Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [36]
We followed him back into the dark basement beyond the shop to the oil tanks. We could hear the squeak of the living room’s floorboards above us, the bass beat of the stereo, voices and the tapping of someone’s boot.
“Look.”
Leaning against the wall were ten or twelve brand-new sheets of paneling, four feet wide and eight feet long, a thin layer of dust coating their top edges.
BY THE weekend, we’d built frames for our walls, then nailed to them those thin sheets of paneling. We had five sheets left over and we used all of them for the flat roof, stacking one on top of the other. Now the roof was strong enough for us to stand on and we made it a deck and took our last two-by-fours and nailed some of them lengthwise from branch to branch for railings.
Because we didn’t know how to frame windows, our tree hut had none and when we crawled inside our short narrow doorway that faced Cleary’s alley, we were crawling into a black hole that smelled like sawdust and basement musk, but it was our black hole, and we didn’t want just anyone climbing into it either.
We got rid of the ladder and built a rope elevator. Just above the hut there was a long branch jutting out from the trunk, and into this we screwed two heavy-duty pulleys we’d found in Cleary’s basement. It’s where we got the rope too, coiled under a workbench.
Cleary’s house didn’t have a bulkhead entrance like ours and the only way in was through his kitchen and down the stairs. When the three of us walked into the house on that weekday afternoon, his mother was on the couch watching their black-and-white TV, Merv Griffin maybe, her yellow plastic tumbler in her hands on her lap. She was slow to look up at us, her eyes glazed over, the whites pink.
“Hi, honeys, you boys hungry?”
“No, Ma.” Cleary was already halfway down the basement stairs. Jeb followed him, but Cleary’s mother was smiling at me like I’d just said something funny to her. “You need a haircut.”
I shrugged.
“How’s your mom?” She took a long sip off her drink.
“Good.”
“She still working down to Boston?”
“Yeah,” I said, though I don’t think either of them had ever met. I wanted to go downstairs but didn’t want her to know I didn’t want to stand there talking to her anymore, Cleary’s drunk mother in her clean house, always so clean, the linoleum floors swept and mopped, the rugs vacuumed, the coffee table and TV and windowsills free of dust, even the windows looking out onto the dirt alley were as clear as if they held no glass.
Sometimes I would think how good it would be to have our mother at home all day too, to have her there to make sure we got to school, and to have her there when we came home in the afternoon, an adult who wouldn’t let just anyone into her warm, clean house.
Even if she was like this.
Her attention was back on the TV now, men in shirts and ties sitting around talking, and I went down the basement stairs, ducking my head under a joist, hoping Cleary and my brother had found something useful.
TO GET up into the hut, you’d sit on a short section of two-by-four, the rope it was tied to between your legs, and you’d pull on the other rope hanging a foot away, the pulleys creaking as you rose up and up till the hut’s floor was at your chest and you’d keep one hand gripping the rope, then reach out with the other and grab the inside jamb of the door, lift your knee onto the platform, then let go of the rope and hear the whistle of it through the pulleys as your two-by-four seat fell to the ground and you were inside. When all three of us were up, one of us would lean out and grip the rope and pull both ends and the seat up and nobody could get in unless he was a monkey.
But what was there to do up there? Soon it was fall, then early winter, and it was cold in the hut, and late at night we ran up and down Columbia Park stealing welcome mats from every front or side porch, our faces lit up under the exterior lights, and we hauled the mats back, tossing them one at a time up into the hut, then tacking them to the inside walls and ceiling till