Sprout

by Dale Peck

  This wasn’t an accident.

  It turned out Ty’s dad was convinced the Russkies, China-men, Islams, or Aussies (I know, random) were going to start Armageddon any day now, and he’d built his house accordingly. Metal shutters flanked the narrow windows and the concrete-walled “sub-basement” held more canned food than a supermarket, not to mention an armory of pistols, shotguns, deer rifles, semiautomatic weapons, and a couple of compound bows and military knives in case the ammo ran out. Mrs. Miller says to avoid hyperbole when characterizing bad guys or else they become satirical, but it’s hard not to sound O.T.T. when you’re describing a man who has a sign on his front door that says:

  God Bless Our Home

  And CURSE the Homes of Sinners!

  complete with a picture of a mushroom cloud in the background. All this, and a picture in the living room, right where some people put pictures of their family and other people put needlepoint aphorisms and still other people put bark paintings or chrome rims. The picture showed a pasty, slightly pointed face (not unlike Ty’s actually) scowling above one of those police-number boards you get when you get arrested. The caption read:

  Timothy McVeigh

  A REAL American hero

  All this makes it sound like I actually met Mr. Petit, but that didn’t happen until later. Ty told me up front that if his dad caught a glimpse of my green hair he’d forbid his son from coming near me (what he actually said was that his dad would forbid him from visiting my grave, since Mr. Petit would shoot me on sight), so the only times I went to Ty’s place were when the house was empty, which, not coincidentally, were the only times I let Ty come to my house, because I was pretty sure that if my dad saw Ty he’d forbid me from going near him too, if for entirely different reasons—reasons that had a lot to do with the condom he left in my bedroom one day, along with the note, “I don’t want to know. But I don’t want you dead either.” What gave the gesture added significance was the fact that my dad’d taken the condom from the box he’d bought when he started dating Mrs. Miller. Touching, right? Not dysfunctional at all.

  But I’m getting ahead of things. Before we get to sex we have to get to Ty’s house, and before we get to Ty’s house we have to get to the forest, which was the neutral ground we chose to have our first out-of-school meeting. Which just about brings us to:

  “Hey. You found it.”

  You’d think his play clothes would be different from the slacks-and-buttondown ensemble he wore to school, but nope: he was dressed as he was every day, from the weird shoes right up to the collar of his shirt, still buttoned tightly against his Adam’s apple. The end of his belt had come free from the loops, hung down like the rope a monk uses to cinch his cassock.

  In the sunlight beaming down on the Andersens’ pasture he was as bright and indistinct as a candle flame. A stiff breeze swayed the branches and the world pixilated like a screensaver. For a moment I was afraid he would disappear, but the crunch of leaves beneath his feet testified to the concrete existence of his body. I could tell from his expression that I was looking at him the same way he was looking at me: as if he were nothing more than a dream.

  “We, um, we don’t have trees like this on our land,” he said when I continued staring at him as if he were a ghost or Pamela Anderson or something equally improbable. “I, um, I used to sneak over here when I was a kid. I’d crawl through the fence and hop over that branch you’re sitting on, and when I was done I’d go back over it too, even if it was way out of the way and I ended up being late.”

  As it turned out, I knew the tree Ty was talking about it. I even knew the branch of the tree he was referring to, and not just because I was sitting on it. It splintered off from the tree’s base and sloped upwards like a staircase for a good twenty-five or thirty feet, where it poked from the forest’s edge over the Andersens’ pasture and gave you a view for miles in three different directions. In fact, I’d read so many books in the crook of this particular branch that I’d even given it a name. Originally I called it the Northern Branch of the Hutchinson Public Library, but, in addition to being stupid, that name was also unwieldy, so I shortened it to the Lending Library, which, though also stupid (hey, I was twelve) was easier to say. But, stupid or not, I’d been right to think there was something special about this particular tree, this particular branch, because Ty’d noticed it too. Now, though, you could see he was wondering if there wasn’t something “special” about me too, and not in the good way.

  “So, um, yeah. When my sister June got her period my dad pulled us out of Buhler and sent us to Central Christian. He said he didn’t trust her in a ‘heathen school’ now that she had the ‘blood of Eve’ on her. Said boys wouldn’t be able to resist temptation. Of course June had her period for like a year before he noticed, but whatever: he pulled her and me and L.D., that’s my oldest brother, L.D., he pulled us out of Buhler like it was Sodom and Gomorrah or something. Sodom or Gomorrah, I guess. One or the other. Me, I didn’t give a crap, but L.D. only had a year of school left and had to give up all his friends. June finished three years later and that left just me, at which point my dad said he was tired of fighting with Central Christian to keep them from expelling me, and so whatever, if I wanted to go to hell, it was my own business. Buhler was cheaper than private school anyway. Christians suck,” he said, presumably to explain why his last school tried to expel him, and then he shoved his hands in his pockets.

  The silence was so loud the leaves bumping against each other sounded like a thirty-car pileup on the highway. One fell to the ground. I guess it was the foliage equivalent of a Mini or a Prius.

  Ty’s eyes followed the leaf to the ground, stared at it for another whole minute or so. Finally he looked back at me.

  “So, uh, are you ever gonna, you know, talk?”

  Of course I wanted to talk. I mean, I’d talked to him a dozen times in school. But now, away from all those other distractions, all those other people, I felt completely paralyzed, like I was caught in one of those in medias res beginnings of a music video and had to wait for the action to catch up to the opening scene so I could figure out what was going on. I looked around desperately, as if the ability to speak were something I’d dropped, a golfball, a housekey, and all I had to do was find it. But all I saw was a crabapple tree growing at the edge of the Andersens’ pasture. At some point they’d wrapped the fence wire around it, and bark bilged over the steel tourniquets like a kinked rubber hose filling with water. See, those were the kinds of sentences that were running through my brain: over-articulate, pointless observations that, if I said them aloud, would’ve probly made me look even worse than my Marcel Marceau impression.

  “Daniel? Earth to Bradford. Are you there?”

  The ground beneath the crabapple tree was dotted with dozens of mushy green balls. I glanced at Ty, then hopped off the branch and walked over and picked one up. It was spongy beneath my fingers, gave off a sweet yet acrid smell, like a bowl of sugar that’s been peed on.

  “Daniel Bradford. I swear to God. I will feed you your own ba—”

  My shot caught him square in the chest, and even as the green goo exploded over his shirt I was off, my feet following a trail I’d worn into the underbrush over the past four years. Ty’s ridiculous shoes were loud in my ears, along with his curses and death threats and general promises of bone-breaking, life-ending, gender-altering revenge.

  As I ran, I wracked my brain, trying to visualize the terrain around me. South was out. The clearing lay that way: the stumps, the trailer, my dad, all the other things I didn’t want Ty to see just yet. Suddenly I remembered a large catalpa about a hundred yards to my right. Its low branches were perfect for a speedy ascent. Better yet, it linked up with an adjacent tree at a fairly good height above the ground, so I could go up one tree and, when Ty followed, clamber down the other.

  “I’m gonna kill you!” Ty screamed, punctuating his threat with a series of curses.

  I veered off the trail. Immediately my footsteps grew lo
uder, as tamped mulch gave way to years of dead leaves and sticks. Branches slapped my face, vines tangled my arms and legs. I heard my own screams, and my mind flashed back to my first day at Buhler, when I’d heard the little kids screaming and thought they sounded more like they were dying than having fun.

  “I will bury you, Bradford! Right up to your neck! And then I’ll drag a cow over here and get it to chow down on your stupid grass-colored hair until it rips the brains right out of your skull!”

  I saw the tree I was aiming for, sprinted the last fifty feet, launched myself at its lowest limbs. I’d climbed it countless times, knew instinctively where to place my hands, my feet. By the time Ty reached it I was safely out of reach. He took a moment to walk symbolically around the trunk, as if to emphasize that the only way down was past him. Or, who knows, maybe he was just trying to catch his breath.

  “Rookie mistake, Bradford. You’re trapped now.” He looked up with an evil grin on his face. “Your ass is mine.”

  He heaved himself into the tree gracelessly, his slick-soled shoes slipping against the bark of the trunk, his hands grabbing at branches that were obviously too thin to support his weight. A twig snapped off in his fingers and he swung by one hand, legs kicking wildly.

  While he was distracted, I transferred to the second tree. It was a tricky business: I had to shimmy out on the proverbial limb, which quivered beneath my weight in a way that I didn’t remember from the last time I’d done this (growth spurt, I guess). I reached for an even thinner branch growing off the second tree. Once I had hold of it, the only thing to do was swing free and loop my legs around the new branch—a relatively easy monkey bars—type maneuver, but complicated by the fact that the branch I was grabbing swung beneath my weight like a fishing pole with a great white on the line, and plus too I was thirty feet up in the air, and between me and the ground were several thick branches that didn’t look like they’d break my fall so much as break my neck. I half wished Ty wasn’t stuck twenty feet down, so he could see how gracefully I pulled it off. (Hey, like I told Ruthie: don’t hate the playa. Hate the game.)

  Once safely on the new tree, I climbed closer to the trunk, made my way a couple branches higher so Ty couldn’t see where I’d gone across. I sat down then, and waited.

  Assuming I was trapped above him, Ty concentrated on his climb. God, those shoes. You’d think they’d been sprayed with WD-40 or something, they were so slippery. The fact that he’d outgrown his pants at least a year ago didn’t help, and his shirt, in addition to the big green splotch in the center of it, was soaked with sweat.

  “What the—”

  Ty suddenly realized I was no longer above him. He looked around wildly, finally found my smirking face a dozen feet over from his.

  “That damn hair. It’s like camouflage.” Then: “How in the hell did you get over there?” Instead of waiting for an answer, he began making his way towards me. He stood up, held on to a branch above him for balance, and tightroped away from the trunk. The branch he stood on was too thin to support his weight, and before he’d gone a half dozen steps he was bouncing up and down. This seemed to amuse him, and he sproinged up and down until one of the branches, either the one he stood on or the one he held, cracked in protest.

  He looked over at me again, then looked up and down for an alternate route. The branch he needed was actually off to his left; but by this point in the season the catalpa leaves were as big as sheets of printer paper, and I doubted he could see it. But just to make sure he didn’t look too hard, I began throwing sticks to distract him. I’d broken off about fifty while I waited for him to get up here, so I had more than enough.

  “Jesus Christ, Daniel, what’s up with you and the throwing?” ?” He broke off a stick and threw it at me, but his perch was so unsteady that it sailed ten feet wide.

  “Hmmm,” he said, as if he were thinking aloud. “This is a pickle.” He pursed his lips, furrowed his brow, tapped his temple with the index finger of his right hand. “What will I do?” The next thing I knew he was reaching for his belt, slipped it free of the loops in one long flourish. The kinked, cracked length of patent leather hung from his hand like a dead snake, or maybe just a snakeskin. It had to be at least five feet long.

  “My dad always buys clothes we can ‘grow into.’ I think he went a little overboard with this, don’t you?”

  He leaned towards me. For a moment I thought he was actually falling off the wobbly branch he stood on, but then I saw he was reaching for another branch about three feet in front of his face. This branch was a bit thicker than the one he’d been holding on to, about as big around as his upper arm.

  I remind you that his upper arms were not particularly thick.

  His upper arms were, in fact, particularly thin.

  His body was at an incline now, like a trapeze artist caught midair in the jump from one bar to another. As I watched, he looped his belt around the new branch, pulling the end through the buckle and tightening it so that almost the entire five feet hung free. He yanked on the belt several times, testing to make sure it would take his weight. Then, looping the end of the belt around one hand, he suddenly stepped off the branch into empty space—not like a trapeze artist at all actually, but like a yo-yo in the hands of a skill-less yo-yoer, his spasmodic bounces gradually flattening out until he hung thirty feet above the ground.

  “Ty!”

  My voice reverberated through the vibrating branches.

  “It speaks!” Ty said, his own voice thin with the effort of holding on to what was proving to be a slippery liferope.

  “What are you doing? Get back on a branch!”

  “I intend to. Just not”—Ty’s voice disappeared when he kicked a leg out and began swinging back and forth—“the one”—kick—“I was”—kick—“on.” He was swinging a full 180° now, a violent yawing motion like the pendulum on a grandfather clock that just happened to be caught in an earthquake. The branch his belt was tied to creaked ominously, and other, smaller branches broke as he kicked them out of the way.

  “Ty, c’mon. Enough already. Get back on the tree.”

  “I’m—gonna—get—on—your—tree—in—STEAD!”

  How he did it I’ll never know. Hell, what he did I’ll never know. Well, I mean, I know what he did: he jumped. But how he jumped, and how he managed to grab the end of one of the branches growing out of the tree I was on, is a complete mystery. Ty’s feet swung forwards and upwards till they were higher than his head, and then, when they swung back, he hoisted himself up so that his waist pressed against the branch, his hands hip-width apart, his arms rigid, the muscles of his chest straining against the crabapple-splattered buttons of his shirt.

  One of his ridiculous shoes slipped off his foot and, like a bird that leaves the nest too soon, bounced off one branch after another before thudding, dead, to the ground. His foot was surprisingly small, his sock phenomenally dirty.

  “Daniel? What’re you looking at?”

  What I was looking at was a distant silver shadow just visible though the forest, a plastic dome beneath which huddled all the furniture we’d brought from Long Island that hadn’t fit in the trailer. For five fantastic minutes I’d forgotten every stupid thing in my life, but that shiny blob was a reminder that it would all be waiting for me as soon as Ty went home.

  “Daniel?” Ty said again, his voice curiously gentle. “Quick. Gimme the name of a famous gymnast.”

  I looked at his hands, gripping the branch. His muscles, corded with effort. His face, purple as a pokeberry.

  “Um, Nadia Comaneci? Mary Lou—”

  And then the branch broke.

  “Sh

  ih

  ih

  ih

  ih

  ih

  ih

  —OW!—

  ih

  ih

  it!”

  His voice and body bounced off one branch after another. He didn’t manage to grab onto any of these branches, but at least they broke his de
scent into a series of three- or four- or five-foot drops instead of one thirty-foot plunge, which is why this book doesn’t end here, but still has another hundred pages to go before it reaches its (dramatic and deeply satisfying) climax.

  He hit the ground with the kind of dull thud that a fifty-pound sack of dogfood makes when you drop it off the roof of your house (did I mention that we had a German shepherd named Fang for three weeks? For three weeks we had—oh, never mind, it’s not important right now), and then he just lay there, unconscious, and, as far as I could tell, unbreathing. His belt hung limply from its still-swaying branch, the frayed end of a gallows rope after the hanged man has been cut down.

  “Ty?”

  His mouth was open, and there was a brownish bubble of blood below his right nostril. His arms and legs splayed out from his body, but none of them was obviously broken or twisted out of socket. I stared at his chest for I don’t know how long, trying to see if it was moving, if he was breathing, before I suddenly realized that if he wasn’t breathing it was more likely I could help him down on the ground rather then up here in a tree. I started descending, cautiously at first, then faster and faster, more or less falling the last ten feet or so, then running towards him.

  Just as I reached him he shot up from the ground with a huge gasp, eyes wide, arms thrown out as if to ward off a blow. I could’ve almost thought he was faking it, save for the single word he screamed out: