Sprout

by Dale Peck

  It was raining when I went out. That wasn’t a big deal during the summer. I knew half a dozen places in the forest that were as dry as an attic. But the leafless trees weren’t up to the task of sheltering me, and somehow my mind just came straight here. The first thing I noticed was that water had leaked through the plastic in a couple of places, and even seeped behind a couple of picture frames, staining the photographs. Well, one photograph in par tic ular. The photograph of my mom on her wedding day. This wasn’t, you know, an omen or something. I’d hung the picture off a bit of rope (not vine, but garden-variety store-bought rope) that I’d run through a little hole in the plastic to a branch of the tree above, and even at the time I worried moisture might get through.

  I took the picture out of the frame, laid it on the desk. It was hard not to think of the tracks of water as tears. I tried sponging it dry with an old washcloth but that just made it worse. Half my mom’s face was warped and swollen like the Elephant Man’s, and, well, no one wants to see their mom looking like that. Why I used a leaf to cover it up—the youngest palest green shoot from a locust tree—is anyone’s guess. But that left this strange faceless green oval sticking out of a wedding dress. So I covered the hands next, and then I added little bits of twig to connect head to hands, and then I went ahead and added torso, legs, feet. “Stick-figure” is what I was thinking, but of course what it looked like was a skeleton. And instead of being scared off by this, I was inspired. I began gathering bird bones, which is a lot easier than you might think, given the fact that a local fall pastime is shooting crows out of the sky, whose abandoned carcasses are promptly set upon by coyotes, skunks, and other crows, the gnawed bones picked clean by flies and ants and other insects.

  And then, well, it was off to the races. Doctoring pictures, gluing together broken dishes into crazy new shapes, training trees and vines to grow into and around all the furniture in the room. I suppose it was one of those combos of cathexis and catharsis. (No, I’m not showing off, or taking refuge in my dictionary. One was Word of the Day, March 14, 2006, the other came out of Advanced English on Oct. 22, 2007. And anyway, you don’t have to know the name of what you’re doing to do it. Peristalsis is a vital part of your daily existence, and I bet you don’t ever think about it.) And when it was done it was done. It’d be nice to say I stopped spending time in the nidus after I started writing, but the truth is my last big stint out here was after my dad broke the computer, and that happened a couple of months before my fifteenth birthday. Tell you the truth, I was surprised to find everything still standing. I’d half expected it to’ve all collapsed. But I guess the past is more durable than that, huh? Or, if not the past, the monuments we make to it. Just call me Ozymandias—

  “Ozzy who?” Ty said. This was sometime after our third or seventh or nineteenth trip to the nidus, when I’d finally finished telling him the story (we didn’t do a lot of talking when we were there). He shushed me before I could answer. “Never mind, show-off.”

  We lay coiled together on the sofa inside a four-foot-thick stack of old clothes and towels and sheets. Somewhere incredibly far away I could feel my left big toe, which was sticking out into the twenty-degree air, but the rest of my body could’ve been submerged in a tub of warm water.

  “Whatever,” I said now. “But still. Aren’t you glad I made it?”

  “I wish we never had to leave,” Ty said. “But . . .” He extracted his arm from the pile of clothes, pantomimed looking at a watch. Or, who knows, maybe he was just looking at the bruise on his wrist. He extricated himself from the pile and stood up. All he had on was his socks and a stocking cap, and he immediately started shivering as he tried to find the rest of his clothes. Shirt and pants were pretty straightforward—no one in my family had ever gone in for black polyester slacks or off-white shortsleeved poly-cotton buttondowns—but finding his Fruit of the Looms was trickier, guys’ underwear all looking pretty much the same.

  “You know,” he said, sniffing undies, trying to tell which pair smelled like sweat and which like mouse feces. “We could just put our clothes over there instead of mixing them in with everything on the couch.”

  Still snugly inside the pile, I said, “Yeah, but then we’d have to get undressed in the freezing cold air.”

  “Well, this way we just end up having to get dressed in the cold, and it takes like ten times as long.”

  I shrugged, but the gesture was lost inside the pile. “What can I tell you? Logic. Not sexy.”

  Ty looked down at me with soft eyes, still naked but no longer shivering, and I have to tell you, his gaze made me even warmer. Then:

  “Where’d you get off to?”

  Before I could ask what he meant, he knelt down and pushed my own cap off my head, ran his hand through my hair. He waggled his fingers at me. Green smudges winked like flecks of moss.

  “There you are.”

  I took his hand and licked the stains off, then, braving the cold, stood up and looked for anything that even hinted at green on his skin, and licked, nibbled, chewed and otherwise rubbed it off. I’d’ve painted his whole body green if I could have, just to let the world know he was mine, but I was afraid his dad would see. The bruises scattered over his body—blue-black smudges that wouldn’t rub off no matter how hard or gently I kneaded—reminded me what the consequences would be of leaving my own mark on Ty’s flesh.

  He had his shirt on now, and the expanse of skin between it and his socks was whiter than either. The last time I’d seen skin as green-white as Ty’s butt was on my mother’s face after a round of chemo.

  Yeah, I know. Totally inappropriate. What can I say? The unconscious doesn’t give a crap about propriety.

  He stopped dressing, took two steps towards the TV. “Oh wow,” Ty said now. “Is that the famous dictionary?”

  He wiped a spiderweb from the glassless cube, reached inside to pull it out, blew dust—well, dirt really—from the open spread in front of him.

  “Homily to honesty,” he read. “Any reason why—oh.

  Homosexual. Of, pertaining to, or characterized by sexual attraction between persons of the same . . .” His voice trailed off. “Let’s just turn the page on that whole question, okay?” He turned about a hundred pages actually, backwards, forwards, backwards again, until he reached the inside front cover, which nearly came off in his hand. There was a long moment of silence while he stared at the inscription, and then he read it aloud, as though I might not know what was written there.

  Presented to Irene Morgan

  upon her graduation from Brentwood H. S.

  in the year Nineteen Hundred and 81.

  There was a little puff of dust as the cover fell closed. “It was your mom’s?”

  “She always said it was her favorite book.”

  His eyes fell on the circle of books planted around the perimeter of the nidus. “What was she, an English teacher or something?”

  I walked over to him with his underwear, exchanged it for the dictionary, put it back inside the TV. “Come on,” I said, “we need to get you home.”

  It’s tempting to call the nidus our home away from home, but really, it was pretty much a shagpad. November had given way to December by then, which meant fall was pretty much over. We had our first frost on the 2nd, and a stretch of days afterwards when the thermometer never went above 20°. And despite what Ty said about never wanting to leave, the truth of the matter is that when every minute you spend away from the house increases the likelihood that your dad is gonna beat you with a belt or a wooden paddle, throw a cup at you, a boot, a brick, a bible, might lock you in the basement or a closet or a dog collar, or, hell, just get it over with already, grab that baseball bat and bring it down BAM! on your skull, you really don’t think about much besides buttoning buttons, zipping zippers, pulling on shoes and gloves and stocking caps, and getting your ass home to be kicked before it freezes off. And, as well, once the hump’d finally been crossed, Ty’s inhibitions fell away faster than the leaves on the trees
. We snatched kisses in the bathroom before school started, behind the cedar break at the northern end of the football field, under the bleachers during lunch, and then I had a brainwave (or maybe just a stroke) and I told him to cut out of history and I cut out of civics and we met in the study carrel in the library that I had occasional access to as a student working on a semester-long project—i.e., the State Essay Contest, which was just weeks away. It helped that the librarian thought she and I shared some kind of magical bond (her name was Mrs. Greene, and even though she scolded me for the fingerprints I left all over her books she was so proud of me for reading something besides Harry Potter that she was willing to overlook it). The carol was 4'×4' and half the floor space was taken up by a desk, which meant we had to do it standing up, but it was still better than feeling a blast of frigid air on your private parts, which could cause them to wilt like summer squash caught in an early frost. But at the same time, the carol was in the library, which meant we couldn’t talk, let alone, you know, moan, curse, cry out, or sing hallelujah. In fact, I only remember one sentence from all our meetings there. Ty had caught me looking at the marks on his body, trying to decide which had come from me, which from his dad.

  “We could run away,” he said, pulling his shirt over his chest. “We could disappear.”

  His voice sounded unconvinced, and I wondered if that’s what he really wanted to do. But I also knew it wouldn’t work, because it’s what my dad and me had tried to do, one of us consciously, the other dragged along for the ride, only to discover that your past comes with you no matter where you go. Still, on Saturdays, when I had the car, we’d drive around for hours, testing the limits of our leash. We circled Hutch first, inside the city limits, then outside, and then we pushed out to the edge of Reno County, and then we crossed the county line, McPherson County, Harvey, Sedgwick, Kingman, Pratt, Stafford, Rice, and then back to McPherson. The number of names made it sound as though we’d traveled a huge distance, but the truth is we were never more than twenty or thirty miles from the center of town. Only one time did we spike up north, towards Salina and I-70, and then, almost like it’d been choreographed, we spiraled up the long on-ramp to the interstate and spiraled right back off the same exit. As we left the interstate we passed a sign that read

  HUTCHINSON 65

  which was the same sign my dad and I had passed four and a half years ago, when we moved here, and after that our spiral tightened even further, our plans contracting like our route and like the ever-shortening winter days, until eventually—who knows, maybe inevitably—we ended up in the park.

  Carey Park.

  Before my dad trashed the computer, I’d gone online to do a little investigation. All protestations to Ruthie aside, I had to admit I was kind of curious about what did or didn’t go on there. Needless to say, Hutchinson doesn’t have much of an internet presence, and gay Hutchinson is pretty much off the radar. There was that movie Mysterious Skin that came out a few years ago, which was based on a book by a writer who actually grew up here, and which seemed to confirm the general suspicions about what went on in the park—but then, the story also featured a guy who thought he was kidnapped by UFOs, so who knows what was real and what was made up? Other than that it was pretty much bits and pieces . . . but all the bits and pieces seemed to say that if you wanted a little gay action in Hutch, Carey Park was your best bet.

  None of which explained what I was doing here with Ty.

  It was Saturday morning, around 11. Ty and I sat in the Taurus, a good two feet between us. The windshield reflected thin gray clouds streaking across an ice-blue sky. A cold front had moved in from wherever it is cold fronts move in from (“Hey there, Kansas. Just in from Salt Lake. How’s it going?”) and the temperature hovered around zero, with forty-mile-an-hour gusts pushing it down to something like twenty-five below. All the groping and writhing and thrusting in the world wouldn’t warm us up enough to combat that, and so we huddled in the car instead.

  “So, uh, what’re we doing here?” Ty said.

  If you’ve never seen a Kansas municipal park, I can tell you that they all look pretty much the same. A few cottonwoods (in this case leafless), a few elm trees (ditto), an artificial pond slightly smaller than a Hollywood swimming pool (frozen, duh), and a patchy brown lawn flatter than Terri Schiavo’s EEG. From where we sat we could see a cast-iron horse, beetle, and duck, all of which were exactly the same size, and mounted on rusty metal coils. All three were gaily painted save for their backs, where the butts of countless toddlers had rubbed the paint away and burnished the metal to a brilliant shine.

  Did I mention that there was one other car in the parking lot too? There was one other car in the parking lot.

  “You ever ride one of those?” I said.

  “I don’t think my dad would approve.”

  “See, the thing about those rides is, they’re scaled for three-and four-year-olds, but they weigh about five hundred pounds, so no three- or four-year-old could possibly get them to move.”

  Ty didn’t say anything for a minute. Then: “Think your balls’d stick to them? If you sat on ’em naked?”

  “We’re juniors, Ty! Juniors! We’ve still got a year and a half left at this crappy school! A year and a half left in this crappy town!”

  Ty’s silence lasted even longer this time. Then, quietly: “Well, let’s just go then.”

  “Go where? Go how?”

  “Anywhere. Anyhow.”

  See, that was the difference between me and Ty. He just wanted to run away. But I had to have a destination. I had to know where we were going.

  Oh, and there was a man in the car.

  “It’s like thirty below,” I said, staring at the man across fifty frozen feet of barren parking lot. “Where are we gonna sleep? What are we gonna eat?”

  “We’ll go south.” Ty’s voice was stronger now. “Texas. Galveston or Corpus Christi or Laredo. All the way south. We’ll sell your dad’s car for a couple hundred bucks and sleep outside and wash dishes for food. We’ll learn Spanish from the guys in the kitchen and hitchhike down the Gulf coast of Mexico, end up in the Yucatan peninsula climbing to the top of some Mayan temple.”

  “How do you know so many border towns?” I said, still staring at the man, who was staring back at us. “And how do you know there are Mayan temples in the Yucatan? And how do you know the Yucatan is a peninsula, for God’s sake?”

  “Don’t, Daniel. Don’t make one of your random comments to change the subject and don’t treat me like an idiot. We can do this. You and me. Together. We can do whatever we want.”

  “What is he doing in that car? Does he think we’ll just walk over to him? Ask him if he needs a teenage boy to do some yardwork or if he’ll buy us beer or something?”

  “Who are you—that guy? In the Buick?”

  “Don’t you know what he’s doing here, Ty?”

  “Why the hell would I know anything about that guy, except for the fact that he’s dumb enough to drive a Buick?”

  “He’s here for us, Ty. You—and—me. That’s what he’s doing here.”

  “What are you talking—oh.”

  “Yeah: oh.”

  Ty stared over at the guy in the Buick. He was far enough away and his windows were dirty enough that we couldn’t see much more than an outline. His face could’ve been made out of bits and pieces of old dinner plates for all we knew, his scalp could’ve been covered with hundreds of shards of green glass bottles in lieu of hair, but we could see still tell exactly what he was.

  “Is that what happens to you? When you’re gay?”

  See, kids, this is why grammar is important. Did Ty’s you really mean one, as in any gay person, or did it really mean me, as in the only gay person in the car? Did Ty’s you mean that if I dropped the car in gear and pointed us towards Texas that he’d stick with me, through Galveston and Corpus Christi and Laredo and all the way down the Gulf coast of Mexico? Or did Ty’s you mean that he’d wake up one day, realize what he was doing wit
h me had more to do with his dead brother and his evil S.O.B. of a father and his general sense of being lost and alone in a world that didn’t care if he lived or died, and that he’d be the one to ditch me, leaving me stuck in the Mexican equivalent of Carey Park with Spanish skills that, well, weren’t quite as good as Ian Abernathy’s?

  “We—” I stopped, split the pronoun; two letters became four. “I won’t turn out like that,” I said, “because I have you.”

  Ty continued to look at the guy.

  “Let’s just go home, Daniel,” he said finally. “He’s giving me the creeps.”

  The sense of a ticking clock grew louder during the last couple of weeks of the semester, and I wasn’t the only one who heard it. Ty started calling me in the middle of the night, but, because the phone was right outside his dad’s bedroom (I hope you don’t think Mr. Petit ever went cordless) all he could do was breathe heavily into my ear. If my dad was home that’s all I could do too, because every room in our house was right outside my dad’s room, and if my dad was at Mrs. Miller’s, then, well, I’m not going to tell you what I said. And no, it’s not what you’re thinking (that is, if you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking). It’s just that there was such a plaintive quality to Ty’s sighs, such an overwhelming mixture of need and fear and, yes, lust, that I found myself saying things I never should’ve said. Offering him things I could never give him. Making him promises I had no way of keeping. And the more outrageous my promises, the more his breathing seemed to calm down. I would hear his sighs and I would try to picture him curled up on the floor with the phone pressed to his ear, but it was always Holly I saw, not Ty. Holly with his silent mouth and blank eyes, his stick figures and his dirty feet. Holly at the bottom of that shallow pond, sleeping on his side, like a baby.