Sprout

hallelujah. In fact, I only remember one sentence from all our meetings there. Ty had caught me looking at the marks on his body, trying to decide which had come from me, which from his dad.
    “We could run away,” he said, pulling his shirt over his chest. “We could disappear.”
    His voice sounded unconvinced, and I wondered if that’s what he really wanted to do. But I also knew it wouldn’t work, because it’s what my dad and me had tried to do, one of us consciously, the other dragged along for the ride, only to discover that your past comes with you no matter where you go. Still, on Saturdays, when I had the car, we’d drive around for hours, testing the limits of our leash. We circled Hutch first, inside the city limits, then outside, and then we pushed out to the edge of Reno County, and then we crossed the county line, McPherson County, Harvey, Sedgwick, Kingman, Pratt, Stafford, Rice, and then back to McPherson. The number of names made it sound as though we’d traveled a huge distance, but the truth is we were never more than twenty or thirty miles from the center of town. Only one time did we spike up north, towards Salina and I-70, and then, almost like it’d been choreographed, we spiraled up the long on-ramp to the interstate and spiraled right back off the same exit. As we left the interstate we passed a sign that read
    HUTCHINSON 65
    which was the same sign my dad and I had passed four and a half years ago, when we moved here, and after that our spiral tightened even further, our plans contracting like our route and like the ever-shortening winter days, until eventually—who knows, maybe inevitably—we ended up in the park.
    Carey Park.
    Before my dad trashed the computer, I’d gone online to do a little investigation. All protestations to Ruthie aside, I had to admit I was kind of curious about what did or didn’t go on there. Needless to say, Hutchinson doesn’t have much of an internet presence, and gay Hutchinson is pretty much off the radar. There was that movie Mysterious Skin that came out a few years ago, which was based on a book by a writer who actually grew up here, and which seemed to confirm the general suspicions about what went on in the park—but then, the story also featured a guy who thought he was kidnapped by UFOs, so who knows what was real and what was made up? Other than that it was pretty much bits and pieces … but all the bits and pieces seemed to say that if you wanted a little gay action in Hutch, Carey Park was your best bet.
    None of which explained what I was doing here with Ty.
    It was Saturday morning, around 11. Ty and I sat in the Taurus, a good two feet between us. The windshield reflected thin gray clouds streaking across an ice-blue sky. A cold front had moved in from wherever it is cold fronts move in from (“Hey there, Kansas. Just in from Salt Lake. How’s it going?”) and the temperature hovered around zero, with forty-mile-an-hour gusts pushing it down to something like twenty-five below. All the groping and writhing and thrusting in the world wouldn’t warm us up enough to combat that, and so we huddled in the car instead.
    “So, uh, what’re we doing here?” Ty said.
    If you’ve never seen a Kansas municipal park, I can tell you that they all look pretty much the same. A few cottonwoods (in this case leafless), a few elm trees (ditto), an artificial pond slightly smaller than a Hollywood swimming pool (frozen, duh), and a patchy brown lawn flatter than Terri Schiavo’s EEG. From where we sat we could see a cast-iron horse, beetle, and duck, all of which were exactly the same size, and mounted on rusty metal coils. All three were gaily painted save for their backs, where the butts of countless toddlers had rubbed the paint away and burnished the metal to a brilliant shine.
    Did I mention that there was one other car in the parking lot too? There was one other car in the parking lot.
    “You ever ride one of those?” I said.
    “I don’t think my dad would approve.”
    “See, the thing about those rides is, they’re scaled for three-and four-year-olds, but they weigh about five hundred pounds, so no three-or four-year-old could possibly get them to move.”
    Ty didn’t say anything for a minute. Then: “Think your balls’d stick to them? If you sat on ’em naked?”
    “We’re juniors, Ty! Juniors! We’ve still got a year and a half left at this crappy school! A year and a half left in this crappy town!”
    Ty’s silence