19

The large man was sweating, uncoiling a hose and looking up into the tree. The hose was new, and it squeaked, the coiled circles wound into it not shaking out very well. The hose wriggled, a long, looping spiral.

The tree had a trunk about as big around as my leg. The branches were naked except for subtle black movement. What appeared to be leaves on the twigs and branches were slowly wriggling. The wriggling larvae had fed on all the foliage, and now the black, spiked grubs were starving, raining slowly onto the lawn.

His hand surrounded mine, but he kept his grip gentle.

Sky made the introduction, and then she vanished, leaving me in the backyard with her father.

“Baseball,” he said.

I followed his thought after a pause. “A little.” I didn’t tell him that I had basically taken myself off the team in recent weeks.

He whipped the green hose, and far away a loop of it straightened out.

I had met Sky’s mother a few times, a woman who, as far as I could tell, never spoke, a round, slow-moving woman in outsized T-shirts. Sky’s father didn’t talk much either. He twitched the hose and did not talk at all, and yet he was not ignoring me. His work was convivial, a sharing of his presence, the way some people might whistle or hum a song when someone is around even though they don’t want to say anything.

I sat on a low wall made of bricks. The light was both bright and gray, and the bare tree was alive in places with caterpillars.

“I used to want to be an athlete,” he said. The hose flicked again, the pulse traveling in a wave along the length of the green hose to where it screwed into the wall.

He turned his back to me, and I made out by his motions and the glimpses I caught that he was fastening a container of poison to the mouth of the hose.

He did not bother to glance over at me to see if I was paying attention. He was used to commanding people with his size, and as a result was friendly and full of confidence in himself. He drove a truck that delivered big bags of ready-popped popcorn to movie theaters.

“I worked all over,” he said, scuffing his foot over some of the larvae. “I worked in Hollywood, delivering.”

He looked at me as though he wanted to remember something he didn’t like about me. “It’s all fake,” he said. “Those buildings. You know those buildings? Only half-buildings. You walk around them and they aren’t there.”

The poison container looked like a space gun worked by a lever. He sprayed poison all over the naked tree, and all over the black, still-crawling larvae, and the ones that weren’t moving anymore, and all over the grass under the tree.

I moved back and sat on an overturned wheelbarrow so I wouldn’t inhale the yellow poison, but he wasn’t even wearing a respirator. “Chinese elm,” he called. “Nothing but problems.”

Sky wanted to know what her father and I had talked about.

“It was pretty profound,” I said.

“He’s very serious.”

We were both eating pattimelts on Piedmont Avenue. It was the first time we had ever eaten anything together, and I was eating very slowly.

She added, “He believes in me, Stanley.”

She said this so solemnly that I needed to make a joke of some kind. “Is there some question? Do some people say you don’t exist?”

Having said that, I didn’t like the sound of it. Sky’s family was not to be joked about.

Her eyes were downcast, and she was no longer eating. “He worries all the time.”

“He looks calm.”

“He’s slow, but he’s not calm, Stanley.”

I ate the crust of my pattimelt, which was crunchy and flavored with cheesy grease.

“He remembers some stuff about you.”

“I’m an all-right person.” The statement sprang out of me, and I grabbed a paper napkin.

“But you remember when the school blew up.”

This made me crumple my napkin into a wad. “That’s ridiculous,” I said, feeling small and futile.

The school had blown up before I had even gone there, before I was even a freshman. I had slept through it, but it blew out windows from Trestle Glen to Chinatown. Dozens of students had been questioned, past, present, and future high school students, and I had been dragged into the investigation because I used to smoke cigarettes behind the auto-shop building.

“He would hate it if I got in any kind of trouble, Stanley.”

“Does knowing me automatically mean you’re in trouble?” I really can’t stand the way words spit out of me.

Sky took my hand from across the table and opened it up, actually turned it over and parted my fingers with hers without looking at it, looking right into my eyes all the time.

“Tu likes you a lot,” she said.

“But you don’t,” I heard myself say.

Sky doesn’t strike poses, and she doesn’t flirt. She considered my words. “I like you, too,” she said.

I thought: but. She’s going to say, “but …”

She didn’t. She glanced down, and kept her hand where it was.

“Who is this other guy?” I said, and wanted to put my hands over my mouth.

She withdrew her hand. “He’s not important.”

But she said this regretfully, as though the other guy was a large, churchgoing, nonsmoking person her father adored.

Careful, I told myself.

Be very careful.