Sprout

by Dale Peck

  “Cactus!”

  By some joint navigational effort we managed to veer off to the right just in time to avoid the needled paddles of a nest of prickly pears, but:

  “Crap!” Ty said, which might’ve been a pun, since what he was exclaiming at was a big pile of ostrich turds, nestled together like a basket of plums, or dinner rolls maybe, or cupcakes (though why they only reminded me of food is anyone’s guess). We stopped then, since otherwise we’d’ve had to roll uphill, and we were too exhausted. Ty loosed his nelson and fell off me, and we lay side by side on our backs, panting, coughing, spitting, staring up at the blue-brown sky, occasionally turning our heads to the side to spit. At one point Ty turned his head my way, and I slitted my eyes against a glob of brown spittle, but all that came out of his mouth was:

  “You think this is what Adam looked like? When God first made him out of dust?”

  I turned and looked at Ty head-on. A brown patina covered his skin from top to toe, and you could almost believe his blinking eyes were opening for the first time, taking in the vastness of the physical world and the even vaster sky that hung above, empty and endless and blank.

  “You believe all that stuff?”

  “I want to believe. I wanna believe that there’s a heaven and my dad’s gonna go to it, and that there’s a hell I can go to too, so I don’t never have to see his ugly face again.”

  I looked over to see if his lip had started bleeding. The bruise was covered in dust, but I could still see the shadow of it. Fist-sized. Right there on his cheek. He saw me looking. Looked away.

  “You miss her?” His voice was hard, defensive, like someone holding up a tennis racket to protect his face rather than actually trying to return the ball.

  “Who?”

  “Duh. Your mom, doofus.”

  “Oh. Her. Yeah, sometimes.”

  “Sometimes I wish my mom was dead. Then I could stop wondering if she’s ever gonna come back.”

  “And rescue you?”

  Ty coughed, then cursed. “That’s what I’d say to her,” he said, “if she came back.” He spat out the wad of phlegm that had come up with the hard k at the end of the particular curse he’d picked out. “That’s what I’d do to her.”

  “I, um.” I didn’t know what to say. “I don’t know what to say,” I said, and then I threw in, “Maybe she had her reasons?”

  Ty’s lip curled away from his teeth, half sneer, half snarl. It was scary how quickly he could go from being mad at someone who wasn’t around to being mad at the person who just happened to be in front of his face.

  “You were doing better when you had nothing to say.”

  “Look, Ty—”

  “No.

  ”

  Ty’s word shut me up like a punch to the throat.

  “If you leave your home—your kids—you don’t get to have reasons. You don’t get to come back. Ever.”

  I just stared at his stomach then, rising and falling heavily.

  His shirt was unbuttoned, remember, and the bruise seemed to expand and contract with his anger. Then suddenly he stood up. “Hey! Follow me!”

  He was already running across the hard soil, grit and grass crunching beneath his shoes, leaving me no choice but to stagger after him. How he knew one shallow hollow from another in that featureless world was beyond me, but somehow he made a beeline directly for, well, for—

  “Uh, what is that?”

  Ty looked at me like I’d incorrectly identified a gamepad as a joystick, confused Black Eyed Peas with the Fugees or called a Ford Bronco a Chevy Trailblazer.

  “Duh. It’s a coyote den.”

  “It” was a hole in the ground. Or rather, a pair of holes: a shallow trench covered by about eighteen inches of earth. There were no tracks, no bits of bone or fur. How Ty knew it was the work of coyotes and not erosion was anyone’s guess. But, you know, he was a Kansan, and a Petit besides: I figured he’d probly shot it. But I could’ve never predicted what he said next.

  “Let’s make one!”

  I stared at the trench. I tried to connect it to what we’d been talking about a minute ago: his mother, and abandoning your home and your kids. I could see the symbolism in it, I suppose, the concept of shelter reduced to its most fundamental sense, but the idea of making a human-sized version—of excavating it from this rock-hard soil in hundred-degree air—seemed less romantic than, well, stupid.

  “C’mon, Daniel,” Ty sensed my reluctance (probly because I said, “I’m reluctant”). “It’ll be cool.”

  “Dude. Scoring a copy of The Grey Album on Pirate Bay is cool. Getting a new car is cool. Digging . . . a . . . hole? Not cool, dude. Not cool at all.”

  “Enough with the dudes, dude. Now come on, let’s get a couple of shovels. We’ll dig our way straight to hell.”

  By “hell” I assumed he meant the place where people who never wanted to see their dads went. I wasn’t quite as mad at my dad as Ty was at his, but still. If hell was where we could be alone, far away from fathers and teachers, and friends who weren’t really friends, and enemies who weren’t really enemies, then, well, toss me a shovel.

  The hole story

  We spent five weeks on it. Not because we worked at it every day, but because we didn’t.

  In fact I almost never hung out with Ty two days running, because every afternoon he spent with me translated to one or two or six afternoons that his dad invented a whole slew of chores to keep him busy. “It drives him crazy that he don’t know where I am. He thinks I’ve got a girl somewhere cuz I lost my belt.”

  Ty reported this gleefully, but what he didn’t report was the source of the fresh bruises that replaced the ones on his cheek and ribs, the archipelago of black-and-blue lumps that floated on his back, the welts that tracked up and down his legs like tire treads. When I tried to ask him about them, all he said was:

  “Check this out.”

  He lifted up his shirt. His dad had run a length of rope through his belt loops to replace the strip of patent leather that’d been there before. He’d even—may God strike me dead if I’m making this up—poured hot wax over the knot, so he’d know whether the rope’d been untied.

  “I was like, Dad, I don’t have to take my pants off. All I have to do is—” and he pulled down his fly, exposing a sliver of not-quite-white undies framed by the angry teeth of his zipper. It made me think of that scene in There’s Something About Mary—I’m sure you know the one, although Ty, not surprisingly, didn’t.

  “Mary who?” he said, dropping his shirt over the waxed rope. “Whatever,” he waved away my answer. “He like to knock my head off.”

  Judging from Ty’s fat lip, it looked like his dad had knocked his head off. But that was the one injury Ty did tell me about.

  “That lard-ass Mike Weise.” Ty poked his swollen lip so hard that it brought tears to his eyes, which in turn made him laugh until he started coughing. He squeezed his bruised ribs and let out a string of curses. “Man,” he said when he could talk again. “I am a mess. But you should see him.”

  In fact, Mike Weise was in first period calc with me, and I didn’t recall a scratch on him. But I didn’t mention this to Ty.

  In fact, I always knew when Ty got in fights, because he didn’t show up for lunch. Apparently Mr. Petit’d convinced Principal Stickley that Ty absolutely had to come home right after school to work in the family business, and so whenever Ty got in trouble (i.e., two or three times a week) he had to spend lunch period in the front office.

  I only ever saw him fight once: Chad Paglia, who, besides being the only kid in school with an Italian last name (besides his sister Christina, I mean) was also the welterweight star of the school’s wrestling team. That’s 184 pounds if you don’t know wrestling weight classes; Ty weighed about 125. So you kind of get how it went down: Chad beat the holy royal crap out of Ty, or he would have, if Mr. Pollack hadn’t told them to knock it off. Actually, Mr. Pollack told them to knock it off, and Chad was totally like, whatever, I wasn�
��t really fighting anyway, but Ty kept swinging at Chad until Mr. Pollack, who just happened to be the assistant coach of the wrestling team (and one-time All-State heavyweight), put Ty into some kind of headlock. Even then Ty was struggling to throw himself at Chad, lifting both feet off the ground so that Mr. Pollack was more or less holding him up by this throat, and it was hard to say which of them had the redder cheeks.

  “Step to me!” Ty half screamed, half choked (though God only knows where he picked up a phrase like “step to me”). “Step to my face and say it to me!”

  “I already said it to your face,” Chad Paglia said, doing that fake dusting-off thing with his shirt and jeans. “Your friend is a faggot.”

  “I’ll hunt you down!” Ty spat. “I’ll find out where you live!”

  “We’re the only Paglias in the phone book,” Chad said. “Come by any time you want to get your face broke.” He turned and strolled down the hall then, and Mr. Pollack dragged Ty to the principal’s office, kicking and screaming the whole way.

  “I’ll kill you if you go near him! You hear me, you piece of trash? I—will—kill—you!”

  Meanwhile:

  The dog days of September metamorphosed into the why-yes-it-really-is-autumn chill of early October. Fall was a tricky time for me, because that’s when the leaves started falling off the trees (that doesn’t even deserve a duh), and the heretofore impenetrable Trojan Wall of foliage that protected our house from prying eyes was suddenly revealed to be nothing more than a thin strip of trees that, because they’d been planted in straight lines, almost seemed to point your eyes towards our dingy little trailer choking inside its net of vines. Not that the leaves had fallen, yet. They’d just gone limp and brown around the edges, maybe one or two blowing to the ground like shoppers trying to beat the Christmas rush. The sun set earlier too, bringing with it cold breezes that seemed to blow off the snow-covered Rockies five hundred miles to the west. It was barely light when I got up for school, which made it that much harder to wake up, and then it wasn’t light at all, and the only thing that got me out of bed was the thought of seeing Ty at his locker before classes started and then seeing him for a whole twenty-five minutes at lunch and then again for one final chat outside his bus, where, like a cheating spouse, he would tell me whether or not he thought he could get away to see me that night.

  So. The hole. Our original intention—to build a human-sized coyote den—faded pretty quickly, and what we ended up with was, well, a hole. But a covered hole: if it ever actually rained on the plain we would’ve been protected, or at least our heads would’ve been, although I’m sure our butts would’ve gotten soaked since, well, it was a hole, and holes tend to fill up with water when it rains, don’t they?

  What I can tell you for sure is that it was a filthy job. Filthy. Every night we went there we emerged coated with dirt that our sweat had turned to mud, which is fun when you’re five or six or seven or eight, but a little gross when you’re sixteen. At the same time, however, the fissure opening up in the earth’s skin seemed to promise so much, as if, if we kept at it long enough, we would make a tunnel to a place far from Kansas and broken dads and missing moms and a school full of kids who hated us and we hated back. Or maybe the ambition was smaller: maybe it was just the idea of making a space that was ours and not theirs, no matter how small and dingy it was. Or, who knows, maybe it was the labor itself. What I mean is, the work was sweaty and close. It was impossible not to rub against one another in the cramped quarters. Ty had this way of taking me by the hipbones and guiding me to one side or the other as we squeezed past each other in the entrance. I was shyer, would use my shovel to steer him out of the way as though he were roadkill I didn’t want to touch—but then, as I stepped by, I would pretend to trip and fall against him and wrestle him to the wall.

  There was a lot of wrestling.

  There was a lot of lying next to each other after wrestling.

  There was a lot of lying next to each other.

  I thought of what Ty’d said the first time we’d lain next to each other, about Adam opening his eyes and taking his first breaths, and I remembered how Adam was lonely because he was the only one of his kind. But I didn’t know if I was lonely or not, because I didn’t know if Ty was my kind or not, and after a minute or two, when the silence seemed to float above us like some impossibly huge thing, a Borg cube or the Death Star, I’d get up and grab my shovel, and Ty would get up and grab his shovel, and then we’d squeeze past each other in the narrow entrance to the hole, hips rubbing against each other, chests brushing, hands touching bare skin in ways they could’ve never done in another context, but which was innocent here—clean—precisely because we were so dirty. Because we were digging a hole, and that’s all we were doing.

  When we finally stopped, the hole was ten, maybe twelve feet deep and half as high, narrow enough that our knees touched when we sat cross-legged inside it. We built a fire—it took us an hour to gather the firewood and two to set it alight—and toasted marshmallows and then we never went back again. Sometimes Ty would bring it up, wondering if maybe a hundred years in the future somebody would come across it and find the ashes and the faded plastic marshmallow bag and think it was, “like, historical.” I wondered if maybe the top would fill up with snow during a blizzard and then a deer or a coyote or maybe even an ostrich—we never did see one the whole time—would fall into it and be trapped there, and would slowly starve to death. Ty said maybe we should fill it in, but we never did, and we never went back the following spring either, to see if there was a half-rotted corpse in the bottom. If you believe in Schrödinger’s cat then these possibilities are probly interesting to you, but me, I’m a dog person, and only good with what’s in front of my face.

  I mentioned that we had a dog, right? The German shepherd? Fang? It was a good dog. A smart dog. How do I know it was smart? Because it knew enough to get the hell out of our house, that’s how.

  “Creepy,” I said to Ty, after the marshmallows were gone and the fire’d burned out.

  “What’s creepy?”

  I looked up at the dark walls hemming us in, shovel cuts prominent as whip marks, the sliver of sky visible around the bend of earth.

  “It feels like we’re sitting in our own grave.”

  A stricken expression twisted Ty’s face—the same look he got when he grabbed the Regiers’ electric fence on a dare—and then he got up and walked away.

  You know that expression, “mo’ money, mo’ problems”? Yeah, that’s pretty much crap. I mean, I know Biggie got shot and all, but Ty was living proof that the less you have the harder it is. Compared to him I was rich. Compared to me he was the most miserable boy in the world.

  I followed him up and down the usual hills. Again, I don’t know how he knew where he was going, how we’d never been here before, but there was something different on the other side of this hill. Truth be told, it was just mud. The valley was a little lower here, which made the water table a little higher. The resulting bog—an eighth of an acre at most—was black and churned by two-toed ostrich prints, with here and there standing puddles of water three or four feet in diameter. In a minute I’d kicked my shoes off. The mud was cold and thick like cream cheese just taken out of the refrigerator—but black cream cheese, foul and fecund at the same time. Strong and resistant when you stepped in, tightly gripping as you tried to step out. I made it six steps before I fell onto my hands and knees. I had an urge to lie down and roll around in it, but before I could Ty screamed.

  “Daniel!”

  The panic in his voice: I thought something had happened to him, but it turned out he thought something had happened to me. When I turned I saw that he’d kicked his stupid shoes off but hadn’t actually ventured into the mud. Instead he paced its edge like a sandpiper skirting the tide back on Long Island.

  “Jesus, Ty. You scared the crap out of me.”

  “You should get out of there. It’s not safe.”

  Still on my hands and knees, I l
ooked around at the expanse of mud. My body had already acclimated to the chill and my fingers kneaded the clayey goop. Ty’s fear made me think of the La Brea Tar Pits, but only in a hey-aren’t-I-a-good-student-to-remember-the-La-Brea-Tar-Pits-( just-like-I-know-about-Schrödinger’s-cat)? kind of way. There were no sinkholes or pools of quicksand in Kansas. Just mud so thick we could’ve made pottery out of it, ashtrays or blobbies or voodoo statues to take down our enemies: Ian Abernathy and Troy Bellows and Beanpole Overholser, either of our dads. Both of them for that matter.

  “Dude,” I said to Ty, “calm down. It’s just, you know, mud.”

  Ty wrung his hands like a nervous monkey. “You don’t know. There could be holes. You could sink in, I couldn’t reach you in time. You should get out, Daniel. You should get out now.”

  Something in his voice told me this wasn’t the time to reason with him. I stood up awkwardly, made my way to dry ground, lurching in the thick soup. I fell once, and he stifled a yelp. When I stood up again I held my goop-encrusted hands in front of me like the Swamp Thing, lurched stiff-legged the last few feet. In my best old-time horror-movie voice, I said: