So we stood forty feet away from each other on the sidewalk and threw bare-handed. Soft arcing tosses that were fun to catch. Fun. At first, as the white ball sailed at me, I tensed up and jumped at it with both hands. But then, as I kept catching it, I began to look forward to catching it again, to see it spin in the air as it came, its dark stitching rotating. I had no idea how to throw it back. I have a vague memory of my father telling me to lift my leg, to throw over my shoulder, though he may not have. But I knew we were talking about something as we threw the ball back and forth, an occasional car passing in the street beside us, the charcoal glowing hotter for our burgers, and there was so much surprise in his face that I clearly had no experience with a baseball whatsoever, that I did not know one thing about it. I could see he didn’t want to draw too much attention to this. In my father’s eyes above his trimmed beard, I saw pity for me, and maybe I began to feel sorry for myself too, but what I remember most is being surprised that he was surprised. What did he think kids did in my neighborhood? What did he think we did? But how could I tell him anything without incriminating us all, especially my mother, whom he would blame? And when we sat down to eat at his tiny table in his tiny kitchen we were both quiet and ate too quickly, so much to say there was nothing to say.
ONE WEEKDAY morning, I woke late and was surprised to hear Mom’s voice downstairs. She and Bruce were talking in the front room. I dressed and walked to the first floor. The sun was out and shone through the window across the dusty rug. From Suzanne’s room I could hear Mick Jagger singing how beautiful Angie was. It sounded like Mom and Bruce were arguing about something, which didn’t happen too often. I climbed the stairs to my sister’s room.
Suzanne sat on her mattress, her back against the wall. She was smoking a cigarette, and when I walked in she looked up and stubbed it out as if she’d been waiting for me.
“You hear what happened?” She blew smoke out the side of her mouth.
“No, what?”
“Jeb tried to kill himself last night.”
“What?”
She told me how sometime after midnight our thirteen-year-old brother had called a rock station down in Boston, how he’d requested a drum solo, how he’d crept outside with Bruce’s car keys, a blanket, tape, and our vacuum cleaner’s hose, how he then attached it to the exhaust pipe of Bruce’s Jaguar XJ6, how he taped it airtight, then pushed the other end into the crack above the back window and stuffed the blanket around it till it, too, was airtight. How he climbed in behind the wheel, started the engine, and waited.
Maybe if Bruce hadn’t been a drinker, Jeb would have died, but Bruce woke needing to piss and that’s when he’d heard his engine idling out in the driveway. That’s when he went out there and found Jeb half-conscious behind smoky glass. That’s when he jerked open the door and pulled our brother out, switched off the Jaguar, and walked Jeb up and down the street till his head had cleared.
“Jeb wrote Mom a note. I guess Janice fucking Woods broke his heart or something.”
Mick Jagger was singing on about Angie, how he still loved her. Suzanne shook her head at me. I stared down at her floor, shaking my head too. There was a twisting in the marrow of my bones, a twisting that vibrated with sound. You should’ve done something. You knew Janice Woods was bad news. Why didn’t you do something?
“Where is he?”
“School. Mom’s pissed at Bruce ’cause he didn’t even wake her up last night to tell her about it.”
THAT AFTERNOON after school I waited on the porch steps for my brother. It was a warm day in spring, and I could smell damp earth, the dry paint of the railing. Soon he was walking down Columbia Park, then he was standing on the sidewalk in front of me. He was smiling guiltily and his cheeks were pale, his T-shirt ripped under the collar. I stood. “You try something like that again, I’ll fucking kill you.”
“Sure, governor.” He said this in a British accent, smiling through me as he climbed the steps and brushed past me. We both knew I was full of shit. We both knew I wasn’t capable of killing anyone.
Jeb may have gone to a counselor after that, but I don’t think so. The days became again what they were, and life continued as it was.
BECAUSE THERE was never a mother or father home in the afternoons, our big rented house on Columbia Park became another place for kids to gather and get high. There were some from the bus stop and the avenues, Nicky G. and Glenn P., Bryan, and Anne Marie and Dawn, but also many people I’d never seen before. Some were grown men, their motorcycles on the sidewalk leading to our porch. By three in the afternoon, the house would be thick with pot and cigarette smoke, the stereo Bruce bought us blaring in the front room: the Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, Ten Years After, Pink Floyd. In the living room, girls would be sitting on the laps of their boyfriends, some of them sharing a beer or cigarette or joint. In the dining room, at the table that came with the house and one we rarely used, five or six would be playing 45, using for an ashtray their beer cans or one of our cereal bowls.
I hadn’t moved up to the attic yet, and my room was still on the second floor in the back of the house across from Jeb’s. I’d go up there and shut the door behind me. I’d lie on my bed and try to ignore the weekday afternoon party voices and laughter, the yelling or loud trash-talking from Nicky G. or one of the rent collectors from Seventh who’d started coming around too. I’d lie there and imagine being a different kind of kid, one who could walk downstairs and open the front door and yell at them all to just get the fuck out. And when they wouldn’t, I’d jerk the men to their feet one at a time. They’d swing at me, and I’d duck and then start hurling punches and kicks like Billy Jack, smashing bones and severing arteries, all with my hands and feet.
Instead I stayed in my room and waited for the sun to go down and for them to drift off, two or three at a time.
Still, some would come around at night. Once, close to ten o’clock, Mom lay on the floor in front of the TV in her work clothes, a pillow under her head, her cheap coat covering her like a blanket. A knocking echoed from the front door and Nicole got up and answered it. I was sitting in a wicker chair. I was half asleep, but there was a mild electrical current telling me that I should have gone to the door, not my ten-year-old sister.
She walked back into the room. Her back was held erect with her scoliosis brace, her chin resting on its plastic collar. “It’s Glenn P. He wants to talk to Suzanne.”
Mom opened her eyes. “Well you tell Glenn P. to go take a flying fuck.”
Nicole turned and walked through the hall to the door. I could see her red hair pulled back over the rear collar of her brace. “Um, my mom says for you to go take a flying fuck.”
If Glenn P. said something back, Nicole didn’t repeat it. She locked the door and walked back into the living room and sat down with her homework.
ONE RAINY afternoon in April, I came home to another full house and I went straight upstairs and there was Kip L. and Donna H. coming down the narrow hallway. He was half a foot taller than I was but lighter, his skin white, blue veins and capillaries standing out in his arms and hands. People said he shot heroin, and I was sure that’s what he and Donna H. had been doing up here, maybe in the bathroom, but her halter top was unbuttoned and beneath the flared hem of her hip-huggers were bare feet. As she passed me in the narrow hallway she smelled like sweat and Kip L.’s leather jacket.
They didn’t say anything, and I didn’t either. Then they were back downstairs and I walked into my room. Rain pattered against the window. The only light was gray and shadowed, and I flicked on the overhead bulb. Lately I’d been making my bed some mornings, pulling the top blanket or bedspread tight at the corners. I could see it was still made but rumpled, and there, in the middle of my mattress, was a spot of wetness the size of a quarter.
ONE WEEKDAY morning I’d somehow woken before anyone else and went down into the kitchen to see what there might be to eat. Usually the inside of the fridge was nearly empty shelves, but I was reaching for its handle
anyway when I heard the hissing. I turned to see the blue flames of the front burner. It had been going all night. Inches away was a greasy Burger King bag on a stack of dirty dishes, and I rushed over and switched off the gas. The air was warm and smelled like scorched metal.
That night, long after everyone was in bed, I lay on my mattress and pictured the flames climbing the walls, thick smoke filling the hallway, snaking under our doors, blackening the glass of the windows, suffocating us before the fire even made it to where we slept. I got up and went downstairs and checked the knobs of the oven and stove. I touched each one five times, turning it to OFF and holding it there. But this did not seem to be enough. I moved to anything electrical and unplugged it, too. I started with the kitchen clock. I hurried to the lamps in the living room, even the stereo and TV, unplugging them all. Then I moved quickly to the front door and checked the lock, again having to touch the cool metal five times to make sure. I crept through the dark house to the back door and did the same there. Then I climbed the stairs and lay in bed and tried to sleep. I’d think of my brother wanting to die; I’d see the exhaust pipe and the vacuum cleaner hose, and I’d hear the drums on the radio, feel the carbon monoxide entering my lungs like a thief.
JEB AND I began building again. The backyard was small and square, probably thirty feet by thirty feet, but in the far corner away from the house was that tall beech tree. Tacked into its trunk at its base was the corner post for the side and rear fences, short rotting planks on rails, the one we hopped over to get to Cleary’s house down the back alley to Main Street. It was the one we hauled our stolen lumber over, too.
Cleary helped us. At the bottom of the avenues on Primrose Street, not far from a Catholic church and cemetery, was a lumberyard. They kept most of their wood outside under tarps surrounded by a ten-foot chain-link fence, but there was no barbed wire at the top and lately they’d been tossing used pallets on the sidewalk outside.
At night, long after we’d eaten and Mom had dozed off, Jeb and Cleary and I would run down Seventh past the lighted noise of the apartments, the dogs barking, TVs blaring. We’d get down to Primrose where every other streetlamp was out, the lumberyard lit up with only one security light over the door to the office, and we’d check the street for a passing cruiser, then stack those pallets and climb up and over, the points of the fence sometimes catching on our pants or shirts, and we’d drop down onto a stack of plywood and head for the eight-foot two-by-fours and two-by-sixes. They were pale white in the shadows and smelled like dry wood and were hard and smooth under our hands, and we yanked them from their stack and leaned them against the fence, then pushed them up and over to the first of us down on the other side.
We needed nails, too. The office and warehouse were locked and there was that light over the office door, but lying in the black shadows around the corner were discarded sections of steel bands that had been cut away from what they’d held together. There was loose rope and spools of cable, more pallets, and all along the asphalt up against the warehouse were scattered loose screws and nails. We’d pick up as many as we could and load up our pockets. When I climbed back up over the fence, I thought it was the fence poking my thigh, but it was the nails, fifteen or twenty of them.
It seemed like we’d been in there a long time. We walked back up into the avenues where very few of the streetlights worked, most of our walk safely in shadow, and we passed the tin-sided houses with no front yards, the shades or curtains drawn, each of us carrying no more than three or four two-by-fours over our shoulders, but we walked along like men who worked, men who had actually earned what they carried.
WE WERE building a tree house in that beech in the backyard. Our landlord had a shop in the basement, and we went down there and found a couple of hammers and a handsaw. In the garage, hanging on the wall, was a wooden ladder, and within a day or two we’d built a fairly level platform fifteen feet up in the branches of the tree. For the flooring, we’d stolen a sheet of plywood from one of the stacks in the lumberyard, but it took two of us to carry it back home, and when we went back for more a few nights later, there were bright floodlights shining down into the yard and the warehouse and office.
Cleary stood there in the dark, his hair over one eye. “Holy shit.” Then there was the sound of something heavy sliding over the asphalt, then a rattling, then a German shepherd charging us till the chain yanked straight. And we ran.
We needed walls and a roof. Weeknights we wandered up and down the avenues looking for scrap piles behind houses, but there seemed to be a dog chained in every third or fourth lot. Once we hopped a fence and dropped down into a packed-dirt yard. There was a motorcycle, a lawn chair, and a picnic table. In the corner a couple of bikes leaned one against the other, and Newburyport and Cody Perkins and whoever had hopped over our fence and stolen our bikes came rushing back and I began to feel like somebody I didn’t want to be, an exterior light coming on and shining on the three of us. “You motherfuckers want to get shot?”
Cleary pushed open the gate and we ran up Fourth Avenue in the dark and didn’t look back until we were on the other side of Main, breathing hard, sweating under our clothes, Cleary saying that was boss, “That was so friggin’ boss.”
WE GOT the rest of the materials from our basement. Before renting the house to us, our landlord had started building a recreation room. The floors were still poured concrete, but he’d hung a ceiling to hide the exposed subfloor and joists above, and he’d framed walls along the length of the foundation and around the furnace and oil tank and wood shop, tacking fake paneling to the studs. Jeb had studied the situation and seen right away that if we went behind the wall near the furnace, we could rip out every other two-by-four and the paneled walls would still stand and look the same from the finished side.
It was easy to take the hammer and swing it down at the base of the stud till it slid away from the nails that held it. Then we’d grab the bottom and yank till the panel nails ripped free and we’d keep yanking till the top nails gave too, and we’d carry the stud up the bulkhead steps and outside.
I did a few, but Jeb was faster, his hammer-swing more efficient. Out in the yard, Cleary or I would pull the nails out of both ends and then straighten them out on the concrete driveway, tapping them with a hammer until they were usable again. The sun was on us, and I could hear the party sounds coming from inside the house—the stereo turned up loud, some kid laughing louder, high or half drunk, and I may have felt superior out in the yard building our new house high in the beech tree with our stolen materials, but I hoped nobody would come out and see us. I hoped nobody was in my room. I hoped Nicole had locked herself in hers, as she always did, though she never talked much anymore to anyone, and I didn’t talk much to her either.
“Hey, you guys, come look.” Jeb stood on the lower steps of the open bulkhead, a cobweb in his long frizzy hair. “I found something.”
We followed him back into the dark basement beyond the shop to the oil tanks. We could hear the squeak of the living room’s floorboards above us, the bass beat of the stereo, voices and the tapping of someone’s boot.
“Look.”
Leaning against the wall were ten or twelve brand-new sheets of paneling, four feet wide and eight feet long, a thin layer of dust coating their top edges.
BY THE weekend, we’d built frames for our walls, then nailed to them those thin sheets of paneling. We had five sheets left over and we used all of them for the flat roof, stacking one on top of the other. Now the roof was strong enough for us to stand on and we made it a deck and took our last two-by-fours and nailed some of them lengthwise from branch to branch for railings.
Because we didn’t know how to frame windows, our tree hut had none and when we crawled inside our short narrow doorway that faced Cleary’s alley, we were crawling into a black hole that smelled like sawdust and basement musk, but it was our black hole, and we didn’t want just anyone climbing into it either.
We got rid of the ladder and built a rope eleva
tor. Just above the hut there was a long branch jutting out from the trunk, and into this we screwed two heavy-duty pulleys we’d found in Cleary’s basement. It’s where we got the rope too, coiled under a workbench.
Cleary’s house didn’t have a bulkhead entrance like ours and the only way in was through his kitchen and down the stairs. When the three of us walked into the house on that weekday afternoon, his mother was on the couch watching their black-and-white TV, Merv Griffin maybe, her yellow plastic tumbler in her hands on her lap. She was slow to look up at us, her eyes glazed over, the whites pink.
“Hi, honeys, you boys hungry?”
“No, Ma.” Cleary was already halfway down the basement stairs. Jeb followed him, but Cleary’s mother was smiling at me like I’d just said something funny to her. “You need a haircut.”
I shrugged.
“How’s your mom?” She took a long sip off her drink.
“Good.”
“She still working down to Boston?”
“Yeah,” I said, though I don’t think either of them had ever met. I wanted to go downstairs but didn’t want her to know I didn’t want to stand there talking to her anymore, Cleary’s drunk mother in her clean house, always so clean, the linoleum floors swept and mopped, the rugs vacuumed, the coffee table and TV and windowsills free of dust, even the windows looking out onto the dirt alley were as clear as if they held no glass.
Sometimes I would think how good it would be to have our mother at home all day too, to have her there to make sure we got to school, and to have her there when we came home in the afternoon, an adult who wouldn’t let just anyone into her warm, clean house.
Even if she was like this.
Her attention was back on the TV now, men in shirts and ties sitting around talking, and I went down the basement stairs, ducking my head under a joist, hoping Cleary and my brother had found something useful.
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