Sprout

by Dale Peck

  “Holly!”

  The pure aching empty need in Ty’s voice could’ve stopped traffic, distracted soldiers in the line of fire, caused a stream of lava to split and run around either side of him. I don’t know if there’d been any birds singing before, but they weren’t singing afterwards, and the only sound was my last footfall before I reached him, thudding against the earth like a boulder falling off the side of a mountain. Don’t get me wrong. I’d’ve stopped too, at the sound of his voice, but momentum worked against me, and I more or less ran into him.

  His hands clutched my legs blindly, pulling me into him. He slammed his face against my knees, his choked breaths tearing from his body like pages ripped by the handful from a book.

  “Ty?” My hand hovered above his head for a moment; then, as delicately as I could, I placed it on his crewcut, matted now with bits of leaf and bark and dirt. “Are you okay?”

  He stiffened, shuddered, then relaxed. He let go of my legs and, shakily, sat back.

  “That—” his voice caught in his throat, he coughed. “That knocked the wind outta me.”

  “It knocked you out is what it did.” My voice was almost as raspy as his.

  “I’m fine. Just—” He coughed again. “Have to catch my breath.”

  “Who’s Holly?”

  He reached for his oversized, ugly shoe, pulled it on.

  “Hollis. My brother. My other brother.”

  “Oh. Does he have green hair?”

  Ty looked up at the sky then. No, not the sky: the trees. His belt.

  “Screw it,” he said, though it didn’t seem like he was talking to me. “Least this way he can’t hit me with it.” Then, standing unsteadily: “No,” he said. “He didn’t.”

  The difference a tense makes. Not doesn’t. Didn’t.

  “Hey!” Ty did his best to make his punctured voice sound cheery. “What’s this?”

  He pointed to something on my chest. I looked down, and he smacked me in the face, nearly peed himself laughing, then nearly choked to death coughing.

  “I gotta go,” he said when he could talk again. And, coughing and crashing, he ran off through the trees.

  But he found me before first period the next day, still wearing yesterday’s green-stained shirt. The little bubble of blood below his nose had swollen into a fist-sized pink and purple bruise that stretched from his cheekbone down to the corner of his mouth, and he was limping too, his left foot half sliding out of his oversized shoe with every dragging step—which was weird, since he hadn’t been limping yesterday. From a distance he looked like the old battered jockey in the Hemingway story we’d read for Mrs. Miller’s class, but when he got closer I saw that his smirk, though shrunken by the bruise on his face, was even more self-satisfied than usual.

  “Dude.” He lifted up his shirt (which was covered with hay for some reason) to show me a black and blue mass laid over his ribs like the 72-ounce porterhouse at Amarillo Andy’s. “That was awesome.”

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

  The Andersens’ St. Bernard had acquired legendary status two years earlier, when it pulled down a six-tined buck whose flight had been hampered by snowdrifts from a recent blizzard (it almost never snows in central Kansas, but when it does it tends to dump a foot or two, which the wind whips into four- or six- or eight-foot drifts that’re a lot of fun if you’re a kid, but apparently less so for things like rabbits and deer). According to Vernon Andersen, his St. Bernard ripped the buck’s throat out and fed on the rotting carcass for almost two weeks before he—Vernon, not the dog—was able to get a rope around its—the deer’s, not the dog’s—antlers and haul it away. I suppose I should mention that this story came to me through my dad, who heard it from Vernon at the 4th Street Tavern, the bar my dad went to on the rare occasions he wanted to drink with other drunks. Among other things, the 4th Street is actually on 5th, so it’s hard to trust any bit o’ wisdom that manages to stagger out of its door (although my dad told me the name/address discrepancy is just to throw wives off the track of wayward husbands, but whatever): my point is, however vicious the Andersens’ St. Bernard was, he still wasn’t the major obstacle preventing me from visiting Ty’s house.

  “Oh—my—God,” Ty laughed so hard a pea flew from his mouth, landed on my thigh, disappeared into the sea of green stains. “When my old man saw my shirt he kicked my ass from one end of the house to the other. Course, we live in a pretty small house, which when I pointed that out he kicked my ass back to the other end, and then kicked me out the front door. I had to sleep in the barn.”

  “I guess that explains the hay,” I said, although what I was looking at was the bruise on his face, the others concealed beneath his stained, straw-covered shirt.

  Ty picked a piece of hay off his shirt. “You kind of like pointing out the obvious, huh? When you don’t got nothing to say? Anyway,” he cut off my protest, “here’s the plan: cut around the southern edge of the Andersens’ pasture to avoid that stupid dog—”

  “Do we know the stupid dog’s name, by the way?”

  “Do we care about the stupid dog’s name, by the way?”

  “It’s just easier than calling it ‘the dog,’ or ‘the Andersens’ dog,’ or ‘Vernon Andersens’ stupid—’ ”

  “What’s easier is if you shut up and listen to the plan, so that way you don’t get your head shot off by my dad.”

  There was a pause here, while I waited for Ty to laugh, and Ty waited for me to realize he wasn’t going to laugh. Something—talking or chewing—had caused the cut on the side of his mouth to open, and after a moment he touched a finger to his lip, looked at the blood, licked it off. My eyes flickered to the bruise on his face. Noted again that it was the size of a fist, with knuckle-shaped scalloping following the line of his cheekbone like lace at the edge of a bra.

  “Okay?” Ty’s eye twitched a couple of times above his bruise, less wink than tremor. A flush had pinked his cheeks, and for a minute I thought he might actually cry. But all he did was say:

  “So.” He gulped. Then: “So,” he said again, “follow the Andersens’ fence all the way to Tobacco, then walk up the road till you get to this line of hedge on the west side. There’s a sign on the fence that says it’s electric, but that’s a lie. Go through it, but make sure to keep the hedgerow between you and our house. When you get to the end of the hedge you’re gonna have to cross this big open field, kind of a valley like, with a couple of little willows and mesquite at the bottom you can use for cover, if you make it that far. My dad’s usually in the barn when we get out of school, so make sure he don’t come outside, cuz that’s only about a hundred feet away from the field and he keeps a thirty-ought-six hanging by the door in case of terrorists or taxmen. Anyway, once you get across the field, you have to make your way up the hill to this linden tree that grows about halfway up. It’s the only tree, you can’t miss it. It’s half dead cuz it’s so dry up there, but it’s tall enough that you can use it to get over the fence, which is electric, even though there’s no sign on it. There’re a couple of places you can go under, but my dad’d probly spot you before you found ’em and then, well, then you’d be dead, and we wouldn’t get to have no fun. So anyway, get yourself over the fence and then go far enough down the other side that no one can see you from our property, and then wait for me. And try not to make too much noise, or you’ll rouse the ostriches.”

  In the time it’d taken Ty to say all this a spot of blood had welled up on the side of his mouth and then run down his cheek. It didn’t run straight down, however, but veered left into the hollow between his lower lip and then spiraled around the point of his chin. It seemed just about to drip onto his white shirt when he suddenly finished talking and wiped his face on the back of his hand and, after inspecting the smear of blood with an almost proud expression, licked it off. I was so transfixed by the blood’s progress that I missed most of what he said, and in fact only really remembered the last word, which, s
ince I couldn’t think of anything else to say, I now repeated:

  “Ostriches?”

  “The back of our property butts up against the Regiers’ ostrich farm. You seen the sign? ‘GOOD MEAT OSTRICHES’?”

  “Uh, yeah. I’ve seen it.”

  “They’ll rip your throat out if they’re in a mood. There’s a pretty thick stand of sandhill plums just over the hill. If they come at you, just go in there, they can’t get in. At least I don’t think they can. Whatever you do, don’t try to outrun ’em. They can do forty miles per, easy.”

  “Wipe your chin,” I said, and then: “You ever tried ostrich meat?”

  Ty wiped; looked; licked. Shrugged. “My dad shot one once. He told Regier that it got on our property, but that was a bald-faced lie. He said if God wanted ostriches in America, He’d’ve put ’em here Himself, so he—my dad, not God—was really just staving off the Apocalypse, which a Methodist like Willy Regier should thank him for, since he’s just gonna end up in hell when that happens.” He licked his lip without wiping first. “I thought it was okay.”

  “That he shot it?”

  “The meat. Jesus, Daniel, keep up.” Ty took a breath. “So. You got all that?”

  I stared at him. We’d started out with cave canem and ended up with the horsemen of the Apocalypse, except they were ostriches, not horsemen, and then something about plums and Methodists. And of course all that blood, and the fact that every time Ty licked it my mouth filled with water. Of course that too.

  “JFC, Ty, this is more complicated than the plot of Ocean’s Eleven.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Um, George Clooney, Brad Pitt?” When he still looked at me blankly, I said, “Julia Roberts?”

  “I meant, what’s JFC?”

  “It’s like OMG, but JC instead. With an F in the middle.”

  Ty looked at me as though I was speaking Greek. Then: “Julia Roberts played the whore, right? They burned her picture in our church so we’d know what was going to happen to her in hell. The preacher said hair the color of flames deserves to go up in flames.”

  Ty’s voice went a little fire-and-brimstone, and I tried to imagine what it must be like being raised to believe that everyone in heaven is going to have brown hair, maybe a few blonds, but no redheads and probly no green-haired atheists either. (I asked him one time about people with black hair and he said, “You show me a person with black hair, I’ll show you a Catholic or a Muslim”).

  He’d lifted up his shirt now, pressed on his bruised ribs until he started coughing and laughing, and then the bell rang and we had to go to class. I caught up with him in the break between fifth and sixth periods, worked out one more kink in the plan (“You’ll see a metal thing that looks kind of like a great big TV antenna or a really small jungle gym. Whatever you do, don’t touch that”), and then, just before we got on our separate buses, he saluted me and said, “Go with God, my son.” I started to walk away, but he called me back.

  “I just got it.”

  “Huh?”

  “What the F stands for.”

  “The F?”

  “In JFC. Dude. Good one.”

  Ty was waiting in the Regiers’ pasture by the time I got there, had already picked a couple of plums, one of which he tossed me. I dodged it instead of catching it, I guess thinking of the crabapple from the day before, which made Ty roll his eyes.

  “Food, doofus? You eat it?”

  I looked at the plum on the ground, lying a few feet from something I’m guessing was an ostrich turd, which looked pretty much identical to the plum, right down to the shininess.

  “Huh.” I let the plum lie where it’d fallen.

  Ty had already turned and was marching west. He skirted the plum thicket, which clung to the bottom of the field like a dense green cloud, and headed up the opposite hill. I was half tempted to pick up the plum and throw it at him, but instead just followed.

  In the shallow valleys the air was hot and still, but on top of the hills the wind needled us with a powdery grit that collected in the corners of our eyes and nostrils and lips. Ty led me up one dusty rise after another, only speaking to point out this or that cottonwood or willow or patch of sumac we could use for cover if the ostriches got wind of us. I thought about pointing out that ostriches had a pretty crappy sense of smell (I’d googled them in the library that afternoon) but figured that would be obnoxious, and so I just nodded. At some point I realized that Ty didn’t have a destination. Or, rather, that this walk was the destination. That he was showing me his childhood stomping grounds—the dry Kansas plains—just as I’d shown him my forest yesterday, or at least the parts I was willing to share.

  And so we walked. Up one hill, down another. Up one hill—the ever-present wind, the dust and the grit—and down another, to the hot bowels of the earth. Up one hill. To the left, right, forwards, more of the same. Down another, to another prairie hollow. Clumps of grass grew from a parched lunar landscape imprinted with the tracks of coyote, deer, snakes, ostriches. Thickets of sand plums picked clean by larks and starlings and blackbirds; ditto blackberries and raspberries. A bone, anonymous as a paper towel tube, lay bleached and white in the lengthening shadows. A few ants gnawed at the memory of marrow in its seams.

  After nearly an hour of walking, my throat felt coated with dust, and I regretted abandoning that plum. I didn’t have enough saliva to spit, instead swallowed what seemed like a mouthful of grit.

  “So, uh”—I had to swallow again—“you never mention your mom.”

  “I got one.” Ty didn’t bother turning around.

  “Got,” I said, “or had?” Thinking of his doesn’t-not-didn’t of the day before.

  “Don’t know.” Ty kicked a tumbleweed off its stalk, sent it on its endless rolling way. “Don’t care.” His back was ramrod straight, and he forged ahead like a periscope rising out of sandy soil, purposeful, directed, the very opposite of the tumbleweed, which rolled lopsidedly heels over head down the hill.

  I finally managed to spit, a big brown lugie that landed on the ground with an audible splat, then immediately disappeared as the dry soil sucked up the moisture.

  “My mom died.”

  “Everyone knows that.”

  Something about his voice. All I could say was: “Huh.”

  “Everyone knows Sprout Bradford’s mom died of cancer,” Ty went on before I could think of something else to say, “and Sprout Bradford’s dad is a drunk, and Sprout Bradford dyes his hair green because he thinks he’s special, and Sprout Bradford gets drunk with Mrs. Miller because she don’t got no kids and he don’t got a mom cuz she died of cancer. Tell me something I don’t know.”

  Ty rattled off his list, but all I could hear was Ruthie’s voice. It’s not like everyone doesn’t know already.

  Ty whirled around. “Not all of us like to talk about it, okay? Not all of us like to share every last endless detail of our lives like we’re a character in a book, or—or a writer, Mr. State Essay Contest.”

  For a moment I just stared. Then:

  “You’d be surprised what you don’t know about me.”

  “Yeah, I bet I wouldn’t.”

  “People see this,” I said, running my fingers through my green hair, not smoothly like Ian Abernathy, but making it stick out in every direction like a tumbleweed. “They think they know me. But they don’t know me. They just know I have green hair, cuz that’s all I want them to know. But I have secrets. I have secrets,” I repeated, as if repeating it might make it true.

  “Yeah? Then how come everyone knows you’re—”

  I felt the blood drain from my cheeks, felt the wind blow its grit against my pale face as though it would flay skin from bone. I waited for him to say it. Waited for him to say what he knew, then waited for him to tell me to get the hell off his land and never bother him again. But, well, it wasn’t his land, and all he said was:

  “It’s not so easy for some of us, Daniel. It’s not, Oh, my mom died, feel sorry for me. It’s,
My mom took off cuz maybe she didn’t give a crap about her kids or maybe her husband punched her in the face one too many times, or maybe, you know, maybe she was just a whore, and not no Julia Roberts kind of whore neither, but the kind of whore who sneaks out in the middle of the night and climbs in the cabs of truckers who park their rigs down at the end of the driveway. Listen,” he cut me off when I opened my mouth. “Don’t talk. Listen. Don’t try to make sense of it, cuz it’s not something you can make sense of. It’s not something you can tell. It’s just something you got to live with. She’s gone, okay. My mom’s gone, and my brothers’re gone, Holly’s dead and L.D.’s working full time and my sister went and married the first goombah who’d get her out of our house, but my jerkwad of a dad is still here, and so am I. Me, Daniel. Ty. I’m—still—here.”

  There was a moment then, just the wind blowing grit in our faces and some movement on the horizon I was hoping was a distant stand of trees or the smoke from a burning field and not an army of ostriches come to rip the guts from our bodies. The idea that we might be set upon at any time by a troop of eight-foot-tall, five-hundred-pound birds added a slightly surreal edge to what Ty was saying. A comic edge, I want to say, despite the desperation in his voice. Or, I don’t know, maybe it was just the smile that cracked his dust-ringed lips, the cough that barked out of his mouth.

  “Ow,” he said. He rubbed his sternum gently. “My ribs.”

  “Let’s see,” I said, and he unbuttoned his shirt, showed me how the bruise was spreading across his fish-white skin like an oil slick dispersing in the ocean. “Does this hurt?” I said, and jabbed a finger right in the center of the dark pool.

  “Mother—” The rest of the word disappeared in a cough, and I turned to run, but he tripped me before I could get away, then fell on me in a rain of punches so hard I wasn’t sure if we were wrestling or if he was really trying to kill me. But even as we began to roll downhill, strangling, elbowing, scissor-kicking and otherwise aiming ninja death blows and Ultimate Fighting—style submissions against each other, I knew it was a game—a life or death game, maybe, but that was how Ty did things. That was how he played, and I was discovering I liked playing that way too. Or at least I liked playing that way with him. Every jab, every parry was a bone-hard reminder that I finally had someone else to measure myself against, to find out what was me and what was beyond me. By which I mean: I got him in a rear-naked choke and squeezed as hard as I could. Ty didn’t bother to try and pull free, just went straight for my groin with the big fat heel of one of his shoes, which, when my boys exploded in what felt like about a gallon of blood, suddenly seemed less ridiculous than a masterpiece of offensive engineering. Spots danced in front of my eyes, and when I could see again Ty was behind me, his arms looped under mine and his hands pressing my head forwards in a full nelson. My shoulders screamed as Ty attempted to rip my arms from their sockets, and plus too our heads were knocking together because—remember?—we were still tumbling down the slope, which was baked hard as concrete yet powdery at the same time, battering us and coating us in dust, breaking bones and choking the last breaths from our bodies and Ty doing his dead-level best to snap my arms out of their sockets, until suddenly something green and spikey caught my eye.