//------------------------------// // A lonely teenage broncin' buck // Story: Far from the Tree // by KorenCZ11 //------------------------------// “Hey, Buddy.” Even seeing his name on the screen was odd, but hearing the voice confirmed it. For once in his life, Fin Sharp had called me instead of the other way around. “Oh. Howdy, Bud. Somethin’ up? It’s not like ya ta call.” I’d had a bad week last week. This week had been less so, but Sugarbelle had yet to return an ‘I love you’ since that night on the patio. My son had been wary of me for whatever reason, and Liberty attempted to get me to throw apples for her to shoot out of the air, which could only make what was an unfortunate circumstance with her mother worse. She wasn’t happy about it and wouldn’t let it go, so I spent an extra sixty bits taking her to the range twice this week, putting my already heavy-budgeted month even further over the line than it should’ve been. “I know it’s a little earlier than usual, but how about we get together tonight at the bar, huh?” Oh, Goddess, a good glass of whiskey would be nice right about now. Gosh, what do I have to do tomorrow? August is just around the corner, so I need to start getting the fall plot ready to be planted in. Other than that and bucking the next group of apple trees, I should be able to squeeze in some time to see my friend. “Ah’m a little ahead of schedule right now so Ah suppose it wouldn’t hurt. Any reason for movin’ it up? The thirty-first is just a week away after all.” “Are ya on the phone with him?” I heard my sister’s voice in the background of the call. “Well, yeah, who else would I be talking to right now? I just told you—” “Pass it over here.” The mic picked up sounds of movement. “Mac, ya there?” “Uh… eeyup?” “Tell it ta me straight, did ya screw around with Cheerilee?” Oh. That’s what this is about. And now I’m on the phone with the lie detector. I let out a breath. “Once. In early 2004. Before Ah met Sugarbelle. We broke up a few days after. You were there, Applejack.” “Mmhmm. And ya never cheated on Sugarbelle?” “Nope.” A long silence. A breath. “Alright, Mac, Ah believe ya. Ah’m gonna give it back ta Fin, but don’t forget what Pa used ta say, alright? Ya made this bed, now ya gotta lie in it. Love ya bro.” I let out a breath. “Love ya too, sis.” Shuffling sounds over the mic again. “Well, I’d planned on having more tact than that, but you know how she is.” I sighed. “Eeyup.” “Anyways, meet me at the bar at seven. I’ll explain everything there.” “Sure, Fin. See ya then… Ah guess.” I hung up the phone and put it back in my overalls. It was closer to noon, I still needed to get through another quadrant of the orchard before nightfall, and the kids wouldn’t be home till after four. I took a deep breath and blew it out my snout. What a mess this turned out to be. “Hey, there he is. I ordered you a JD No.7 on the rocks, and I dipped into my humidor to break out a couple Opus’s.” I have another son. This cheap bastard would never just give me an opus on a Thursday. Not for free, anyways. I didn’t say a word. I sat down on the bar stool he’d pulled out for me and immediately went to light the cigar. Fin scratched at his little black and white goatee. “Well, I expected at least some kind of verbal appreciation, but going straight for it is fine too. Run into traffic on the way?” I glared at the orange-eyed stallion for a few seconds, then took a sip of my drink. He’s gotta be… what, fourteen? At least? Why didn’t she tell me? Hell, I got married before he was born if that’s the case. Did she know I’d already found somepony else? If Ponyville never grew like it did, would I have ever known about him? I let the sweet flavor of tobacco fill and sit in my mouth for a bit, then blew a smoke ring toward the ceiling. “How old is he, Fin?” Fin sighed and took the lighter to his own cigar. Once the end was a soft glowing orange, he took a couple puffs and set it down on the ashtray. “Malus was born on January 23rd, 2005, to one Cheerilee at Ponyville General Hospital. Just in case it isn’t obvious by how much he resembles my own son, the Department database already had his bloodwork and he does have a half match to you and a quarter to my wife and your other sister.” I shook my head. “As if anypony needed ta do anythin’ but look at him ta know that.” Ah cannot believe she never told me. I turned to Fin and said, “So, not only was he born while Ah was half a mile down the road, but she didn’t tell me about him then, either.” Fin nodded, then reached down into his bag and pulled out a file folder. “Let’s see… after leaving Ponyville in 2004, Cheerilee was living with her parents in what used to be another small town east of here before Ponyville spread out and absorbed everything within a forty-mile radius of the castle. Five years after that, she had a falling out with her parents and moved up to Manehattan with her son and lived there from 2009 to 2017. She quit MISD after getting into an altercation with another teacher that ended with him in the hospital being treated for a stab wound. Yikes. Uh… nopony pressed charges.” “Good Goddess! Cheeri wouldn’t have stabbed somepony, would she?” It was asked, but it was more thinking out loud than a direct question. Fin shook his head. “Uh, no, actually, apparently that was Malus. He’s been charged with two misdemeanors for petty theft, one for aggravated assault, and another for possession of an illegal weapon. Those were mostly unrelated events from 2016 to 2017.” I shot the rest of my whiskey. “Perfect. He’s a delinquent.” “Correct, sir.” He flipped a page in his folder. “She lived with her parents again for a few months until finding her current residence in District 47 on the eastern side of Ponyville. She teaches for a private school that’s apparently owned by an old friend of hers. Malus is enrolled there as well, but his attendance is spotty at best.” I scratched at my head. Well, that’s just great. He’s a punk teenager. “And ya know all this… why?” Fin shrugged and took a puff of his cigar. “Well, your wife called my wife, who then volun-told me to look into it. She didn’t think you were capable of cheating, but if it was around the time she thought it was, it was certainly possible. We both know what she tried to do that year, so if you were in anywhere near as bad a place as she was, I could believe it.” Exhaustion-filled smoke fell out of my mouth. “Come on now, Ah was never suicidal.” “Yeah, but you were all depressed, and you thought you were going to have to sell your family legacy to survive. You know how the saying goes. ‘The only thing between a stallion and cheating on his mare is a few drinks and a wink.’ If she’d been at the right place at the right time…” I put my elbow on the table and rested my head on my hoof. “You certainly were.” Fin frowned but eventually agreed. “Well, yeah. The idea is far from fiction. But, the timeline here takes place too early for you to have done this after meeting Sugarbelle, so suspicion cleared, right?” I rubbed at my temple. “Fin, ya know darn well that ain’t the problem anymore.” Fin shot the rest of his glass and crossed his hind legs. “It’s one less problem for you to deal with, at the very least. And, hey, he didn’t have anything in the Ponyville database about warnings or run-ins with the cops here, so maybe he’s turned a new leaf since he’s been out of the city.” I lowered my eyes at my brother-in-law. “Really?” Fin raised his hooves in defeat. “Okay, maybe that’s just wishful thinking, but what else are you supposed to do here? Show up at her door for the first time in a decade and a half and tell the kid, ‘I’m your dad, quit being a punk?’ Are you gonna tell your legitimate kids they have a half-brother? At least you have a detective’s word that you couldn’t have done this when you were dating your wife, but I mean… what else can you do?” I put my cigar back in my mouth and circled the rim of my glass with my hoof. And that was the question. What should I do now that I know? It’s not as if Cheeri and I ended on bad terms. We just… went all the way and figured if that didn’t feel right then it couldn’t have been love. Nopony was angry. Maybe we were both a little upset, but we just… didn’t think we were right for each other. Provided that was the truth, anyways. Would she have lied to me? Was it just me and I didn’t notice how she felt? I wonder if… “She, uh… she never got married, did she?” Fin checked through the file again and shook his head. “No sir. She’s had a few stallions come and go. None stuck around. Now, this is just speculation, but, if Malus was the one who stabbed this male teacher, then I could make an educated guess as to what was going on at the time.” I clicked my tongue. Come on Cheeri, what happened to ya? “It… wasn’t with like, a knife or somethin’, was it?” “Nah. It was almost fatal though. Half an inch higher and it would’ve pierced the guy’s jugular. Again, if I had to guess, there was probably something between this teacher and Cheerilee, and maybe he was being a bit more aggressive than she wanted him to. Malus walks in to take his mom home, sees what’s happening, flips his lid thinking the worst, grabs the nearest pointed object and tries to protect her. If nopony pressed charges then maybe he was being a bit too aggressive with her, and would rather let that go than lose his job.” I narrowed my eyes. “Kinda specific, ain’t it?” Fin tilted his head. “It’s only happened in four different districts of Ponyville in the last ten years, but at one point, the point when Cheerilee and Malus lived there, Manehattan was bigger than Ponyville. If it’s happened four times here, I can only imagine how many times this exact case has happened in Manehattan. You don’t survive a public scandal in this day and age.” I huffed. “Only four times, huh? What a graceful society we’ve become.” Fin chuckled. “Ain’t no rest for the wicked. It’s all too easy to get swept away by the surface-level sensationalism and never think about anything deeper than that.” I took another draw of my cigar, then snuffed out the end. “Ya would think that, what with all the information we have at the tips of our hooves at any given moment, we’d become smarter as a people, wouldn’t we?” Fin took a deep draw of his cigar and blew a ring in the air. “You would, but, if ponies ever learned anything, we probably wouldn’t be ponies, now would we?” If I didn’t know better, I would say this place was never ‘Ponyville.’ No, the massive sprawling city that was new Ponyville was about the opposite of the little village I grew up in. On a good day, with all the tourists we could muster back then, all ponies here to pick up deliveries from the Acres and every other little shop in town, Ponyville probably had, at most, a thousand ponies. The current population of Ponyville, at least last I looked, was somewhere closer to Eight Million. It’s just a bit bigger than it used to be. I hate driving on these cursed crowded streets more than anything. Where does Cheerilee live but on the opposite side of this sprawling mass of concrete and steel, in what used to be two towns over, but is somehow still a two-hour drive when travel time from one place to another has been significantly reduced? Would’ve taken me half a day on hoof, but at least I’d be moving the whole time. Thank the Goddess for highways; otherwise it would be faster on hoof. Last week, I met Fin at the bar and confirmed that I did in fact have an even older son that I never knew about. This week, I’m using the time I would’ve set aside to hang out with him to go see my old marefriend and possibly meet my son. Everything about it feels so backwards, I couldn’t tell if my life hadn’t been turned upside down again or not. At least nopony is on the verge of death this time. Things with Sugarbelle have been patched over thanks to both Fin and Applejack vouching for me, but that was almost a secondary concern at this point. What am I supposed to do after I meet them? Should I… try to take him back home? Clearly he needs to get acquainted with Granny’s belt, but that’s not going to make him respect anypony on its own. If… if I want him to be a better pony, then I need to be in his life and make sure it happens. But how am I supposed to do that if we’re on opposite sides of the city? I can’t make a drive like this all the time, I’m already cutting into my August budget as it is! I let my head fall to the wheel. Why me? Somepony honked from behind me which made me notice that the light was green. A couple more blocks and I’d be free of the shopping part of District 47 and all its traffic lights at every single intersection, and finally on the residential side. She didn’t live too far away from the shopping section, but she did live in what most would call ‘low income housing.’ If that wasn’t a label for a place filled with broken ponies, bad ponies, and ponies under hard times, then I didn’t know what was. I arrived at the building, and again, it was something that seemed foreign to me. I’d been to Manehattan once to visit my aunt and uncle years and years ago, and I had no desire to ever go back. I hated the claustrophobia of the city, the often awful smells you get a whiff of as you passed the wrong vent, the… unpleasant demeanor of the hundreds of ponies you’d pass on the street. It looked interesting, but it always made me nervous. The stories Fin told me about what happened in this city were bad enough; Manehattan had always been where the underbelly of Equestria lay. This apartment complex reminded me of Manehattan. I didn’t want to go into it, but here I was. You made this bed, now you get to lie in it. Of all the things Pa and Granny said to me growing up, I think that was the one I hated the most. Inside and up a few flights of stairs, I hit the third floor and found my destination, Room 301. Here goes nothing. I raised a hoof and knocked on the door. “Oh! I’ll be right there! Malus, can you get that?” That’s Cheeri alright. “Yeah, sure.” I swallowed. He’s getting the door? I’m not prepared for this! What do I say? What do I do? Oh Goddess, oh Goddess, somepony tell me what to do! Whether or not I wanted it to, the door swung open, and there in front of me was the spitting image of my father in a slightly darker mulberry coat than my son. My own eyes are his eyes, and a carrot-orange mane rocked his head. Why is it that every mare I ever seriously dated had this color on them somewhere? The easiest way I could discern him from Ox, save the size, would have to be the freckles which he lacked and Malus had. “Ma, did ya hire an escort? Again?” I wasn’t quite expecting to hear the image of my father speak in a city boy accent. It threatened to make me laugh. Malus took offense to that. “Hey, you think somethin’s funny, ya old fuck?” He took a step into my personal space, puffed up his chest and glared at me. I had to hold back another laugh. “Ah think you’re funny, kid.” I looked back at this angry colt with something to prove, and though I didn’t mean to say it, I asked, “How did ya end up like this?” His face wavered for a few seconds before he finally stepped back. “Ma? Who is this freak?” I leaned my head through the door frame just enough to see the mess inside, and just as she walked out from another room, I locked eyes with Cheerilee. “Oh. Oh! Oh, Goddess, I was… Um, he’s an old friend, dear.” She paused and moved her mouth like she had several things she wanted to say all at once but stopped and redirected her attention to Malus. “Didn’t you say you wanted to go out tonight?” Malus raised a brow at his mother, turned and looked me up and down, then back to his mother. “Whatever I guess. Don’t be a retard with this one, alright? I don’t wanna live on instant ramen again because you got fuckin’ stupid with some guy.” The words struck me like a hammer to the head. I’m certain my mouth fell open. I looked to Cheeri expecting some kind of rebuke for that, but she didn’t say a word: just put her head down in shame. He pushed past me, she wouldn’t look at me. I had to do something. I pulled on his tail before he could get too far away and yanked him back. “Who the hell do ya think ya are, talkin’ ta yer mother like that?” He whipped around just as quick and slapped my hoof away. “Who the hell do you think you are touchin’ my tail, you old piece of shit? You’re not my dad, I talk to my mom however the fuck I want! Piss me off and I’ll put you in the hospital too, ya got me?” I was speechless. He meant every word. Malus had no idea who I was to him or his mother. Cheeri was always a little more passive than I would’ve liked, but she might as well have introduced me to her abusive husband! How did you get like this? When I never moved to do anything else, Malus huffed and flicked his snout at me. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. You’re lucky Ma’s here.” He turned to his mother and said, “He better be gone by the time I get back, and you’d better still have your damn purse this time!” Down the hall and around the corner, the maelstrom had passed. I stared at Cheeri in open-mouthed silence for what felt like an eternity. It was only broken by the sound of a kettle whistle going off. “I, um… I was making tea. Would you… would you like to come in?”