The Janus Tree: And Other Stories

by Glen Hirshberg

  The Janus Tree

  And Other Stories

  Glen Hirshberg

  Cemetery Dance Publications

  Contents

  Part 1

  The Janus Tree

  I Am Coming To Live In Your Mouth

  You Become The Neighborhood

  The Pikesville Buffalo

  Part 2

  Shomer

  Miss Ill-Kept Runt

  Millwell

  Like Lick Em Sticks, Like Tina Fey

  The Nimble Men

  Part 3

  Esmeralda

  After-words

  About the Author

  Cemetery Dance Publications

  Part I

  Longer Stories

  The Janus Tree

  “Go to it, boys and gals, fierce, fierce, up and down, swing your partner round an’ round, to the beats of your heart, the drums of your hearts under your leathery skin. Go to it now while the night is still young…young…young…young.”

  Myron Brinig, Wide Open Town

  So much about your life depends on when you fight. And whom. I learned this growing up in Silver City, Montana, which someone proclaimed the richest ruined mountain on earth half a century ago, and where the ghosts are still waiting two generations later for the last, dazed living to leave so they can set up permanent shop in the abandoned mansions and collapsing mine shafts.

  You do have a choice. You can take on the Company grinding you into debt, or the Chinese next door trying to lowball you out of your job. Take your stand against the Communists coming for your freedom, or the copper barons coming for your last unclaimed dime. You can fight for the town you hate, or the earth that dried up underneath you. For mining safety regulations, or the Apex Law that lets you follow a vein off your underground claim right into the tunnels of someone else’s, and you can fight that one in court with lawyers or underground with dynamite and high-powered hoses. Up to you.

  At the moment it happened, I really believed I was fighting Matt Janus for Robert Wysocki, whom I couldn’t help anymore, and Mr. Valway, who may not have cared, and Jill Redround, who didn’t love me. But I was doing it for myself. In a way, I guess I won.

  What I remember is walking with Robert one night during the summer after sixth grade, all the way across Aluminum Street past the hunched, dark taverns with their decades-old, hand-lettered signs proclaiming NO MINERS still posted in the windows. Just in case Company employees from some other town with enough miners left to matter decided to come by on a road trip, we guessed. We walked under a ridiculous, blazing moon, down rows of tightly packed, boxy Company houses, their yards full of rusting bikes and truck parts and swingless swingsets, into a wind that pummeled our faces or horse-kicked us in the back, depending on whether we were coming or going. We were bouncing a red rubber ball we’d found somewhere. Robert had his black cloak billowing around his peach polo shirt and yellow shorts. And he had his backpack, of course.

  “The Dark Lord appeared at my window at dawn,” he said.

  “Again?” I asked.

  “He’s never been at my window.”

  We cleared the houses, and the wind half lifted us off our feet, but we punched forward. To our right, the gouged mountains loomed black and treeless. The moonlight pooling in the biggest of the abandoned blast pits up there made it look more like an eye than a wound. To the east and below us, the plains stretched out, running free of the mountains. Robert took a cigarillo from his shorts pocket and pretended to snap an imaginary match to life on his thumb. He made puffing motions with his mouth, and the cigarillo popped out. Robert picked it off the pavement and plugged it back in his lips.

  “Where’d you get that?” I asked.

  “Elven Trading Post.”

  This meant the 7-11 the Welsh women owned on Magnesium Street, in Robert-speak. It also meant he’d been shoplifting again. At age eleven, he’d already been caught three times. The last time, his parents had avoided reform school for him by agreeing to a weekly 110 mile trip to Missoula for a kid-shrink Robert called the Delphic.

  We came to the place where the sidewalk gave out like a tapped ore vein and just kept walking, past the last houses to the rocky overlook over Snake Lake. Robert pointed down the slaggy hillside to the surface, which reflected the moon, alright, but in the hard, flat way tin roofs do.

  “New ones,” he said.

  He was right. A whole family, it seemed. Every year, some hopeless set of ducks who’d somehow missed the memo alighted to fish and nest down there. Calling the place a lake was a local in-joke. Once, it had been the biggest open-pit mine in North America. Lately, it had started filling with a red-streaked, metallic liquid that almost looked like water. At least to the dumbest ducks. We usually found the ones that hadn’t sunk bill-down on what passed for a beach, dead-necked, like unfolded paper boats.

  Dropping to his knees, Robert scooped up a fistful of pebble-sized slag, whispered one of his spells over it, and pitched his first toss of the night toward the lake. One pebble actually dropped close enough to a dead duck to splash muck onto it. A rare occurrence, as most of Robert’s throws never got near the water.

  “One night,” he said happily, “when the moon is full, and my aim is true…ducks will rise from the dead.”

  I threw some pebbles of my own, pegged one bird right on its flappy foot, and barely moved it. Then I bent down to scoop more rocks.

  “What’d the Dark Lord want?”

  “He summoned me to the Janus Tree.”

  Halting mid-throw, I turned and looked at Robert. He just stood there, toeing the backpack at his feet.

  “Matt Janus came to your window?”

  “He said to come tonight. At the stroke of twelve.”

  “Your parents will never let you out.”

  “My parents are offering libations.”

  It was the first I’d known that Robert’s mother had started drinking again, too. “I’m coming,” I told him.

  “The Dark Lord said to come alone.”

  “Don’t go, Robert. I mean it, don’t go.”

  “Young Ted, don’t be a jackanapes. It’s Matt.”

  “He’s…” But I stopped, having no idea what to say. I hadn’t actually spoken to Matt Janus in close to a year. Not since his partyfreak dad bolted for South America or somewhere, and Matt had stopped hanging around the basketball courts with me or climbing into the old quarries to have miniatures battles with Robert. I only saw him at school, where he mostly lurked by his locker or hunched over his desk in the black leather jacket his dad had given him as a going away present while his legs just kept sprouting underneath him, longer and longer. The way he always seemed to be leaning forward made him look like a praying mantis.

  “He’s not the same kid,” I finally mumbled.

  “Nor am I,” Robert said. Turning my way, he squared his shoulders and huffed out his practically concave chest at me.

  I snorted. “Yeah, okay, Warlock.”

  “Sorcerer.”

  “I don’t think you should go. I mean it. Didn’t his dad just come home? I hear he’s super-sick, and he never…” Liked you, I was going to say, and didn’t.

  Robert wasn’t listening anyway. He stared up the butte overlooking Silver City, squinting at The Virgin of the Great Divide, all lit and glowing white in the moonlight. For the thousandth time, I wondered who had decided to build a giant statue of Mary up there, right as everyone who had the means was fleeing town. It was as though all those soon-to-be former inhabitants from all those faraway places, sharing virtually nothing except their devastating plunge into poverty, had built themselves a collective mom to wave goodbye to.

  Eventually, Robert said, “I’
ll take the backpack.”

  Did Robert Wysocki really believe his backpack was magic? He never once let on either way, even to me, which is probably why kids liked him or left him alone. It also may be why I let him go. Robert just seemed to have this bubble around him. Aura, he might have called it. Or level three shield or something. Whatever it was, I think I believed in that.

  Two evenings later—moon gone, thunderheads looming way out on the prairie but riding the wind clear of town—Robert and I biked to a Silver City Copper Barons game at Anaconda Stadium, recently proclaimed the worst facility in minor league baseball by some magazine or other. We sat in the backless, splintering bleachers out past third base, several rows closer than we used to sit to the high school girls in their short skirts and pink lipstick, all of them whispering together and catching the eye of every uniformed player jogging back to the dugout.

  In the fourth inning, Robert stood up, knocking my half-eaten hot dog out of my hands, lifted his backpack, unzipped it, and turned it upside down. A roll of cherry Chapstick and a single, black Darth Vader mini-figure spilled onto the cement at our feet. Before I could even react, Robert threw the backpack onto the field, where no one paid any attention to it, climbed over the three-foot wall separating the stands from the parking lot, made his way to the heap of slag beyond the left-field fence where little kids chase home run balls, and started climbing it. No one except me even looked at him until he started taking off his clothes. The cloak went last. Then he sat down stark naked on the rocks, put his face in his bone-white hands, and started weeping.

  It took maybe ninety seconds for paramedics to show up and scoop him off there. The Wysocki family fled town that night for Missoula, then Seattle, and then they disappeared into Canada somewhere. I left the backpack where Robert had dropped it, which I’ve always regretted. And I never saw him again.

  I didn’t see Matt Janus either, or anyone else much for a while after that. That fall, in my first month of seventh grade, I started yelling at teachers in the middle of class for any reason I could think of or sometimes no reason. On my fourth or fifth trip to the Principal’s office, I shoved her, and that was that.

  My parents came to get me, but when I saw their car pull into the lot, I bolted off campus, through the neighborhoods, hopping fences, dodging broken bikes and yapping little black dogs I desperately wanted to kick and would have if I’d had time, and lost everybody on my weaving way back to Snake Lake. I think my plan was to dive in there, take a giant swallow, fill my mouth and lungs with metal. But the humped, furry dead thing splayed on the rocks nearby—could have been a crow, a baby coyote, or even a cat—stopped me. In the hard September sun, it looked gray-red, oxidized, more like a discarded mining tool than anything formerly living. Even at twelve, I understood that that’s what all the residents of Silver City were, even with the Company long gone: discarded mining tools. I sat down in the slag and thought about Robert and kicked stones in the lake and stared up the mountains at the Virgin and then to the left, where the easternmost roofs of the Janus mansion could just be seen, tucked among the ledges, red and complicated, like an aerie. At some point, I broke down. After that, I just sat for more than twenty-four hours, until I was good and sick. Then I went back to my house.

  My parents decided to home-school me, and somewhere in that first month I must have made some kind of decision, because I stopped battling them. All morning, I forced myself through the math and geology I hated (although I liked the bits about exactly what the Anaconda Company had done to my hometown). It was fun explaining to my parents exactly why we had to drink bottled water, and why our sheets came out of the laundry pocked with permanent orange spots that looked like bloodstains and terrified the two motels’ occasional out-of-town guests, most of whom had only come to examine the business prospects in the malls my dad spent his working life developing.

  Afternoons, I went to the library. There, for my English and history work, I started rooting through the dust-caked shelves full of decades-old books and periodicals. I taught myself to research. On the Friday of each week, I came home with a paper I’d written—annotated in proper footnote format—about fights my parents had never heard of despite living in Silver City all their lives, like the 1889 boxing match at a roadhouse outside the town limits, where some miner named Groeninger broke his left arm and hand in the 48th round against some carpenter named Broad and went on fighting until he knocked Broad out in the 105th. Broad died the next day, and Groeninger disappeared out of the newspapers, off the registry, completely out of history.

  As surprised as my parents were by the way I hurled myself into my schoolwork, I think they were more surprised by the sheer number of kids I somehow surrounded myself with. This wasn’t so much through any conscious plan as the discovery of the one thing Robert had missed, or didn’t care to know: that just plain smiling, acting interested, and not expecting much can earn you a whole lot of friends.

  So I came out of the library and rode skateboards (badly) down the banister-rails on the front steps and got chased out of the lot with the buzz-haired skateboys and girls. From one of the infamous picked-over junkshops in Uptown, stocked half a century ago with the belongings the mining families and their bosses could no longer afford to own or carry, I bought a set of congas. One drum-head was complete, though the other had a jagged rip down the center, like a mouth with teeth. I took my new congas to Kenny Tripton’s house when he and his fledgling cowpunk band had their Thursday night rehearsals in the basement, and if I never exactly became a band member, they did get me a stool and a microphone after awhile, and I got to beat my one good conga and scream “Hey F Off!’ when the choruses called for it, which they generally did. One of the conditions of rehearsing at the Tripton’s was that we were only allowed to say “F.” It became a band trademark.

  I didn’t join the junior high chess class at the library on Tuesday afternoons, but I lurked in the doorway, and there were seven class members, so they needed an eighth come game time, and eventually I became friends with most of those people, too. I snuck onto Anaconda Stadium field with the football team one sleety night and came home soaked and bloody-mouthed. In May, my parents applied to Mrs. Morbey, the Principal, for my reinstatement, and were welcomed enthusiastically.

  “We’ve taken note of Teddy’s progress,” Mrs. Morbey bubbled as we squirmed in her cracked, green vinyl chairs across her desk from her. “It’s a hard thing to lose a pal like that. We all understand.”

  Lose a pal. I wanted to jump on her desk. Kick the lamps over. But I didn’t really want to shove her anymore. The truth was, Robert already felt like this years ago. That weirdo with the backpack I’d hung around with in grade school. And anyway, as soon as that meeting was over, I was going walking with Jill Redround.

  I honestly don’t remember exactly how that started. At the Spring Powwow, probably. Watching Matt Janus, come to think of it. His dad and Mr. Redround, the local Blackfeet chief, had been business partners for years on casino and nightclub projects on the reservation and off, and Matt had known Jill since birth and also had the softest outside jumpshot in Butte, which is why he’d been the only white kid welcomed to play in the reservation games. Seeing him now, it was like his spine had just popped up on him like an expanding tent-pole. His blond, spiky head loomed too far over his absurdly elongated body, and his legs had stretched even taller and thinner. Also, weird muscles bulged out the sides of his shoulders, all knobby and asymmetrical, as though he’d stuffed his skin with slag. He’d always been pale enough to verge on albino, but now his cheeks had ugly, blotchy patches, and little pits, too, as though he’d been mined.

  He dominated the basketball game. Not only could he still shoot from outside, but everyone just ducked out of his way as though fleeing a bear when he barged through the paint for rebounds. Twice, he caught Jill’s eyes and waved. Once, near the end, he saw me, stopped in mid-dribble, and got called for traveling. Shrugging, he tossed the ball to the ref and retreated to the other en
d of the gravel court.

  At some point, Jill wound up next to me. She had on some open-sleeved, beaded dress with fringes everywhere for the Powwow, I remember that, and she wasn’t wearing shoes—she rarely did, except when forced—and her boundless black hair streamed over her strong shoulder blades and back.

  “You’re the only person everyone I know knows,” she said. “Know that?”

  I smiled—the smile I’d practiced all year long—and earned myself an answering grin. “You, too,” I told her.

  “And Matt, of course.”

  Glancing toward the court, I saw him sink a jumpshot, flash an unreadable look our way. Or maybe just our direction.

  “And Matt,” I agreed.

  That night, at her invitation, I watched her dance the dance to Old Napi, and then we took our first boulder-scramble up the buttes. After that, we did it at least once a weekend and usually more for the rest of the summer.

  I got my first shock on the morning I returned to regular school before I even left my house. “Listen, Teddy,” my dad told me, over the warmed Grape Nuts he ate every morning, their smell rolling through our bright, window-jeweled, hardwood house like new soil imported from somewhere cleaner. “Mom and I put you in Valway’s English class.”

  Tomato juice halfway to my mouth, I froze, staring at my father. Until that moment, I’d been thinking how different school was about to feel. Friends in every class. Basketball at recess without Robert darting onto the court to bless the ball. Boulder-scramble with Jill as soon as the bell rang, we’d arranged to meet by the Copper Miner fountain in the front hallway.

  My dad had some blueprints half-unrolled at the table and was studying them self-consciously. This was his traditional method whenever he lost whatever straws he drew with my mother and so had to break news to me: casual, as though it were nothing.