Townie (10 page)

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 elevator. 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.

TO GET
up into the hut, you’d sit on a short section of two-by-four, the rope it was tied to between your legs, and you’d pull on the other rope hanging a foot away, the pulleys creaking as you rose up and up till the hut’s floor was at your chest and you’d keep one hand gripping the rope, then reach out with the other and grab the inside jamb of the door, lift your knee onto the platform, then let go of the rope and hear the whistle of it through the pulleys as your two-by-four seat fell to the ground and you were inside. When all three of us were up, one of us would lean out and grip the rope and pull both ends and the seat up and nobody could get in unless he was a monkey.

But what was there to do up there? Soon it was fall, then early winter, and it was cold in the hut, and late at night we ran up and down Columbia Park stealing welcome mats from every front or side porch, our faces lit up under the exterior lights, and we hauled the mats back, tossing them one at a time up into the hut, then tacking them to the inside walls and ceiling till you couldn’t see the paneling anymore. We found an orange electric cord in the garage and ran it down the trunk and along the fence to our house where Jeb pulled it through a crack in the bulkhead doors and plugged it into a socket near the washer.

Down on Seventh Avenue, on top of the trash pile in the dumpster, was an electric heater, a brown metal box, half of its safety grille kicked in but the coils looking new and untouched.

“Give me ten fingers.” Cleary put both hands on the steel lip of the dumpster. He kept glancing back at the apartment houses behind us, mainly the one with the rent collectors, but there were no motorcycles out front and no music playing. Three or four times a year, the collectors went on drug runs down south somewhere. Kids talked about it at the bus stop, what was coming up here from New York and New Jersey and Florida. The mud beneath us was frozen, and from somewhere deep inside the apartments a baby cried. I squatted and knitted my fingers together and Cleary put his cold sneakered foot into them and pushed off into the trash.

NOW THE
hut was warm. We’d hung a wool blanket over the doorway, and the orange glow of the exposed heater coils gave off almost enough light but not quite. Soon we had a small lamp up there, its shade scorched in spots, and Cleary got hold of a radio too. It was old and covered with dried paint splatter, but if we kept it in the corner facing southeast, it got pretty good FM stations down in Boston, and every time we were up there it’d be playing Led Zeppelin or Aerosmith or the Stones, though sometimes it was just DJ talk and we’d switch it off.

Girls were coming up now. Girls who were strong enough to pull themselves up our rope elevator. Some of these were from Cleary’s alley, and they were twelve or thirteen and wore tight hip-huggers and smoked Marlboros or Kools and swore a lot. Others came from a few streets over. One was the little sister of Ricky J., one of the rent collectors who’d thrown us out of the pot party and beaten the shit out of Cleary. She was short and thin and wore so much black eyeliner she looked like some kind of night rodent. Cleary bragged to us once that she liked to give blow jobs and that she swallowed, too. Right off she seemed to like Jeb, his wild hair, the soft brown fuzz on his cheeks and chin, his blue eyes and sweet smile.

I had sort of a girlfriend now and while Jeb and Cleary and their girls made out in the hut, I was starting to spend my afternoons at Rosie P.’s house a few blocks west and closer to the highway.

Rosie was black and quiet. She had a neat afro and a pretty face, and she wore small gold earrings like a woman. We’d met months before when we were both thirteen, at a party up in the woods at Round Pond, a Saturday night and thirty or forty kids drinking around a fire, passing joints, listening to the Alice Cooper blaring from the speakers of a Camaro somebody had driven down the trail to the clearing. I was standing next to Rosie, our backs to the dark water, and she seemed shy and kind. I offered her one of the Schlitz Tall Boys we’d brought. Cleary had stolen money from his mother’s purse and we waited outside a liquor store on Cedar Street for over an hour till somebody bought some for us, a big Dominican man in a suit jacket, his Monte Carlo parked half on the sidewalk, its engine still running.

Rosie smiled and took the beer. Her older sister Laila was there too, laughing at something Cleary was saying or doing and she kept eyeing my brother.

Usually these parties got broken up by the police. From across the water, one or two cruiser spotlights would shine in our direction, lighting up the trees and casting their shadows across our faces. Then there’d be flashlights, their light paths jerking up and down as cops on foot came for us, and we’d start running.

But this night, somebody threw leafy branches on the fire and they began to smoke up right away. Someone else yelled, “That’s poison
sumac,
asshole!” A few began coughing, then a few more, then the owner of the Camaro revved his engine and headed back up the trail, his headlight path rising and falling with each dip and rut, and Jeb and Cleary and I ended up at Rosie and Laila’s house.

It was a freshly painted clapboard two-story with a small green lawn in front on a street with other houses just like it. Inside, the rooms were as clean as Cleary’s, no dust or clutter anywhere, pillows set on the sofa, a bowl of apples on the small kitchen table, the hardwood floors gleaming under the lamplight.

Laila and Rosie were being raised alone by their mother who was working two jobs, one in an office, the other in a restaurant. In the six months I was with her daughter, I never met her mother or even saw her.

I don’t know whose idea it was for the five of us to go up to the girls’ bedroom, or if it was Rosie or Laila who lit the candles, or where we got the bottle of wine we began to pass around, Jeb and Laila sitting at the foot of the bed, Cleary leaning against the bureau, Rosie and me sitting side by side up near the pillows. The record player was on, Bill Withers singing “Lean On Me,” and Rosie’s tongue was in my mouth and we kissed a long time. Once I looked up and Laila was standing between Jeb and Cleary, kissing one, then the other, her hand rubbing Cleary’s crotch.

After a while the three of them were gone, and Rosie and I stretched out on the bed on top of her covers. I was thirteen and had touched breasts before, a girl when I was eleven and she was twelve, and it was like holding a soft-boiled egg gently so it wouldn’t break. Rosie let me touch hers that way under her shirt and we never stopped kissing and soon her jeans were unsnapped and unzipped and I was rubbing her pubic hair, so much more than I had, and I kept expecting there to be some kind of hole there, that if I kept rubbing, it would be like finding a button that would open her secret compartment. She seemed to like what I was doing, but I began to wonder if something was wrong with her, if some girls just didn’t have holes and couldn’t have babies. Or maybe I couldn’t find it because she was a virgin, and it wasn’t there yet.

This went on for a long time, maybe half an hour, my wrist burning so I had to switch hands. Then Rosie arched her back slightly and my fingers slid lower and into the warm, slippery answer to all I’d been asking myself, my lips never leaving hers, this girl I’d just met.

A WEEK
later we did it on the floor of her bedroom while up on the bed Laila made out with Jeb or Cleary or Sal M., a handsome slow Italian kid who lived close by. The room was dark, but I remember a nightlight plugged in near the bureau. It was shaped like a seashell and it gave off a dim white light over Rosie’s pretty face, her eyes closed, then mine too as something happened to me that had never happened to me, this gathering and gathering in the very center of my body that seemed to pause, then pulse and pulse though it was like I was falling and I knew something was leaving me and going into her.

A few days later, on a bright afternoon lying clothed on her mother’s made bed, she told me that had been her first time.

“Me too.”

“You know what my sister says?”

“What?”

“No protection, no affection.”

She straightened her legs and reached into her front jeans pocket and pulled out a small plastic package. She handed it to me. On the front was the silhouette of a man and woman facing each other, sunset colors behind them. Rosie and I looked at each other, then started kissing, and I learned how to put that thing on and we did it on her mother’s bed.

This is all we ever did. We never ate a meal together or got dropped off at a movie, or even went walking. And she only came over to my house a few times. Mom would be asleep on the wicker couch or the floor or maybe in her room reading a book, and Rosie and I would go to mine.

Laila had done it with Jeb and Cleary, and probably Sal M., but she was older than we were, almost seventeen, and soon enough she had a boyfriend, a white basketball player who’d pick her up in his black Mustang and they’d roar down the street and away. By now Jeb and Cleary had forgotten her and were back up in the tree hut with some of the neighborhood girls. And maybe what happened next came because Ricky J.’s little sister told someone what she’d been doing up there and with whom, told Ricky and her older brother Tommy, too.