Sprout

put ’em here Himself, so he—my dad, not God—was really just staving off the Apocalypse, which a Methodist like Willy Regier should thank him for, since he’s just gonna end up in hell when that happens.” He licked his lip without wiping first. “I thought it was okay.”
    “That he shot it?”
    “The meat . Jesus, Daniel, keep up.” Ty took a breath. “So. You got all that?”
    I stared at him. We’d started out with cave canem and ended up with the horsemen of the Apocalypse, except they were ostriches, not horsemen, and then something about plums and Methodists. And of course all that blood, and the fact that every time Ty licked it my mouth filled with water. Of course that too.
    “JFC, Ty, this is more complicated than the plot of Ocean’s Eleven .”
    “What’s that?”
    “Um, George Clooney, Brad Pitt?” When he still looked at me blankly, I said, “Julia Roberts ?”
    “I meant, what’s JFC?”
    “It’s like OMG, but JC instead. With an F in the middle.”
    Ty looked at me as though I was speaking Greek. Then: “Julia Roberts played the whore, right? They burned her picture in our church so we’d know what was going to happen to her in hell. The preacher said hair the color of flames deserves to go up in flames.”
    Ty’s voice went a little fire-and-brimstone, and I tried to imagine what it must be like being raised to believe that everyone in heaven is going to have brown hair, maybe a few blonds, but no redheads and probly no green-haired atheists either. (I asked him one time about people with black hair and he said, “You show me a person with black hair, I’ll show you a Catholic or a Muslim”).
    He’d lifted up his shirt now, pressed on his bruised ribs until he started coughing and laughing, and then the bell rang and we had to go to class. I caught up with him in the break between fifth and sixth periods, worked out one more kink in the plan (“You’ll see a metal thing that looks kind of like a great big TV antenna or a really small jungle gym. Whatever you do, don’t touch that”), and then, just before we got on our separate buses, he saluted me and said, “Go with God, my son.” I started to walk away, but he called me back.
    “I just got it.”
    “Huh?”
    “What the F stands for.”
    “The F?”
    “In JFC. Dude. Good one.”
    Ty was waiting in the Regiers’ pasture by the time I got there, had already picked a couple of plums, one of which he tossed me. I dodged it instead of catching it, I guess thinking of the crabapple from the day before, which made Ty roll his eyes.
    “ Food , doofus? You eat it?”
    I looked at the plum on the ground, lying a few feet from something I’m guessing was an ostrich turd, which looked pretty much identical to the plum, right down to the shininess.
    “Huh.” I let the plum lie where it’d fallen.
    Ty had already turned and was marching west. He skirted the plum thicket, which clung to the bottom of the field like a dense green cloud, and headed up the opposite hill. I was half tempted to pick up the plum and throw it at him, but instead just followed.
    In the shallow valleys the air was hot and still, but on top of the hills the wind needled us with a powdery grit that collected in the corners of our eyes and nostrils and lips. Ty led me up one dusty rise after another, only speaking to point out this or that cottonwood or willow or patch of sumac we could use for cover if the ostriches got wind of us. I thought about pointing out that ostriches had a pretty crappy sense of smell (I’d googled them in the library that afternoon) but figured that would be obnoxious, and so I just nodded. At some point I realized that Ty didn’t have a destination. Or, rather, that this walk was the destination. That he was showing me his childhood stomping grounds—the dry Kansas plains—just as I’d shown him my forest yesterday, or at least the parts I was willing to share.
    And so we walked. Up one hill, down another. Up one hill—the ever-present wind, the dust and the grit—and down another, to the hot bowels of the earth. Up one hill. To the left, right, forwards, more of the same. Down another, to another prairie hollow. Clumps of grass grew from a parched lunar landscape imprinted with the tracks of coyote, deer, snakes, ostriches. Thickets of sand plums picked clean by larks and starlings and blackbirds; ditto blackberries and raspberries. A bone, anonymous as a paper towel tube, lay bleached and white in the