The Janus Tree: And Other Stories Read online

  That night, I tried calling the Redround house for the first time in my life. Why had I never done so before? I’d just had this sense that I wouldn’t be welcome. And Jill had never asked me to. When the Chief himself answered, I almost hung up. But in my ears, I heard the hard hitch in Jill’s breathing as she’d watched Matt and Whitney—what Matt had done to Whitney?—and also her voice.

  Soon. Please?

  “Chief Redround, this is Jill’s friend Ted. From—”

  “Gone to Albuquerque,” he said. I recognized the slur instantly, from years of incoherent phone conversations with Robert’s parents.

  Gone. “When…do you know when she’ll be back?”

  “Mother says never,” Chief Redround said.

  “Will you tell her…” But I let the sentence trail off and hung up and went to my room and locked the door.

  Fifteen minutes before the bell for winter break—Whitney had not returned to school either, and it was only the blond girls, Matt Janus, and me in the classroom—Matt stood up and took a single sheet of paper to Valway’s desk. Even Valway opened his eyes and sat forward in his chair. Unless I’d missed it, this was the first time the entire semester that Matt had given Valway anything to read.

  Valway glanced at the paper, breathed through his mask. He handed the paper back without looking up. “Go back to your desk,” he said, at half his usual volume. “Matter of fact, Matt, get out of my room.”

  Sometime that afternoon, in the hours between the moment the school emptied for vacation and the moment the janitors finally made it downstairs to that hidden hallway for the year’s final mopping of the floors, Mr. Valway died at his desk.

  The Tuesday after New Year’s dawned freezing, snowless and gray. I sat in the silence I’d cocooned myself in the entire vacation, poking a bowl of Kix with my spoon, watching the pebble-sized bits bump against each other and thinking of the slag outside, the empty streets of Uptown with the wind walking where once Welsh miners and local senators and German-born copper kings and Chinese dancing girls and whole armies of mixed-blood kids had whirled from bar to keno parlor to restaurant to dance hall, shouting and shopping and kissing and fighting. Once, wandering around there—Robert liked to sneak up the hill, even though his parents forbade it; he treated the whole place like one giant Dungeons and Dragons set—we’d followed this faint ringing sound all the way through the maze of streets before finding ourselves at the foot of a flagpole. We’d found no flag, just the rope, which was pinging against the pole and making the sound. On the way back, we’d passed a homeless woman staggering from one sidewalk to the other, muttering, “Somebody slapped me. Somebody slapped me.”

  Those were the thoughts I was having when my mother brought me the phone. As she held it out, she touched my hair gently. They hadn’t asked, even once, where all my new friends had gone during this vacation. For that, I was profoundly grateful.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “My dad said you called,” said Jill, and I dropped the spoon and glanced up at my mother. The hopefulness in her answering smile almost set me crying.

  “Jill? It’s great to hear your voice, where are you?”

  “Home.”

  “Here?”

  “Here, yeah, home, what’d I just say?”

  I stood, spun from my mother toward the hall for my winter boots and heavy jacket. “Let’s go walking. Right after school, I’ll meet you by the Copper Miner fountain. We’ll get good and frost-bitten.”

  “Tomorrow, okay?” Her voice, suddenly, was the one she’d used when I’d seen her last. And her breathing had that hitch again. “I think I’m coming back tomorrow.”

  “You heard about Valway, right? What English class did they put you in?”

  Silence, except for her clipped, hiccoughing breath. Then, “Hey. Teddy?”

  I waited, listening to her breath, holding my own.

  “Thanks for calling,” she said, and hung up.

  Walking to school, I replayed the whole conversation in my head, sifting it. The day had proved strangely windless for Silver City, and lead-colored clouds hung over everything, smothering the mountains and suffocating the whole town. I was running late, saw almost no cars or kids until I hustled through the front doors. The bell had just rung, and the hallways filled with banging and chatter as locker doors shut and kids dragged themselves toward their first classes of the new year.

  I made it to my own spot and fumbled the door open just as Matt Janus emerged from the restroom. He came up beside me, flung open his locker directly in my path as usual, and started riffling through his books. Impossibly, he looked even bigger. His black jeans barely contained him, and when he swung off the leather jacket and hung it on its hook, his arms looked positively cartoonish, almost childlike despite their size, like clubs from a “Flintstones” cartoon. They were also covered in purple-red blotches. Bruises?

  Elbowing me even farther back without so much as turning his head, he slammed his door and started off. To either side, kids ducked away and then closed behind him. He never looked around or back, and so never noticed that one of his jacket sleeves had caught in the locker door, and that the door had not shut.

  Later—much later, when I talked about it at all—I told people the decision wasn’t conscious. But that was a lie. It was immediate, but I thought about it every step of the way.

  I stared at the locker. At Matt’s retreating back. I pulled his locker door the rest of the way open. I wasn’t seeing Robert’s weeping face, or hearing Jill’s breathing. I was thinking of that basketball kid’s shoes tipped sideways in the puddle where Matt had hurled them, half-sunk, like the dead ducks beside Snake Lake. And also Mr. Valway’s damp, dour smirk.

  Matt’s jacket felt heavy and huge as I pulled it off the hook, more like a dog-carcass than clothing. It smelled bad, too, like caked lineament oil. Turning, I dropped my backpack and started with the jacket down the hall toward the front of the school. Toward the Copper Miner fountain.

  The most immediate effect was the spreading silence. Every step I took, another group of kids glanced over, saw what I had in my hands, and stopped talking.

  I didn’t rush. I looked around. Saw three of the skateboys I knew, and nodded. Saw the bass-player from Kenny Tripton’s band, held the coat out to him. He recoiled as though I’d offered him a dripping wolf hide. If the leather had been any less heavy or smelled better, I might have slipped the thing on, like Hercules donning the skin of the lion of Nemea. That’s what I felt like. Giddy. Almost invincible.

  I walked straight to the fountain, gurgling stupidly in its toilet-shaped porcelain pool. In the center of the pool stood a bronzed, bearded miner, copper shovel poised over the water. Folding Matt’s coat neatly—sleeves first, zipper up—I held it outstretched in my arms a few more seconds. Then I plunged it into the lukewarm water, laying it right under that copper shovel, and held it hard on the bottom as though drowning puppies in a sack.

  Without drying my own arms and without looking back, I left the jacket where it was, walked back up the row of dead-quiet kids, collected my books, and went to math.

  The news that I would soon be dead reached me during milk break. Whitney Drum, of all people, came scurrying up as I emerged from second period bio and dragged me around a corner into an empty chem lab. Her eyes, for the first time since I’d known her, were all the way clear, and her skin glowed a little paler than I remembered. She looked hosed clean, and somehow more frail.

  “He’s going to fucking kill you,” she said.

  The weird thing was that until right then, I’d felt no fear whatsoever. In fact, I’d half-forgotten what I’d done, wandered through the morning in a daze. The fountain felt like months ago, and the only thing echoing in my head was that homeless woman’s voice. Somebody slapped me.

  “Beat me, maybe,” I told Whitney, and tried to smile. “Break my fingers.”

  “End your life,” Whitney said. “Stop your breathing. That’s what he told me.”

 
Just like that, my legs went, as though the bones had been pulled from them. I sat on the floor, staring at my knees.

  “Get out of here,” Whitney murmured. “Go home, Teddy. Jesus Christ, go home.” She was sobbing as she darted from the room.

  The whole rest of the snack break, I was thinking I would do exactly that, wait until the next class bell and then slip out amidst the bustle. I’d have gone right away, except I had no idea where Matt Janus went on his break. In fact, now that Valway was dead, I had no idea where his schedule took him at any point in his day.

  So I waited. Once, four minutes before time, I heard heavy boots clump down the hall toward the room where Whitney had steered me. I glanced around the lab, thought about breaking a beaker and wielding it in front of me. But if Matt came, and I cut him, I’d only enrage him more. There wasn’t anywhere to hide. I ducked to the side of the window carved into the door, so at least no one could see me through that. Whoever it was went past without slowing. The bell rang.

  It was all I could do, the whole way down the hall, to keep from running. I kept jerking my head to both sides, waiting for that tell-tale parting in the crowd, that towering figure bearing down. The double doors of the gym stood half open, and as I passed one of them banged back and a giant roared out, but it was only Mr. Kellaway, the basketball coach, chasing a ball. He saw me leap back, knocking over two girls behind me, stared at me a few seconds, and started to laugh. Ignoring the girls—who’d realized who I was, and crab-walked away before getting to their feet—I kept moving.

  Thirty feet ahead, I saw the stony gray light through the front doors. Behind me, sounds were thinning as students split off into classes, all of them watching me, most of them whispering. I could hear individual footsteps, now. Some of them heavy. I didn’t look back. I kept walking. Fifteen feet. I thought of the crawl-space in our empty house. I’d take a salami sandwich and a flashlight down there, stay until Mom got back from work or Dad from whatever construction site he was on. I had my hand outstretched for the door when I thought of Jill, wondered what crawl space she’d slipped into in her house. Without thinking about it, I veered right, half-sprinted down the front hallway, and went to Spanish after all.

  I don’t remember any of the next two periods. I’m not sure I even got my name on the pop World Civ quiz. No one spoke to me. No one even looked at me, though they all glanced in my general direction periodically, as though I were already a ghost, something they could feel but no longer see. When I came out of Spanish, Matt Janus was standing by the fountain, and he was looking straight down the hall toward me. He waited until he was sure I was looking. Then he lifted out his folded coat from under the copper shovel, held it up, and wordlessly, expressionlessly, slid it on. He stood there dripping and staring. I ducked down a side hall and went all the way around the school to reach the cafeteria.

  Once there, I hurried to get a place in the middle of the line, surrounded by as many other people as possible, but I’d been too long arriving and wound up at the end. Frantically, I scanned the huge, echoing hall, the students huddled around the squat, rectangular wooden tables, their chairs screeching horribly in the ruts in the scarred and cracked linoleum floor.

  No Matt.

  I scanned again. The line inched forward. The room echoed, and chairs screeched. I’d reached the edge of the actual food displays, picked a pudding and placed it on my tray, when the silence bloomed behind me.

  It came like a wave of radiation, spreading from the door of the hall outward in all directions. Matt didn’t waste any time. If I’d made any calculations at all, I realized right then they were wrong. Whatever Matt was doing, it wasn’t for effect, or for sending a message. He didn’t wait for the silence to become total. He didn’t stroll in slow motion. He just came for me.

  Don’t turn, I was murmuring inside my head. Stupid, really. A completely inappropriate climber’s thought. As if not looking, in this particular case, was going to help.

  Would he do it with his hands?

  It was that thought, mostly, that triggered my reaction. My hands were already gripping the food tray so hard it seemed I could feel my fingertips touching through the plastic. When I whipped it off the countertop, sending the pudding goblet flying to the side to shatter, the tray felt light, so pathetically light. Whirling, swinging wildly, I caught Matt Janus on the point of his chin and dropped him to his knees like a felled tree.

  Around us, the silence exploded. Everyone was shouting, though I couldn’t make out a single word over the buzz in my ears. I also couldn’t blink, couldn’t even look away from Matt where he knelt, chin split and bleeding, gorilla-hands at his sides. After a few seconds, he glanced up. The look on his face wasn’t quelled-bully, and it wasn’t amazement, and it sure as hell wasn’t fear. I bolted, hurtling to the side as his hands shot out for me, and this time I kept going, through the school’s front door, down the hill, off the street into the trees, and home.

  From the garage, I grabbed one of the ceremonial silver shovels bankers always gave my father when he broke ground on some new project. Instead of going into the crawl space, I crouched on the couch by the front window, then later went outside so I could breathe better and hid in the pine tree in our yard, watching the road. Of course, the air out there was Silver City air, probably had less oxygen in it than what was in our house, and as the gray light turned darker gray, then black, the cold got inside my jacket, then my skin, then my organs, so that each new pump of my heart sent a fresh shock of iciness down my veins. Finally, I went back indoors.

  I’d had the whole afternoon to think of something to say to my parents. In the end, I told them I felt sick, might not be able to go in tomorrow. I didn’t specify what kind of sick, and they didn’t ask. They turned the heat up high, though—my mother’s habitual response to anyone’s illness—and in the sweating small hours I lurched awake, believing I’d heard a scratch at my window. What time had Robert said the Dark Lord had come?

  Dawn. He’d come for Robert at dawn.

  The only thing that came for me was the light. I curled deep into my sheets, rolled around, twisted them up, tried a practice moan or two. I didn’t usually play sick, and didn’t think my parents would ask, but I wanted them to believe it. Somehow, I tricked myself back to sleep, and awoke with my mother placing the phone at my ear.

  “How’re you feeling?” she asked.

  “Not so—” I started, and Jill’s voice poured through the receiver.

  “Teddy?”

  “Hey.” I sat up.

  “Walk today?”

  “You’re coming in today?”

  “Meet you by your locker right after last class? Wherever I have that now?”

  “Okay.”

  Dazed, wordless, I handed the phone to my mother, ignored her questioning look, and got dressed.

  I considered taking the ceremonial shovel. During breakfast, I actually pocketed the knife my mom always laid on the margarine container. So that if Matt maybe brought some toast, we could butter it before he dismembered me. I’d left my books, my backpack, even my winter coat on the school cafeteria floor. Maybe someone had collected them.

  In the end, I just put on a second sweatshirt, kissed my baffled parents, and set off into a surprising, dazzling winter sun. The light carried no heat, but it caught the shards of uncollected copper and useless ore refuse in the rocks, turned the buttes blue and maroon and orange like stained glass. Shattered stained glass, but still. I came through the front door of LMMS right on time, moved steadily through my classmates, who parted before me and went quiet yet again. I glanced around for Jill, didn’t see her.

  Matt Janus was leaning against my locker in his leather jacket.

  I could have run. I could have gone to Mrs. Morbey’s and gotten myself suspended for vandalizing Matt’s locker and also decking him with the food tray. I could have demanded that the police come and search Matt’s locker and his pockets for the drugs he almost certainly had stashed there.

  I walked s
traight up to him instead. It’s going to hurt, I thought. And then, one way or another, it’s going to be over. I thought of Robert weeping. And, yet again, of Valway’s masked face. And his, “Well, now.”

  I reached Matt and stood before him. There were probably 200 kids watching. I couldn’t hear them, could barely make myself believe they were there.

  “I don’t suppose sorry’s going to do it,” I said, staring at his collarbone, the masses of muscle crowding in on his neck. Then, finally, I made myself look at his face.

  His expression was utterly unreadable. But his eyes…

  I couldn’t make sense of it. Not quite yet. I can only say what I thought: The only thing in Matt’s eyes, right that moment, was Matt.

  He didn’t move for a while. At no point did he grin. What he did do, finally, was step back and tap my locker with his long, white fingers.

  “What?” I whispered, barely breathing. “Open it?”

  Matt tapped again. I twirled the combination, fumbled it twice, finally got the door unlatched. Inside, my backpack and coat and books lay neatly re-stowed. Elbowing me—not hard—to one side, Matt ducked in, pulled everything out in a single pile, and dropped it on the floor beside him. Then he stuck out his hand in a slow, graceful movement—if not for his coat, and his muscles, and the fact that he was Matt Janus, he could have passed for a butler—and gestured me inside.

  For a long moment, we just looked at each other. Me, and the balrog of the abandoned mineshaft. My friend from years ago.

  I stepped into the locker. Matt shut the door, shoved it until it the click told him it was locked. The bell rang, and a buzz roared through the halls. From the breathing just outside, and the weight I could sense when I pushed my hands against the inside of the door, I could feel that Matt was still out there. Soon, there was silence.