My father stared at his digital watch, its settings on “stopwatch” as it counted the seconds, and even the more rapid milliseconds. Whatever numbers he was waiting for appeared, and he lifted the top of the grill, releasing a pillar of smoke that cleared to reveal the drumsticks and chicken breasts he was cooking. I moved to throw the brown leaves that I had been collecting into the ash catcher. I watched, transfixed, as their edges glowed, and they turned to dust from one touch of the glowing red embers. It was dangerous, but dad wanted me to learn how to respect fire. I had managed, so far, not to be burned. When I ran out of brown leaves, I used green ones, which took longer to shrivel and gave off thicker smoke. But the transition from green to ash, then to nothing, still fascinated me.
The phone rang inside the kitchen. I was not old enough to answer, so it was nothing more than background noise to me, adding to the sound of bird chirps, lawn mowers, and HVAC units that hummed in our neighbor’s, the Blumfields’, backyard—they insisted on AC even on mild evenings like this one, when my parents would open the windows so that breezes could waft through the screens.
My mother came out onto the deck. “The Whitlocks just finished the tree house that Jim had built for Kent and Susan. Danny, why don’t you go over and see it?”
My father cautioned me to be careful as I bounded down the steps of the deck. I was still small enough that I could have slipped and fallen through them, as they did not have backing like inside-steps, but I managed and ran around the corner of the house, looked in both directions, crossed the cul-de-sac, and made my way between two parked pickup trucks. I was too young to read the company lettering painted on their sides, but by the size of the tools and wood scraps in the truck beds, I knew the tree house had to be huge. The side yard was marked with piles of sawdust and trails of crushed grass, which I followed around back.
My eyes were fixed upwards as I rounded the house. Within the trees of the Whitlocks’ backyard a huge tree house waited—more like a tree palace to me. Its shape was reminiscent of the pictures I had seen of the fire-watch towers that park rangers used to scan the forest canopy for signs of smoke. This was no ramshackle clubhouse like the other neighborhood tree houses. It was a true house, with a shingled roof, a hinged trapdoor, and shuttered windows.
“Look who’s here,” Linda Whitlock said, turning her attention from her children, Kent and Susan, who were looking down from the windows of the tree house. I was too distracted to be polite and acknowledge her. Instead I stared at Susan, who was waving at me.
I had one older brother, Rick, but Kent and Susan felt like siblings too. Their mother, Linda, was more of an aunt to me than neighbor. Once I had fallen face first from my bike onto my driveway. My nose was broken, and I was blinded by my own blood. Linda had been across the street. She was wearing a white dress and had been about to leave for a formal dinner with her husband Jim. She was watching Susan and Kent play HORSE at their new basketball hoop while she waited for Jim to finish a business call. After I fell, I groped around on the ground screaming, my disorientation and confusion only ending when Linda lifted me, pulled me to her chest, and carried me inside, whispering, “It will be okay. It’s all okay.”
I opened my eyes in the bathroom, where Linda and my mother were wiping the blood from my face and applying pressure to my nose. Once I could see, I noticed all the scarlet red tissues littering the floor. My Sesame Street shirt was wet with blood. I looked up to see Linda leaning close to me. The bodice of her dress was red and stuck to her frame the way material does when it is soaking wet. I started to hiccup with fresh cries, afraid I would be blamed for ruining the dress. Linda ran her hand through my hair and said, “It’s okay, Danny. It doesn’t matter.”
But my mother paused. “Linda, I’m so sorry. We’ll pay—”
“You will not.”
“You’ll be late for your dinner.”
Linda scoffed. “We’re already late. I’ll be changed and ready to go before Jim even gets off the phone.”
That was a year ago and hardly on my mind as I moved beneath the tree house to find the entrance. I stumbled over a plywood scrap as I walked, since all my attention was turned upward. The carpenters were collecting their tools. Jim Whitlock, his polished bald head reflecting the sunlight through the cloud of cigar smoke enveloping him, was talking to the foreman. Jim did not notice me. He usually didn’t.
“Come on up, Danny,” Susan said. She lowered a rope ladder down to me, but after one step I was too terrified to climb its wiggling struts. Linda lifted me up through the trapdoor instead, guiding me into Susan’s waiting hands. I clutched at the sides until my feet were safely on the floor.
Susan and Kent competed to show me the best features of the tree house. Jim had arranged for a telescope, a zip line, skylights, and even secret compartments. As Susan lifted me up to a window I waved to Jim, but he still didn’t wave back. I wondered if I had done something to make him angry.
“Kent, my tummy hurts,” I said, my arms folded across my stomach. I had spent the night at the Whitlocks’ while my parents were at the hospital with Rick, who had fallen during basketball practice and broken his arm. For breakfast I had eaten my first bowl of Honeycombs. More accustomed to the low-sugar, organic cereals my mother insisted on serving, the Honeycombs were not sitting well with me.
Jim walked past carrying his briefcase. “Come on, Danny. Be a man,” he said.
I tried. I wasn’t. My stomach continued to hurt. I remember feeling inadequate. I looked to Kent for reassurance, but he had turned on the television. Once Jim was gone, I asked, “Kent, can we go to the tree house?”
“Sure.” He said it so fast, I wondered if he had really been paying attention to the TV at all.
“The Whitlocks found a possum in their downstairs closet,” my mother said in the front seat of the car one night.
“How did it get there?” my father asked, his hands resting on the wheel.
“One of the interior decorators left the sliding glass door in the basement open.”
“Mom, why don’t we have our basement finished?”
“We don’t need to. We have enough room.”
“So do the Whitlocks,” my father said. I didn’t understand my father’s tone. It sounded critical. Jim had told me that getting a basement finished was a good thing. He was going to have a pool table and a bar down there.
After a soccer game, my family pulled into our cul-de-sac. A brand new red Jaguar waited in the Whitlocks’ driveway. I walked over to take a closer look. I liked the silver cat on the hood and leaned in for a closer look, but Jim appeared from the garage with his bag of golf clubs slung over his shoulder. “Don’t touch that, Danny boy.” He was chomping on one of his unlit cigars. I noticed Linda at the doorway leading into the kitchen, but she said nothing to me and instead slammed the door after Jim.
The next week, a rival blue Mercedes appeared in the Whitlocks’ driveway. My parents took furtive looks at it and spoke to one another in low voices, which always meant that something was upsetting them, something they did not think they needed to share with me. I had to eavesdrop to find the answers.
I knew “adult” subjects were always broached after I want to bed. So one night, I crept down the hallway, past my brother’s bedroom where he was already asleep, and moved one step at a time down our staircase to listen to my parents talk. They sat in the living room, which was not far from the bottom of the steps. I listened, holding onto the banister, ready to bolt upstairs if one of them turned around.
“Jim bought that Jag without talking to Linda about it first,” my mother said.
“So he bought the Mercedes to appease her?”
“No, Linda bought it to get even with him. He’s making her take it back.”
Silence followed. I pressed my face up against the banister to try to get a view of their expressions. The wood was cold and smooth against my face.
“It’s probably pretty restless in that house tonight,” Dad said.
I was walking home from school alongside a neighbor’s fence. It had been fashioned to mimic a rustic, split-rail fence you might find on a farm, miles away from the suburbs. I was pretending there were actually dairy cows and horses on the other side. The fence came to an end at the Whitlocks’ yard. I heard voices in the back, behind the house. I put down my backpack on the front lawn and wandered around on the flagstone walkway. Kent and one of his new friends from junior high school, Greg, were in the woods at the base of the tree house.
“Hey, Danny.” Kent acknowledged me then turned back to his work, pulling something through the underbrush. It was a twisted cable of some kind that snagged and ripped at the leaves of the saplings along the ground.
“What are you guys doing?” I asked, still standing on the outside of the woods, uninvited.
“Fortifying the tree house so no one can get to it,” Kent’s friend Greg said from the tree house. I didn’t like his voice. It had just a hint of cruelty in it that I recognized from the bullies who teased the kids with learning disabilities, the ones in special classes, at school.
“What’s that wire?” I asked, pointing to the cable Kent was stringing around the perimeter of the tree house.
“Barbed wire.”
“That stuff is dangerous.”
“Not for older people,” Kent said.
“Can I help?”
“No, you’re too little.”
I stood quiet for a moment, watching Kent yank the wire to the height he wanted. When it was about level with my neck, I asked, “Kent, if it doesn’t hurt older people, then how are you going to keep them out?”
Kent stopped and let out an exasperated sigh.
“I think I hear your mother calling, Danny.”
She wasn’t. She wasn’t even home, but I left anyway.
Susan was away at college, Kent was an upperclassman in high school, and I was a sixth grader when Jim finally asked Linda for a divorce. The phone rang during dinner, and my mother decided to take the call in the other room. Dad, Rick, and I ate quietly, trying to listen. The loudest sound among us was the breaking of rolls and the scratching of forks on our plates. Mom’s food was cold by the time she returned.
“That was Linda,” she said. “Jim just told her that he wants a divorce. They told Kent, and he locked himself in his room. They haven’t told Susan yet. Linda thinks there is another woman, because Jim kept saying he was sure they both would meet ‘other people’ quickly.”
My mother wasn’t hungry after that. When Rick and I cleaned up, I wrapped her plate in foil in case she woke during the night hungry, but by then it did not look very appetizing. The fat on the chicken had hardened into white lumps and a film had formed on the gravy. I didn’t know how she would ever be able to eat it. It looked less like dinner and more like a mess. I threw it away.
Kent left for college the next year, leaving Linda to sell the house alone. I never saw Jim again. From my window I could see all the people that came to look at the house. I could also see Linda wiping her eyes as she closed the curtains in her room at night.
Eventually, a SOLD sign went up in the front yard. I kept the grass mowed for Linda, free of charge. We all waved good-bye as she drove away in her compact car, loaded with boxes and suitcases. She and my mother remained best friends, and we saw her regularly, but Kent and Susan did not come back into town from school very often.
I quickly got used to the Whitlocks’ house as the Durrands’ house. They were one of the first black families in the neighborhood. I remember my mother saying something about hoping they felt welcome. The Durrands and my parents actually became pretty good friends. Their oldest son, Andre, became a good friend of mine as well. We were in some of the same classes at school, and both of us made the varsity soccer team. After our games, we would sit on his back porch with cold water and ice packs, resting our feet on soccer balls. The tree house loomed at us from the overgrown woods. Birds would not land on it, but occasionally a squirrel would climb up a tree, jump on the house, scamper across the shingles, maybe look inside, then—uninterested—continue up the trunk of the tree that ran floor-to-ceiling through the house. One Saturday, Andre’s mother came outside after getting a phone call from one of the neighbors.
“Andre, the Hensons found a possum in their garage,” she said laughing.
“That’s what they get for keeping that door open all the time,” Andre said.
“I know, that’s what I told them,” she said.
“The Whitlocks found a possum in their closet once,” I said after she had gone back inside.
“No, really? Which one?”
“It was the one downstairs. It came in when they were having the basement finished.”
“Did it die down there?”
“I actually don’t know.’
Andre stretched his hamstring and rotated his foot. His shin pads sat, discarded and grass-stained, on the ground next to him. My shirt and shorts had similar stains, as well as a rust colored one where blood had dried. Andre looked up at the tree house.
“We have to take down the tree house, you know.”
I sat up.
“No. Why?”
“It’s falling apart. Half the roof is caved in, and the tree it was built around has grown so much that the floor is buckling and the shingles splitting.”
“But it’s cool. We could fix it up.”
“Or die trying. I don’t know if black people do tree houses, anyway.”
I was not sure what to say to that, so I just stayed silent. Andre continued, “My mom will pay us to take it down. It will probably take a day or so. We can do it this summer, when school is out. You want to help?”
“I don’t know.”
Andre and I were both sweating from working in the heat, but we did not dare remove our long-sleeved shirts or thick work trousers. They were our protection against the rusted nails and brown recluse spiders that were all over the tree house. Andre and I had succeeded in tearing most of the structure down; only the platform that had been the floor remained. The scraps made a jagged, termite-infested pile that both of us were afraid to touch unless at the end of a rake. We took turns knocking out the four diagonal supports that held the platform up to the tree. When only one remained, Andre swung his sledgehammer at it. The beam shook but didn’t give.
“Your turn,” he said, leaning on the handle of his hammer.
I looked at the last support. The other three lay broken on the ground. A millipede crawled in and then out of a rotted hole in a plank of wood. I tapped a fungus-covered shingle on the ground with the end of my own sledgehammer. A rusty nail threatened my foot. I started to lift my hammer, but couldn’t.
“I’m too tired. You do it.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I’ll just stand over here.”
Andre gathered his strength and swung the sledge. I listened as the monstrosity fell but never lifted my eyes from my feet. Andre was standing over the wreckage, posing like John Henry.
“Dan and Andre, one. Tree house, zero,” he declared.
“Yep, I guess.”
“We’ll pick up the scraps tomorrow. My little brother and his friends want to scrimmage before it gets too dark.”
“I don’t know if I can.”
“We’ll go easy on them.”
“They would have to go easy on me. I’m pretty tired. I should just go home.”
“Aw, man.”
“Sorry.”
“Well, come on, we’ll take the tools in.”
We picked up our weapons of demolition—hammers, saws, and crowbars—and carried them off to put away in the garage. I looked back at the ruins of the dark and moldy tree house one last time. It looked crumpled and expired, like a smashed jack-o-lantern.