The three weeks after my birthday were busy. By the end of them, we were running five miles in the morning and three in the evening. Eight miles a day. Briar said I was doing really well, and that he was proud of me even if I was pretty slow. I told him it didn’t feel slow to me, and he said we were running ten-minute miles. He sounded disgusted about that, and said marathon competitors ran 26-plus miles at about twice the pace we were running only ten. I asked him how many 14-year-old kids won those races, especially 14-year-old kids who’d never run at all until a month ago, and he changed the subject.
But he’d been coaching me, too. I’d thought running was pretty straightforward and natural. Not so, at least for serious runners, it seemed. I’d always run—when I did, which wasn’t often—with my heel coming down first. I’d begun running with Briar that way. But after I’d built up my wind and could run a decent distance without my lungs exploding, he’d started correcting my form.
“Dustin, try landing on the balls of your feet instead of your heels,” he said when we were running uphill one time. I did try, having learned by then that most everything he told me to do worked better than the way I did it.
I found landing on the balls of my feet did work better. He told me I shouldn’t land on my heels because that worked as a brake, and would eventually damage my spine if I did a lot of running. He said exactly where I landed on my feet should depend on my stride length or my speed and I’d learn what was most comfortable with practice.
He found other things for me to change, too. Some of them I found sounded wrong but worked well. Like lifting my knees. When I was jogging around the track at school, the gym teacher was always telling me to lift my knees higher, and I’d begun doing that so he wouldn’t yell at me. Briar said I should stop doing that, that my knee action should be left to itself, because the knee was much better at doing its own thing than me trying to control it. So, I stopped lifting them and could feel the tension in my thighs ease off.
There were other things, too, but the overall effect was: he was watching and helping, and I was listening, and my running had improved much more than I thought possible. I liked running now. Had I been told a month ago that I would, I’d never have believed it.
We also got more work done in the house. There would have been more accomplished except he kept taking the time to show me how to do things, then letting me do them, and then showing me again because I was making a hash of it. He stayed with me till I was doing it right. When he’d stay with me—encouraging me and correcting me—eventually I’d get it right. I’d always thought I was simply incompetent, unable to do much of anything. Now, I was doing all the things he was having me do, and I got to be able to do them pretty well. It took me some time to learn them, but after a lot of practice, I got better, and he was able to stop looking over my shoulder. Once I was on my own, he’d come to appraise my work now and then, and he’d pat me on the back and say how good the job looked. I always expected him to finish by saying something like, “Of course, I could do it a lot better,” because he loved being sarcastic and thought he was funny, but he didn’t do that. He simply told me how well I was doing, and that was that.
I was starting to wonder if I really was as incompetent as I’d always thought. Of course, I’d been hearing I was for years and years. This had only been a few weeks. Still, it made me wonder.
The weeks had been spent on weights, too, not every day but not missing too many, either. Travis had shown up for those sessions. They were usually in the mornings. Briar and I would get up, stretch, run, have breakfast, then stretch again and either go to work on the house or hit the weights. I’d call him and Travis would be there when we were to do that; sometimes he’d even show up for breakfast. The first time he did that, he said he’d wait for us outside. Briar looked at him and said, “The hell you will. Get your ass in here!” Then he’d put four more sausages in the pan and made twice as many pancakes. After that, Travis would show up early about half the time.
Travis seemed to understand Briar’s sarcasm a lot better than I had at first. Travis reacted to what Briar did rather than what he said. He seemed to understand Briar right off and even began answering him back in kind when Briar got nasty to him, nasty in a way that it had taken me awhile to understand was Briar’s very own brand of humor. Sometimes while lifting, I’d get to laughing and had to set my bar down so I wouldn’t drop it. It was later that I realized something. Briar wasn’t ever as sarcastic with me as he was with most everyone else. It finally dawned that he was being protective of me. I’d told him how my father was, always putting me down. I think he knew I’d had a full share of sarcasm when I was growing up and so wasn’t subjecting me to much of it now.
We’d work on the house after the weight training and after Travis had left. Travis said he had a lot of lawns to mow. I used some of the time by myself to start shooting my rifle. Briar let me do it by myself a few times after making sure I know how to handle it safely, then showed me some things that would help my accuracy. He adjusted my hand positions, and when I was standing, my feet as well. He showed me about breathing and how the end of the barrel tended to just barely twitch in rhythm with my heartbeat. Just like everything else, if I had patience and worked at it—and listened to what he said—I got better. Not right away. I was learning that expertise came with time and effort. I learned what I heard all the time was true: work hard at something and you’ll be rewarded. I was learning the value of hard work.
At the end of one week, the day started out really hot. Our run was more difficult because of that, and when I was lifting, I sweated up such a storm that the barbell kept slipping in my hands, even though I was wearing gloves. I sweated right through them.
When we finished, Travis was as wet as I was. We were both chugging water, and then, just out of the blue and without thought, I said, “I’m getting under that shower.”
And also without thinking, or at least that’s how it seemed to me, Travis said, “Me, too.”
I looked at him and he at me, and I said, “I’ll get towels.”
I ran into the house and realized my heart was beating fast. Not from the lifting or running into the house, either. I grabbed two towels and went back out. He was in the backyard and had his shirt and shoes off.
He waited till I was in the same state. We looked at each other, and then I said, “You’ve already seen me,” and shucked out of my shorts and underwear. Then I just stood, watching him, feeling myself twitch down there with anticipation.
He sort of grinned, that wonderful grin of his, said, “I guess I do owe you one,” and then he was naked, too. Except, he was well plumped up as his briefs came down, and as I watched, he stiffened to past horizontal. “See,” he said, “told you I was gay.”
The problem was, there was no way I could watch that and not have the same thing happen to me. It had already begun even before he was naked. And he saw it. He looked up into my face, a grin on his own.
“Hey, it happens,” I said. “I’m 14.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said, and then turned to get under the showerhead.
That water felt really good. So did standing naked with Travis. I knew he was enjoying it, too. We didn’t talk much, we didn’t touch each other, but we did stare at each other a lot, both into each other’s eyes and lower. We both looked about the same below, each of us being just partway into puberty. We were both hard all the time we were under that water.
We didn’t get out till we were very clean and the hundred-plus gallons were well on their way to being drained.
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Briar said the house repairs were going faster than he’d expected, that I was really helping and that was the reason we were doing as well as we were, and that we could ease up a little. We didn’t have to spend all our time on the house now. I think he was telling me it was okay if I wanted to spend more time with Travis.
He’d had a plumber and an electrician out and we really didn’t need to use the outdoor shower any longer. That was when he sprung another surprise at me.
“That shower was only temporary anyway.”
“But we put it in with concrete footings,” I said. Yeah, so I was starting to speak the lingo now. I guess if you do work like we were doing and talked to someone about it, it expanded your vocabulary.
“There was a reason for that.” Briar was looking smug.
“You seem to have a reason for just about everything we do.”
“You noticed!” he said, smiling broadly. “I do like to think ahead. Well, maybe you can, too. If we take those drums off the top of the platform and lose the hose, is there any reason to keep the platform up there?”
I was about to say no, without really thinking, but saw his face and a look of anticipation on it and stopped myself. He had something in mind, and if he could imagine something for that platform, I should be able to as well.
So, we had a platform in the backyard solidly supported way up in the air, right below the spreading branches of a large oak tree. I remembered thinking what a great climbing tree it would have been if the branches had started closer to the ground. Then I thought about climbing in them and thought about Travis up there with me and then . . .
“We could build a tree house!”
“Damn tootin’ you could!” he said, never losing the smile. “Why didn’t I ever think of that?”
Remember when I said he was sarcastic a lot?
He continued. “Not only might it be a good base for a tree house, even if it isn’t exactly in the tree, but, and this is the part I like, you can use that unexercised brain of yours and design the thing yourself. I’d suggest it be at least two levels. Of course, now that you have some pretty impressive building skills, I’d say this is a project that you can do all by yourself. Your design, your workmanship. I wonder if Travis might have any ideas? Maybe you could even teach him how to use a hammer and a saw.”
With that, he turned around and walked away, whistling, leaving me there to stare upwards till my neck got sore.
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I practiced every day with the rifle. I had become pretty good at fifty feet now. Very good, in fact. I put well over half of my shots in the X-ring, all of them inside the 10-ring when prone, and almost as good standing. I’d learned how to control my breathing and not jerk the trigger. How to shoot between heartbeats. How to keep the barrel from moving as I shot. I really controlled myself, and doing that allowed me to also control the rifle.
I was as good shooting as I was with a hammer. And shooting was more fun. At least from 50 feet.
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Briar liked Travis and liked having him around. I couldn’t figure out if it was because he liked the idea that I had a kid my age to hang with, or he simply liked the boy himself. I do know that he’d not been happy after talking to Travis’s father on the phone, getting permission for Travis to work out with me. I’d come to realize that while Briar said he didn’t like kids, he had a very warm spot in his heart for some of them at least and didn’t like it at all when they had problems with parents who didn’t seem up to the task.
I liked having Travis around, too. He had a perky sort of attitude, a cocky way of behaving, and didn’t back down from anything. The days he was with me were happy days.
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“Farther back,” I said.
Travis picked up the frame and walked ten steps more and set it down again.
“Yeah, that looks good.”
He attached a paper target to the frame and came back to where I was.
The rifle allowed me to load eight cartridges in it. A spent cartridge was ejected when the rifle was fired, and a spring forced a new one into the chamber to replace it. I had to pull the trigger each time to fire each shot, but could shoot awhile before needing to reload.
I lay prone in the grass and aimed for the target. Our back yard was level where the house had been built and where the tree that would hold our tree house was located, but then the property rose as part of the same hill that the road climbed. This meant my backdrop for shooting was the hill itself and so was very safe.
I shot all eight shots at the target which Travis had set up about 100 feet from my position. When I was done, we went and looked at the target. Two of the holes were right near the bull’s-eye, with the other six scattered around the target. When I’d first begun practicing, I’d been lucky to even hit the target. After a week, I was doing much better. From fifty feet, I hit a lot of bull’s-eyes. From 100, I wasn’t quite as good but improving. It felt good to realize that. I was working at something and was improving.
I wasn’t as good standing up, so I was practicing more from that position than prone. I wanted to get as good as Briar. He hit mostly bull’s-eyes standing and prone, and at 100 feet, too.
Travis didn’t seem to have the patience for shooting, at least accurate shooting. He liked doing it, but he never got frustrated if he didn’t score well. We were different in that. Whatever I did, I wanted to do well. There was something inside me, some drive, that seemed to insist on that. Maybe it was because all my life, before this, I’d never been good at anything and had never thought I could be. Travis was much looser, freer than I was. It was part of what I liked so much about him. He didn’t worry or fret much. He just enjoyed the world as he found it.