The Color of Trees

by Canaan Parker

  The two brothers were a picture of sameness and contrasts. Even at dinner I’d observed the same courtliness in Chris I’d always known in Ethan — a grace not so much natural as learned, thoroughly rehearsed and dispensed with a throwaway ease. Though Ethan was thinner, his hair darker and his Jaw more square, there was between them a clear fraternal likeness, variations on a visual theme I found attractive. Both had small, tightly packed bodies, doe-like amber eyes, and a fullness in the nose and lips that gave a cream-puffy sweetness to features that would otherwise be bland.

  I whispered his name aloud as I lay in bed. Christopher Thayer. Christopher Blackwood Thayer. I loved the pomposity of Chris’s full name as I’d read it on the school roster. But I loved even more the incongruity of that old English resonance matched against this sporty boy in corduroys and desert boots, this unassuming scion who told dirty jokes and ducked out of boring parties. I decided that 1 liked Chris very much. Christopher … Blackwood … Thayer, I whispered again, before I rolled over and fell asleep.

  Classes started the next day. T. J. and I were in French class together, along with Moonshot. The three of us sat together in the back corner of the classroom, where Moonshot and T. J. continued the joint regression into infancy I’d noticed at the Headmaster’s Tea. French, for some reason, was very funny to Moonshot. He burst out laughing whenever our teacher Mr. Boit asked him to recite. It wasn’t long before T.J. and I were infected with Moonshot’s contagious silliness. Mr. Boit was disgusted with us. He labelled us the “Diminished Triad” and took every chance to berate our performance. I’d never misbehaved in class before, ever in my life.

  I tried out for varsity football and made it, to my pleasure, having put on ten pounds over the summer. More to my surprise, I was elected to the student council when the Fifth Form voted for class officers. Giddy from this first taste of voter approval, I began planning my political future. I imagined becoming a United States Senator, then accepting appointment as the Undersecretary of State. I started reading the New York Times to stay abreast of global affairs. I became intolerably grim and wise, until T.J. poured Pepsi Cola over my head and told me to knock it off. After a week I got bored with the Times and forgot all about going into politics.

  I saw Chris Thayer everywhere on campus — on the athletic fields, in the hallways of the Academic Center, or reading a magazine in the Common Room. In the library, he’d sit with his shoes off and one leg hung over the edge of his chair, dwelling for an hour on a single unturned textbook page, too long to be paying attention. He caught me watching once, and shook his head in mock agony. On the touch football field, Chris ran and played with a loping stride. He’d spin on one foot and bounce the football hard on the grass whenever he made a catch. Once I stepped on his ankle by accident, shearing his soccer cleat and sock half off his foot, and he became furious. “Look where you’re going, Givens,” he half cried, half commanded as he hopped like a pelican to the sidelines. Five minutes later he was back on the field, laughing and trying to knock me over. Outdoors, Chris seemed happier and livelier than he ever did indoors.

  Three weeks into the school year, Mr. Chase announced Briarwood Beautification Day. Classes were cancelled, and the students were organized into cleanup and landscaping details. Chris Thayer was on my detail, and so were Keith Hanson and another black student named John Shepherd. Our team’s job was to pull up weeds and chop the overbrush in the woods behind the athletic fields. It was a cool, clear morning, a perfect day to spend in a Connecticut forest. We were to work in pairs, and as we lined up to get our work tools and lunch bags I shoved my way past Gorilla Waxton to make sure I would work with Chris.

  “Hey, watch it,” said the Gorilla, shoving me back.

  “Go take a bath, Waxton,” I said. Chris turned and yawned, with his hands in his front pockets.

  “Come on, guys, it’s too early in the morning.”

  We all climbed on the back of a truck, and Dean Press drove us into the woods west of the soccer fields. Chris and I got off at the old Cushing cabin, a restored school monument that had been built by the original owners of the Briarwood land. Around the cabin was a four-foot-high wall of layered brick. Behind it was a tangled growth of dead white pine.

  “These weeds grow in between the bricks, if you let them,” said Mr. Press. “Then water gets in there and freezes in the winter, and splits the bricks apart. You guys chop all this weed off the bricks, okay? Get all the green off and rake it up. And then cut down all that whitewood in that clearing. It’s dead and dried out, and there’s too much risk of fire. I’ll be back at twelve o’clock to see how you’re doing.”

  Dean Press drove off towards the fields. I started cutting right away, but Chris sat down on a rock.

  “Take it easy,” he said.

  “Press will be back to inspect in three hours.” I looked at the green growth on the bricks and the huge net of white-wood. “We got a lot of work to do.”

  “I’ll bet there’s bees in that deadwood. You better be careful.”

  “Ain’t no bee catching me, man. I’ll break the sound barrier getting out of here.” Chris laughed and picked up his cutters.

  We worked steadily for an hour and cleared off the weeds from the bricks. Then we started to work on the deadwood. The sun came out high around eleven o’clock and it began to get warm.

  “What are we, slaves?” said Chris, wiping his brow with his shirt sleeve. “They must think this is the Dark Ages, putting us out here like this.” He took off his plaid woodsman’s shirt, then pulled off his cotton t-shirt, struggling for a moment to get it over his head. “That feels better,” he said. He wiped the sweat off his chest with the bundled-up t-shirt. He looked at me serenely for a moment. “Why don’t you take off yours?”

  “I catch cold easily,” I said.

  “You’re just a pussy.”

  Dean Press came back around noon and inspected the bricks. “Don’t leave those weeds scattered on the ground like that. Rake ’em up,” he said. “Then finish up with that deadwood.” He went into the Cushing cabin as Chris and I started raking the weeds. In a minute he came back. “Okay. I’ll be back around four with the truck and we can haul it away.”

  “See you later, fartbag,” Chris said as the dean drove off. He turned to me and let out a brattish, braying laugh. “I need a break,” he said, throwing down his rake.

  We stopped and took drinks from our water canteens, then opened our lunch bags. The kitchen staff had packed ham and Swiss cheese sandwiches and oranges.

  “T. J. says you and he are really close,” said Chris.

  ‘‘Yeah, I guess so.”

  Chris looked off into the woods. ‘‘I think T. J. is really cool. He’s an individual, you know. He’s too excitable. But I like him. I think he’ll go places.”

  “I think he’s nuts.”

  “He told me you’re on Honors all the time. And student council. What are you, Joe Prep or something?”

  This wasn’t what I wanted to talk about so I changed the subject.

  “I was thinking about you last night, Chris.” I spoke before I realized what I was saying. Chris registered no response to my more intimate tone, so I continued. “I remembered I met your father once. He was on a panel at Convocation my freshman year.”

  “You met ol’ Henry?”

  “Did your father go here?” I already knew the answer. I’d practically memorized the entry for Chris’s family in Who’s Who in America. Henry Thayer, Chris’s father, was an investment banker and an alumnus of Briarwood. The Thayers were English Catholics who came to the United States in the 1800s.

  “Yep. My father, my grandfather, my brother Ethan. My cousin might come here too.”

  “You’re a real Briarwood family.” Chris’s eyes glazed over, and he looked lost for a moment.

  “Let’s get back to work,” he said.

  We chopped and cut and talked for the next couple of hours. Chris had a lot of things on his mind and he was in the mood to talk.

>   He talked about his past summer. He’d worked on a fishing trawler off the Maine coast. He described full days under the white sun, fish scales and nets, red raw hands and hard, sweaty work. I tried to imagine working on a fishing boat, but could only put part of the picture together.

  We spoke philosophically about politics, about school, about love and sex. “Why do men love their ugly wives more than sexy pinup girls?” he asked. “Sure, they’ll ball the pinup girl, but they love their skinny wife with no tits.” Chris thought sex was all in the mind. I thought it was in the nuts. Although Chris thought student council was a joke, chapel was a joke, even sports were fun but still a joke, he took grades seriously. He jokingly predicted he’d beat both me and Barrett Granger for first in the class. He told me mathematics was a leisure interest of his father; at home, Chris was quizzed in the calculus over family dinner.

  We bumped into each other once, and without thinking I leaned into his bare skin and stayed there for a long three seconds. “Get out of my way, Givens,” he said, smiling and pushing me away with his elbow. In his mind he’d turned this drudgery of chopping deadwood into a sport, a contest between us.

  Chris dropped his cutters on the ground. “I’ll be back. I have to take a leak.” He went behind a wide oak tree about ten feet away from where we were working. I could hear the tinkle of his belt buckle, and then the hiss and splatter of piss on crisp leaves. “Oh, that felt good,” he shouted. His voice was flat and dry, like a foghorn. There was silence, then a long, louder yell. “Pete, come over here,” he said after another pause.

  I couldn’t see him behind the tree. I dropped my cutters and walked towards his voice. Chris was standing with his back to the trunk. He still had his dick out, and was shaking away the last drops. Even after he was dry, he stood there holding it between his fingers.

  “I wish there was a girl out here. I could really use some head.” My mouth went suddenly dry. Chris was looking at something off in the trees, and didn’t notice the hard look I could feel on my face. Before I could say anything, he tucked his dick away and zipped up his pants, then leaned back and propped one foot up against the trunk. He was breathing deeply and slowly and had a nervous smile on his face. I was frozen with nerves, standing in leaves.

  “You want to smoke a joint?” he said. He pulled a thin marijuana cigarette out of his wallet.

  I had never smoked pot before. I’d gotten drunk on beer at T.J.’s house, but I had always been afraid of drugs. In prep school, smoking pot was the equivalent of a capital crime. I could count the number of times Dean Press had announced a boy’s expulsion for doing drugs on campus. But I was so taken in by Chris now, with his small, smooth chest, his hard breathing, his foghorn voice, the puddle of his urine in the grass at his feet, and now this conspiratorial offer, that saying no to anything he suggested was probably impossible. “Okay,” I said.

  I didn’t like the pot. It made the sounds in the woods much louder, and I started worrying about mountain lions. It took my mind off Chris and onto Cady Donaldson and my brother Malcolm back home. We went back to cutting, and I worked even harder, hoping the exertion would push the pot out of my bloodstream. Chris said almost nothing too, and when he spoke now, it was in almost breathless whispers. He kept looking up into the trees. “The birds are cool,” he said calmly. “When I smoke and I look up at a bird flying, I feel like I’m right there flying with the bird.”

  Keith Hanson and John Shepherd came walking through the woods with shovels on their shoulders. Keith spotted Chris and me, turned right, and started to walk out of his way, then turned back and came towards us. He stared at me blankly, blinking behind his thick glasses.

  “You guys through?” I said.

  “All done,” said John. “We had to move all these rocks that were damming up a stream out that way.” John pointed southwest.

  “Great. Now you guys can help us,” said Chris.

  “We did our jobs,” said Keith angrily. “You’re not going to make us do your work for you.”

  “Just joking, guy,” said Chris.

  “I’ll see you at dinner, Keith,” I said. Keith and John walked off towards school.

  “Jesus, I was just joking,” Chris said after they’d disappeared.

  “I think he expected me to work with him today.”

  ‘‘You’d think he owned you or something.”

  10

  Chris and T.J. were a natural match as roommates. They came to breakfast together most mornings and sat and talked and laughed. One morning they had a food fight. Chris poured salt and pepper into T.J.’s hot chocolate and T.J. smeared mustard onto Chris’s blueberry muffin. I saw them walking across the quad one afternoon, only inches astride of each other. T.J. did nothing but smile quietly. Chris, by contrast, was very animated, very much at ease.

  In November was the Fall Cookout for the Fifth Form. There they were again! Off to themselves, Chris sitting with his legs crossed on the grass, T.J.’s arms wrapped around his knees, one loafer kicked off and dangling from the tip of his foot. There was a faint smile on T.J.’s face, a shade of tenderness over his eyes. He sat in a deep repose, as though with one deep breath he could have passed right through the earth as easily as sand through a sieve.

  I was sitting with Keith Hanson at the cookout, eyeing the roommates from behind a tree. I wasn’t worried that they’d catch me spying. The two of them were entranced. Their talk was flowing smoothly, punctuated by winsome gestures — a tossed grass seed, fingers whipped through brown or yellow hair. Chris did most of the talking. Chris was the only boy at Briarwood who could make T.J. keep quiet.

  “What are you looking at?” asked Keith.

  “Uh, nothing,” I said, startled. I looked back at the two roommates.

  “There’s a fly on your hot dog.”

  I sat up and shooed away the insect.

  “You’re thinking about something. What is it, home? Your brother?”

  “No,” I said with irritation. Keith was annoying me now. I gave him my most dour, squint-eyed glance — a shot across the psychic bow — and then looked back around the tree. T.J. had rolled over on his stomach and smudged his yellow shirt in the grass. Chris was struggling to chew down too big a bite of hamburger. He coughed and his face turned red. “You pig,” I heard T.J. say.

  “It’s nothing,” I said to Keith.

  “I’m getting another hot dog. You want one?”

  “What?”

  “Do you want me to get you another hot dog?”

  I didn’t answer. Chris and T.J. had stood up and were collecting their paper plates and plastic ware off the grass. They dropped their trash in the garbage bin and started walking together towards Chase Hall. I followed with my eyes as they walked up the back stairs to the infirmary wing. It seemed, for some reason, inevitable that Chris walked up the stairs first. When the door closed behind them, I turned and was surprised to see Keith frowning at me.

  I was terribly curious about the two new roommates. I had to take a closer look, so I went over on Saturday afternoon to give T.J. a guitar lesson. My stepfather, a big fan of Son House and Robert Johnson, had taught me guitar years ago. T.J. played guitar a little but wanted to learn more. We’d planned for months to practice together, but had procrastinated until now.

  T.J. was seated on the edge of his mattress when I walked in. Chris was lying flat on his bed, reading a book and listening to the stereo through headphones.

  “Hey, Pete,” said T.J.

  “Hey, Pete,” echoed Chris.

  “How’s the guitar coming?” T.J. asked.

  “Listen to this,” I said. I sat next to T.J. on his bed and played a tricky blues-ragtime guitar figure I’d just learned.

  “That’s cool.”

  I played the song again slowly so T.J. could follow. “Now it’s your turn,” I said.

  T.J. took my guitar and fingered a few basic chords. “Here, let me show you,” I said. I put my left hand around T.J.’s to walk him through the melody. He rel
axed and let me control his hand. His fingers were soft and hot, as I remembered. He breathed on my cheek when I moved closer.

  “Show me again,” he said into my ear. I glanced at Chris, who was nodding his head to music and concentrating on his book. Then I grabbed T.J.’s hand more firmly and pressed his fingers into the guitar’s fretboard. My elbow was resting on his stomach now. I placed my right hand against his waist for balance. I could feel his flesh sliding under his cotton shirt. I looked up again at Chris, who was still reading and ignoring us.

  “That looks a little tough for me,” T.J said, looking too at Chris and moving away from me on the bed. “Maybe next year.”

  “We’ll get there, T.J.” I took back my guitar and put it aside.

  “Have a seat, Pete,” said T.J.

  I sat down on a giant blue futon on the floor. “What are you guys doing tonight?”

  “I’m going to the dance at Sarah Waters School. You want to go?” T.J. asked.

  “I’ll pass. The girls at those dances aren’t exactly that hot.” My standard excuse to escape the merciless boredom of acting straight.

  Chris pulled off his headphones and sat up.

  “Look who’s back from outer space,” said T.J.

  “What are you boring Peter with now, T. J.?”

  “The dance tonight.”

  “Those dances are for bozos. I go home to my girlfriend when I want to get laid.”

  “Right, Chris,” said T.J. “Tell us about your imaginary girlfriend in Pound Ridge. The girl nobody has ever seen or heard of.” Chris put his headphones back on and stretched out on his bed.

  “You guys are just like husband and wife,” I said.

  “Chris is okay. Except he keeps leaving my record albums out of the covers.” T.J. spoke loudly so Chris could hear him under his headphones.