What We Find In the Trees

It always seemed plausible that Greg Miller was from somewhere else.

I knew him back when I used to draw. I had several sketchbooks of different paper, though I didn’t know what the difference in the paper meant. The grain was smoother, the paper absorbed more ink- were they meant for being covered with watercolour waves or inked faces or gesso or charcoal or what? In the end, I drew animals. Digging, flying, leaping, burrowing, looming, lunging, tearing. Sometimes I drew them with faces. Mostly I didn’t. I went through my pens quickly. They either ran out of the ink or I pressed on them so hard the nib broke and drawing became scraping the ink out over the paper.

I wanted a pen I wouldn’t break, or a pencil that wouldn’t smudge. I had more than a few pages where the ink of my pen had run through and dictated the content of the drawings on several subsequent pages. One became a constellation, to accommodate for the blot. One became an animal with black tunnel eyes. One became a black-eyed susan.

Greg liked to look at my drawings. And in exchange, he showed me where he liked to climb trees. He showed me the tree he particularly liked in the field of crab apple trees on the way to school. When I closed my notebook, he gestured me over to the tree and pointed up. He said, “That’s why I climb this one.”

Up the tree, the light was immediately inconsistent and unpredictable, like an animal’s dappled pelt, if the animal were in motion. It seemed to shift even when there was no wind to move the trees. Every shadow might have been a vehicle for a small tree-dwelling creature to move undetected from one spot to another. The bark had deep lines, as though each piece of it had been stuck on the tree very loosely, and a few good tugs would de-nude the whole thing. It was a satisfying tree to look at. Maybe that’s what Greg was feeling when he climbed into its branches. Satisfaction.

“And I found you this,” Greg said. It was a pen, with a nib so sharp I almost didn’t see it. I held it in front of my face like it was evidence and I a crime investigator of sorts. I knew before I pressed it to my notebook page that it would never run, and that the nib wouldn’t break. Drawing with it looked more like I was gouging a layer of the paper away to reveal the black underneath.

“Quality find, Miller,” I said. “Where did you find it?” He usually found things in field, or by roadsides, or outside shops (though he always tried to return those, if they originally belonged to the shop) or other places where you wouldn’t expect a sixteen year old boy to be. I knew this because I’d known Greg for a while, and I knew that he, embarrassingly, wasn’t embarrassed by the things most sixteen year old boys were embarrassed by, like walking through fields on the way to school, or marching into a shop with what was possible misplaced or stolen goods. He was honest like that, and just hadn’t figured out that at sixteen, no one expected honesty, and girls our age (and boys) didn’t appreciate it. He was good and reliable, and everyone at this age was trying out adrenaline-steeped hormones and thought the best way to deal with the trouble they brought was with more adrenaline and hormones. If he were a car, intelligent businessmen or practical parents would drive him. But sixteen year olds want Mitsubishis they can wrap around trees, never mind that it would take a specialist and a lot of money to repair them.

I didn’t like cars in general. Which is why Greg and I walked together.

“I found it in the tree,” Greg said, adjusting his backpack straps. He was the only boy I knew who actually wore both straps, securely, instead of just the one.

“In the big one?” He didn’t seem to realize this wasn’t something you could just say to people our age. He was this earnest with everyone, and I didn’t know how to tell him that maybe he shouldn’t mention to our classmates that he was regularly up in a tree.

He smiled with his whole face. It was a smile you saw as much around his eyes as in his mouth. “That one, yeah.”

“That’s something. I wonder who left it there. How do you find these things, Greg?”

“I go looking for them. It’s an effort. Like your drawings. Can I see?”

I twisted my bag around halfway, because I did only wear it on one shoulder. I skipped through my drawings to the most recent ones. When he looked at them, his face looked truly interested, not interested for the sake of flirting, or for the sake of assessing. He didn’t pretend or criticize anything.

“I like this one,” Greg said, pointing at one of the pages in my sketchbook as we walked. It was one of the animals with human faces. I drew the human faces with as much detail as I drew the animals, so every crease was visible, every hair in the eyebrows, every slanted cheekbone. They looked strange and disturbing, which I knew because they tended to disturb people in my class, but Greg liked the details.

“Thanks,” I said, closing my book.

The pen stayed with me for a while, until I almost forgot there was a time before I was using the pen. This sounds like ages, but two weeks can be an eternity at sixteen. I forgot too that Greg gave it to me, his tree-find, until I was using it in class and he was speaking. We had Mr.Baird for Introduction to Anthropology, Psychology and Sociology. He liked to assign us helpful readings and not go over them, though he said the material would be on the advanced placement test. In that class, the seats were arranged like a horseshoe, so Mr.Baird could lecture us from the middle. Greg sat perpendicular to me, five seats down, with his bag between his feet, his elbows on his desk, and his back pressed to the back of his seat, every time. Every other seat that contained a boy in it smelled like Axe body spray. Greg didn’t smell like anything.

We were reading Lord of the Flies, because apparently that was a wealth of knowledge in IAPS. Mr.Baird asked a question, some boy responded, girls tittered, and Greg said, seriously, “I don’t think it would be the same if they were all girls. There’d be more talking and working things out, probably. I think the point of the story is that they’re boys, and what they think of as masculinity is a handicap here.”

The girls tittered louder. The boys guffawed. People exchanged knowing looks. Not because the answer was wrong- it was right. My stomach squirmed, like I was watching someone trip in the hall or talk with something in their teeth. Why had no one ever explained to him that if he just wasn’t so sincere, there would be no tittering or guffawing? Why didn’t Greg just figure it out for himself. He didn’t seem bothered by the girls or the boys, or even seem to notice them. He held his book open and addressed Mr.Baird directly with a serious expression.

He always had that expression in class.

We walked to school next Tuesday. Greg showed up when I passed his street and said, “Draw anything new? Pen still good?”

I didn’t get out my sketchbook, because he hadn’t asked to see it. If he wanted to see it, Greg would ask. “It’s the Arthur of pens. The once and forever ruler of writing Albion. It’s Excalibur. Kings seek it. Magicians have visions about it.”

“Good,” he said, sincerely pleased. “Hey, I found something else in that tree.”

“Cool. What?”

“It doesn’t have anything in it,” Greg said, handing them to me. He had to be right, because the eggs weighed nothing at all. It was like they held ghosts, or they’d already been cracked open and abandoned, except that there were no cracks or punctures. They weren’t speckled. Instead they had a pattern on them like the veins of a leaf. I tried to commit them to memory, so I might sketch one of my animals with faces emerging from one later.

“Did you find them in a nest? They must have come from some bird,” I said. Greg shook his head. “Maybe something hid them in the tree because it thought they were food.”

Greg gave me one of his full-face smiles, using all the muscles of his face. I had thought a couple times about putting that face on the head of one of my animals, but my sketchbook had been stolen before, and peeked at, and ridiculed, and now I knew never to draw in it anything that I couldn’t stand to expose to tenth-graders. And walking into school with Greg Miller was an entirely different thing to drawing his face.

People still stole my sketchbook in grade ten, only this time it was the boys and they didn’t do it as loudly. They just picked it up and turned the pages and hoped I would struggle. But I’d learned already that struggling only made it worse. Adoption a cloud of boredom around you made it tolerable. I didn’t even mind their stupid, smirking faces anymore. I said, “Bored already with your own life, Elias?”

“You look like you’re bored with yours,” Elias said. He did recognize some faces, but they were drawn in an ugly sort of style that could only mean I was mocking the people I drew, and no one liked our phys ed teacher, or the substitute that came in to teach math when Ms.Ziliotto was gone. He still found the animals strange, but he’d told me that before and already knew I wouldn’t rise to it. There was nothing to set off here.

“Well A plus plus,” Elias said. I could tell he really did like the drawings, even though he’d never say it.

I just took back my sketchbook without saying anything. That was the trick that I was so proud of learning, that it was best to say nothing, to make them think I wasn’t even bothered enough to answer.

Greg continued to find things in the tree. I hardly ever saw the tree, because unless Greg was walking with me and drew attention to it, I forgot that we even passed it on the way to school. I was thinking about other things, like keeping my soccer uniform dry in a mesh bag I stuffed under my raincoat on the way to school. My sketchbook would survive. I kept plastic bags in my backpack to wrap around my sketchbook, ever since I’d run home in the rain with one once and found have of the pictures bled into inky clouds.

Greg appeared with an umbrella. “You’re going to get wet,” he said, as he hoisted it over us. It didn’t cover us both completely, so his left shoulder became instantly damp. His backpack was still on both shoulders, and part of it was getting wet. I wondered if he’d put his homework in a plastic bag. It seemed a very deliberate and Greg thing to do.

“I never remember umbrellas exist,” I replied. “I didn’t even know it was supposed to rain. I don’t check the weather. Thanks. Were you up in the tree?”

Climbing the tree in the rain, despite how dangerous it might be, also sounded romantic and like a day dream and therefore entirely like something Greg would do.

“Yep. Look at this.” Greg pulled something out of his pocket, the size of a leaf.

It wasn’t a leaf. It was the thickness of the bark on the tree, but it wasn’t bark either. I’d only seen scales like that on reptiles, but not in that colour. It was iridescent, and the longer I looked, the more colours I saw. It gave me a feeling in my stomach, like the sort of primal feeling you get when you’re looking at something you know instantly is a predator.

I didn’t remember that scale, really, until the end of the day. This was because I spent most of the day feeling sorry for Greg. In IAPS we were meant to share one of our childhood memories that made us feel sadness at the time. We were later going to reflect on how it made us feel now, but first we had to sit through thirty-one students reading aloud stories of losing pets or walking past “hobos” on the street. Greg’s one-paragraph story informed the class of a friendship that had broken up because of distance, and the way losing that girl told him that things don’t last, and how he wished he’d known she was going to leave so he could say goodbye properly. He didn’t say it for sympathy. He meant it. Which is why, by the time he was done, there was more snickering than I’d ever heard in our classroom. It took four full minutes for Mr.Baird to get us to move on.

I died a little in my seat, watching and listening. If Greg heard the commotion, you couldn’t tell. He sat back in his seat and waited for Holden, beside him, to speak.

You can’t just say serious things, just because you mean them, I wanted to tell him. I didn’t think that was something that would ever change, when I was sixteen.

I remembered the scale later, when we were walking home. We shouldn’t have been, because I should have been at soccer practice, but it was canceled due to the rain and Greg was already outside the field with his umbrella and he was playing with the scale in his hand when we started walking. “How high up did you find that?” I asked.

He said, “A little higher up than the eggs.”

Greg continued to be sincere, and he continued to say things he meant, and at some point I wondered if our teachers disliked him, because they must have known that complimenting his work in front of our classes would just make the half-audible laughter inescapable. Our English teacher told him he was a sweetheart. Michele, coming up behind us as we were leaving, agreed loudly and meanly with our teacher.

I remember that as a moment when I was suddenly worried about whether or not I was a good person. I was furious about what Michele had said, and I vowed to never say something so horrible. But I was more furious with Greg than I was with Michele. For not grasping the easily acknowledgeable facts about high school. For not seeing, despite how obvious it was, that there was a point to popularity and that it was easily attainable. I was furious with him for the second-hand embarrassment. I knew I shouldn’t be, and for a moment I thought less of myself for my misdirected anger. It didn’t stop me wanting to tell him to just hold his backpack over one shoulder or wrinkle his pressed collar.

I caught up with Greg, one of those days, as he was walking to school. Which never happened, except when I was late to school and he was walking ahead, apparently. I walked beside him for a few minutes with the air around us sucking up the sound of my footsteps like a vacuum before I finally said, “Hi, Miller.”

Greg let the silence stretch out long and smooth before he spoke. His voice sounded far away and echo-y. “How’s the drawing going?”

The drawing was going well, as usual, so I said, “Peachy. It’s that pen. Like I said. Arthur’s pen.”

Greg smiled. Then the smile vacated his face. There was no bag on his shoulders. The silence slipped from smooth to sharp. The vacuum pulled words straight from my throat. “Go looking for anything today?”

Greg said, “No. But I found something anyway.”

I waited for him to explain what it was, or to bring it out of his bag, but there was no bag, and no explanation forthcoming. I considered asking him about it, but he’d never not shown me before, without my asking. I felt this might be the closest Greg would ever come to telling me not to ask him.

I showed him another animal I’d drawn, this one with scales like the one he’d found in the tree. I had to use green and blue pens for the iridescent shine in the scales’ ridges. It didn’t look like any animal that existed, more like the way I pictured an animal, except I couldn’t picture it fully, so it was more a picture of an idea of an animal.

“I like it,” Greg said, with complete sincerity.

Greg didn’t walk with me the next day. He didn’t come to school. Or the day after that. I drew a close up picture of the scale. The more I looked at it, the less it looked like tree bark. The more it looked like it wasn’t done with whatever animal it had come from, like the air was dissonant around it, like it was trying to go back to where it had come from.

Greg’s backpack hung on the doorknob when I left for school the next day.

The straps were perfectly even, like he’d just adjusted them for his shoulders, and it looked like it had been hung up in a tree for a year. There was a crust of dirt on it, and a green stripe that looked like the paste you got from grinding a leaf between your fingernails. There were twigs in mesh pockets and a long string of leaves stuck in the zipper. I picked it up and weighed it, but it didn’t feel like there was anything inside of it. If Greg was putting things like scales in it, though, it would be hard to tell. There might had been several scales in this bag. Or maybe it was done collecting things.

I tugged the zipper open, which meant tearing apart the leaves and scattering plant matter and small dirt clods. It was dirty business, really dirty, for finding nothing inside. There were some muddy streaks on the driveway where someone had scuffed their shoes. The muddy streaks made a path, and I thought about taking it. It was different to imagine something, and imagine truly doing it. When I imagined doing it, I imagined keeping the bag with me, taking its dirt onto my hands, and skipping school, and putting my own backpack down, and all the sensations that came with the day that would unspool if I followed the footprints.

I put the bag down inside the door. I had two days of school left before the weekend, and nothing to stop me following muddy footprints all over town if I wanted to. Soccer was finished for the season. I had time for this later. I moved the bag into the garage, to keep the dirt off the floors.

I got to school more quickly when I wasn’t walking with Greg. I sat in IAPS and listened to group presentations and everything was quiet as I drew animals with regular animal faces next to my notes.

We didn’t clean out the garage until recently, where I found the bag again. No footsteps to accompany it this time.

Art by Anonymous

Text by Lucie MacAulay