Again, this is no hero you’re talking to.
On our way back toward the street, back into the world, Jason stopped to dump over a bowl of antifreeze that had been placed near their garage. We watched it stain the hot asphalt green.
“I just saved that dog’s life,” Jason said. “Where’s my parade?”
I later stood with Jason Landry in the woods, all in this same year, maybe this same day. Who knows? My memories of the neighborhood keep no calendar but one: before Lindy’s rape and after, and this was before. That I can tell you.
We had been exploring, Jason and I, cutting trails through the brush with machetes and trying to find a good place to build a tree house. We wanted it to be a sturdy place like a fort, we decided, a place we could hole up in if there was ever an invasion against the neighborhood. We talked about finding a tree so thick that we could bore a tunnel right through its middle and into the ground so that, if the fort was ever surrounded, we could escape and pop up on the opposite side of our unsuspecting foes. In the meantime, we agreed to stock up on things like spears and Coca-Colas and bows and arrows. We should make sure the fort had windows to shoot out of, we said. Maybe dig us a moat.
This was just boy talk, the American standard.
I’d had conversations like this with Randy as well. We’d tromped the woods like scouts do. But with Jason, the tenor of the conversation was different. When he talked about Russians falling from the skies, or packs of rabid wolves descending on us from the forest, you got the sense that Jason was serious, and prepared for their inevitable appearance.
So, when Jason sized up a tree, it was technical. He would pick at the bark of it, stomp his foot on the ground as if listening for something, and then construct the fort in his head like some primitive engineer. His eyes would scamper up the trunk where a ladder should be. He would lay 2×4s out like a deck. He’d envision impenetrable walls with long slits to fire weapons from and, when he was finished, you could almost see him all alone in his safe house, rain falling on the tin roof overhead. Then, after he was satisfied, and the place fully built in his mind, Jason would take the stance of a sniper. He’d hold an invisible bow in his hand and pull back the arrow and you could watch his eyes trace a figure in the yard below him, a large and lumbering creature that Jason had waited all this time to face.
“That’s right,” he would whisper. “Just a little bit closer.”
And with his left eye closed, his body carefully positioned in his fort, Jason would not miss.
He made me swear this location to secrecy.
“What about Randy?” I said. “He’ll want to know.”
“Is he any good with weapons?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Tell him if you want,” Jason said. “But if anyone tells my dad, I’ll kill them.”
“What about Lindy?” I asked him.
“Good point,” he said. “I guess we will need someone to repopulate the world.”
“Right,” I said. “She’s not like that.”
Jason laughed and tore a big chunk of bark off the tree to mark the fort’s location.
“What?” he said. “You like that slut?”
“Don’t call her that,” I said.
Jason laughed again, genuine and deep, as if truly tickled.
“Come on,” he said. “I want to show you something.”
So, sweaty and freckled with bites, we walked back through the woods to his house.
A piece of the puzzle about to connect.