Bird (5 page)

John's eyes were pretty big by now.

“Duppies don't like some kinds of trees and plants,” I continued, “and if you plant them around your house, it helps keep them away.”

“Really.”

“It's a Jamaican thing.”

We weeded for a while in silence, and then he said, “What kind of trouble do duppies make?”

“I don't know,” I said, even though every fiber in me was screaming,
Bird
. I lowered my face between my shoulders so he couldn't see my lie.

“Do you believe in that stuff?” John asked.

I couldn't look at him even if I wanted to. “I don't think so,” I said slowly. I'm not sure if I believe in duppies and souls and spirits, but a part of me felt like I was disrespecting Dad right then, because he does.

We do all believe that Grandpa killed my brother when he gave him the nickname Bird. Names are important, and even though Grandpa didn't mean to, he attracted a duppy into the house who followed my brother and convinced him to jump. Mom doesn't believe in duppies, being a Catholic—not that we go to church much. She thinks that Grandpa killed Bird because his talk messed up Bird's mind, got him confused. He was only a little kid, after all. “Loose lips sink ships,” she spat at Dad once, when they were arguing about Grandpa, “but loose lips killed our son.”

“Duppies.” John was shaking his head. “That's crazy.” He glanced at me. “No offense.”

There. He said it.
That's crazy.
I gave a little shrug, like I didn't care very much about what he thought, but my lips sure zipped up tight. I was glad I didn't mention anything about the cliff like I did with Mr. Williamson, and I decided right then not to say anything else important, like ask where John was headed to yesterday. Or where he really
really
came from.

Instead, I said, “So where will you go when you're an astronaut? Mars?”

John tossed a couple more weeds into a new pile. “Nah. Mars is overrated. I'll go to Jupiter's moons.”

“Moons? More than one?” A trickle of sweat ran down my neck. A rock crushed into my knee, and my back was starting to get tight on me. Weeding was more work than I remembered.

“Jupiter has over sixty moons.” John sat back on his haunches. “The biggest ones are Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. I'm going to be the first astronaut to land on those.”

Sixty moons. Imagine how great Jupiter's night sky would be.

Just then I heard something behind me, and I turned.

Grandpa.

Grandpa, who never comes near me. The air grew colder, like he was freezing everything around him, including every limb in my body. He stood not ten feet away from John and me, on the grass, in his boxers and a thin, white T-shirt.

I sucked in my breath and struggled to my feet, averting my gaze. “Grandpa, this is John.”

“Hey there,” John said, standing up and wiping his hands on his shorts. He extended his hand to Grandpa.

Grandpa's eyes were as big as eggs.

John's hand was still stuck out, warm and friendly.

Grandpa was still staring. I never saw him stare before; usually he makes it a point not to look at anything.

“We met yesterday,” I said, trying to shake the ice from under my skin.

Suddenly, Grandpa's nostrils flared, and his eyes squinted into slits.

John put his hand down.

The sun stopped climbing up the sky.

Then, to my horror, Grandpa smacked his lips and spit on the ground, by John's feet, and he made an X in the grass with his toe.

John backed up a couple inches and his jaw dropped. If I were him, I would have just run away. But John's back straightened and he lifted his chin slightly. “I'm sorry if I did something wrong,” he said, “but the garden is weeded. I hope you have a nice d—”

Grandpa scowled and made a funny gesture with his hand, one that I'd never seen before. Then he made another X in the ground.

John's mouth fell open. It was as if his words dropped, midair, from shock.

I hung my head and waited to hear John's footsteps as he walked away. I waited to hear him say that with all the craziness that's in my family, I didn't deserve his company. A lump formed in my throat. John had seemed like he really wanted to be my friend.

I had been so close.

“Come on,” John said to me. “Let's go somewhere.”

I yanked my head up. Grandpa had moved back about ten feet away from us, listening to every word. John was talking as if Grandpa wasn't even there.

“Come on,” John insisted, grabbing my arm.

“B-but I haven't done my chores yet,” I stuttered. “Mom will be mad.”

John's brow furrowed. “But she wouldn't be mad that he”—John jerked his head at Grandpa—“just spat at me? Come on. It'll only be for a little while.”

I bit my lip. I don't disobey my parents. Not intentionally. I know a lot of kids in my class don't listen to their parents, or they sneak out, or they talk all disrespectfully. But it's different for me. It's like, my parents have already lost Bird. I'm Bird's replacement.

At least, that's how it feels sometimes.

“Come on,” John said again, exasperated. “I want to show you something.”

Grandpa frowned.

I shuddered and leaned away from Grandpa, and in that moment I had a crushing desire to go with John, wherever he wanted to take me. Someplace other than my silent and cold house. I took a couple hesitant steps toward John.

Suddenly, Grandpa dashed at me and gripped my upper arm, his fingers like a vise.

“Let me go!” I cried, and I jerked my arm back violently. Then, before I knew what was happening, John started running and I was running after him, away from my house, my chores, my grandpa, and through the rows of growing corn.

CHAPTER FIVE

“IT'S
just a little farther,” John said, his legs swishing quickly through the calf-high cornfield and up the hill. He had longer legs than me, and I had to work hard to keep up.

I felt tingly and strange all over, like my body didn't belong to me. Did I really just do that? Did I disobey my grandpa, right to his face? My stomach churned with shame. Would he tell my parents? That would be even worse.

My foot caught on a dip in the earth, and I fell to my knees. John stopped and came back. “You okay?” he asked.

“It's nothing,” I said, even though a little rock had hit my kneecap hard.

“Just wait until you see this place I want to show you,” John said, and his smile was so bright I wondered for the two hundredth time why Grandpa was so angry at him. John helped me to my feet. “What was up with your grandpa? He went nuts back there.”

“I don't know,” I said, and that was the true-blue truth. “Maybe he was in a bad mood.” That wasn't quite true, but it was better than saying that Grandpa didn't like John for no good reason.

“A bad mood,” John repeated. He looked like he was going to say something else, then thought better of it.

I thought we were going to go to his uncle's house but instead we went in the opposite direction, where I'd seen John come from yesterday. We cut through three different fields and climbed up a steep hill to a small but dense grove of trees that sat at its crest and looked over the land. Iowa isn't all cornfields, unlike what a lot of people think; it has a lot of variety to it, with bluffs and caves and sinkholes and oxbow lakes. And it's not flat, either; its hills swell and dip, a river of land flowing from the Rockies in the west, rolling like waves on the horizon.

The sun was high overhead now, and my throat itched with thirst. Iowa is no place to mess around without water in the summer. With it being a landlocked state and all, the heat just swelters and bakes everything it touches. All the folks with air conditioners hide in their houses. My family has to sweat it out.

We slowed down when we reached the thin, outlying trees, which seemed to sweat in the summer heat. The trees farther in got bigger, thicker, and under their protective canopy they became a grove of mothers holding out their arms, shielding us from the sun. Leaves bent softly beneath our feet, and John guided me through the glowing understory, until he suddenly stopped.

“Here.”

I looked up. In front of me stood an enormous hollow tree, a basswood, much taller and larger than all the rest. It pierced through the canopy with its bare branches and naked trunk. It was dead, for sure; it must have died long ago from lightning or fungus or old age. The heartwood was completely gone, dissolved away, almost, but the bark and shell of the trunk and all its branches stood firmly intact. A four-foot-high hole rose from its base, like a door.

It was a house. Made of a tree.

“What happened to it?” I said. I was almost whispering.

“I don't know,” John said, and he seemed a little embarrassed. “I was hoping you would.”

I shook my head.

“This is Event Horizon,” John announced. His chest puffed out a little.

“What?”

“The name of my tree,” he said.

I found myself grinning again. “It's not your tree, you know.”

John's dark eyes twinkled. “Trees belong to everyone. Check it out.”

The temperature seemed to drop twenty degrees inside the tree, and the ground was soft, spongy beneath my feet. As my eyes adjusted to the shadows, I could make out the dark, rich walls of wood encircling me and squinted up at the bright disk of sky overhead. It smelled of peat moss and loam, the scent of one thing slowly becoming another. It's funny, I realized, that people feel like they have to go into churches to pray when there is all this sacredness sitting here, outside, silent and waiting.

“It's really great to come here at night,” John said. I hadn't even heard him enter, the ground was so soft. “You see the stars when you look up.”

“Like a spaceship,” I said, and the moment I said it, I knew I was right. I turned around slowly, my neck craned up, taking it in.

He nodded and handed me a bottle of water. I looked at him, grateful but confused.

“Over by the doorway,” John said.

I had missed it when I ducked inside: a little stash of water, candy bars, flashlights.

“Awesome,” I whispered.

No one had ever shown me their secrets. In my family we hoard our secrets, gathering them in with greedy arms, never sharing them with anyone. And now that John had shown me his secret place, it was like the universe was unrolling before me.

I felt rich.

Then it hit me. “This is where you were coming from yesterday.”

He pressed his lips together. “It's better than home.”

Anyone could see why being at Event Horizon was way better than being at some dumb house with nothing to do.

“So does your grandpa spit at every person he meets?” John asked.

I winced. I'd nearly forgotten about it. “No, he's just . . .” I searched for the word. “Different.”

“Really.”

“No, I mean, besides that. He doesn't talk.”

“Not at all?” John ducked out of Event Horizon, and I followed after him. We sat down some ten feet from the tree, drinking our water and watching the sun cast mottled patches of light on our legs.

“He hasn't talked since my brother died.”

A pause. “I'm sorry.”

I squirmed. I hate it when people say
I'm sorry
when I mention my brother. “It's okay,” I said, “I never knew him.” And, I realized, I never really knew Grandpa, either.

An awkward silence fell over us, and my hands started digging into the cool soil.

John watched me dig for a moment, then looked back at his tree. “Event Horizon's a great tree, but I don't climb it.”

Dead trees are dangerously brittle. I let the dirt sift through my fingers. “Why do you call it Event Horizon?” I asked.

John gave a little knowing nod, as if he'd expected me to ask that. “You've heard of black holes, right?”

“Right.” I hesitated. “A little bit.”

“When a supergiant star dies, it implodes—crashes in on itself—and forms a black hole. Everything gets sucked into it. Even light. Stars too.”

“Where does all that stuff go?”

John shrugged. “No one knows. Anyway, if people were able to get into a black hole, there'd be no way to tell us what was on the other side, because they couldn't get out.”

He had a point.

“The black hole's pull is strong, but you can avoid getting sucked in if you don't get too close. The event horizon is what scientists call that point of no return. You cross it . . .” John pointed a finger and crossed his neck with it. “Ack. You're sucked in. Good-bye. If you don't cross the event horizon, you can still get free.”

I thought it sounded scary to name a favorite tree as the point of no return. But it sounded daring, too. I would have never thought of a name like that.

“If you ever get sucked into a black hole, where do you think you'll end up?” I asked.