Good things
come in threes, they say. At least that was my cousin’s argument when he
proposed his idea over the phone. “Deaths do, too,” I rejoined, rather
insensitively. He had lost his son to a motorcycle accident when he was around
forty—I was thirty-six—and the kid was, well, too young. Dave didn’t shut
people down about the topic—quite the contrary: he quit his job as a tax
consultant and became a driving school instructor, especially for cyclists.
Felt he owed it to his son, to teach a safer way to meet the road and all
twists and turns therein.
“Well,
that’s why I thought of you,” he said. “Stats aren’t diminishing under my
watch—another one of my alumns crashed on Friday night.”
“Jesus, did
he make it?”
“Lingered
more than most.”
“It’s only
Tuesday.”
“That’s
three days more than Tommy.”
I hesitated
before delivering a meager “maybe it’s better to be out of misery fast—if fate
has your number...”
Dave didn’t
seem to nod one way or another, invisibly of course, as the phone couldn’t show.
Instead, he reiterated his proposal and finished with a “what d’ya say?”
I didn’t
know what to say. I had just taken the risk of employing an itinerant neighbor
who had run out of tours in our Muslim wars—the risk not his skill set or need
for more fight—rather, I feared the growth of my business would fade.
“C’mon,”
Dave persisted, “you said you got orders ’til Christmas, and swing sets don’t
smile at the snow.”
“That’s
true. But I don’t know how to compete with the ‘bigs’—I’ve only made swing sets
from lumberyard slash and untested rope and everything else probably not up to
code—”
“Cousin, I
need more than a job and less than a code—and, in stride with your instincts,
I’d be happy to see kids realizing dreams in their own backyard, in tune with
the trees…”
We worked
pretty hard that summer, Dave, Drifter—my neighbor’s preferred epithet—and I.
Dave was barrel chested and inclined to do the heaviest lifting—cement,
long-beams off the flatbed truck and such. Drifter liked to drive and account
for all the small pieces—ready as anyone for a run to the hardware store—and
tighten the bolts we’d set in half-way. As for me, I had to be both the face of
the business and chief lemur to handle the trickier fits—the two D’s a bit
acrophobic, frankly, which should have annoyed me more.
Because
most our projects were ‘lay-of-the-vertical-land’: we’d be invited to survey a
suburban backyard and propose what kind of tailored jungle gym might make an
impression—between that shack, for example, and those oak trees, a couple feet
clear of a neighboring fence but towering, of course, to rise above all the
stock swing sets made of stainless steel. Ours were out of burnished wood with
natural curves that nestled into the intersections of other beams we brought,
but also of the branches we could merge them with—tree forts growing from their
anchor legs like giraffes heading into a canopy.
And sure,
the kids would come to advise our plans and we’d pretend we hadn’t thought of
things they’d want to see. Moms would brew us coffee, ask more questions than
the dads who’d grin self-consciously—knowing they should be the ones to make
their children happy.
Drifter,
Dave, and I were relatively pleased. Occasionally I’d have my daughter
Jacquelyn earn some extra cash against the babysitting jobs that usually kept
her busy; she could paint the details of anything—a dashboard cockpit, a
dinosaur theme, Tweety and Sylvester vying for a platform, ridiculously. We’d
lacquer the job complete, then move on to another job that now—Godspeed—we
could wrap before Christmas.
If autumn
would allow—
One house
had a Boo Radley type who we knew monitored our moves. The job was more complex
than most, as the most usable crook of the sycamore tree we were commissioned
to reach was at least eighteen feet from the ground. From there, and the nearby
jack pine, the mandate was to go higher—connecting the two with a ‘monkey
bridge’ and minuscule platforms that wouldn’t pass muster on a typical ropes
course.
Our ladders
would only reach so high, and because Dave was barrel chested and Drifter was
disinclined, I made my way up through this project with the help of Jacquelyn
and a friend she had recruited—Nikki—who was good at heights if bad at knowing
limits. She flirted with Drifter, who flirted back, mostly when I was in the
jack pine and had no other tether to the world besides the monkey bridge that
shook and swung like a swing set where it shouldn’t be.
Boo Radley,
who clearly couldn’t be the one we were constructing for—his two little sisters
ran happily in the yard while we worked—watched everything we did. We only knew
this from his sisters’ hints and the all-too-quiet feel from the upper floor of
their house that looked across the yard into our tree house—or fortress, by
now, bigger than a fort, as his sisters insisted it be.
“Good God,”
said Dave, “ain’t the damn thing high enough by now?”
Drifter, as
a way of showing off perhaps, demurred: “it could go higher, if you see those
branches over there.”
“Well, then
come up and point them out—there’s no ski lift or—”
“finder’s
fee?”
“What d’ya
mean?”
“I found
the patterns in this tree.”
“I still
don’t follow what you mean.”
“Just leave
it,” Dave growled to Drifter, who indeed left it to trudge toward the house,
ostensibly to use the loo.
We had a
couple more conventional jobs to complete while—as Dave kept track of such
logistics—the anchor cement had to harden to concrete. I had no idea, growing
up, how cousins in adulthood could crutch each other through such things—motorcycle
mishaps and all the Plan B’s in between. Drifter wasn’t into coffee breaks that
went in that narration, and for stretches of the less laborious stuff, he would
tend to disappear.
“Like Boo,”
I joked beneath my breath, and Dave had to raise his brow as a way of wondering
why I took him on—forgetting, perhaps, who preceded whom in this venture of Swing Sets Unlimited.
“Listen,”
he said. “You don’t probably know why I took to the cycles—”
“No, not
precisely.”
“Tommy,” he
paused a bit, “climbed up the walls. I tried to tell him, ‘calm down’ or ‘be
calm’, but that kind of talk doesn’t do well for someone who hates any sense of
calm.”
“We’re
talking Tommy, or Drifter?”
Dave
snorted. “Maybe we’re talking Boo.”
“Why bring
up Boo?”
“Well, why
did you?”
“Ok, Dave,”
I tried to restart, “I think I passed him off as a joke, and we were talking
about Drifter, and then Tommy emerged—whom you know I’d never make light of.
He’s a spiritual touchstone of sorts—”
“You don’t
have to say—”
“But I
will. I loved how you led him to dirt bikes when skateboards weren’t cool—”
“They were
never—”
“uncool? or
how helmets were law, and Tommy said ‘hell with that’ and you said—”
“don’t do
this—”
“you said,
‘Tommy, your brain is beyond what’—”
“No, I just
said what you said—quoting some poet: ‘The Brain is wider than the Sky’, or
some such nonsense—”
“which you
evidently memorized. Dickinson 101. Tailored for the tax man.”
“Don’t
pigeonhole me.”
“Definitely
won’t. I also shouldn’t do so to Boo…. But let’s get back to Tommy—”
“No—I think
for the moment we’re cool.”
Our
business abruptly shut down when Drifter had sex with Boo Radley’s mom in the hideout
of the sycamore. Naturally up there, the girls wouldn’t see. Dave and I were
blocks away surveying another prospect that wouldn’t entail such ambitious
dreams, which we agreed would make for a little relief.
’Til Nikki—off-duty—skulked
her way up the tree and blasted five holes in the fortress, landing the
meaningful three—mom (didn’t matter), Drifter (her aim), and her own right
temple that may or may not have been part of the plan. Dave and I heard them,
remotely, but didn’t compute. We finished our survey and walked back to learn
from one side and the other of a police cordon.
Jacquelyn was
there before us, answering a detective’s “what got into your friend?”
She
considered, stone-faced, and uttered “remorse.”
“That’s not
sufficient—” I shouted over the detective’s glare.
“For fuck’s
sake, Dad, what do you want out of this?”
It was an
odd question. Of course I wanted nothing of this. Dave waddled over to give her
a hug before making his way to the backyard. The detective shadowed him there.
I moved closer to say, “I just want kids to be safe.”
“So, you
build shit they can fall out of?”
“Maybe to
resort to.”
Jacquelyn
shook her head. “Playgrounds are cruel places. You know that—you saw how I was
harassed as a kid—”
“I stepped
in whenever I could.”
“You did.
Maybe Nik’s dad didn’t.”
“Was she
harassed by Drifter? Gotta know this, Jacquie.”
She looked
toward the neighboring house. “I doubt it.” She wanted to say more but, like
the build-up of a sneeze, she knew the sobbing was going to begin. I embraced
and assured her she didn’t have to say anything, which she allowed for a minute
before unloading a stream of recall—not of Nikki, who in the end wasn’t a
confidant, but of that goddamned playground and those boys—and some girls, too—and
getting flung off the merry-go-round or left to dangle on see-saws. “The zip line
was the worst,” she asserted, clutching tighter the back of my shirt.
I didn’t
have anything—no lines from Dickinson, no need to bring up the goodness in most
people, despite desperation and fallings out. I thought of the paltry poem I dashed
off last year—somewhat to justify my odd-ball profession—and wondered if all
things idyllic were dead. Of course now—this moment of meta-remorse—could not
be the time to scan such a thought. But later that evening, with only Dave
present, I read it aloud and fell into a primordial stream.
Couldn’t be better, blending in
with the trees—
if you find my aphid remains,
just let ’em be…
unlike that Supertramp who
bivouacked a bus,
I can come down and look like the
rest of us;
a Swiss family Robinson refugee,
I aim to take
cues from the island—on
greenprints to make.
Against my own heft, I’ll burnish
the branches
for handholds I need, and measure
my chances
to live off the grid and blend in
with the trees—
Daniel Martin Vold
Lamken (2017)
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