Stand Tall (3 page)

In sixth grade when he was taller than his teachers and the principal.

And this year, seventh grade, when he just sat in the back at the table because he was too big for the desks.

The back table wasn’t so bad.

Bradley padded over, put his paw in Tree’s hand. Bradley understood when people needed comfort. The older and slower Bradley got, the more he seemed to know.

“Good dog.”

Tree scratched Bradley’s head, massaged his neck like the vet showed him.

“We’ve got to practice your trick.”

Tree walked into the kitchen, Bradley followed. Tree got out a large dog biscuit from the canister.

“Bradley, sit.”

Bradley sat.

“Good dog.”

Tree got the picture he’d drawn of a sitting dog balancing a biscuit on his nose. He showed it to Bradley, who looked at it. Tree had invented this method of dog training.

“Okay, that’s what you’re going to do. Ready?”

Tree balanced the biscuit on Bradley’s nose, put his hand out in the stay command. Bradley sat still, balancing it, as Tree timed him with his watch.

People think you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but an old dog is going to pay attention when you’re doing something serious.

After forty-five seconds, the biscuit dropped, Bradley ate it.

“Good dog.”

He made Bradley his dinner, put it on the floor. He made two serious submarine sandwiches with extra meat and cheese, put them in a bag.

A car horn outside.

“That’s my ride, Bradley. I’ve got to go see Grandpa.”

Bradley looked up, wagged his tail.

Seeing Grandpa was the best part of the week for just about anybody.

“Is that man behaving himself or being difficult?”

Mrs. Clitter half shouted the question over the phone.

Tree held the receiver, looked at his grandfather lying in the hospital bed at the VA with half a leg all bandaged up. The VA is a special hospital for people who’ve served in the military.

“She wants to know if you’re behaving yourself.”

“Tell her I’m dead.”

“
Grandpa
 . . .” Tree covered the receiver.

“Tell her I have amnesia.”

“
She’ll come and take care of you.
”

“Tell her I escaped.” He motioned for Tree to hang up.

Tree sighed, phone to his ear. “He’s behaving. But he’s got to get some sleep, Mrs. Clitter.”

“Let me just say good night.”

Tree extended the phone. Grandpa shook his head, made snoring noises.

Tree: “He’s already asleep, ma’am.”

“You tell him I’ll call in the morning.”

Tree hung up the phone.

Grandpa raised a tired hand. “That woman needs a hobby.”

“Sounds like she’s got one,” said Wild Man Finzolli, Grandpa’s roommate. “
You.
”

A loud groan from the old soldier.

Tree scrunched down in the vinyl chair that had been designed by a short person, rearranged his body to get comfortable.

Sometimes it seemed like the whole world had been designed by people shorter than him.

Airplane seats were misery.

Mattresses were never long enough.

Regular clothes didn’t fit—he had to shop at the Big Guy Shop in Baltimore.

Regular shoes were out—he had to order from the Big Foot catalog.

The pediatrician had run tests to see if Tree had some kind of condition that made him so tall, like Marfan’s syndrome or giantism.

He didn’t.

“You’re just unusually large,” Dr. Flemmer said, like that explained it.

Tree shoved his long legs out.

He couldn’t imagine losing a leg.

A young nurse came in to change Grandpa’s bandage. “How are you, Mr. Benton?”

“It’s getting harder for me to sneak up on people.”

She laughed, unrolled the bandages down to the stump. Tree didn’t want to look, but he did. The leg stump looked better than it had the first day—a big raw wound with staples. It still looked pretty angry.

But his grandfather wasn’t into bellyaching.

Hadn’t been since the Vietnam War, when his leg got shot up with shrapnel when he was on a night patrol in the Mekong Delta. There had been multiple surgeries to try and fix it, but like the Vietnam War, that leg just wouldn’t behave.

“Take it off,” Grandpa finally said to his doctor. “It’s more trouble than it’s worth.”

And the long road back to healing began.

First, he’d be in a wheelchair.

Then, he’d get around with a walker.

Months later, he’d be fitted for a prosthetic leg—a leg specially made to take the place of the old one.

Tree’s grandfather wanted that new leg bad.

The nurse put on a fresh bandage and left.

Grandpa slid to the end of the bed, sat up. His arms were strong. He nodded to Tree, who brought the walker over.

They’d been practicing this.

Good leg on the floor.

“Lean on me, Grandpa.”

He did. Tree took the weight. If there was ever a reason to be a too-tall seventh-grader, it was so you could help your grandpa get walking again.

Tree’s grandpa steadied himself as Tree held on tight to the walker. Slowly, Grandpa moved it forward.

“Awright, Leo,” Wild Man shouted. “Reach for the stars.”

“I lost my leg, Finzolli, not my arm.”

Slow moving to the door and back. Grandpa plopped down on the bed.

“That’s a couple miles, right?”

“At least,” Tree said, smiling.

Grandpa grinned back. “You want to take apart an ugly lamp and make it uglier?”

Tree really wanted to do that.

He got the trunk out from under the bed, opened it to his grandfather’s tools of the trade—pliers, wires, sockets, plugs. Grandpa was a master electrician who repaired lamps in his workshop above the garage. He’d brought this to the hospital so he wouldn’t go crazy.

They worked for two hours, not counting the time it took to eat the two submarine sandwiches and the two bags of barbecue potato chips Tree had brought with him. They took the lamp apart, laid the pieces on the bed, examined the insides. Talked about how the wires had been broken and the power couldn’t get to the bulb.

“When that happens, nothing works,” Grandpa said. “Kind of like life.”

They glued nails around the base. Grandpa searched in the trunk, held up a rubber tarantula.

“I’ve been saving this bug for the finishing touch.” He hung it off the lamp’s side.

They rigged up a little motor that rotated the lamp and shot the tarantula’s shadow against the wall in creepy red light.

It was the best lamp in the universe.

“That,” said Belle, the night nurse, “is
disgusting.
”

Tree was so proud.

Disgusting is what they were going for.

Belle folded her arms across her chest. “You’re not supposed to have tools in the room, Leo. You know that.”

“Belle, I’m saving you grief. Let me tinker around here, or I’ll get so bored, I’ll start taking this hospital apart piece by piece.”

“Someone already beat you to it,” shouted Wild Man, looking at the peeling paint, the broken TV.

Tree couldn’t wait for his grandpa to come home.

Tree’s father was late picking him up at the hospital. He’d never been too punctual, but since the divorce, he was so late for everything.

Tree’s mother had been the time sheriff.

It was one of the things Tree’s parents always fought about.

Nine
P.M.
Visiting hours had been over for a half hour. Tree was getting nervous that something had happened to his dad.

Things made him more nervous these days.

At nine-thirty, a nurse going off duty said Tree had to leave.

Tree got really upset at that.

“Put on one of those patient robes,” Grandpa told him. “Those awful things that flop open in the back. Sit on the empty bed and look wounded.”

Tree did this, feeling strange. A hospital attendant came in at ten, stared at Tree. “I don’t remember you here before.”

“He just got transferred,” Grandpa explained.

“Where’s his chart?”

“On its way up,” said Wild Man.

Tree slumped his shoulders, tried to look wounded.

The attendant walked closer. “Where’d you come from, soldier?”

Tree tried to think of a recent war and couldn’t, so he said, “Canada.”

The attendant looked surprised. “Canada?”

“It was a secret mission,” Grandpa said.

“It saved the Republic,” Wild Man whispered.

Tree tried to look brave and humble.

“This one’s got some stories to tell,” Grandpa added.

Tree sniffed. “I got a few.” He’d heard a cowboy say that in a movie once.

Then, thankfully, the attendant’s beeper went off and he headed for another room.

His grandpa gave him a thumbs-up; Wild Man said he seemed so much like a real soldier, he could have fooled a five-star general.

A regular-sized kid couldn’t have pulled that off.

Tree’s father rushed into the room like he’d driven a hundred miles an hour to get there.

“Sorry. There was a problem with the computer at the store, we had a shoplifter, my best checker quit.”

He managed a sporting goods store, or maybe it managed him.

He looked at Grandpa. “How you doing, Pop?”

“They’re going to paint my stump green for Christmas so we don’t have to look at the purple lines anymore.”

He laughed. “That’s good, Pop.”

He looked at Tree in the robe.

“What’s this?”

“I saved the Republic,” Tree explained, and went into the bathroom to get dressed.

“Hold this here, Dad.”

They were in the bathroom of their house, putting up rails around the toilet so Grandpa would have something to hold on to when he came home.

Father and son looked at each other, wondered how the other was doing.

“You okay?” Dad asked, looking up. Tree’s father was five-eleven.

Tree nodded.

“Good.” Dad slapped Tree’s back, relieved.

He so wanted Tree to be okay. To look at this boy, it was easy to believe he was handling things.

How could someone so big not be fine?

“You okay, Dad?”

Weak smile. “I’m just tired. Christmas, you know.”

Tree knew.

Christmas for retailers was crazy—the late hours, the difficult customers.

But Tree’s dad was tired down deep.

He tried to explain it with sports.

“All this change, Tree, is kind of like trying to bat left-handed when you’ve been a righty all your life.”

Tree mostly struck out. He could barely bat right-handed, much less left.

“Divorce is like being in the fourth quarter with ten seconds left on the clock. They throw the ball to you and you get pushed back from the goal. You can’t make it over. You don’t make the play-offs.”

Tree had always been one of those linemen anyone could get by—even a small child—but he knew that not making the play-offs was a bad thing.

Curtis and Larry were athletes. They spoke Dad’s language.

Tree wanted to speak it, too. “It’s like you don’t get your contract renewed. Right, Dad? You get sent to the minors.”

“Not
exactly.
 . . .”

Dad went to bed.