Sprout

wrapper at me. “ Empty . You know what that means.”
    “Um, Ty?”
    “Doing it in the car . Give it up for Mr. B. and Mrs. M. W00t, w00t!”
    I grabbed the condom wrapper and threw it out the window. So my dad was having sex with Mrs. Miller. In the car. That was kind of, I don’t know, gross and funny and even a little sweet. But still, it seemed to me that there were more important things in the car right now. Well, one thing. It was sitting on the seat, its barrel pointed alarmingly towards my leg.
    “One,” I said sternly, “there will be no w00ting of my dad’s sexcapades. And two: what are you doing with a—Ty! What in God’s name are you doing now ?”
    Cuz Ty was clambering butt over brains into the backseat, kicking me in the side of the head with one of his ridiculous shoes for good measure.
    “Evidence! I want a wet spot. Crusty stains!” Bits of paper flew around the cabin and were sucked out the open windows. “Condom number two! Three! Mint-flavored lubricant! Oh, peng-you!” he moaned in his best orgasm voice. “Peng-you, peng-you, PENG-you!”
    I was just about to grab the gun off the passenger’s seat and hit him over the head with it, but at that exact moment the sides of the road just sort of fell away, and we found ourselves on the long low bridge that crosses the Arkansas River south of town. The actual channel of the river isn’t particularly big—in some places only twenty feet or so—but because it floods regularly (or used to, before most of its water got sucked out for irrigation) its bed is nearly a mile wide, with a jungly border of vine-choked softwoods growing on either side, and then the dark sandy track of the river itself, which splits and writhes around hundreds of sandbars, some of which had dark campfire circles on them, or raggedy pieces of garden furniture. Silver and gold cans glinted more brightly in the morning sun than the brown water, and in a single sparkling instant the last four years of my life melted away. I was back in the passenger’s seat of the Taurus and my dad was behind the wheel, my mom had just died and we had just moved here and my dictionary was open on my lap, filled with meaningful words that told me absolutely nothing about how my life had managed to turn itself inside out like a reversible fleece—blue one minute, red the next. The same, yet completely different.
    And then Ty’s gun appeared in the corner of my eye, pulling me back to the present.
    “Blam,” he hissed, and the fact that he whispered it somehow made it scarier. He pointed the gun at the beer and soda cans discarded on the riverbed, yet it felt more like he was aiming at the happy hands that had once held them, the smiling mouths that’d sucked them dry. “Blam blam blam,” he fired at their phantom bodies, as if he hated even the memory of their good times.
    And then the river was gone.
    “Ty,” I said as we descended the far side of the bridge. “What is up with the gun ?”
    “We’ll make ’em pay, Daniel!” He was suddenly hollering, right in my ear. “We’ll make ’em all pay!” But he was laughing as he said it, and then he tapped me on the head with the gun barrel. It was really, really hard. “Re lax . You’re whiter than me, for God’s sake. I just wanted to do some target practice.”
    I waited for more, but there wasn’t more. Ty looked at me with this blank expression on his face, like, Why are you looking at me ? then dropped the gun on the passenger seat and went back to ransacking the debris in the back.
    Well, I’ll tell you: I believed him. About the target practice, I mean. Ty was just one of those people for whom guns were a part of life, the same way computers or cell phones or indoor plumbing are a part of life for other people. It was fun to shoot them, and it was fun to shoot things, but it would’ve never occurred to him that someone might think he wanted to shoot a person with them, because, well, he wasn’t crazy. Angry maybe, a little bit bipolar, but not crazy. But at the same time it didn’t seem to occur to him that the gun in his hand had been specifically designed to shoot people, and so maybe it wasn’t so weird that someone might worry just a little bit about his intentions.
    I picked it up gingerly. I’d never held a gun before, and I was surprised how heavy it was. There was no visible brand name on it. I guess it wasn’t like a car or a pair of sneakers. You didn’t want a big logo or a tagline on the