J: The Clubhouse

Chapter: Kid, Father Building the Clubhouse

My sister and I are woken up by the sound of crashing in the back yard.
We come out of our bedrooms and stand at the sliding glass doors at the
back of the house, watching as my father and another man unload stacks
of wood from a truck. The truck has backed all the way into the yard.
My father is smiling and carrying the wood to one corner of the yard.
The man helping him is no one we know. Cigarettes dangle from the
corners of their mouths, staying put even when they spit onto the
grass.

Eventually the unknown man drives away, and my father stands in the
middle of the yard looking at the wood. He has a pencil behind his ear,
and pulls out a piece of paper from his back pocket. By now we are
standing on the back porch, a thin strip of concrete that holds one old
lounge chair and a dead rubber tree plant, the pot filled with
cigarette butts. The yard smells like the inside of a hardware store,
though not as sharp.

"Building a shed," my father says to no one in particular. He looks
over at us like he's angry, making it clear we're not to touch the wood
or get in his way. I would like to climb on top of one of the stacks of
plywood, or practice balancing one of the two-by-fours in the palm of
my hand, a trick I've almost mastered with tree branches at the bayou.
They stand up longer if I stare up at the top of them while they tilt
back and forth. My sister sits down in the chair but jumps up quickly.
When she turns around I see that morning dew has left wet stripes
across her rear end.

We get bored watching my father move the wood around. It's not a school
day, so we leave the back yard and head out to the bayou down the
street. We come back for lunch after a while, covered in stickers and
carrying a box of crayfish that already stink like dead fish. Our plan
is to put them in a bowl of water and feed them until they grow to
gigantic proportions, though I'm not exactly sure what this means. Most
likely the crayfish will end up staying in the box, smelling worse
until somebody throws them away. I find this preferable to huge
crayfish tiring of baloney and bread and searching for bigger things to
eat.

Once again we stand looking out into the back yard, which looks the
same except that my father is holding a beer while looking at his sheet
of paper. His eyes move from the paper to different parts of the yard,
and I can tell he is trying to decide where to build his shed. He has
dragged out his tool box from the garage. It sits with the lid open,
full of tools that seem to have no purpose other than to sit in the box
until someone decides to look at them. We are not allowed to touch
these tools, but of course we do. Sometimes they become weapons for a
game, or we might need the hammer. But we always put them back in the
box, more or less like we found them in case my father has some unknown
system of order he can use against us later.

We leave again, back to the bayou, the crayfish already forgotten and
sitting on the front porch. We spend the afternoon crouching in the
grass behind a house that backs onto the bayou. We are planning to
steal a motorized go-cart from this house, which we think will be easy
because there is a gate in the fence facing the bayou. The go-cart sits
like giant bug in the grass, shiny and new-looking. The wheels are full
of air, an extra bonus. Our plan is to unlatch the gate and roll the
go-cart out of the yard and along the sloping edge of the bayou, out of
sight. The yard is blessedly free of dogs. My sister and I are lost in
argument about where to store the go-cart when she points out how dark
it has become. We run home, the thistle and sticker bushes a dull
scratch under our bare feet. (Weeks later I will return with two
neighborhood boys about my age and take the go-cart for real, parking
it behind a bush in my front yard until the owner pounds on our door
and yells at my father, who will honestly say he doesn't know how it
got there).

"What's for dinner?" we yell in unison, coming through the front door.
At first I notice there are no cooking smells, and then I notice my
mother. She is standing in front of the sliding glass door, looking out
into the back yard. We walk up next to her. Her arms are folded across
her chest, which makes her elbows point straight out. She is wearing
her hair in a ponytail, like my sister sometimes does, only it's a new
look for my mother. Her mouth is set in a straight line, and one
eyebrow arches up as she shakes her head slowly from side to
side.

My father has completed the base of the shed, a flat expanse of plywood
on top of two-by-fours. There's a hollow space between the top sheets
of plywood and the grass underneath, and I think of spiders. The base
almost glows in the fading light, flat and smooth. My father pounds
nails into the wood. My mother sighs.

The next morning, a Sunday, we are woken up by more hammering, but this
time we know what it's for and so we don't rush to the back door. I am
the first in the kitchen, looking for a clean enough bowl to make
cereal. I stand eating while watching my father put up the shed frame.
He is having trouble keeping the boards upright, and shouts for my
mother. She pushes past me, muttering under her breath and shutting the
sliding glass door so hard that it rattles dangerously. She has pink
curlers in neat little rows all over her head. She rolls her eyes at me
through the glass before turning to help my father.

My sisters gets up, eating her own cereal, which smells like peanut
butter and has little red crispy thing that stain the milk red. We
laugh while my mother and father struggle to hold up the shed frame. My
mother stands with her legs wide apart, holding up a two-by-four while
my father braces it. From our position, we can see when the wood starts
to tilt. Soon enough my father will start waving his arms and pointing
at the wood while my mother shouts back at him, unable to move without
dropping the wood to the ground. The two-by-fours my mother steadies
are much taller than she is, but don't look heavy. They might be heavy,
though; my mother herself is very strong. I've seen her lift up one end
of the kitchen table while reaching under it to grab spilled change or
one of her pink rollers. She can push the refrigerator away from the
wall when something falls behind it, something I can't do without
help.

My mother comes back into the house and tells us to change our clothes
and get on outside. We do what she says but as we're leaving she looks
at my sister and tells her to sit on the couch, then she gets the
hairbrush from the bathroom. I wait while my mother struggles with my
sister's hair, the tangles snapping as the brush goes through them and
my sister screaming and waving her fists around her head. Finally my
mother takes a rubber band from around her wrist and makes my sister's
hair into a ponytail. My sister looks nicer, I have to admit, but I
also know the rubber band will come off sooner or later and her hair
will become wild again.

Outside my sister mopes for a while until I ask her if her head hurts.
She hits me on top of my own head, which seems to make her feel better,
and then she runs down the street and towards the bayou. We have no
plans for the day, except for the understanding that the day should
last as long as possible, it being Sunday and school coming the next
day.

"Should we go look at the go-cart?" I ask. My sister is still ahead of
me, but she's stopped running because she is almost to the edge of the
bayou, where the concrete of the street ends and the weeds and stickers
start. I catch up to her.

"It's too early for that. They might see us," she says. She holds her
hand up over her eyes, the other hand on her hip.

"We could build a raft. Or go look at the cows," I suggest, but my
sister doesn't say anything. She starts off along the top edge of the
bayou, where the fences go right up to the edge and the dogs bark and
snap their jaws together crazily. I would prefer to walk into the
bayou, but I stay behind my sister, afraid that one of the dogs will
make it over its fence. My sister is unafraid, but I have two scars on
my hand to show where a dog I thought was friendly clamped down and
held me through its fence until its owner came out and pulled the dog's
jaws apart. I don't like dogs.

"Where are we going?" I ask.

"Up here," she says, which could mean anything. Eventually she makes
her way into the bayou, to a muddy clearing that is also sort of a
pond. We've been here before, and in fact there are still traces of a
mud castle we built, now a melted brown lump with tiny, three-toed
tracks across the top of it. My sister sits on a log. I crouch down to
look at the tadpoles swimming in the water. Some of them have the
beginnings of legs. I would like to see them become frogs, but somehow
we always miss that part. Maybe they hide.

"Do you want to build another castle?" I ask. My sister shakes her head
and leans forward, holding her stomach. I don't ask her what's wrong,
because if she's sick we may have to go home. Instead I sit next to her
on the log, my toes digging in the mud. The dampness on the log seeps
through the fabric of my shorts.

We spend several hours in the clearing. My sister either sits on the
log or gets up and paces back and forth, all the time holding her
stomach. I play in the mud, or twirl sticks in the water while the
tadpoles dart from side to side. They are so fast that they seem to go
from one spot to another magically. Both my sister and I swat
constantly at the mosquitoes. Dragonflies land on us, too, but they
have metallic wings and don't bite. They remind me of
helicopters.

"Let's go," my sister says. She says this suddenly, as if she's been
waiting for me to wake up or get dressed so we can go outside to play.
I stand up and see that she is already headed out of the bayou, her
head down. The tall grass scratches at my legs as I half-run to catch
up. My sister has a gray stain across the seat of her white shorts from
sitting on the log. She walks fast.

She's quiet all the way home, her arms wrapped around her middle and
her eyes on the grass and eventually the road. I can just see the side
of her face, but she looks sick, or mad. Maybe she is both.

At home my sister shuts her bedroom door, blocking me out. But she
can't keep my mother out, who knocks on the door and doesn't wait for
answer. She walks right into my sister's room. From where I'm standing
in the hallway, I can hear my sister burst into tears. "What's the
matter now?" my mother says as the door shuts again.

Outside, my father is pounding away. By now the shed has walls, and a
door in the middle of the front section. I watch him through the glass,
wishing I was in my sister's room, staring out of her window. My father
is making what looks like another wood base, and I realize it's the
roof for the shed. He works fast, and the yard is mostly clean again,
the shed bigger than I thought it would be. It makes the yard look
smaller.

I hear my mother come out of my sister's room, and go to investigate.
The door is half open to my sister's room; I can see her feet on the
bed. My mother is rooting around under the bathroom sink, and I catch a
glimpse of something that looks like a big candy bar before my mother
sees me and hides it behind her back.

"What's that?" I ask.

For an answer I get "Too goddamn soon" and my mother pushing me out of
the way. She looks angry.

I go outside, into the back yard, because I can tell my father is in a
good mood. Also the shed is almost finished, and I know I won't be
asked to help work on it. My father is whistling without moving his
lips, a trick neither my sister or I can do. But I plan to, because I
want to be able to make that noise without anyone being able to tell
it's me.

"What do you think?" my father asks. The roof is still lying on the
grass, but the rest of the shed is finished. I don't know how to
answer.

"You can go inside if you want," my father says, "But watch out for
nails in the walls. I haven't knocked them down yet."

I walk up to the shed, making sure my father isn't lifting the roof
behind me. I don't want to be inside when he throws it on top. The wood
smell is stronger as I get closer, like the polish my father sprays on
the furniture sometimes, clean but sharp. I feel something poking into
my foot, but can tell it hasn't gone through the skin. I walk more
carefully.

The door knob on the shed is shiny and new, and turns easily. I go
inside, and see all of the nails sticking through the plywood walls
that my father warned me about. The floor is scratchy, and with no
roof, I feel like I'm in a giant cardboard box. There are no windows.
Satisfied, I turn to go, which is when I see something I know will make
my sister feel better. I decide to tell her right away.

"What'd you think?" my father asks me as I come out. Again, I'm not
sure what to say.

"I like it," I manage, then run back up to the house. I can feel my
father's eyes on my back. Or maybe he is concentrating on his work.
It's hard to tell.

My sister's door is open again, my mother nowhere in sight. She is
probably lying on her bed, reading one of the books she always reads.
The books have castles, or at least big houses on the covers, and
usually a man and a woman in the foreground, staring at each other. I
go into my sister's room, where she is sitting up on her bed. She has
one of my mother's books in her hands.

"What do you want?" she asks. She keeps the book open.

"I wanted to tell you something," I say, "About the shed."

"I don't care about the shed," she says. There is something different
about her that I can't place. She looks the same, although she is
wearing different clothes and her eyes look puffy. She huffs loudly and
says, "What?"

I stand for a few seconds wondering what to say. My news doesn't seem
to fit in my sister's room, with the way she seems now. Suddenly I am
afraid of her, and the way she holds my mother's book, as if she's
always sat on her bed and read those books.

"Nothing," I say, and leave the room, knowing that if I didn't leave,
my sister would order me to go, or throw something at me to get me to
go away. I'm disappointed, because what I wanted to tell her was a good
thing, something that would make her glad after feeling sick all
day.

Because the shed locks from the inside, not the outside, which means it
would be easy to hide there, or to get out fast, if you needed to.