Sprout

his face.
    “You were doing better when you had nothing to say.”
    “Look, Ty—”
    “ No.
    ”
    Ty’s word shut me up like a punch to the throat.
    “If you leave your home—your kids —you don’t get to have reasons. You don’t get to come back. Ever .”
    I just stared at his stomach then, rising and falling heavily.
    His shirt was unbuttoned, remember, and the bruise seemed to expand and contract with his anger. Then suddenly he stood up. “Hey! Follow me!”
    He was already running across the hard soil, grit and grass crunching beneath his shoes, leaving me no choice but to stagger after him. How he knew one shallow hollow from another in that featureless world was beyond me, but somehow he made a beeline directly for, well, for—
    “Uh, what is that?”
    Ty looked at me like I’d incorrectly identified a gamepad as a joystick, confused Black Eyed Peas with the Fugees or called a Ford Bronco a Chevy Trailblazer.
    “Duh. It’s a coyote den.”
    “It” was a hole in the ground. Or rather, a pair of holes: a shallow trench covered by about eighteen inches of earth. There were no tracks, no bits of bone or fur. How Ty knew it was the work of coyotes and not erosion was anyone’s guess. But, you know, he was a Kansan, and a Petit besides: I figured he’d probly shot it. But I could’ve never predicted what he said next.
    “Let’s make one!”
    I stared at the trench. I tried to connect it to what we’d been talking about a minute ago: his mother, and abandoning your home and your kids. I could see the symbolism in it, I suppose, the concept of shelter reduced to its most fundamental sense, but the idea of making a human-sized version—of excavating it from this rock-hard soil in hundred-degree air—seemed less romantic than, well, stupid.
    “C’mon, Daniel,” Ty sensed my reluctance (probly because I said, “I’m reluctant”). “It’ll be cool.”
    “Dude. Scoring a copy of The Grey Album on Pirate Bay is cool. Getting a new car is cool. Digging … a … hole ? Not cool, dude. Not cool at all.”
    “Enough with the dudes, dude. Now come on, let’s get a couple of shovels. We’ll dig our way straight to hell.”
    By “hell” I assumed he meant the place where people who never wanted to see their dads went. I wasn’t quite as mad at my dad as Ty was at his, but still. If hell was where we could be alone, far away from fathers and teachers, and friends who weren’t really friends, and enemies who weren’t really enemies, then, well, toss me a shovel.

The hole story
    We spent five weeks on it. Not because we worked at it every day, but because we didn’t.
    In fact I almost never hung out with Ty two days running, because every afternoon he spent with me translated to one or two or six afternoons that his dad invented a whole slew of chores to keep him busy. “It drives him crazy that he don’t know where I am. He thinks I’ve got a girl somewhere cuz I lost my belt.”
    Ty reported this gleefully, but what he didn’t report was the source of the fresh bruises that replaced the ones on his cheek and ribs, the archipelago of black-and-blue lumps that floated on his back, the welts that tracked up and down his legs like tire treads. When I tried to ask him about them, all he said was:
    “Check this out.”
    He lifted up his shirt. His dad had run a length of rope through his belt loops to replace the strip of patent leather that’d been there before. He’d even—may God strike me dead if I’m making this up—poured hot wax over the knot, so he’d know whether the rope’d been untied.
    “I was like, Dad, I don’t have to take my pants off. All I have to do is—” and he pulled down his fly, exposing a sliver of not-quite-white undies framed by the angry teeth of his zipper. It made me think of that scene in There’s Something About Mary —I’m sure you know the one, although Ty, not surprisingly, didn’t.
    “Mary who?” he said, dropping his shirt over the waxed rope. “Whatever,” he waved away my answer. “He like to knock my head off.”
    Judging from Ty’s fat lip, it looked like his dad had knocked his head off. But that was the one injury Ty did tell me about.
    “That lard-ass Mike Weise.” Ty poked his swollen lip so hard that it brought tears to his eyes, which in turn made him laugh until he started coughing. He squeezed his bruised ribs and let out a string of curses. “Man,” he said when he could talk again. “I am a mess . But you