By early evening the fort was complete. The moon appeared above the power lines, a sliver small and bent like a staple in the middle of a magazine. (In his Spiderman stack, Pat had smuggled a couple new Playboys, swiped from his older brother. Staples, notched in intriguing spots on the bodies of women, had acquired a vague erotic charge for us. The fort, we hoped, would protect our pilfered centerfolds.)
Bacon was agitated. Our sprawling structure blocked his path to the door. I gave him his food, and he disappeared under a hedge.
“What should we call it?” Pat said.
“Fort Bliss?”
He curled his mouth and thought. “Fort Trat. Your name, Troy, and my name, Pat.”
“Great!”
After supper and birthday cake, we ensconced ourselves in our stronghold. Pat had a little trouble squatting and squeezing through the opening between the desk and a United Van Lines box, but over the years he’d learned to compensate for his hip. He slithered through, pulling his crutches behind him, and closed our entrance flap: two yellow pillowcases clothespinned together. Safety-pinned to it, a sheet of notepaper proclaimed KEEP OUT! in purple Marks-A-Lot.
By flashlight, we arrayed my presents at our feet: the Star Trek paperback from my father, the new Peanuts collection from Mom (“Of course, the desk is your main gift,” she’d reminded me all through dinner), and the transistor radio Janey had bought me (“I even put the batteries in, dork, ‘cause I knew you couldn’t figure that out.”). I switched the radio on. Tommy James wah-wahing “Crimson and Clover.” On the walls of Fort Trat we had taped our Bucky Dean autographs, Life magazine photos of Wally Schirra and Eugene McCarthy (because he had, Pat said, a kind face), and a picture of John Berryman. I didn’t know who John Berryman was. I just liked his looks. Life called him a poet. He was standing by a stone wall — somewhere in Ireland, according to the caption. The wind blew his long black beard nearly sideways. He appeared ludicrous and bold, a combination I found enormously appealing.
We also displayed on our fort’s walls the Geographic’s moon map, last season’s Lee Rebels football schedule, a Country Joe and the Fish album cover (Pat and I thought their music was day-old garbage, but we loved the psychedelic artwork, so we taped it to the back of the desk). The Playboys we kept hidden beneath a towel. Since it was a special day, our folks let us play in the fort until nearly midnight — grateful, I think, to get us out of the house. Birthday cheer had been clouded for them this year. My dad hated the Kennedys — he considered himself “forever and always” a Goldwater man — but the shooting in L.A. troubled the adults more than they would say. Pat and I fell asleep outside, safe behind our barricade.
What did I fear, that the fort protected me from?
1) Janey’s friend Michelle, who lived next door. She had begun to look at me as though I were one of the colts she coveted in Horse Fancy magazine. Even more frightening, I had started to imagine her in conjunction with the centerfolds — not while I was gazing at them, but afterward, thinking about the pictures and about girls as a category. I didn’t see much connection between the Bunnies and Michelle — something bubbled her blouses, and I’d heard her whisper with my sister about training bras, but her body was angular, skinny. Still, I understood that she was on her way to becoming one of those grown-up creatures. The caterpillar and the butterfly. Her batty-eyed stares at me behind Janey’s back made me part of her process. What was I to do with that? What did I want to do with that? Something, maybe. But I didn’t know for sure. A retired cop, Mr. Wallace, lived on the other side of our house. I’d see him in his red bathrobe early in the mornings, plucking the newspaper off his lawn. He was blocky and muscled, like Broderick Crawford in Highway Patrol. Even his ears looked powerful. The strict orderliness of his garden countered some of the chaos I felt emanating, day and night, from Michelle’s house.
2) My mother’s financial ledger. As black as the school globe’s seas. Each Thursday after supper, Mom spread the family’s bills on the kitchen table and opened the ledger. Her face squinched as though the pages had appeared, all smelly, out of the garbage disposal. For the next hour, nothing we said could reach her. On the tabletop, the ledger’s leather cover scritched across old toast crumbs or fried chicken flakes, a grating worse than fingernails on metal. My dad was an independent oil man; he had a tough time competing with Exxon, Texaco, Mobil. “Your desk may be the last big purchase we’ll make for a while,” Mom told me. One night I overheard my folks talking, low, about “new directions,” “relocating.”
3) Hip disease. Though Pat had told me his malady wasn’t catching, his crutches made me queasy. The kiss of their rubber tips on concrete … the bandage-like padding … these struck me as unnatural, and I feared proximity to them. Neither Pat nor I understood the word arthritis. We didn’t talk about his disability. Our bond had formed on the playground. While our classmates smacked softballs, Pat and I sat on the sidelines. He’d punch holes in the dirt with his “sticks,” and wheezing, I’d try to catch my breath. We shared an excitement for reading and jokes. “Where’s the Anal Canal?” Pat asked, hanging around the jungle gym one day. Kids scratched their heads. “I don’t know. Egypt? India?” We laughed and laughed. I think his physical agility made our friendship possible. He could twirl on one crutch. In water balloon fights with neighborhood boys he could move as fast as the rest of us, flying like a pole vaulter. He could prop a crutch against a fence, climb it with his good leg, and wriggle over the top.
4) Powerlines. Josh, a neighbor boy, said the wires that crossed the alley, our house, and Mogford Park caused cancer. Neither of us knew what cancer was; Josh figured it was like bedwetting, only worse. “That’s just stupid,” I said. “Of course it’s worse, you dork.” Josh said, “Your house was already built, so it was too late. But Mogford Park? It’s there ’cause the city found out how terrible powerlines are, and they won’t allow another house on that spot.” Mogford Park wasn’t really a park; it was an empty lot. One year, the neighborhood raised money, planted holly bushes along the sidewalk, and put in some grass so it wouldn’t be an eyesore. Summers, I earned six dollars a week mowing it, wearing a face mask because of my asthma. I didn’t like Josh. His family had recently joined a Pentecostal church. Healings, speaking in tongues … spooky crap. He’d told me I was going to hell for listening to rock and roll. He’d told me my turtle was going to have a heart attack because of the fat in bacon. “Your foods are unclean,” he said. But the powerline business … that had a certain credence. The empty park, and all. On still, hot days, standing in my yard, I heard a buzzing above me like hundreds of bees.
5) The Rebs’ future. With the latest graduations, they were weak at quarterback, center, safety.
6) Sirhan Sirhan.
7) Vietnam.
Fort Trat did not become a bulwark against any of these threats. Some of the disturbances — the Playboys, Pat’s crutches — entered the fort. But the darkness and heat provided a reassuring cover, a space where distraction could thrive. We’d sit there in the afternoons, with a pitcher of Mom’s lemonade, cutting pictures and comic strips out of the paper to tape to the walls. Sometimes we shredded pages before Dad got to the baseball scores or his crossword puzzle. On his lunch break, he’d step onto the patio and rattle the edge of the desk. The sheets shook above us; the boxes would shift. The desk leg fell. But he didn’t destroy the fort, and surviving his assaults gave us a sense of invulnerability.