To girls I was invisible, a brainy kid with chronic acne, buck-toothed and exceedingly thin. To Kilburg I was worth something. Not a day went by when I didn’t think about him. I felt lucky to be more than just his friend, though I was convinced I wasn’t gay, deciding on a precise distinction between bona fide homosexuality and my curious interest in Travis Kilburg. Surely a person could be drawn, temporarily at least, to a member of the same sex without being a homosexual—surely there were explanations for such a phenomenon. Like Kilburg, I didn’t want anyone to know about what we did at the fort.
By the end of May—as the days grew longer and the air dryer, the sun scorching the valley with what people now joked could only be malice—the saplings numbered twelve around the fort. After dinner my father read from newspaper articles about the drought, the longest in the city’s history, his voice thin and scratchy as he shook his head in disbelief. His hands had fattened from the prednisone and had taken on a yellowish color, as though he soaked them in formaldehyde. One evening he ran across an article that made mention of the missing maples. “Whoever’s taking those trees should be rewarded,” he said, calling our crime retribution for the city’s mistake of planting them in the first place, in the middle of a drought. He was right. It had been a surprising decision, and you got the feeling that, drought or no drought, the city was trying to change the landscape of Las Vegas, trying to turn it into something it wasn’t. The saplings were well-hidden at the fort, but I worried that the avenue might now be under some kind of twenty-four-hour surveillance. When I mentioned this to Kilburg, it seemed only to excite him. “Screw ’em,” he said. “Bring ’em on.”
Mornings, we walked together to school—through our neighborhood and up Eastern Avenue, past each of the humps of soil we had emptied, caved-in like little volcanoes—but when I ran into Kilburg between classes, he usually ignored me. Todd Sheehan and Chad Klein teased him as he hobbled through the hallways, and time after time I had the urge to stand up for him. I never did, afraid they might unleash their viciousness on me.
My mother, who worked days as a receptionist but played the violin in her spare time, started speaking of my father as though he were already dead, her words bearing a gravity that seemed childish and contrived. “Before long, it’ll just be the two of us,” she would say with tear-filled eyes, playing something morose by Brahms or Tchaikovsky—composers she spoke of as if they were friends—lowering her head and sawing away at the strings, her hand moving wildly up and down the fingerboard. She had always thought of herself as an artist whose potential had never fully developed. Resting the bow on her shoulder, she would tell me to get used to being the man of the house, and hand me a tissue. When I failed to cry, she would insist that I was in a state of denial. But if my father was around, my mother was all smiles, preparing his favorite meals, surprising him with tickets to a movie or a new set of golf clubs. She bought him watches, ties, books by his favorite authors, and in June, for his forty-fourth birthday, she gave him a new Buick LeSabre—an expense, I know now, my parents couldn’t afford.
One night when I returned home from the fort, a light was on in the family room. It was late, one o’clock. I had never been caught sneaking out, and I feared that my parents had finally discovered my absence. I worried the police had been called, but when I crept to the window, squinting into a space of light where the curtains didn’t quite meet, I saw only my mother, her knees drawn to her chest in my father’s leather armchair. She paged through a stack of sheet music, a pencil behind her ear, eyes half-closed.
I knelt down between some shrubs. My mother rested the stack of sheet music in her lap, rubbing her eyes with her knuckles. A tear streamed past the corner of her mouth as she scribbled something into a margin. When she glanced up, I ducked below the edge of the window, holding my breath. But as I looked back in—cautiously, my heart hammering in my chest—I saw her paging through the stack again. For some reason, I kept holding my breath, thinking of my father, of what it would be like to struggle for air. I thought about what the specialists had told him, that soon he would need an oxygen tank to breathe, one he would wear all the time, as you might eyeglasses or a hearing aid. I imagined tending to him, what my mother would have to go through, fretting at the bedside of a dying spouse. I, too, began to cry, ashamed of the tears, as if my father himself were my witness. Kilburg had once told me that crying was a sign of weakness, that, according to his father, shedding tears meant you were no stronger than a little girl. I had never seen my own father cry, not even when he talked about his health—which he did only when motivated by my mother—or when he wheezed around the house, huffing his words when he spoke. My chest heaved, and I let go my breath. We had parted only minutes ago, but I suddenly missed Kilburg. I didn’t know if he could understand what I was feeling, but I missed him anyway, as though I might never see him again.
Placing the stack of sheet music on the floor, my mother got up from the chair, stretched her arms, and switched off the light. I walked down the block, but Kilburg’s bedroom window was dark. He lived in a big split-level with wood trim and aluminum siding, out of place in our neighborhood of low stuccoed houses. As always, a trailered boat took up the driveway, and an orange ’67 Mustang was parked against two bricks in the middle of the yard. A single agave grew beside the rusted automobile, the dead grass a sunburned brown. The development dipped along a hillside, and the distant valley was a bowl of glimmering light, the Strip a reddish flare that blazed across the land.
I walked around the side of the house, through the open wrought-iron gate. The backyard had never been landscaped, and patches of creosote grew from the wind-blown dirt. Along the edge of the cinderblock wall stood an abandoned lawn mower, two of its wheels missing. I sat down in an old blue wheelbarrow that was overgrown with dandelions and quack grass, as if, like the lawn mower, it hadn’t moved in a hundred years. It was a school night, but I remained in the wheelbarrow for a long while, deciphering constellations that glared in the night sky, a skill my father had taught me. Kilburg was asleep in his bedroom, and I wondered if he even liked me, or anyone else, for that matter. He was a bully, and bullies weren’t known to enjoy the company of others. I had never seen him completely naked, but I pictured what he might look like—a solid torso, two arms and a leg—and I unzipped my shorts and began to masturbate.
The following morning I was running late for school. When Kilburg knocked on the front door, my mother told him to go ahead without me. Fifteen minutes later, I was making my way up Eastern Avenue when I spotted him at the corner. He should have been in class by now, but there he was, twenty yards away, surrounded by Sheehan and Klein and a third boy named Billy Walsh, who had been in my gym class the previous semester. Suddenly Sheehan swung at Kilburg, clipping him on the cheek. When Kilburg raised an elbow to shield himself, Klein took a step forward and kneed him in the groin. Walsh stood in the background, howling and stomping his heel on the concrete. Doubled over, Kilburg stumbled to the left, then to the right. I waited for his leg to come off. Like a felled tree, he tipped slowly to one side, his textbooks spilling from his arms as he hit the sidewalk.
I was half a mile from school, and I considered running for help, cutting unseen through the desert and summoning the principal, Mr. Gerhard. I wondered what, if anything, Kilburg had done to provoke the boys. Walsh was short and skinny, a loudmouth and a tagalong. Paralyzed with fear, I knelt behind a beat-up Impala, figuring that, if I had to, I could take him in a fistfight. But I had recently chipped both my front teeth during a game of touch football, and I imagined Sheehan and Klein kicking them in entirely while Walsh held me from behind.
It was a hot, clear morning, and sunlight glinted off the Impala’s chrome bumper. As I leaned against it, I understood that Kilburg was really no bully at all. He was just a kid with a difficult homelife and an unfair disadvantage, someone to feel sorry for. Perhaps this, beyond his physical appeal, was what I liked most about him. I suppose I loved him, or thought I did—I had never known such love, or anything like it—and I waited to feel compelled to rush to his defense, to act as any good friend would. But the feeling never came. I had once seen my father break up a quarrel between two rowdy fans at a UNLV basketball game, and I contemplated why it was that I hadn’t inherited his bravery. I was glad I hadn’t walked to school with Kilburg. I had nothing but a desire to escape, a spineless longing to be somewhere else: back home, or safe at the fort.
I peeked