But in my imagination, I saw David slipping and falling. He was already ten feet off the ground with another twelve rungs to go. I trained my flashlight beam on the next rung so David could see it. There was just a little sliver of moon, too weak to reach through the trees. Appropriate for Halloween. Inside the treehouse were two large pumpkins and two carving knives, courtesy of Jake. The pumpkins came from a little patch his uncle kept, and the knives were swiped from his mom’s kitchen. It’d been a bitch hauling the pumpkins up there one at a time in an oversized backpack, but they’d insisted I do it, a bit of hazing I endured to keep them happy. David reached another rung and looked down to check on Chet. David was my age, Chet a year younger. They had almost the same face, freckles and a pug nose. But Chet had brown eyes and David’s were blue. They walked side-by-side everywhere, in lockstep. It was hard not to picture them being joined at the hip, so it was weird seeing one ahead of the other. They entered the treehouse. The light of their candles made the windows yellow, and I exhaled a long-held breath. We didn’t ask questions when we found the treehouse two years ago. We just climbed the rungs straight up through a floor hatch. Outside, the treehouse looked like a small Victorian mansion stretched across the cradling branches of a maple that might have been two hundred years old. It loomed high against the cloudless sky. The dilapidated structure was flanked on both sides by turrets that framed the peak of its partially collapsed roof. It looked like the house in Psycho, that movie we watched at Jake’s last Halloween. The interior wasn’t nearly as spacious, taken up by a mess of strange, disorienting angles that left just a small practical space tailor-made for three people to hang out. There were windows here and there and they were all sorts of irregular shapes too. It was one of those strange things waiting to be found by the right kids, the kind of kids who sneak cigarettes from their mother’s purse. We weren’t the first ones inside, but it’d been a while between occupants. We found broken beer bottles, cigarette butts and used condoms. There were scattered pages from titty magazines, faded and water damaged in the most frustrating way possible. While Jake and Randy obsessed over them, I found a rolled piece of paper in the corner. It was yellowed with age, but not crinkly at all when I unrolled it and realized it was a wall calendar with all the months printed in little square blocks above a flowery script — Fitzhugh’s Apothecary. What the hell was an apothecary? The calendar was from 1916, several years after Kingwood’s founding. “Look at this, guys. Figure it means this place was built seventy years ago?” Randy and Jake weren’t interested. They’d discovered more ripped pages from some porno mag and knelt on the floor in a desperate effort to fit the jigsaw scraps together. Fitzhugh. I thought of the town drug store. How long had it been there? “Mark, get over here,” Jake said. “We’re like three scraps away from seeing pussy. Help us find the missing pieces!” “Hunt for the cunt,” Randy said, and soon we three kings chanted it together and giggled. I wasn’t any help though. My thoughts were on that calendar. On questions of time and who’d built the treehouse. I sat back and thought about it. A story sprang to mind so readily it was like someone spoke it to me. “John King built this,” I said. “The statue guy?” “For his sons. Twin boys. But he discovered they weren’t really his kids, so he . . .” They applauded when I finished telling the story. “You should be a writer,” Randy said. “That was fucking awesome. Especially that line about the one starving brother realizing you can climb up to Hell.” I shook my head. I couldn’t explain how the story just came to mind. I guess I’d made it up in a burst of imagination. It wasn’t important. Whoever built the treehouse didn’t matter. It was ours now and we spent damn near every day that first summer here, cleaning it up, making it ours. We pledged to tell no one about it except girlfriends, when we got ‘em. We vowed to lose our cherries up here. That summer in the treehouse, life was more real than ever before. The three of us did the same shit we would have done in the park or the woods, but we did it in our own world. Our dreams carried more weight in the treehouse, and our friendship was never stronger than when we occupied it together. I went there by myself only once, when Jake and Randy were off on family vacations. I don’t know why, but I thought the treehouse was almost angry with me for coming alone. I got creeped out by the sound of the groaning wood, the creaking of the branches and stood up. I went to look out one of the windows and something seemed off. The world outside was different, like the picture on an old postcard. I didn’t even feel like I was looking out of my own eyes. I left a few minutes later and didn’t return until Jake and Randy were there. Then it all felt right again. Our fascination with the treehouse lasted through that summer and stayed strong into the second one and was still going good in the third. We went there almost every day, up until that Fourth of July. Then I began hanging out in secret with the Somerset brothers and my room became a sort of treehouse for the three of us and we never left it. Mom kept covering for me whenever Jake or Randy showed up. I started feeling like I had two separate lives that mustn’t intersect. They’d have to when school started, I supposed, but that was a ways out. I didn’t ditch Randy and Jake, of course. When I was determined to hang out with them, I set off early on my bike. As far as I knew, Chet and David didn’t have bikes, but I always kept looking around expecting them to be running after me. I never saw them once, but only felt hidden from them once we were a quarter of a mile into the forest. “Dude, what’s been up with you?” Jake said after we’d climbed the rungs and could lounge in privacy. “What do you mean?” “Sneaking beers? Flipping off your mom? You got a death wish or something?” I grinned. “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do sometimes.” Their look of respect was priceless. “You’re going to be grounded the whole summer at the rate you’re going.” I shrugged. “It’s totally worth it. Fuck that bitch.” I winced inside. As moms went, mine wasn’t as lame as most. Her excuses were making me look badass, but how far would she go if Chet and David kept coming over? Jake had scored a copy of Playboy and had the magazine open on the treehouse floor. As the three of us knelt around it, Randy took 29
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