Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [35]
It seemed like we’d been in there a long time. We walked back up into the avenues where very few of the streetlights worked, most of our walk safely in shadow, and we passed the tin-sided houses with no front yards, the shades or curtains drawn, each of us carrying no more than three or four two-by-fours over our shoulders, but we walked along like men who worked, men who had actually earned what they carried.
WE WERE building a tree house in that beech in the backyard. Our landlord had a shop in the basement, and we went down there and found a couple of hammers and a handsaw. In the garage, hanging on the wall, was a wooden ladder, and within a day or two we’d built a fairly level platform fifteen feet up in the branches of the tree. For the flooring, we’d stolen a sheet of plywood from one of the stacks in the lumberyard, but it took two of us to carry it back home, and when we went back for more a few nights later, there were bright floodlights shining down into the yard and the warehouse and office.
Cleary stood there in the dark, his hair over one eye. “Holy shit.” Then there was the sound of something heavy sliding over the asphalt, then a rattling, then a German shepherd charging us till the chain yanked straight. And we ran.
We needed walls and a roof. Weeknights we wandered up and down the avenues looking for scrap piles behind houses, but there seemed to be a dog chained in every third or fourth lot. Once we hopped a fence and dropped down into a packed-dirt yard. There was a motorcycle, a lawn chair, and a picnic table. In the corner a couple of bikes leaned one against the other, and Newburyport and Cody Perkins and whoever had hopped over our fence and stolen our bikes came rushing back and I began to feel like somebody I didn’t want to be, an exterior light coming on and shining on the three of us. “You motherfuckers want to get shot?”
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