The Janus Tree: And Other Stories Read online

  “Then there was that whole Ponce de Leon thing, that was funky,” my dad said, pushing away his chicken barely eaten.

  “Ponce de Leon went to Chile?” I asked. “I thought he was in Florida or somewhere.”

  My mother shook her head. “The things some people will try, just to avoid growing up.”

  “He seemed a little…” My father paused, considering. “Wiser, maybe? More resigned? Something.”

  My mother stretched her lips into a smile that looked exactly like Mr. Janus’. “You have to get old,” she hissed, imitating his new, shredded voice a little too perfectly. “Everyone has to get old.”

  “Christ, you’re a little too good at that,” my father said. “Funky guy.”

  “He was funky when he was just a cokehead,” I said.

  “That’s not nice,” my mother snapped.

  “‘Went to see who his parents…raped?’ Was that the nice word your mother used, Ted?”

  Even my mother laughed.

  I thought about Jill and Matt up the hill, under the juniper shadows in the mouth of the Balrog cave, then of Matt Senior’s shrinking body. “So he’s better now?” I asked. “Mr. Janus, I mean?”

  Now my mother sounded tired. Sad and tired. “He’s dying,” she said. “Couldn’t you tell?”

  The weather got cold, and school days dropped into their school-day rhythm. Most often, I got to my locker long before Matt, and didn’t see him until Valway’s class at the end of the afternoon. But every time he did arrive at his locker while I was still at mine, he threw open his door right in my face, dumped his books, and stood a few extra seconds as though daring me to say something. Then he slammed his locker and sauntered off. He never so much as glanced at me, and we never spoke.

  School really had gotten better, though. Without Robert to take care of, and with the range of friends I’d made, I had people to laugh with in every class, and every class was easy. I ate lunch at a different table each day, and was welcomed at all of them. The person I most wanted to eat with was Jill, but as Student Council President, she ran meetings every day but Friday, when she mostly stayed in the library and did work.

  The first kid Matt Janus brutalized was a hulking, stupid linebacker who strolled up to him on the athletic fields at the end of P.E. one day as all of us shivered in our shorts and the nearly-winter wind roared down off the rocks. He said, “Think you’re tough, Mr. All-in-Black Fagboy?” The linebacker wound up in the emergency room with three broken ribs and a shattered jaw, and Matt got suspended for a week.

  The second kid might have been an accident. It happened in the middle of a lunch-break basketball game. The kid had been pouring in jump shots, but Matt’s team was still winning, and as far as I knew, the kid—little seventh grader, big glasses, elephant ears that seemed to flap when the wind caught them—had never even spoken to Matt. But he pump-faked the shit out of his defender late in the game, drove the lane, and went hard to the hoop. Matt’s elbow caught him under the adam’s apple and seemed to drive it all the way up into the back of his mouth. The kid hurtled into the basket pole and collapsed, face smashed, mouth gulping as though trying to work the adam’s apple back down so he could swallow some air.

  Matt was the first one on his knees at the kid’s side, and he was kind of crying as the paramedics carried the kid off. No one claimed it had been anything but unintentional. But no one played basketball with Matt anymore, or anything else, either. He ate alone, and then he went out to the court, rain or snow or whatever, and stood underneath the rim in his open leather jacket, tossing a ball up and through, up and through, until someone came to buy from him. Then he’d go back to shooting baskets by himself until the bell rang and the rest of us went inside.

  In Valway’s class, I sat in the hissing, echoing half-light and worked alternately on papers for Valway and notes for Jill. The notes I passed had jokes in them, and funny things I’d heard other kids say, and random Butte facts I pulled off my library notecards from the year before, and invitations to go walking. Jill smiled occasionally at the jokes, topped my amusing quotations with better ones from the girls she knew, parried my Montana facts with Blackfeet lore (her personal medicine, she revealed, was an eagle-bone whistle that she carried around her neck in a beaded pouch), and rejected every one of my invitations by writing “Can’t,” then drawing a frowny-face next to the word. Occasionally, passing the paper back, she’d brush or even squeeze my hand.

  While Matt snoozed at his desk or thumb-wrestled with Whitney, and the other kids did the rest of their homework or threw spitwads at each other, Jill and I raced one another to finish papers. In late October, I got into a long one about the lynching of Wobblies on the railroad bridge out the east end of town. When I finally finished a draft and took it to Mr. Valway’s desk, he twitched in his chair as though I’d woken him—which I very well might have—and half turned his bulbous, veiny face toward me so that I could see the perpetual dampness reflecting the fluorescent light. Without lifting his oxygen mask, and with no audible shift in his slow, measured breathing, he started reading.

  With every previous paper I’d shown him, he’d reached the end, spat out three or four concise, disinterested suggestions, and told me to try again. But this time, a couple paragraphs in, he abruptly tilted forward in his chair. His breathing didn’t alter, but he looked up after a bit, and then he lifted his mask. Horrible, stupid thoughts flashed across my brain—I think I actually believed he might shoot out a tongue and lick me—and then he said, “Get me a pen.”

  From the flick of his hand, I thought he meant in the trash can, glanced toward it, and shuddered slightly. The thing was just a metal canister, but it had an oversized green bag stuffed in it, so that there was no way to see what your hand might be reaching for. But he thumped the desktop with his fist, and I realized he meant the drawer. I opened it and gave him a fine-tipped black marker.

  For the next half an hour, he bent over my paper, scratching relentlessly at it with the pen. By the time he’d finished, the bell had rung, and everyone but Jill had gone. Eventually, he dropped the marker to the desktop, shoved the paper across at me, lifted the mask one more time, and said, “Well, now.”

  In the hallway outside, I thanked Jill for waiting for me, and she poked me in the ribs with her finger, kicked her tennis shoes off because no one cared after the last bell, and gave me the brightest smile I’d had from her in ages. “The score after two months,” she said. “Teddy: one ‘well now.’ Redround, nothing. The crowd goes wild.” I asked her to go walking, she said, “Let’s go to the Elven Trading Post,” and once there, she bought us a bag of Funyuns and we stood in the doorway while yet another late-fall thundercloud crawled over the Virgin of the Great Divide.

  On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, my mom stopped me on my way out the door and told me I should seek out Matt and check on him. When I told her I never spoke to Matt anymore, she shrugged and said, “His father’s gotten worse. He’s about to die.”

  Walking through a slanting, stinging rain, I thought maybe I would check on Matt. I passed the corner where I used to meet Robert, and I thought of his cloak and backpack, and Matt’s leather jacket and scowl. Not so much difference, really.

  But he wasn’t at his locker when I got there, and he wasn’t on the basketball court at lunch, and he wasn’t in Valway’s room when the bell rang. Almost no one was in Valway’s room that day. Jill’s family had gone north to Alberta to see cousins, and three of the other six students had been rescheduled by furious parents into other classes, leaving only the blond girls, Whitney Drum, Valway, and me.

  Valway looked particularly ghastly, leaning sideways in his chair with his head tipped so far back it seemed halfway chopped off, eyes closed, green mask clamped to his face like a feeding spider. Every few seconds, the mask seemed to lift slightly, and it hissed.

  For the first fifteen minutes, I forced my way through some of Valway’s latest suggestions on my Wobblies paper, which had ballooned to more than t
wenty pages. But with Jill gone and the whole school sagging toward the holiday, what little work energy I had bled away. The only consistent movement in the room came from the blondes, who kept passing tired notes back and forth. Whitney Drum had her head down on the table, her arms—still miraculously tan, darker even than Jill’s—stretched out straight, once-bouncy curls flat against her scalp. Her white sweater was too short, unraveling some, and I watched strands from the hem of it trailing down the small of her bare back where it curved into her jeans.

  The first bombardment of fists-on-door shook us like bombs dropping, and set the blondes crumpling notes and scurrying off their seats. Whitney dragged her head up, turning more toward me than the door, and I saw the redness in her irises and knew Matt Janus must have been at school that day after all. Valway never even stirred.

  Another flurry, longer, louder. We all knew who it was. By now, Whitney was grinning, the other girls gawping, and even Valway opened his eyes, squinting under that massive brow. Then he lifted his mask. As always, the clarity and off-hand loudness he could still generate startled me. “You. Ted. Better let him in. Or else I’m going to castrate him.”

  Whitney giggled. I got up and let Matt in. I started to say something to him, “Hello” or “Sorry about your dad,” but before I’d formed a single word he was past me, sliding into place next to Whitney and dropping his huge white hand on her thigh and leaving it there.

  The room reasserted itself. Valway went back to sleep. The blondes crept back to their stools and, after a few seconds of staring—along with me—at Matt’s hand high on Whitney’s leg, returned to note-writing. I tapped my paper with my pencil and tried revising a little more. And Whitney, after a few seconds, snuggled in against Matt and put her head down on his leather-jacketed arm.

  We all stayed like that a while. Every sixty seconds, the clock on the wall lurched another drunken step toward 3:30.

  I didn’t see it happen. I think I might have been asleep. For a few indefinite moments—the thought disturbs me even now, for reasons I will never be able to explain—Matt Janus may have been the only person awake in that room. Then the reek flooded my nostrils, and I jerked my head up to find Whitney bolt upright in her chair, eyes hurtling back and forth between Valway slumped at his desk and Matt with the bong lit and bubbling in his cupped palms.

  “Sssh,” he said—to all of us, maybe—and grinned. The thing looked grimy, hideous, very possibly assembled out of a stolen chemistry beaker and some rotten rubber tubing from this room. Sucking in a huge drag, Matt held the smoke in his teeth, then blew it in a rush toward Valway’s desk. The girls in the corner had gone completely still. Matt glanced that way, held up the bong, and offered it to them. They swept their notepads into their backpacks in a single collective rush and fled the room.

  Shrugging, Matt lifted the bong toward Whitney, and she took it and Matt’s long, white finger into her mouth at the same time. He stiffened in his chair. She was laughing so hard she could barely get the smoke to her lips.

  Almost as an afterthought, Matt turned to me. His eyes had no redness in them, were almost frighteningly clear, and I saw, or for just one second thought I saw…

  Both of us looked away at the same moment, Matt toward the floor, me toward Jill’s seat. Eventually, Matt noticed the direction of my gaze and snorted.

  “What?” he said, waving the tube of the bong. “You think she never has?”

  More because of the way he said that than anything else—casual, right on the edge of cruel—I passed on his offer with a wave of my hand. Whitney snatched the tube from him and took another hit. The clock lurched, the bell rang, we all stood, and Valway opened his eyes.

  “Mr. Janus,” he said quietly. “I seem to have dropped my tie-clip in my trash can. Could you come get it for me?”

  Whitney and I had frozen the second Valway started speaking. Now we just stood, transfixed, as Matt lifted the bong away from Whitney, dragged on it while staring right back at Mr. Valway, and then moved slowly around the table toward the front of the room.

  “What is it you dropped?” he said. “Old man.” His legs, I noticed, no longer looked stick-thin. The muscles that had bulged out of proportion on his arms early in the year had spread through his body now. From the back, he looked twice his age, powerful as hell.

  “Tie clip,” Valway told him. “Little metal heart.”

  Matt never took his eyes off him. Bending at the waist, he placed the bong gently on the corner of Valway’s desk, as though it were an apple he was offering, then slid his hand into the green folds of the trash bag, which folded around it like an anemone’s mouth. Whitney and I strained forward, watching Matt’s hand disappear up to the wrist, past it. Valway leaned back again, closed his eyes. There was a soft smack.

  Matt’s legs straightened, and then he held still for a long moment. Finally, he stood. Clamped on his middle and ring fingers was a small, rubber-guarded mouse trap attached to a blocky wooden base. With the rubber sheathing on its jaws, the snap of that trap probably wouldn’t have killed a housefly, let alone hurt Matt. In slow motion, almost thoughtfully, Matt pried the trap off his fingers and dropped it in Valway’s lap. Valway barely glanced at him. Matt was grinning as we left the room.

  Mr. Janus’ funeral was held that Sunday. The rain had stirred the dredged earth and set it sliding in filthy glaciers down the hillsides. Caked, coppery clods checkered the lawn of the First Saints Cemetery, where the preceding generation of Januses, Clarks, Heinzes, and other copper lords had been returned to the ground they’d ravaged. Jill’s father gave the eulogy. At the end, he held up a fringed hide bag filled, he said, with “magic dust. Good medicine.” They buried the bag with Mr. Janus. On the way home, my parents had a big fight trying to decide whether he’d been joking. Neither of them had any doubt what the bag contained.

  Jill came back on Tuesday, but she barely spoke to me. On Wednesday, I wrote her a note asking what was up, and she scowled at Matt’s back and then gave it the finger. But when I started to laugh, she gave me the finger, too, and moved several stools away to the next table. On my way out of the schoolyard that afternoon, I saw Matt Janus pass an elementary school kid and shove him down in the mud, then rip off the kid’s shoes and hurl them forty feet onto the puddle-soaked grass.

  The Monday before winter vacation, I lurked at the top of the stairs leading down to Valway’s room until Jill came, then stopped her. She had her black hair tied in a tight braid and tucked into her heavy gray sweater, and her eyes looked so empty that I found myself thinking about Matt on the day of the bong. You think she never has?

  “Let’s go walking,” I told her.

  I half-expected her to ignore me completely, slip right past into the classroom and to her new seat a table removed from all of us. Then she sighed. “It’s going to snow.”

  “So we’ll get wet.”

  “I was thinking more about rocks being slippery.”

  “So we’ll fall down.”

  Abruptly, she smiled. Tight-lipped, fleeting, but a smile all the same. “Soon, okay? Please?”

  As in, please, let’s go walking? Please leave it alone? I left it alone. But when I followed her downstairs and inside the classroom a minute or so later, I found her papers piled at her old seat next to mine, and Jill back on her accustomed stool. Five minutes into the period, she passed me a note. It had a gallows with a noose drawn on it, and a row of twelve dashes underneath. Immediately, I wrote ‘S’ and passed the paper back, and she sketched a head into the noose. No S. I tried other letters, began filling in the word. I’d just figured it out, gotten to m o t _ e _ f _ _ k e _ , and Jill had a neck and trunk and one arm on the stick figure she meant to hang before I got the other blanks, when the classroom door swung open. Glancing over, we were astonished to see Mrs. Morbey, in pink business suit, framed in the grim light creeping down that hall from the stairwell.

  My gaze slipped toward Matt, who tapped his closed notebook and played with Whitney’s fingers, and then
toward Valway, who made no move to straighten in his chair but did open his eyes.

  “Albert, could I see you outside a minute?” Mrs. Morbey said.

  Obviously, we knew Valway could move. He got to the classroom every day, didn’t he? Nevertheless, the sight stunned us, the way he just hopped to his feet and shambled around the desk, tugging the green oxygen tank on its wheels as though pulling grandkids in a wagon. Passing our tables, he caught Matt’s eye—or maybe mine—and winked. We watched his huge gut sway under his yellow-check leisure suit jacket as he left the room.

  Had Matt been planning for such a moment? Was it impulse? I’ve always wondered. Never known.

  All at once, he was on his feet and hoisting Whitney Drum by her hips onto the table in front of him. She giggled in her stoned, happy way, swatted his shoulders, and then kicked her legs around him. Her knee-length, plaid skirt had slid all the way up her thighs when Matt spun her to face him. Now he kissed her so hard her head snapped back, and I swear the crack of their teeth colliding rattled the legs of my stool. I had my mouth open, and one of the girls in the corner started laughing—in sheer panic, I think—and then came a ripping sound, and a shred of Whitney’s heart-dotted panties appeared in Matt Janus’ fist as he dropped it behind him. On Jill’s backpack.

  Most of the rest of the time, I watched Jill. But she never took her eyes off what was happening in front of her: Matt’s pants dropping to his knees; Whitney’s navy-blue Espadrilles curled around his waist. She’d stopped laughing now. I could hear Jill’s breathing, hard and hitched between her clenched teeth, could see her shoulders stiffen with each thrust of Matt’s body. Whitney gave a single, strangled gurgle, then started crying. When I let myself look at her, I found her eyes locked on Jill’s.

  When he’d finished, Matt pulled his pants up, picked another ripped shred of Whitney’s panties off the table, and mopped some of the blood off her legs. Then he kissed her cheek, eased her gently down onto her stool, and held tight to her hand. Valway never came back, and when the bell rang, Whitney shook free of Matt’s grip and fled. Jill raced after her, and I ducked out fast and slipped through a back door of the school building and walked all the way to Snake Lake with no books except my English notebook and no jacket—everything else was in my locker—and sat where I had when I’d broken down eighteen months before. Just as before, I stayed there rocking on my heels and ducking my face against the cat-o’-nine-tail whips of the barbed winter wind.