The Janus Tree: And Other Stories

by Glen Hirshberg

  “You know about him,” I said slowly. “Right?”

  “I know exactly as much as you do. Which is a few stories. Nothing.”

  “He keeps rat traps in his waste basket. Makes kids reach in there and get pens he’s dropped on purpose. Just to see what happens.”

  “You ever actually see anyone with a broken finger?”

  “He wears a gas mask.”

  “He has emphysema.”

  “Dad, he’s supposed to be the worst teacher in Silver City, why would you do that?”

  “He saw you researching at the library this summer, apparently. Went to Mrs. Morbey and begged her to let him have you. And we believe in second chances around here, don’t we?” He gave me what passed, on my tanned, health-crazed father’s permanently smiling face, as a severe look. “In case you failed to notice, Ted, he wrote half the articles and at least a few of the books in that Silver City history corner you spent most of last school year buried in.”

  Had I noticed that? I must have, but it had never occurred to me that I’d one day have to deal with him personally. I’d never actually met him, barely even seen him. He’d written Bloody Fisted Dublin Gulch, come to think of it—my favorite. And the one about the prostitutes the copper barons used to send to single mining men some Saturday nights, when the employees hadn’t been spending enough at the Company stores or their wives were starting to get active about new labor laws or something. I’d kept that article to myself, never written about it for my parents.

  “Okay,” I murmured.

  “Just an experiment. You don’t like it, you’re out of there, that’s the deal we made with Mrs. Morbey. No questions, no delay.”

  The second shock came ten minutes later, as I was strapping on the bike helmet I would shed as soon as I got out of sight of our front door.

  “Don’t make plans for Saturday,” my father said. “Matt Janus Senior has invited all of us to some giant game-barbecue up at his place.”

  This time, I actually fumbled the bike helmet and dropped it. It landed hard-side down. Staring into it was like looking into the hollowed out rind of a melon, or a skull. I thought of Robert naked and howling on the slag heap, and I missed him, hard, for the first time in months. Last I’d heard, Matt Janus’ father was all but dead.

  “Not that you’d be able to make plans.” My father’s voice was jokey, chipper. “Sounds like everyone you’ve ever met, and me, too, for that matter, is going to be there. Invitation was weird, for Janus Senior, anyway. No booze bottles, no half-naked women. Just this gold-embossed card with balloons and a pick-shovel on it, I’ll show it to you. WELCOME BACK MATT PARTY. COME CELEBRATE MY RESURRECTION. That’s what it said. Odd duck, Mr. Janus. Should be something.”

  The third and final shock came as I stood in a tightly packed row of fellow eighth-graders before the skinny standing lockers we’d just been assigned. The lockers were dull green, the combination locks clunky and rusted. Every now and then, there’d be a snick and a laugh as another student got his lock popped open, hopped into his locker and hopped out, just to prove you really could fit a whole kid inside. Every now and then came a clang as someone banged the metal door with his head or a backpack in gleeful frustration. We’d been waiting years for this moment, after all. The lockers in the back hallway with the windows facing directly onto the hill that had once been the black, beating heart of Silver City were the great prizes Lower Magnesium Middle School had to offer for getting to the final year before high school. Our rewards.

  I’d finally found the sweet spot on my own lock, clicked it open, and swung my door wide when it slammed shut almost right on my elbow. I fell back, startled, and stared up at Matt Janus breaking into his own locker with a single twist-and-yank. Opened all the way, his door completely blocked access to my locker.

  But I’d learned about people, that year I’d been gone. I truly believed I had. I stepped forward, left his door where it was, and waited for him to dump the entire contents of his blue backpack into his locker. The backpack sat ridiculously high on his immense shoulders because the straps were way too small. It looked like a beetle climbing the scaly trunk of an oak.

  “Hey, Matt,” I said. “Long time.”

  His whole torso swayed to the left, as though a wind had blown through him. Then he turned on me. His pupils looked weirdly wide in his eyes, which were shot through with red. That blotchiness I had noticed this summer was all over his forehead now, creeping down his neck into the tight collar of his black shirt like moss.

  “Don’t talk to me,” he said, kicked his door shut, and left.

  That afternoon, I followed the instructions on my schedule card all the way back past the green lockers, down a staircase I hadn’t known was there, along a windowless, tiled corridor that reeked of chlorine and reminded me of the bottom of an emptied pool, and arrived for the first time at Mr. Valway’s room. The door was green, thick, and closed. I was about to knock when it flew open, and a startlingly tan girl I’d never seen before stuck her poodle-nose right in mine and said, “Boo.”

  The girl’s grin was too wide, her plaid skirt disconcertingly short, her curly brown hair bouncing around her ears as though she were hopping on a trampoline instead of standing in front of me. She didn’t move back far enough as I slid into the room, and my chest grazed her elbow and then the tip of one of her breasts. My first feel.

  “Whitney,” she said, and did a drum roll on her thighs, her hands hitting half skirt, half skin. “Drum. New here.”

  I’d noticed her eyes by then. Very brown, pretty enough. Also very red around the irises. Stoned enough. I gave her my practiced people-smile, anyway. “Teddy. Ted.”

  “Teddy-ted?”

  I blushed, started to protest, saw Jill Redround grinning at the back table, and hurried toward her.

  “Hi, Teddy-ted,” Jill said.

  “Shut up.” I dropped my books. The sound echoed off the bare cement walls.

  “Teddy and Reddy,” said Jill, gesturing to herself, then glancing around, pulling her black hair back into a pony tail and shivering a little. “Ready, Teddy? Not sure I am.”

  Sitting, I took in the room. Once, clearly, it had been a science lab. Instead of desks, we sat at long, black tables, each of which had a chemical sink with one of those pointy nozzles on the faucets. The school had newer science labs now, thanks to a grant from the Janus family. Judging by the rust on the pointy nozzles and the rotting, rubber hoses dangling from a few of them like dried skin from some unimaginable mine-reptile, this particular lab was probably from two grants ago.

  “Surprised to see you here,” I murmured to Jill as Whitney Drum flung open the door to greet two ghost-pale, glassy-eyed blond girls I’d never seen before. “Your dad can place you pretty much anywhere, right?”

  “Matt Janus got dumped here. His dad asked my dad if I’d keep him company.”

  “Mr. Janus—” I started, and Matt strode into the room. He caught sight of Jill, then me.

  Something flittered over his lips. Possibly a smile. Jill started to wave him toward the stool on the other side of her and stopped when Whitney said, “Ooh, my favorite boy at LMMS.” I think Jill realized at the same moment I did where Whitney must have scored her weed. Matt followed her toward the row in front of ours, and sat down fast in her stool when she started to settle, so that she wound up on his lap. I found my eyes flicking toward the hem of her skirt against his hip. She wriggled once against him before slapping his jeans and sliding off.

  In the front of the room, where the fluorescents had either burned out or been turned off, something stirred. Finally, as a group, the nine of us in Mr. Valway’s last English class turned toward his desk.

  The whole of it was occupied by one of those gigantic blue jugs of water that usually sit upside down in dispensers. This one rested on its rounded bottom, top open to the stale air. When Mr. Valway, grunting through his green oxygen mask, somehow shoved the thing sideways far enough to lean around the side of it and face us, the wa
ter in the jug sloshed, and some of it flew out the top and slapped across Mr. Valway’s cheeks and onto the desktop. Even Whitney Drum stopped talking.

  Most of Mr. Valway’s face was green mask and dirt-gray eyebrow. With the wetness dripping down it, it looked like cave-wall. To speak, he lifted only the bottom of the mask, so that I never got a good look at his nose or mouth. We sat for what seemed minutes and listened to him wheeze. What we could see of his body looked lumpy, immense.

  Then he grunted again. Was that a laugh? “Well,” he said, his voice surprisingly strong, not exactly friendly but clearer than expected. “We still supply the water. Course…no bathroom within a hundred yards. So you bring your own bottles to piss in.” More grunting, after that. A lot of it.

  Very slowly, over the next forty-five minutes, Mr. Valway explained procedure. No lessons; those involved too much useless talking. We’d read what he told us to read. We’d write papers on topics he and we agreed upon. When the papers were finished, we’d bring them individually to his desk. He’d tell us what he thought. We’d do what he instructed. If we tried hard, we’d learn more about writing than any other students in Silver City. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t. If we bothered him, he’d invite us to go fishing in his trash can. Questions?

  There were none. We still had ten minutes left of class. Two minutes before the bell, when I think every one of us had figured out that Mr. Valway really had closed his eyes and that his breathing through the mask had gone even and slow, Matt Janus climbed carefully onto a table and knelt next to one of the sinks.

  Mr. Valway didn’t move. So Matt took the rotten rubber hose hanging from the nozzle next to him and pointed it at the teacher’s desk and made a soft, shooting sound. Mr. Valway didn’t move. So Matt stood all the way up, his spiky blond head brushing the ceiling. He offered Whitney Drum a hand, and she hopped up beside him, laughing. I watched Jill’s frowning face, and every now and then glanced toward the roundness at the top of Whitney’s tanned, swaying legs. The bell rang, and we all fled.

  It was already getting dark by the time Jill and I made it to the foot of the butte, and we only climbed half an hour or so before turning back. I realized we’d be doing this more rarely, now. If ever. Jill had tribal duties on weekends, and basketball, and a thousand friends, and I had a thousand friends, too, these days. And both of us worked hard. And within a month it would be winter.

  She was turning up the hill toward her father’s when I asked if she wanted to grab a snack at the Elven Trading Post.

  “The where?”

  Grinning, I said, “7-11. Sorry.”

  “Can’t. Promised Matt I’d help him get started with bio. He’s really bad at bio.”

  “Matt,” I mumbled.

  I don’t know what she saw in my face, but she snapped at me for the first time in our lives. “That a problem for you? He’s probably my oldest friend.”

  “He’s…” I was waving my hands. Of all the people I now knew, Jill was the last I wanted mad at me. “He used to be my friend, too.”

  We didn’t say anything for a few minutes. But she didn’t leave. Eventually, she said, “He’s really mixed up, Teddy. He really needs me.”

  With that, she went to him.

  That Saturday, along with half the town, I got my first look at what was left of Matt Janus’ father. In the morning, as though to remind anyone who’d somehow forgotten that we lived in Montana, a freak storm blew over the top of the buttes and dumped six inches of snow. By noon, the temperature had soared back up to fifty-five, and the new gray drifts came sliding off the rocks and rooftops. My family arrived spot on time, but well after most of the other guests. As we got out, my father told my mother, “Apparently, he caught whatever it is that’s made him so sick while he was in Chile. Guess he finally found a party even he couldn’t handle.”

  After that, my parents grabbed crystal champagne-flutes off one of the dozens of circulating trays and disappeared amongst the grown-ups, and I floated into the terraced yards. The Janus estate was laid out like a layer cake, with descending sculpted meadows interspersed with layers of wrecked, red rock that looked almost earthy, close to beautiful with the snow melting on it and the sun shooting everywhere and the giant stone house with its red roofs looming overhead. Armies of serving girls circled among us, passing out skewers of barbecued white meat that tasted peppery and wild. I couldn’t get enough of it. Neither could anyone else.

  I spent part of the time among some skateboys trying to negotiate the drainage ditch that dove from the easternmost corner of the house down the terraces of rock and lawn to empty against a cyclone fence, but I didn’t skate. I was looking for Jill, but spotted only Chief Redround, in jeans and a black Grateful Dead sweatshirt, holding court with some business people in shirtsleeves and ties, one of whom I recognized vaguely as the mayor.

  Finally, a good couple hours after we’d come, I spotted Jill and Matt way up the hillside above the house, sitting together in the mouth of the old mining shaft, right at the foot of the Janus Tree. I felt the expected stab of jealousy and then—unexpectedly—a little gush of nostalgia. In third grade, Matt and Robert and I had had our greatest-ever miniatures battle right there. It had ended with Matt’s evil dwarves trying to storm their way out of the mine behind a balrog, and Robert and I bringing the balrog down with arrows made of pine sticks. For dramatic effect, Matt had spun when his balrog got hit, swept up the little metallic monster, and tossed him over the sheer edge of the cliff behind him, where it tumbled from our lives in absolute silence.

  Either Jill and Matt had been watching me, or they’d sensed me watching them, because Jill stuck up her hand and beckoned. I started to obey, and Matt lifted his hand, too. To stop me, or invite me? I couldn’t tell. Didn’t care. I was passing the patio and the murmuring adults clustered among the scatter of lounge chairs there when I stopped. Slowly, my head swung around.

  I did recognize him. By his teeth. Despite whatever had happened, his smile still radiated a blinding whiteness that no snow in Silver City ever did. His skin—what there was of it—hung more tan and taut than ever on his cheeks. But where once Matt Janus Senior had looked round-cheeked, wide-eyed, and relentlessly cheerful—the self-proclaimed “party-pumpkin” of western Montana—he now looked like a Tinkertoy with hide barely stretched across it. Bones poked every which way from him, instead of the startling muscles I remembered. His massive chest had deflated completely. He had no hair on his head. No brows. Nothing.

  All the murmuring, I realized, had been coming from him; no one else was talking at all. He went right on murmuring as his eyes alighted on mine. “That’s the great myth,” he was saying. “The story everybody likes to tell. The Incas, well, they just…” he snapped his fingers, the bones clacking together like drumsticks. “Vanished. You’re telling me we can find full skeletons of 350 million year-old trilobites—probably right here on this hillside—but we can’t locate a single dead Indian in the ruins of his own village? You know that’s what they call the town where Anaconda relocated down there, don’t you? Indio Muerto.” This last he said slowly, rounding his lips around the o’s as though blowing a smoke ring. “Dead Indian.”

  Abruptly, he blinked, and recognition flared in his face. “Hey, now. Young Ted. Long time. You ever hear from that poor boy? That Robert?” Then his head jerked up the hill, and he saw Jill and Matt. The white teeth flashed. I hadn’t liked his smile even when there’d been flesh attached to it. “Matt,” he called, and a hundred feet above, his son twitched, looked at Jill, and stood. Around Matt Senior, the adults huddled closer, some of them starting to talk amongst themselves, most just glancing about like squirrels storing gossip-nuggets for later.

  Matt arrived at his father’s side, towering over him. His ever-present leather jacket hung open, revealing a black button-down shirt with polished buttons. “That beautiful native’s monopolizing a bit too much of your time,” Mr. Janus told him. “You’ve got fun to spread. To all your guests.”

  That
’s when I understood where Matt got the weed he was selling all over school. It shouldn’t have surprised me. Mr. Janus had given Robert, Matt and me big bottles of Moose Drool beer in the basement when we were nine.

  Jill stayed by the tree, and she didn’t come down for a long time. I slid to the side of the house and watched her.

  That tree. Long before, when I’d been a regular guest at the Janus house, I’d asked my father about it, and he said it was an alligator juniper. So I looked that up, but the book in the library said it couldn’t grow where we lived. Whatever it was, it stuck almost sideways out of the rock, a stumpy pine with a scaly, black trunk that looked like an arrow buried in the side of the mountain. The only tree on that entire butte. On the uphill side of it, the branches had curled in on each other, gnarled together, and died. But on the downhill side, the same branches sprouted clusters of brilliant, green leaves whose shadows slid over the rock and Jill’s crossed arms and bare feet.

  When she finally came down, I moved toward her, but her father steered her away to say hello to the town dignitaries. Eventually, Matt Senior drew her down beside him in his lounge chair. He made her take sips of champagne from his own glass, and slid one skeletal arm around her shoulders to caress her skin where it poured out of her dress and play with her hair while her father stood over them, laughing. For one moment, glancing up, I caught Matt Junior’s eyes across the patio. The fact that I probably wore the same expression he did unnerved me badly.

  That night, over chicken that seemed utterly tasteless and flaccid compared to the meat at the Janus house, I asked why Mr. Janus had gone to South America in the first place. My mother just shrugged.

  “It happens to people when they don’t have to work and their wives die,” she said, as if she had all kinds of acquaintances in similar situations. “I think he wanted to see who his grandparents and parents raped to make all their money. So he traveled halfway down the world to find another ruined mountain and more big, poison holes in the ground.”