by Daniel Kraus
“What are you doing?” cried Willie. “Knock it off! That’s mean!”
Reggie threw another nail that fell short and lost itself in the grass.
“You don’t want those puppies born here,” said Reggie, not looking at Willie while he took aim with another nail.
“Hey!” said Willie. He moved toward Reggie. Another nail flew and rang off the top of the fence.
“It has those puppies here and they won’t ever leave, ever,” Reggie said. He leaned back to throw but Willie was now in his way, his face red, his lips drawn from the metal that laced through his teeth.
“Knock it off,” said Willie.
“I’m doing you a favor,” said Reggie.
“I know you are,” said Willie.
“Not with the tree house, dummy,” said Reggie, taking an easy step around Willie, and in the same motion transferring a nail to his throwing hand.
Willie spun and ran at the dog, shouting, “Go away, girl! Go away! Go away!” The animal shrank back, muscles defining themselves inside fur. Reggie threw another nail. It missed Willie’s head by inches, and James gasped—he could too clearly imagine a nail lodging in Willie’s eye, the bad luck of his life continuing.
But all James said was “Hey,” and he was appalled at how weak it sounded. Why wasn’t he moving to help Willie? Why was he just standing there? For some reason all he could think of was his parents.
The dog drew itself even lower and then slunk away in haste, its belly audibly rushing through the weeds. Willie stopped chasing it and then Reggie stopped, too. There was a long moment filled with sound—birds, insects, cars, sprinklers, lawn mowers. Finally Reggie picked up the pulley, hooked it to a belt loop, shouldered past James, and started up the tree.
“So I got a plan for getting the Monster,” said Reggie as he climbed, “before the big kids or Mel Herman or anyone else gets to it. I’d tell you guys if you ever shut up for a second.” Neither boy responded and the proposal died. The next sound from Reggie was the hammering of a nail into live wood.
Only now it was too late. Their inspiration had run off through the weeds with a thirsty, pregnant dog. This was work now, nothing else, and therefore the project was doomed.
It was not for lack of effort. Both Reggie and James shimmied up the tree dozens of times. They each took turns fastening the pulley to the first branch, gave up, then tried other branches, higher branches, thicker branches. When the pulley at last held, it was the rope that failed them, sliding from the pulley time after time. After a while, Mr. Van Allen stepped out onto the door step, perhaps drawn by the absence of conversation, and stood with his hands on the railing, his robe tied loosely around his waist.
His presence demanded a demonstration, but it was a clumsy, humiliating scene. The pulley shook, the rope slithered away, and James was reminded of Greg Johnson’s funeral—those pulleys hadn’t worked either. The boys attached the two-by-four that was to serve as Willie’s seat, but when attempting to sit on it the best he could do was to lock his leg muscles in a squat while pretending the seat was not spinning uselessly beneath him. His friends’ hands were all over him, steadying his back, lowering his butt, clasping his hand over the rope, then repositioning it, then repositioning his hand again and burning it when they moved it too quickly. Willie felt embarrassed for himself but also for his friends, and the more they all touched each other the more implicated they became in this extravagant, monumental failure.
Mr. Van Allen said nothing as his son lost balance and flopped to the ground, the rope spilling from the tree and falling in a pile on Willie’s lap, his two friends collapsed around him, their elbows pink, their knees green, their eyes searching desperately for something that wasn’t their fault.
I Am a Pawn
It rained for three days and everyone was excited until they stepped outside. The rain was hot.
Willie was sent out for milk and butter and eggs, no matter that it was late in the day and spitting liquid. He moved slowly, relishing this rare solo venture. It had come unexpectedly. Willie’s mother had put on her shoes—the right one first, and then, much later, the left—and slung her purse over her shoulder and declared she was going to the store. Then she stood at the screen door for a long time, her hands at her sides, breathing slowly and watching the occasional raindrop explode on the sidewalk. Willie saw this happen too often: loud, busy preparations for some out-of-the-house errand that ended at the front door, as if his mother did not know how to release the lock or was afraid of what she would find beyond, or who would find her. Finally she repositioned herself and asked if Willie would like to go get some milk and butter and eggs.
He hopped up and thrust out his stump and she pinned the shirt’s armhole in place so that the rain would not dampen the bandages, and then she opened his palm and unfolded into it dollar bills. “You be careful,” she told him in a labored whisper, her eyes brimming with tears, and she hugged him forcefully as he wriggled to be set free. He stuffed the bills in his front pocket and strode out the front door, the wad of cash feeling thick and important against his hip. As he bolted down the front steps, he heard behind him a gasp from his mother, as if she too were thrilled and astonished by his velocity.
It was difficult for Willie to remember a time when he had gone out alone without incident. Once he had chipped a tooth on a parking meter. Another time he had become caught in a snowdrift until a mailman answered his cries. Yet another time he had been hit by a truck and lost his left arm.
This time he stuck to roads he knew and aimed himself along familiar landmarks: the Harper family tire swing, the tennis courts, the electrical cage with signs warning him to KEEP OUT, HIGH VOLTAGE. Then he was there, pushing through the door, goose-pimpling in the refrigerated aisle, sloshing around jugs of milk, attempting to gauge their comparative worth. Butter was easy-he grabbed the first package he saw. Eggs on the other hand involved lengthy deliberation, for Willie was not satisfied until each egg was lifted, rotated, and inspected for hairline cracks.
He had wrangled himself a cart, but on the way to the register ran into trouble. With only a single arm to guide it, the cart bore heavily to the left and Willie found himself tracing one, then two, then three ever-widening circles, and with each orbit he felt more eyes fall upon him. Still he wrenched and shoved and kicked, and tried to muscle the cart into a checkout lane, until a man in an apron came over and plucked the three grocery items from the cart. The man smiled at Willie, as if to assure him that he had made a valiant effort, but Willie knew a failure when he saw one and so avoided the man’s face, kept his eyes on the food.
Willie left the store with change rattling in his front pocket, and though he was weighed down by groceries he felt quicker and lighter, overjoyed to leave behind the store, that bastard cart, the meddling men in aprons and the women ignoring their shopping lists. The paper sack he clutched marked him as someone not just winding his aimless way through the streets like Mel Herman. No, Willie Van Allen was working. He felt wonderful, and went down a wrong street on purpose.
Then he became fascinated with the way the rain darkened the brown paper sack and how the patterns expanded—miserly faces swelled into obesity, branches grew root systems, stars joined to create planets—and when he finally remembered to look up it was too late. He was lost. The rain slopped against his neck and he stood there, letting his new failure fully soak.
The houses looked friendlier down one street, so he went that way. A sprinkler circulated pointlessly in the rain and Willie stepped out of its spray, briefly onto the road. He heard tires skimming though wet pavement. He rushed back to the curb, regripped the humid sack.
A truck rolled past and Willie eyed it warily.
When the truck reached the far street, it turned right. When Willie reached the same intersection he turned left. Something was happening to the paper sack; it felt gummy. He felt a wave of panic and snuggled it deeper into his armpit. He looked at a house and saw a face in a window, a child. Willie became awar
e of his stump in a way he hadn’t before. He looked away from the child. Water dripped from his long nose. There was a squish in his socks. He felt his bandages getting wet and wondered what that meant—his mother had warned him against it so many different times. He searched this way and that for orientation, but everything was as smeared as a Mel Herman painting, and for a moment Willie wondered if the world through Mel’s eyes was always this murky and upsetting.
From the corner of his eye he saw the truck again. The same truck as before, he was almost positive. It sat in the middle of the road, engine humming, gray smoke rolling between its back tires. Willie gripped his grocery sack and his fingernails slid right through the paper. The jug of milk was warm and perspiring. His mother would not approve.
The truck moved, then its taillights went red and it paused, as hesitant as the pregnant dog skulking around Willie’s house. Willie stared straight ahead. He heard the truck slither away. It would circle around and come back again, he knew it.
Willie turned left. The bottom of the bag parted and the milk jug hit the sidewalk. The eggs and butter tried to slip through too, but Willie folded up his body and managed to pin the items against him. He set everything down on the ground and opened the eggs to evaluate the damage. Two broken that he could see. He stood up and watched the rain drum patiently upon the open eggs, the overturned milk jug, the package of butter. It was an odd sight and for a moment he was transfixed.
There was no way he could get everything home without the sack. He grabbed the wet butter, shoved it into his underwear, and picked up the heavy milk jug by the handle. There were no eggs, that’s what he would say. The store was out of eggs. What happened to the rest of the money, then? Willie scrunched his forehead and felt rain forge new routes down his temples.
He turned again because it felt like progress. He came upon the same lawn sprinkler he had dodged earlier and this time he walked right through it. He thought about going straight at the intersection. He wondered how far the road extended. He thought about the long, windy path that led to Tom and the thing in the apple box. Perhaps there was a resting spot at the end of this road, too.
He set the milk jug within the wet branches of a shrub. Maybe later he could find it again, present it to his mother, make amends.
He did not notice the rain pick up until his sneakered foot swept through a puddle and the water fanned through the air. Now he staggered—he had hurt his toe. He crossed one intersection, another. He heard an engine somewhere nearby, and he sped through yet another intersection, his toe throbbing. He began to limp. The package of butter fell from his pants leg and he left it. He felt himself mumbling and tried to stop it but the words kept coming, strange sentences that he had invented for homework, stranger sentences that he had invented at home for no reason at all, nonsensical phrases that stood for coniferous-deciduous or Indian-Arctic-Atlantic-Pacific or molar-premolar-incisor-canine or Mercury-Venus-Earth-Mars Jupiter-Saturn-Uranus-Neptune-Pluto.
At the following intersection he saw a truck, maybe the same color as the one he’d seen earlier, which was maybe the same color as the one that struck him several months ago, he couldn’t remember, not now, not with these sentences rattling through his brain. He staggered onward and his limp reminded him of how his father walked these days, as if he were constantly butting invisible obstacles with his pajama-clad knees. Sometimes his father even winced, as if the pain of these collisions were real.
His father even walked that way outside, sometimes clutching his beer with both hands as if that might steady him, and sometimes it did. Other times the alcohol made things worse and he would end up wandering the backyard gripping the fence. Other times he would tuck his beer into the waistband of his pants and push the lawn mower in meandering ovals until his limp worked itself out. The lawn was mostly dirt now, except for below the tree house where the grass was lush and soft—it had not been mowed in months.
Willie stomped through a puddle, then skipped, trying to keep off his sore toe. Lust-gluttony-avarice-sloth-wrath-envy-pride. He remembered what the boys said at the junkball field, that they heard Willie’s father roamed the town at night, sometimes in his robe, sometimes with dirty knees, sometimes bloodied. Now Willie wondered if it might be true. After all, here he was, wandering in the rain on some street he’d never seen before, inappropriately clothed and limping, like father, like son. He felt a rush of stubborn pride for his father. He pictured him—his robe, his beer, his maybe-dirty knees, his maybe-bloodied body—and Willie hastened to match his own limp to the one he’d memorized from his dad: diamonds-clubs-hearts-spades.
Now when Willie heard tires on a neighboring street splitting the rain in two, he felt fright, real fright. Asia-Antarctica-Europe-Africa-North-America-South-America-Australia: he limped faster. His father limped alongside him, or so Willie imagined, but instead of feeling safer he felt exposed and dissected like a science-class insect, pinned down with parts labeled—Missing Arm, Crooked Teeth, Elephant Ears, Long Nose. So he kept moving, because at the end of the road could be anything, anything, and if it was an apple box and a crate he was more than ready to be packed away in a warm attic corner, away from eyes, safe from the rain.
He ran faster and louder, and the truck, too: louder, faster. He urged himself on, out loud and with strange sentences indicating the treble clef notes, the bass clef, the first five books of the Bible, and the reedy sound of his own panicked voice revealed everything about him: he was a short, flimsy, worthless kid. Maybe the truck coming up behind him was a killer, maybe it wasn’t; maybe it was the stupid Johnsons, doing their stupid daily patrol. This possibility was the most harrowing. Because if concerned parents were inside the approaching vehicle, they would see him running and they would pull over to the side of the road and ask what was wrong, dear? And he would have to keep running, for if he turned around he’d see his reflection in the passenger window: a boy with one arm, carrying no food at all, soaked to the bone, shivering and small—not small, tiny!—and whether he liked it or not they were going to scoop him up in their arms, drag him kicking into the vehicle, and drive him straight home, touching him all over like Reggie and James had touched him when the tree house pulley collapsed. He would not accept such contact, not now, not again, not ever.
When he saw the Harper family tire swing and therefore the way home, he coughed up more words: “I smell meat.” There it was, home, and he would have to explain the missing money and food. But he would not tell the truth. The truth was something he had dropped along with the milk and butter and eggs. The truth was something for helpless children, and from here on it would be a thing foreign to him, he would see to it, he made himself promise. This thing that just happened, this lost errand, this maybe-pursuit, it was his and he would keep it. He would not tell anyone.
My Panic Inches Closer
“Reggie.”
“What?”
“You think he’ll be mad?”
“Who, Willie?”
“Yeah.”
Reggie considered it. “I guess it doesn’t really matter. He’s never going to know we’re up here.”
“Yeah, but it’s his tree house.”
“It was his tree house. He can’t own it anymore, James, you know why? Because you can’t own something you can’t touch. Just like you can’t own the sun and I can’t own the moon. Look, we tried. That pulley idea of yours was great. But face it. He’ll never see the inside of this thing again. He’s probably already forgot what it looks like.”
“Maybe we should try again. We could lift him, maybe. If we tried together, you think?”
“It’s impossible. Remember how hard it was getting him through the school window? I thought he was going to kill himself. No way we’d ever get him all the way up here. He’d fall and break his neck. And then we’d be in real trouble.”
There was silence for a while. It was late, well past curfew, something that still made James nervous when he thought of his folks noticing the toll of the grand father clock
, which they would any minute now, any second, and the two boys lay on their backs on the wooden floor of Willie Van Allen’s tree house. Their heads almost touched so that they could both stare through the rectangle Mr. Van Allen had cut from the roof long ago. There were tree leaves above, blacker even than the night, and then, above those, the shimmering pinpoints of stars.
On the wall before them hung the oversize Mel Herman painting they had stolen from the school. It had been there for weeks and both boys had spent much time, together and alone, studying its infinite detail. Reggie said it looked like blueprints. James kept returning to the tiny vehicle running over a tiny person, and for that reason insisted the painting must be a map. If they could just decipher it, he said, it could lead them somewhere important. “To Mel’s house,” said Reggie, his dark eyes flashing, although that was not what James meant.
From his spot on the floor James looked from the painting to the dark sky above and breathed deeply. Reggie had a point. The tree house was pretty high. At night even he and Reggie had to be cautious when they climbed.
“Well, we at least should’ve told him we’re borrowing it,” said James.
“What, you just want to make him feel bad?” said Reggie. “It’s better this way. It’s better if we just sneak in after his parents have locked the doors and tucked him into bed.”
“He’s not asleep yet, it’s not that late,” said James.
“Of course he’s not sleeping.” Reggie sighed. “He’s sitting around staring at his Lincoln Logs or telling Softie how crummy it is to have one arm.”
“Shh.”
“Stop worrying,” Reggie said. “He sure as hell can’t hear us. They have their fans on full-blast because the dummies keep all their windows locked. I guess they think …”