Clay

“Nuh-uh. You can’t do that.” Tommy sneered down at Oliver from where he sat atop the fallen tree trunk. He let go of the jutting branch he had used to climb up and smeared the dirt from his hands on his brand new jeans. Several trees had come down in the tornados that passed through a few weeks ago, including two branches of the little pear tree in Tommy’s front yard. The water from the storms was mostly gone by now, and Tommy’s mom let him run free with Oliver after school again.

 “Sure, I could. You could, too, I bet.” Oliver scrambled over the fallen tree to keep pace. Dirt and freckles looked the same on his face. He glanced over his shoulder at the row of houses still in view between the trees. The thin line of woods stretched from the back of their elementary school around to Oliver’s neighborhood a few streets away. But, like so many days, Oliver and Tommy had not gone home at the end of school. Instead, they ran around the back of the small brick building to the edge of the woods that lay just beyond the playground. It was almost spring and the days were chilly but getting longer, so Tommy was allowed to stay later. Oliver’s mom wouldn’t come looking until the sun was completely behind the row of houses, anyway.

“Wouldn’t somebody find it?” Tommy hopped down and continued his expedition through the woods. There was a creek bank somewhere back here, they’d found it before the storms hit and gone digging through the wet red clay. Sitting beside the fallen tree trunk was a perfectly stacked little pile of reddish dirt, each individual granule placed with care and precision and dedication. Tommy kicked it over as he passed.

Oliver dodged the broken mound to avoid another fire ant bite. Last summer the boys had discovered the fun of holding a magnifying glass over the trains of ants that invaded nearly everything – kitchen counters, school classrooms, and slabs of pavement on the sidewalks. It wasn’t quite hot enough for that to take up again, but they were making do. “Easy, you bury it.”

“Yeah, okay. But what about the cops? Wouldn’t somebody notice ‘em gone missing?” Tommy stopped and looked back at Oliver, a hint of victory playing in his eyes.

Oliver shrugged; he had stopped advancing the moment Tommy turned to face him. “Who’s gonna notice?”

Tommy thought for a moment before thumping his chest. “My mom would notice if I don’t come home tonight. She’d call your mom.” He barked a laugh before turning his back to Oliver and continuing through the trees.

“That’s why it’s gotta be something no one knows about.” Oliver’s voice sounded small and faraway to Tommy, so much so that he turned around to see if the other boy was still there, but his smaller friend was standing directly behind him, looking at a funny shaped rock in the dirt.

Tommy stooped quickly to snatch up the rock and curled up his lip at Oliver. “Why would there be a person nobody knows about?”

Oliver shrugged again, less this time, and watched the rock bouncing in Tommy’s hand. “I never said it was a person.”

The older boy whirled around and charged on, looking for everything and nothing. He did not make as much noise as they could have; the ground was still damp from the storms so the leaves and twigs didn’t snap as predominantly under his feet. Oliver stood still and Tommy’s voice carried over. “But how could it be a person? Wouldn’t he go to school and have a mom and a dad and-“

“I never said it was a person.”

“Besides, I would fight you back. You’re not getting a rock near my head!”

“I never said it was a person!” Oliver’s face flushed an ugly reddish-orange. He immediately snapped his teeth together.

Tommy yanked at the jacket hanging loose on his shoulders, the one his mom had insisted he wear. It wasn’t even cold outside anymore. Oliver’s mom never made him wear a jacket. “Well, what would it be then?”

Oliver trotted up to him and they stopped at the foot of another anthill. “Something small. It’s gotta be something small. So small it can’t fight back.”

“Oh. Like a cat?” Tommy plunked the rock down into the center of the anthill and stared down into it with interest. In seconds, thousands of tiny, scurrying bodies swarmed the offending stone in and began rebuilding their fallen home. Tommy laughed loudly and jumped away from the little train of bodies marching towards the laces of his sneakers.

“Well, cats are small, right? So I bet they don’t make much noise.” Tommy paused and scrunched up his face thought. “But then why do they hear so good?”

Oliver watched the ants scurry from a safe distance. His fingers picked at the fraying belt loop on his faded jeans. “I never said it didn’t make any noise.”

“Ha! Yeah, of course it makes noise. Cats make lots of noise. My cat does. ‘til you smash its head in, right?”

“I never said it was a cat.”

“Well, what then? Like a kid?”

Suddenly Oliver charged up and knocked his shoulder into Tommy’s back. He hit the older boy hard, but not hard enough to knock him down. “I didn’t say that! You didn’t hear me say that! I didn’t say that!”

Tommy stumbled forward, barely missing another anthill with his right foot. He stopped himself and pushed Oliver back. The smaller boy tripped over a protruding tree root and crashed onto his back. And then they were rolling on the ground, slapping at each other’s faces and kicking out at anything they could find. They yelled and spit, and Oliver bit Tommy’s arm that was stretched in front of his face. Then Tommy hit Oliver square and the nose, and the smaller boy scrambled back with a yelp of pain.

Both boys were breathing heavy but felt much better as pushed themselves up off the ground. Leaves and pine needles were caught in their hair and red clay smeared their clothes. Tommy looked smug at the sight of blood leaking from Oliver’s left nostril and ignored the scrapes on his own knees and the hole in his brand new jeans. “Told you I’d fight back.”

“I never said it was a person,” Oliver replied sourly, rubbing his sore shoulder and pretending Tommy had just thrown dirt in his eyes, that’s all. The sun was still peeking out through the trees. He would stay out just a little longer.

Mark Druckus and Sonja Tisbe found the Johnsons’ cat just three days after the “Missing” posters first went up on lampposts and fences around the neighborhood. The couple had ducked quietly out of their last period class – 12^th grade English for him, 10^th grade gym for her – and headed off to the woods behind the adjacent elementary school when they stumbled upon the feline in a patch of fresh red clay by a fallen tree trunk. Mark poked the little pile with a stick, just enough to shake the loose dirt from one striped ear. Its little tabby head poked up out of the ground, dirt sprinkled over the ears and crusted blood covering the missing back of its skull.

Sonja dry sobbed once or twice before scrambling away, pulling Mark by the hand, who followed after the girl only once he had looked closely enough to see the carefully filing army of ants making its way one by one up the little cat’s dirty, decaying fur. The couple was met at the edge of the thin woods by the school’s vice principal, waiting with detention slips.

Tommy cried in the principal’s office later that day while offering up an explanation, his little brown eyes red and swollen. When he had heard the other kids talking about that beat up cat with its skull blown off and its brains hanging out, Tommy had burst into tears. It wasn’t his idea. Oliver said they would get away with it, that no one would even notice, that nobody would miss a cat. It didn’t sound so bad when Oliver was just talking about it, but he hadn’t expected it to be so bad and to take so long. He wouldn’t have done it if Oliver hadn’t said so. And he’ll never do it again. Honest. His mother sat next to him, shifting in her seat and adjusting the top button of her cardigan, lips thin and nostrils wide. When they were finished, she shuffled Tommy out of the room and threw one last look over her shoulder at the principal. Talk to that Oliver. It was that boy’s idea.

The principal and guidance counselor took turns trading looks of discomfort and sympathy with one another, and stern reprimands for when Tommy looked at them between his tears. It was well known among faculty that Tommy’s parents were going through a divorce and the poor boy wasn’t allowed to see his father at the moment. It was probably just stress, they reasoned when the door was shut and Tommy sat guarded by his mother in the little waiting area. Stress and frustration and a plea for his pain to be heard that he lashed out at the poor beast. Yes, that was it. They would call in Oliver, just to be sure, but his reasons are probably much the same with a family like that. They would reason with the Johnsons, come up with some acceptable form of punishment for the boys, like painting fences or mowing lawns. The Johnsons would be alright with, they were nice people. After all, it was only a cat.

Oliver crouched on his heels, balancing himself with a hand on the base of a tree trunk. His arm still hurt and a spot on his cheek burned, but it wasn’t that bad. His father didn’t really care about a dead cat. Now, Oliver wasn’t by the fallen tree where the cat was found. He was somewhere else in the small forest, somewhere he knew even better because he wasn’t supposed to be there but he was there. A little pile of pine needles sat in front of him.

He liked these trees. They were tall and skinny and everyone left them alone because their branches were too high up to reach and no flowers grew here. The trees were so thin that, even in the woods, they never grew thick enough to completely block out the school or the houses, but he could pretend. They were no good for tree houses or climbing or anything else that the boys in his class liked, really. But they were good for Oliver.

Once or twice, he had even seen his sister slip out to be in the trees, always at night when they were supposed to be asleep. She never did like to go out in the day, even though she was allowed to now that she was thin again. Oliver never stayed awake for her to come back.

He gathered up the handful of the fallen needles that he had taken from beside the Johnsons’ dead cat. It made him sad to think about it; the Johnsons lived a few houses down from Oliver and he had always liked feeding the cat at night when he was trying to stay out. He’d even given the cat a name, Hitch, because of the funny way it didn’t like to walk on its front left paw. He hadn’t meant for Tommy to hurt Hitch at all. The needles were brown and crunchy and dry between his fingers, but they smelled like he was used to.

The spot he was looking for was only a few feet away. There was nothing unusual about it, just a bare patch of hard-packed red clay in between two trees, but it was marked by a nick in the root of a tree from where the shovel had slipped about six months ago when it first appeared. Already there were three twigs lying on the bare spot of earth in a little triangle fashion, laid neatly head to tail, almost equal in length. Sometimes, not often, Oliver would find other things here too: a handful of rocks, a circle drawn with a stick, a flower. He had even once seen a little yellow button. Not often, though.

Oliver piled up the needles in a neat stack, lining them up carefully with the palms of his hands. Fitting them perfectly. Once, twice. A third time. Patting them down. He had been thinking about setting them on fire. That’s what they did in movies when someone died. Built a little pile of branches and logs and set them on fire, sometimes out on the ocean. But Oliver didn’t have logs or oceans. And he’d have to get the lighter from his father, first. All he had were pine needles and fallen twigs to build patterns with.

About three months ago, Oliver had made the mistake of asking his sister what its name had been. His father did care about that. After that, he’d thought a lot about giving it a name, like he’d named Hitch. Everything deserved a name. How could you miss something that didn’t have a name? But how did you name something you never saw? And something so small was never a person, but he remembered how much noise it had made.

A small mound of perfect red dirt was beginning to form not more than a foot away from where Oliver knelt. A thin, twisting line of ants marched from their new home to the root of the tree with the shovel mark. Oliver liked the ants, too. His mom was always complaining about how hard they were to get rid of, how they never seemed to just die. It was true. No matter how many ants you stomped on or hills you kicked over, there was always another one ready to pop right up just a few feet away. They were always there, deep in the ground. He liked that about them.

When he was finally satisfied with what he’d created, Oliver sat back on his knees, not caring about the dirt and clay getting on him. Most of his clothes were stained from the clay and he never got yelled at so long as he stayed out of the house. The needles would blow away again and the branches would be washed away with the next rain. Oliver would come back again next week with new needles and new twigs and start all over.