Sprout

thinks.
    The phone, which doesn’t care about the implausibility of its functionality, bleeps again. The LCD screen flashes a message: ONE NEW VOICEMAIL.
    The resident of the future picks up the phone and, because the residents of the future are much smarter than us, presses the right button to retrieve the message on the first try. Perhaps this will elucidate the situation, the resident of the future thinks. But all he hears is a thousand-year-old voice squawking in his ear.
    “WHOO-HOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

Liquid courage
    The next morning the phone rang.
    (In fact the phones had been ringing all night, or bleeping really, but this particular ring came from our land line.)
    “Meet me at the end of our driveway. And bring those phones.”
    “When—”
    But he’d already hung up. The car keys were on the counter, along with a twenty-dollar bill and a note: At least half on gas . It was Saturday, I remembered. My dad had promised me the car on Saturdays. Whatever else you could say about him, he was a man of his word.
    The Taurus sat in the driveway beneath a sky seamed by the passage of crows following the harvest south. I put the phones in the trunk so I wouldn’t have to listen to them before climbing into the musty cab. There were lipstick-smudged Kwik Shop coffee cups on the center console, a copy of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in the backseat. The slip of paper from a fortune cookie had been taped to the dashboard—not the fortune side, but the obverse:
    Learn Chinese!
Friend = Peng-you
    It seemed to me a faint scent of Mrs. Miller’s perfume hung in the air too, although that could’ve just been the salsa residue in the Taco Bell takeout containers.
    I know: totally uncalled for.
    The car faked me out for a minute, refusing to turn over, but I stomped on the gas and it sputtered into life, along with a few crows roosting in the stumps, who cloffed and cawed loudly into the air. As soon as I dropped the car into reverse, though, it stalled, and after I got it started again I had to gun it for what seemed like forever until the thermometer needle finally twitched off the blue bottom of the gauge and edged towards the red. I shivered while I waited for the car to warm up. It was a chilly fall morning, but the sky was clear and it would be warm in a few hours. Kansas weather is notorious for being unable to make up its mind.
    Five minutes later, I parked fifty feet shy of the Petits’ gate. Five minutes after that I shut the car off. Five minutes after that I started the car again and inched past the gate, but I couldn’t see anything between the sandy ridges and sumac through which the Petits’ driveway wound like a dry steambed. I parked and resumed my vigil, this time with the rearview mirror. The fortune cookie paper caught my eye. I imagined my dad and Mrs. Miller listening to Patsy Cline or Garth Brooks as they drove six or seven miles an hour slower than the speed limit to prolong their time together. Hello, friend. Ni hao, peng-you.
    “Peng-you,” I said in my best Elvis voice. “Peng-you very mush.”
    A breeze was whipping the nearly leafless branches around, and the migrating crows moved laboriously through the air, as if dragging the threads of some vast atmospheric shroud behind them. With each minute Ty didn’t show up, I imagined the sky filling with long dark lines. Right about the time the bright autumn morning had been completely blacked out and the earth plunged into everlasting darkness, a blond head flickered in the rearview mirror. My heart did something unheartlike, I swear to God. Jumped, or turned a somersault, or Morse coded the words There he is! straight to my spinal cord, which in turn shot the message to the top of my head, where it felt like my hair danced on end as if a balloon charged with static electricity were being waved over it. But then my hair fell and my heart sank all the way down to the pebbles and bottle caps and mashed pages of newspaper around my feet, cuz what followed the head was the snout of Mr. Petit’s beat-up old pickup. Crap, I thought. His dad’s caught him. His dad’s taking him to one of his all-day church services (revivals, they were called, which prompted the question, who died?), or his dad was driving him to a Christian re-education camp, or his dad was driving him to some remote field where he’d make Ty dig his own grave and then shoot him. I smelled ’im on you is what he’d say when Ty asked him why. (I’m just