of buddies (drunks can always find a couple of buddies), he balanced the stump upside down on the grass, so that the roots reached up into the air. On the one hand, it looked a little like an enormous dead cauliflower, or the head of a giant troll doll. On the other, you could stare at it for a really long time. Not just at it, but into it. Even in broad daylight there was something about the shadows created by all those tangled roots that made you think the stump contained limitless hidden spaces. It was a paradox. Something that was normally hidden beneath the earth had been exposed, yet in the process new mysteries were created. I had to admit, it was kind of impressive.

  It was also really ugly.

  It also started multiplying.

  The stumps became my dad’s hobby. He combed three counties looking for them. Would go up to strangers’ houses and ask if he could haul away the tree that had fallen in their field or front yard. At some point he got the idea of cutting up the non-stump part of the tree and selling it for firewood, which proved surprisingly lucrative. So you could never say his hobby was indulgent, or took time away from his job.

  On first glance, the stumps look like leafless trees, dead or merely dormant depending on your outlook on life. But when you get closer you see the difference. Roots don’t grow the same way branches do. Branches tend to be straight or gently curved, easing their way through open air towards a sunlight that’s all around them. Roots have to push though solid earth. To say they inch their way is an overstatement. They millimeter their way, micron their way even, searching blindly for water or nutrients or patches of ground strong enough to hold up the huge mass growing invisibly above them, the evidence of their labors in their gnarled, stunted shape (and yeah, I know I switched from old-style to metric in the middle of that metaphor, but “fraction-of-an-inch” makes an even more awkward verb than “millimeter”). It’s sort of like the difference between the Eloi and the Morlocks in The Time Machine: the surface dwellers pretty and tall and slim and careless, the underworld beings hunched and ugly and doing all the work. Of course, in TTM it turns out the Morlocks are also eating the Eloi. Sometimes I wondered if my dad’s stumps had a similar fate planned for us.

  By the time Mrs. Miller came over, there were thirty-six of them. Six rows of six, evenly spaced over the whole acre and a half of our clearing. My dad had even taken pictures, got some kid from the JuCo to make him a website. He paid him in booze.

  Check it out: www.thestumpman.com.

  Make sure you type thestumpman, or you’re going to end up seeing something you rea
lly don’t want to. Trust me on that one.

  It turned out Mrs. Miller was a nervous (read: incompetent, or maybe just dangerous) driver. Our driveway is a good quarter mile long, but it’s still pretty much just a couple of straight lines connected at one end (that’s called an L, by the way, which maybe I should’ve just said). Despite this, she somehow managed to back onto the lawn and get stuck between two stumps. She slammed on the brakes to avoid hitting one, shifted gears so hard they ground. This was impressive, since she drove an automatic. The first thing she said was:

  “Your father should not be buying alcohol for minors.”

  The second thing she said was:

  “That is a great subject for an essay.”

  I looked around the clearing. Sometimes I thought my dad was a genius. There was something so extreme and obsessive about his strange, bristling grid and the weird green thicket of our house in the center of it. But I was also afraid that liking these things might mean I was like my dad—that I would end up like him, alone and drunk and devoting all my time to building a monument that communicated nothing besides its maker’s lack of connection to the normal world.

  “Listen to me,” Mrs. Miller said now, trying to maneuver her car out of its trap. “It’s like they say on American Idol. It’s all about song choice. Or, in your case, subject choice.”

  “You watch American Idol?”