Beautiful Kate (10 page)

5

I am not sure just how old we were that summer: nine or ten, I would imagine, which means Cliff would have been about eleven. It was during the dog days of August, when even swimming had begun to pall for us and it seemed there was nothing to do except work and loaf and sweat through the few remaining weeks till school and football came to our rescue. Much like Stinking Joe and Jason himself, the three of us became solitary and petulant, even with each other—until Kate pushed upon us the idea of the treehouse. Now, we had never done much in the way of building forts or treehouses, probably because we had always had the barn and especially the loft with all its haybales, which were easy to fashion into cubbyholes and bunkers that required only our imagination to transform them into fortresses and clubhouses and the like.

But this time Kate insisted that we go back to the far northwest corner of the farm, to a remote wooded area covered with oak and hickory as well as a scattering of pines. There she had found the “perfect spot,” she said. And it turned out to be just that: an oak tree with a stout, three-limbed fork specifically designed, it appeared, to cradle the floor of a treehouse. In addition it offered a perfect vantage point from which to spy on the Regan place, a run-down little farmette bordering our land, and the home not only of a dozen junked cars and twice that many dogs and cats and squalling geese, but also of Little Tim and Joey, who were schoolmates of ours, a pair of big, dirty, ignorant Irish kids: the bugger-eaters, as Kate called them.

What little enthusiasm Cliff and I had for the project, Kate more than made up for. She scrounged up most of the wood we needed, got the ladder and tools and nails, and carried more than her share out to the site. From that point on, though, it was Cliff who took over and did most of the building, since he was the only one of us who could pound a nail in straight. And by the time we were finished there were hundreds to pound. First, we had to secure two-by-four steps to the tree’s main branch, between the top of the ladder and the floor of the treehouse, which we fashioned out of a dissimilar assortment of boards nailed onto a triangular two-by-four frame, itself anchored to the three main branches of the tree. Kate then came up with an unusual idea for the walls of the fort: a latticework of evergreen boughs woven through a framework of uprights, connected at the top with another triangle of boards.

Finished, we had to stock our fortress with provisions, including bread and peanut butter, a canteen, binoculars, blankets, an air rifle and a couple of slingshots. I can remember even now how it felt to be up in that piney aerie, just the three of us, with no grown-ups anywhere around and a whole world out there to be spied upon. And if it excited me, it did even more for Kate, who went off into a high fine state of fantasy that Cliff and I quickly accepted as simply a newer and better reality. Suddenly we were Greek partisans, freedom fighters holed up behind the Nazi lines and spying on them, trying to find out if and when they would attack our main column moving up from the south. Kate and I were lieutenants and Cliff our commander—all appointed by Kate herself of course. She wrote up the laws and by-laws of the outfit and kept an hour-by-hour log of our tour of duty. She distributed cyanide pills to each of us (jujubes actually) and we all took an oath to die before betraying our cause. But this soon struck her as insufficient and she insisted we change it into a blood oath, even after Cliff had pointed out to her that it was a redundant gesture because we already had the same blood flowing in us. She overrode his objections, however, and we went ahead and nicked our fingers and joined hands, happily bleeding all over the treehouse floor.

She also decided that it was not soldierly to have tools and a ladder lying about, so we took them back to the barn. Returning, we climbed up to the fort like proper partisans, rappeling up the treetrunk with a rope till we reached the built-in ladder, which took us the rest of the way. And there we commenced our tireless scrutiny of the Nazi camp—the Regans, going about their slovenly lives.

I realize that the names of Little Tim and Joey sound as if they belonged to a pair of benign elves. But that definitely was not the case. Joey was Cliff’s age and Little Tim was a year older, and they were both bigger than Cliff. Yet they were behind Kate and me in school by a full grade, due to such misfortunes as stupidity and measles and a predilection for beating up on other students and sometimes teachers, which naturally had resulted in their being expelled now and then. Consequently we did not take them lightly. We knew they were worthy adversaries, Nazis of the first rank.

So we watched them and their two younger sisters and their parents. Kate kept a careful record of their comings and goings, detailing the time and character of their various missions, such as:
Joey to barn 7:15—chores—takes a leak—returns to house 8:29
. And there were juicier entries too, some covering the old man’s penchant for getting drunk and pounding on his wife and kiddies, others covering the myriad atrocities the two little girls inflicted on their many pets. We were not conned by any of this, however. We knew a smoke screen when we saw one and were constantly on the alert for those inevitable signs that would betray the garrison’s true intentions.

There were periods, however, when nothing was happening at the Regans’, and those were good times too. The three of us would talk and laugh about Stinking Joe and Mama’s kids and the Regans, as well as other characters we knew in school. Kate, who had a gift for mimicry, did hilarious impressions of Reverend Sunbeam and a number of our teachers. And of course we reminisced, we ten- and eleven-year-olds. We looked back fondly upon our lives as we dined on peanut butter sandwiches washed down with warm Dr. Pepper. And best of all, we often stayed in the treehouse overnight, like chicks in a nest, lying there looking up at the moon and the clouds and listening to the night sounds as well as the comforting music of our own voices. Kate said it was all very “neat.” It was “better than freaking home, any day.” And Cliff and I did not disagree.

On occasion we did have to go home, though, for chores and supper if for nothing else. And during those hours our fortress was left unguarded, naked to our enemies in the valley below. So in time the inevitable happened. On the fourth or fifth night we came back from supper—which Jason insisted that we eat at home—and found the treehouse a shambles, with the evergreen walls knocked down and our binoculars broken and Kate’s logbook torn into little pieces and the floorboards covered with chalk graffiti, including a number of crude drawings illustrating such lines as
the Kendals suck
and
Kaits a hore
and the ubiquitous
fuck you
scrawled in a half-dozen different places.

We stayed on through the night anyway, honing our anger and making plans for the coming days of sweet revenge. In the morning we went home and did our chores and then we returned to repair the treehouse, bringing it back as closely as we could to its original state, which meant scrubbing the floor as well as having Kate make up a new logbook from memory. That night and the next morning, despite Jason’s orders, only one of us at a time left the treehouse for home.

It was a full two days later before we made our move against the Regans (who somehow weren’t Nazis anymore—the designation just didn’t seem pejorative enough). Cliff had led us around to the other side of the farmyard, to a position that placed the Regans’ barn between us and their house, which allowed us to sneak up on Joey without him or anyone else in the family seeing us. There was a moment when he could have yelled, but he apparently felt that he did not have much to fear from us and even got halfway through a greeting of sorts before Cliff and I jumped him. I put a neck hold on him to keep him from calling for help and we wrestled him down onto the slimy floor of the milking shed, where Cliff and Kate proceeded to tie him up with baling twine.

Our original plan had been to kidnap him for ransom (the logistics of which we hadn’t worked out yet) but there in the barn, already panting and filthy, we realized that there had to be an easier way. And Kate quickly came up with it. She stuffed Joey’s mouth with an old grease rag and then had us drag him into the “slop trench” behind the cows. And there we held him—until one of the Regans’ Holsteins did its inevitable thing, all over poor writhing Joey. Thereupon we fled, giggling and jumping and slapping each other like Rose Bowl victors—Kate and I anyway. As for Cliff, even before we reached the treehouse he was beginning to feel bad about what we had done.

“We went too far,” he said. “Now there’s gonna be war.”

Kate looked at him as if he had lost his sense. “Well of course, dummy—that’s the whole idea. What good is a fort without a war?”

I don’t think Cliff ever did see the logic in that, but at the same time he was not about to run out on us, for that would have been even more alien to his nature than the attack on Joey Regan had been. Now though we had to worry not only about Joey but Little Tim and possibly the mother and father as well, for even Kate and I were not unaware how far we had gone, how grossly we had overstepped the bounds of normal kid warfare. To my surprise I soon learned that Kate was planning yet another giant leap in the same direction. While Cliff glumly sat looking out toward the Regan place, waiting for their attack, Kate whispered to me to run to the barn and get a saw and hammer, but not to let Cliff know I had them when I returned.

“Hide them in the bushes,” she said. “They’re our secret weapon.”

As was my custom, I did what she said and when I climbed back into the treehouse later, winded and sweating, Cliff gave me a searching look.

“I thought you went home for chores,” he said.

I looked to Kate for an answer.

“That ain’t why he left,” she offered. “He chickened out. But then he changed his mind and came back—right, Greg?”

I was nodding.

Cliff looked disgusted. “You really did? You really chickened out?”

“For just a minute or so.”

“God almighty.” He seemed more puzzled than disgusted. “Least you could’ve done the chores while you were home. You know what time it is?”

“No.”

“Well, one of us has to go,” he said. “Jason’ll hit the roof if the cows aren’t milked—you know that.”

“You go,” Kate said to him. “We’ll be all right here.”

But Cliff would not hear of it. How were the two of us going to stand up to Little Tim
and
Joey, he wanted to know. Tim was bigger than both of us put together, and Joey was going to be so mad he would probably kill the two of us alone, without his big brother’s help. So Cliff had to stay. He had no choice.

Kate gave him an indulgent smile. “Well, we’re not going to stay up here in the freaking fort, you know. You don’t think we’re that dumb, do you? We’ll just lay back in the trees and watch the house. If they head this way, we’ll scram for home. I just want to see what they do.”

Cliff was able to accept that. Warning us to stay out of sight, he finally climbed down and headed for home. And Kate gleefully laid out her plan, which was simplicity itself. All it required was that we pull a few nails and saw through the two-by-fours supporting the platform—saw through them
except
for about a quarter of an inch—which in effect turned the treehouse into a huge trap door. Whichever Regan climbed onto it first would most likely be the first to hit the ground—an eventuality that excited Kate and me so much that it seemed one of us or the other was always crawling away to pee.

Our vantage point was from behind some evergreens on a rocky ridge about fifty yards from the treehouse, and there we stayed through the rest of that morning and on into the afternoon, waiting for the Regans to show. When Cliff came back after chores, we told him to stay with us on the ground, away from the treehouse, just in case old man Regan decided to accompany his boys on their inevitable quest for Kendall blood. And ironically that is exactly what happened, at about three in the afternoon, with the air so still and hot that even the flies were not budging from the shade. Little Tim was leading the way and looking very eager to beat up on someone and reclaim the family’s honor. Next in line came Joey, with a reluctant, hang-dog look, as if he had been marked forever by the moist olive splatter of the cows. The old man (who was probably only thirty at the time) brought up the rear, carrying nothing less than a double-barrel twelve-gauge shotgun, which had the immediate effect of drying my mouth at the same time it dampened my jockey shorts.

“Don’t move,” Kate whispered to us. “Wait till the crash. Then we run.”

“What crash?” Cliff looked from Kate to me.

I shrugged. “Don’t ask me.”

As the Regans reached the tree, the old man gestured with his gun and Little Tim started up, using the rope to reach the first rungs of the ladder. Then he scrambled up into the treehouse and stood there peering down over the top of the evergreen walls at his father and little brother.

“They ain’t here, them bastids!” he said, as he began to kick at the walls, knocking down the uprights and spilling evergreen boughs. And it was then one of the two-by-fours gave way, with a sound like the bark of a starter pistol. And indeed the sound did signal the beginning of a race of sorts—floorboards and braces and Little Tim all speeding toward the ground thirty feet below. Admirably, Tim did not even yell as he plummeted down upon his father and Joey, who stood covering their heads against this sudden rain of boards and boughs and family. That was enough even for Kate.