Sprout

by Dale Peck

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What?”

  “I dunno. I was just thinking maybe you’re right.”

  “Maybe—?”

  “Maybe we should give the dog a name.”

  I looked down at the dog. His tongue was still lapping away, accompanied by snuffling noises it was all too easy to misinterpret.

  “You want to name the dog?”

  “I want to remember this moment.”

  I let the BlackBerry clatter back into the bag. “You want to . . .” I let my voice trail off. I hate it when people repeat the last thing that’s been said to them because they’re too afraid to ask what the other person meant by it. “You want to remember this moment,” I said finally, because when it comes right down to it, I’m a coward.

  “Maybe,” Ty smirked. “I dunno how it’s gonna turn out yet.”

  “I’m pretty sure it’ll get tired and go home eventually.”

  “I wasn’t referring to the dog.”

  “What were you—”

  Ty cut me off by sticking his tongue in my mouth. Later on I realized I didn’t flinch. I’d’ve thought I’d’ve flinched (there’s a lot of apostrophes in that sentence, by the way; sorry). I mean, I knew I was gay and all. But at the same time: kissing a guy? (I mean, I hope you don’t think I ever kissed Ian.) Everything I knew had taught me that two guys macking on each other was weird or different or at the very least would take some getting used to. But I didn’t think any of those things. In fact, I didn’t think anything at all. The Phil-bot would say that it’s a defense mechanism of a certain type of overintellectual personality—i.e., mine—to insulate itself from a given moment by cutting away to the past or the future in an effort to describe what the moment meant rather than what it felt like. Well, I don’t remember what it felt like. What I felt. Emotionally or physically. I don’t remember what I thought, don’t remember what Ty’s mouth tasted like or whose hands went where or how in the hell we managed to stay on that branch. All I remember is that after Ty sat back the 72-degree air—24.6 degrees less warm than his mouth—the naked breath of the forest felt ice cold on my lips, and all I wanted to do was pull him back on me.

  So I did.

  An image of Troy Bellows and Stacy McTaverty popped in my head, and I found myself giving them a mental high-five. Why? Because, well, kissing is awesome. I mean, you practice with the side of your hand, you see it on TV, your friends do it in the backseat and behind you at movie theaters and, well, wherever else they can, and, you know, you’ve probly had the misfortune of catching your parents at it once or twice, but, I mean: take the hint. It’s fun. Try the Pepsi challenge. Kiss someone. Then don’t kiss them. Which one tastes better?

  By the time we unclinched the Andersens’ St. Bernard had wandered off. Ty looked all around for it as though he almost hoped it was still around.

  “I guess I better get home.”

  “Here,” I said, brushing a finger over his lips. “Lemme wipe the lipstick off.”

  Ty flinched, and I jerked my hand back.

  “Um,” I said, “that was a joke? Cuz I’m not a girl?”

  “I know that! I know you’re gay.”

  In the realm of stating the obvious, this seemed to me to significantly outrank anything I’d ever said. But then I suddenly remembered the conversation he’d overheard, the question Ruthie had asked me just before I saw him.

  “I didn’t tell Ruthie,” I said to him. “I didn’t say you were gay.”

  “I’m not gay!” he practically shouted, and then he grabbed me and kissed me and scrambled down the branch so fast I thought he was going to fall and break his neck.

  “Use the lee side,” I said, remembering the dog marking the tree, but Ty climbed right through the wet patch and hopped over the fence.

  So. A thousand years from now, after we’ve all died from global warming or a neutron bomb or brain death caused by reading one too many stories about Britney Spears, the aliens might come down here to check things out—or the cockroaches that have evolved intelligence, or that one lone human who survived in cryogenic suspension—and the sole survivor or the cockroach or the alien might happen across a cottonwood tree in the remnants of an artificial forest eight miles north of what had once been Hutchinson, Kansas. The tree will be dead by then, of course, probly little more than a crumbling stump, but that stump will be ringed by a half dozen indestructible plastic cell phones (not counting the one that broke against the side of the trunk, of course).

  Was this the site of some minor battle in mankind’s final years? A communications center perhaps? A trash heap? As our resident of the future ponders the imponderable, one of the phones bleeps.

  “The ultraviolet radiation penetrating the depleted ozone layer must’ve kept the battery charged all these years!” is the first thing the resident of the future thinks.

  The phone, which doesn’t care about the implausibility of its functionality, bleeps again. The LCD screen flashes a message: ONE NEW VOICEMAIL.

  The resident of the future picks up the phone and, because the residents of the future are much smarter than us, presses the right button to retrieve the message on the first try. Perhaps this will elucidate the situation, the resident of the future thinks. But all he hears is a thousand-year-old voice squawking in his ear.

  “WHOO-HOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

  Liquid courage

  The next morning the phone rang.

  (In fact the phones had been ringing all night, or bleeping really, but this particular ring came from our land line.)

  “Meet me at the end of our driveway. And bring those phones.”

  “When—”

  But he’d already hung up. The car keys were on the counter, along with a twenty-dollar bill and a note: At least half on gas. It was Saturday, I remembered. My dad had promised me the car on Saturdays. Whatever else you could say about him, he was a man of his word.

  The Taurus sat in the driveway beneath a sky seamed by the passage of crows following the harvest south. I put the phones in the trunk so I wouldn’t have to listen to them before climbing into the musty cab. There were lipstick-smudged Kwik Shop coffee cups on the center console, a copy of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in the backseat. The slip of paper from a fortune cookie had been taped to the dashboard—not the fortune side, but the obverse:

  Learn Chinese!

  Friend = Peng-you

  It seemed to me a faint scent of Mrs. Miller’s perfume hung in the air too, although that could’ve just been the salsa residue in the Taco Bell takeout containers.

  I know: totally uncalled for.

  The car faked me out for a minute, refusing to turn over, but I stomped on the gas and it sputtered into life, along with a few crows roosting in the stumps, who cloffed and cawed loudly into the air. As soon as I dropped the car into reverse, though, it stalled, and after I got it started again I had to gun it for what seemed like forever until the thermometer needle finally twitched off the blue bottom of the gauge and edged towards the red. I shivered while I waited for the car to warm up. It was a chilly fall morning, but the sky was clear and it would be warm in a few hours. Kansas weather is notorious for being unable to make up its mind.

  Five minutes later, I parked fifty feet shy of the Petits’ gate. Five minutes after that I shut the car off. Five minutes after that I started the car again and inched past the gate, but I couldn’t see anything between the sandy ridges and sumac through which the Petits’ driveway wound like a dry steambed. I parked and resumed my vigil, this time with the rearview mirror. The fortune cookie paper caught my eye. I imagined my dad and Mrs. Miller listening to Patsy Cline or Garth Brooks as they drove six or seven miles an hour slower than the speed limit to prolong their time together. Hello, friend. Ni hao, peng-you.

  “Peng-you,” I said in my best Elvis voice. “Peng-you very mush.”

  A breeze was whipping the nearly leafless branches around, and the migrating crows moved laboriously
through the air, as if dragging the threads of some vast atmospheric shroud behind them. With each minute Ty didn’t show up, I imagined the sky filling with long dark lines. Right about the time the bright autumn morning had been completely blacked out and the earth plunged into everlasting darkness, a blond head flickered in the rearview mirror. My heart did something unheartlike, I swear to God. Jumped, or turned a somersault, or Morse coded the words There he is! straight to my spinal cord, which in turn shot the message to the top of my head, where it felt like my hair danced on end as if a balloon charged with static electricity were being waved over it. But then my hair fell and my heart sank all the way down to the pebbles and bottle caps and mashed pages of newspaper around my feet, cuz what followed the head was the snout of Mr. Petit’s beat-up old pickup. Crap, I thought. His dad’s caught him. His dad’s taking him to one of his all-day church services (revivals, they were called, which prompted the question, who died?), or his dad was driving him to a Christian re-education camp, or his dad was driving him to some remote field where he’d make Ty dig his own grave and then shoot him. I smelled ’im on you is what he’d say when Ty asked him why. (I’m just guessing about the accent here, but it adds something, don’t you think?) Or, who knows, maybe Mr. Petit would just say what he said when Holly died. One less mouth to feed. Did I mention that’s what he said? He said it to the paramedics as they put Holly’s bloated, eyeless body into the back of an ambulance. Oh well. One less mouth to feed.

  Oh right. Jesus. That’s who died. And now they’re revivin’ him.

  Christians. God save ’em, ha ha.

  The gate kicked open, and I saw that the shaved head wasn’t Ty’s. I figured it must be his brother L.D. He was a little taller than Ty (but still short), a little thicker (but still wiry), the same pointed chin and quick, almost spastic movements as he yanked the gate out of the way and his dad’s truck jerked forwards like a horse at the starting post. No, not spastic. Frightened. As if he knew that if he didn’t get the gate open fast enough his dad would just drive over him. In fact the pickup never quite came to a stop after Mr. Petit pulled onto the road, and L.D. (like I said, just guessing here) had to slam the gate and then run like hell to catch up. He had one foot on the running board and one hand on the door handle as gravel spat from beneath the truck’s rear tires and it shot towards me.

  I hunkered down in my seat, wishing I’d thought to wear a cap to cover my telltale hair, but L.D. (still guessing) was too busy getting in the truck and Mr. Petit had things to do, places to be, and then, well, neither of them knew me from Adam, right? They sped past, filling the road with a cloud of dust, at which point I assume I became as invisible to them as they were to me. Still, I kept my eyes peeled in case they turned around. At 69th Street the brake lights winked once, twice, and I held my breath until the dust settled and I saw that the truck was well and truly gone, and then, when Ty stuck a pistol through the open passenger window and said, “Bang!” I jumped so high I hit my head on the roof.

  “Ty! What the hell—”

  Before I could finish, he pulled open the passenger door and slipped in the car and grabbed my head and pulled it onto his. The sixteen or so hours since our last kiss—the tasteless dinner, the worksheet on imaginary numbers and the fifty pages of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter—all disappeared, along with the seat cushion and the Taurus and Tobacco Road. I felt the rough branch of a cottonwood beneath my butt, wondered if every kiss would put me back there, swaying, shivering in a breeze, the guttural growls of a pink-eyed St. Bernard in my ears. The hand holding the gun was pressed against my head the whole time, but I didn’t even think of pulling away. Kissing: it’s that good.

  “Rufus,” Ty said when he pulled off me.

  Somehow I knew. “The Andersens’ dog? How’d you find out?”

  “I asked my dad,” Ty said. And then, a moment later: “Peng-you.”

  I headed south on 61, towards town. I made it to town. I made it through town. I headed out the other side of town. As 61 merged with 50 (and went four-lane to boot), I thought, one of us better do something, or we’re gonna end up in Oklahoma.

  After his initial boldness, Ty suddenly found himself fascinated with everything in the car except me. There was certainly a lot to be fascinated with, although none of it was particularly, well, fascinating. Takeout containers from about ten different fast-food and convenience-store chains, bits and pieces of months of Hutchinson Newses, beer bottles and cans, pop bottles and cans, the associated detritus of same (caps, cartons, six-pack rings, used straws with dried brown bubbles clogging their hollowness like cholesterol-choked arteries), empty gum and candy wrappers (original flavor Hubba Bubba and watermelon Jolly Ranchers especially), half-chewed or -sucked candies, Styrofoam peanuts, real peanuts, a book of Peanuts cartoons. I’m just making that last one up, but you get the picture. It was just trash, and a lot of it.

  “Good God,” Ty said, as he threw one bit of greasy paper after another out the window. “Your dad is, like, six years old.”

  “Um, Ty?”

  “Oh-oh-oh!” Ty’s voice went up an octave. “A dirty six-year-old!”

  I glanced over, saw that he was holding a little black square adorned by what appeared to be a pair of bodacious tatas. Though I’d never actually purchased them before, I’d been in enough truck stop restrooms to recognize the Rough Riders logo.

  Ty waggled the condom wrapper at me. “Empty. You know what that means.”

  “Um, Ty?”

  “Doing it in the car. Give it up for Mr. B. and Mrs. M. W00t, w00t!”

  I grabbed the condom wrapper and threw it out the window. So my dad was having sex with Mrs. Miller. In the car. That was kind of, I don’t know, gross and funny and even a little sweet. But still, it seemed to me that there were more important things in the car right now. Well, one thing. It was sitting on the seat, its barrel pointed alarmingly towards my leg.

  “One,” I said sternly, “there will be no w00ting of my dad’s sexcapades. And two: what are you doing with a—Ty! What in God’s name are you doing now?”

  Cuz Ty was clambering butt over brains into the backseat, kicking me in the side of the head with one of his ridiculous shoes for good measure.

  “Evidence! I want a wet spot. Crusty stains!” Bits of paper flew around the cabin and were sucked out the open windows. “Condom number two! Three! Mint-flavored lubricant! Oh, peng-you!” he moaned in his best orgasm voice. “Peng-you, peng-you, PENG-you!”

  I was just about to grab the gun off the passenger’s seat and hit him over the head with it, but at that exact moment the sides of the road just sort of fell away, and we found ourselves on the long low bridge that crosses the Arkansas River south of town. The actual channel of the river isn’t particularly big—in some places only twenty feet or so—but because it floods regularly (or used to, before most of its water got sucked out for irrigation) its bed is nearly a mile wide, with a jungly border of vine-choked softwoods growing on either side, and then the dark sandy track of the river itself, which splits and writhes around hundreds of sandbars, some of which had dark campfire circles on them, or raggedy pieces of garden furniture. Silver and gold cans glinted more brightly in the morning sun than the brown water, and in a single sparkling instant the last four years of my life melted away. I was back in the passenger’s seat of the Taurus and my dad was behind the wheel, my mom had just died and we had just moved here and my dictionary was open on my lap, filled with meaningful words that told me absolutely nothing about how my life had managed to turn itself inside out like a reversible fleece—blue one minute, red the next. The same, yet completely different.

  And then Ty’s gun appeared in the corner of my eye, pulling me back to the present.

  “Blam,” he hissed, and the fact that he whispered it somehow made it scarier. He pointed the gun at the beer and soda cans discarded on the riverbed, yet it felt more like he was aiming at the happy hands that had once held them, the smiling mouths that’d sucked them dry. “Blam
blam blam,” he fired at their phantom bodies, as if he hated even the memory of their good times.

  And then the river was gone.

  “Ty,” I said as we descended the far side of the bridge. “What is up with the gun?”

  “We’ll make ’em pay, Daniel!” He was suddenly hollering, right in my ear. “We’ll make ’em all pay!” But he was laughing as he said it, and then he tapped me on the head with the gun barrel. It was really, really hard. “Relax. You’re whiter than me, for God’s sake. I just wanted to do some target practice.”

  I waited for more, but there wasn’t more. Ty looked at me with this blank expression on his face, like, Why are you looking at me? then dropped the gun on the passenger seat and went back to ransacking the debris in the back.

  Well, I’ll tell you: I believed him. About the target practice, I mean. Ty was just one of those people for whom guns were a part of life, the same way computers or cell phones or indoor plumbing are a part of life for other people. It was fun to shoot them, and it was fun to shoot things, but it would’ve never occurred to him that someone might think he wanted to shoot a person with them, because, well, he wasn’t crazy. Angry maybe, a little bit bipolar, but not crazy. But at the same time it didn’t seem to occur to him that the gun in his hand had been specifically designed to shoot people, and so maybe it wasn’t so weird that someone might worry just a little bit about his intentions.

  I picked it up gingerly. I’d never held a gun before, and I was surprised how heavy it was. There was no visible brand name on it. I guess it wasn’t like a car or a pair of sneakers. You didn’t want a big logo or a tagline on the side: “Colt Kills ’Em Dead!” or “Remington Rifles: The Sniper’s Choice!” Talk about ergonomics though: I was amazed at how it just sort of fit in my hand. Without any effort on my part the nobbly grip lined itself up across my palm and my index finger was caressing the trigger, which poked from the base of the barrel like a snake’s single fang. I pointed the gun towards the passenger window, was trying to think of a better line than “Go ahead, make my day,” when a honk sounded behind me—I’d slowed to about 35 on the highway—and I dropped the gun. That tells you something about me. The fact that I didn’t pull the trigger, I mean. That my first impulse wasn’t to hurt someone, but to surrender (or maybe just hide). I ask you to keep that in mind when you get to the end of this book, cuz then maybe you won’t think so badly of me.