Once outside, we traced the dark fences of my enormous backyard like burglars in the shadows. I was familiar with this area, as it is where much of my life had taken place: romps with the neighborhood kids, football with Randy, the first time I ever saw Tyler Bannister smoke a joint, and the first time I walked from this place to Lindy’s water oak. I knew all the frog sounds, the occasional rustling of branches by squirrels or birds of prey, and had seen the random opossum or coon scuttling toward our garbage cans for dinner. But as soon as we ventured past the reach of my backyard floodlights, I felt transported. I no longer recognized anything I saw, and I panicked. Everything my mom had said about the Landrys came roaring back, and I worried where he was taking me. Part of me wondered if I would arrive at some pagan circle to find Lindy bound and gagged, all of the neighbors chanting around her—Randy and Artsy Julie, the Kern boys—each a part of some sinister reality I had been sheltered from. Bonfires, nooses, rituals: all of human life from any era of history, I imagined, is possible in the dark Louisiana woods.
We picked up the pace as we sloped down a hill and were jogging by the time we left my property. We crashed through a screen of weed trees and flimsy saplings and were soon romping past oaks and river birch with trunks the size of our own chests. I could feel my arms and face being cut by thin branches and had no idea what I was doing or why we were running or why I had made any of the decisions I had made in my life. So I concentrated only on the running itself. I counted my footfalls and enjoyed the deep breaths. I leapt over small and moonlit obstacles like roots and limbs and felt suddenly and without warning like I did when I was a child and, in that feeling, I understood that it was a terrible thing that events had taken place in our lives to make it appear as if Jason and I or any of the kids on Piney Creek Road could ever be anything but children.
We splashed through slow-moving rivulets of water that made their way to a larger canal that Jason crossed by walking over a fallen tree. I stopped at the upturned roots of the tree, breathing heavy, and could see him only in silhouette, balancing himself with the box of Oatmeal Creme Pies in one hand. When he got to the other side, he turned around and looked at me. “Get your hand out of your pants and come on,” he said. “It’s not far.”
I walked that fallen tree as if over a canyon and I could not see the bottom. I knew in my heart it wasn’t deep, yet all the playful joy I had felt just moments ago was replaced by childish fear. The oak branches beneath the moon were now monster arms, a curved shadow before me a snake, the canal below an abyss. Although I understood that it was likely just mud and bracken and faded Coke cans and buried arrowheads a few feet below me, all like a wonderful novelty in the daylight, this was not daylight.
When I reached the other side of the canal, Jason was gone. I heard him making owl noises up ahead, and I followed what looked like a trail. As the path narrowed and the vegetation thickened, my baggy jeans got stuck on a series of briars. I scratched up my forearms pulling them loose and fell into the clearing where Jason had made his home. He stood at the base of an oak tree and looked down at me. In one hand he held a white bedsheet. In the other, the large Rambo knife he had shown me in his room nearly three years before. It had a compass on the hilt, an empty handle to stash matches and fishing line, and both a sharp and serrated edge for cutting and sawing, perhaps gutting. He was grinning like a kid.
“Jesus,” he said, and began cutting the sheet into strips. “What did you do, stop to jack off a couple of times?”
I got up and surveyed the area, which was lit dimly by a fading clamp light Jason had hooked to a car battery. The place looked like a hoarder’s paradise, like a beach after a storm. I saw buckets, bottles, dirty towels, stacks of lumber, Playboy magazines, fishing poles, lawn equipment, chairs, and a bicycle. Then I saw more peculiar things like a shovel, a long-poled net to clean swimming pools, and a remote-control car, all made the more peculiar because they were mine. I also recognized Randy’s tackle box, noticed a pair of shears with the name “Kern” on the handle, and saw a miniature trampoline that Artsy Julie used to jump on. The webbing of the trampoline was broken and most of the springs had been removed, and so Jason Landry, I understood, like the opossums and coons, had been visiting our trash while we slept. He had pilfered our open garages and carports, taken advantage of our presumed safety, and hauled away cartloads of our forgettables in the night. Yet I saw no blatant purpose to the items he’d chosen. A box of chlorine pellets, a rusty watering can, a bag of golf clubs. I walked around as if at a yard sale. And then, in the middle of this clearing, I saw Jason’s shanty home in the branches.
“Not too bad, huh?” he said. “Is that how you pictured it?”
That this was the same tree Jason and I scouted those years ago uncorked a new sadness in me. The thousands of hours I had spent since that time falling in and out of things like love and mourning, Jason had likely spent by himself in these woods, bringing our childish vision to haphazard fruition. I walked around the base of the tree and studied it. Cradled between two of the strongest-looking branches, about ten feet off the ground, was a rickety shelter. It had plywood walls and a slanted wooden floor and was held together by nails, duct tape, and rope. It looked like it could fall at any moment. The roof was made of blue tarpaulin and sagged with enough stagnant rainwater to birth generations of mosquitoes. On each wall, crude circles had been cut through the plywood with hand tools and Jason had spray-painted phrases like “Fuck All!” and “No Survivors!” beneath them. Yet I didn’t see a ladder leading up to it. I didn’t even see an entrance.
“How do you get up there?” I asked.
Jason was now kneeling in the dirt, a small flashlight tucked beneath his arm, twisting the strips of bedsheet he had cut into what looked like small sections of rope with a knot on each end. He kept referring to a black book on the ground next to him, and in his diligence it was easy to imagine Jason earning a living one day, having a productive life in suburban America. But this would never happen.
“You’ve got to be skinny,” he said. “And you’ve got to be able to climb. It’s fat-ass-proof.”
I walked beneath the fort and looked up. There was a space in the floor near the trunk, barely a foot wide. As thin as I was, I’d have to hold my breath to get through. And on the trunk itself, I could see where the bark had been scored, maybe knocked a couple times with a hatchet, and I fit one of my hands into the grooves. Jason opened up a box sitting next to him. It was full of brown glass bottles, the same kind Old Man Casemore used to bring to our Fourth of July parties, the kind that he would fill with home-brewed stuff like strawberry-and molasses-flavored beer, and it felt to me a strange breach of etiquette for Jason to steal from someone so old and benevolent. I suppose I was na?ve in this way. I watched Jason carefully remove the bottles, one by one, and drop a piece of handmade rope into their mouths.
“They don’t teach you how to do this in your bullshit high school, do they?” Jason said.
“How to do what?” I asked, but he didn’t answer me.
I looked up at the fort.
“Mind if I go up there?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said. “Just don’t whack off all over the place.”
I put my hands and feet in the trunk’s hatching and made my way up to the fort. It wasn’t easy, as this particular tree was not meant to be climbed. It didn’t offer itself up in the way the knotty water oak by Lindy’s driveway did and, because of this, I understood that Jason had chosen well. Plus, I was a different guy now than the kid who used to own these trees back in the days of moss, and the act of climbing a new tree felt as unnatural to me as anything I’d ever done. My shoes kept slipping out of the grooves. My hands hurt. A chain on my rock-and-roll jeans got stuck on a nub in the bark, and by the time I was able to grab hold of the opening in the floor and pull myself through it, I was breathing hard and sweating.
I sat in the fort with my feet dangling out of the opening and was immediately overcome by the heat of the place. It was so stifling and focused that it made me forget why I had come out there. I felt a quick desire to take off my shirt and go crazy in the old woods, to wipe my face with mud, to pour water all over my head. I began to have truly outlandish thoughts and felt nauseated and confused until I realized what was causing it all—the overwhelming smell of gasoline. I picked up a flashlight sitting by the entrance and looked around the dark and spare fort. I saw a pillow and yellowed blanket on the floor. In one of the corners, I saw stacks of instructional and pornographic magazines like Popular Mechanics and Hustler. Next to those, nearly half a dozen dismantled flashlights. And there, lining the far wall, a series of oil cartons and gasoline cans. The cans were gallon-sized, with ribbed spouts, striped red and yellow and made of metal in those days. I recognized them immediately, as I had seen every inhabitant of our block lugging them around at some point in my youth. The oil was primarily the two-stroke type, used for small engines, and the cardboard cartons they were sold in were already soiled and greasy near their mouths. I thought back to the last time I had heard a lawn mower in the neighborhood, the last time I’d heard a leaf blower. How could they run, I wondered, when all of the fuel of Piney Creek Road had been stolen? What did our neighborhood even look like anymore? How far had we let it go?
I noticed our own gas can along the wall as well. It was dented and scratched along its side from where I had accidentally dropped it, years ago, while bringing it out to my dad as he mowed the largest part of our property. The cap had popped off when it hit the ground and quickly spilled enough gas to soak and eventually kill a large swath of grass by the driveway. I was young, maybe eight years old, and upset with myself. I just stood around, watching the gas pour out. My dad saw me standing there and got off his riding mower to approach me. He put his hand on the back of my neck as we watched the last bit of it soak into the ground and he said, Now, if we only had some salt, we could finish the whole yard off. He was trying to be kind, but I was inconsolable. Later that night, after a few drinks from a Styrofoam cup, he came into my room and stood in the doorway as I flipped through some comics. You’re going to have a hard time in life if you let every little mistake bother you, he said. Life is good, son. Enjoy it.
Okay, I said.
He was gone two years later. And it is hard for me not to wonder what he had already done at that point, when he told me how good life was. Was he already cheating on us? Was he with other women before Laura? Was he waiting until we all went to bed to make some clandestine phone call? If so, then did he mean that the good life, the life like he was living, was a life without virtue? Was that his advice? Or, as I like to think now, whenever we are together as men, was he just being honest? Was he possibly still in love with our family alone, but then life changed without his permission? I mean, was he saying that we should enjoy what we have because nobody, not even a person in love, knows what’s coming? What was he telling me? What was I learning?
Down below, Jason asked if I could pass him the gas cans.
I’d almost forgotten where I was.
“Try not to breathe too much up there, man,” he said. “Those fumes will mess you up. I thought I saw a fucking unicorn last night.”
So I pulled my shirt up over my mouth and carefully dropped the cans through the hole in the floor to where Jason was standing. None of them were full, and as I pictured the shelf in our garage where my can should have been, I felt some strange guilt that it was empty. What else from my past could be missing? I wondered. What else were people just taking from me?
I watched Jason consolidate the gas into one master can.
“What are you doing with all this stuff?” I asked him.
“It’s a science project,” he said. “I want to keep up my grades so Mom and Dad will let me take Buffy to the prom.”
He was joking, but neither of us laughed. Jason had been missing from home for at least a week. I’d no idea how long he’d been missing from school, nor did I know how many schools he’d attended since he got kicked out of Perkins in the eighth grade. I knew so little about him at that time, so little about anyone, really. It stuns me, now, the limited information kids operate with. I watched as Jason began to mix the oil and gas in specific proportions outlined for him in his book and I began to feel an accomplice to something. “Jason,” I said, “why did you bring me out here?”
“Two reasons,” he said. “The first is in a blue envelope in the corner. Take a look.”
I set down the flashlight and walked toward the corner of the small fort, where a blue envelope sat on a stack of magazines and spiral-bound notebooks. I picked it up, lifted the flap, and shook out a small key. And although there were hundreds of possibilities in that square mile, thousands of locks in our lives, I knew what that key was for as soon as I saw it. It was the key to Mr. Landry’s private room, it had to be, and the immediate danger that it represented, the possibilities it created, twisted my stomach.
“I snatched it the night I split,” Jason said. “My dad passed out with the door open. I almost smashed up the fucking place, I was so pissed. But what good would that have done? I just unlocked the window instead. Now we can open it from the outside so it doesn’t matter how many combo locks he puts on that stupid door. I just wish I could have opened the shed.”