A Key to Treehouse Living

by Elliot Reed

  DOWN, BREAKING

  Someone’s driving his car someplace and the engine stops working and he has to pull over and call a tow truck. That’s a breakdown. During the draft, Ned got picked to be on a team called The Crushers because their coach had picked him randomly and it turned out that The Crushers were a team for which a gang of five bullies played, bullies who knew Ned and had beaten him up on numerous occasions, so when Ned heard that he’d been drafted to that team he had a breakdown. Mostly the breakdown looked like crying and yelling, though it also looked like him taking his dad’s shovel out to the backyard and digging himself a grave beneath an apple tree.

  DIGGING IN WOOD: WHITTLING

  To whittle is to sculpt wood into things like spears and knives and shafts for arrows. Some people whittle just for fun, as Ned discovered while digging his grave, for he found beneath the tree a tiny wooden horse that someone had whittled and then buried. The finding of the wooden horse took his mind off his impending doom and led to a thorough archaeological excavation of the dirt around the apple tree, the disturbance of the roots, the falling of the unripe apples, and the breakdown of Ned’s mother. My uncle brought home two whittled chairs one summer. They showed up, stayed on the lawn for a month, and then he pawned them because the bets really weren’t going his way. The two chairs were whittled from cherry by a nearby authority on wood. I remember there was a week or so where I forgot all about the treehouse and just sat in a wooden chair beside my uncle, who was sitting in another. I think he was lonely that summer, because his daughter Isabella had sent a letter saying she’d met an astronaut in France and might move with him to Florida. I remember feeling the cuts in the wood with my fingers and trying to picture what tool it was that had made them. Get a well-whittled chair, put it out on the lawn when it turns to summer, and you won’t want to move from it. At least that’s how it was for me and my uncle.

  E_______? WORD UNKNOWN

  There’s a word for the study of how natural landscapes came to be shaped the way they are. There’s a way for specialists to look out across a meadow and read the humps and divots that make up the surface of the earth, then go on to describe a sequence of natural events that caused the earth to look the way it does. Why are there more trees over here than over there? Why so much of a slope on this side of the meadow and no slope at all on the other side? Turns out there are people who can tell you. They’re experts in ancient forces of nature: prehistoric tornadoes, ancient rains, archaic gales . . . but I can’t remember what they’re called. I think their name starts with E.

  EXPLORATION OF BLACKNESS

  People use the word BLACK to describe many things that are not actually black: blackberries and black people and blacktop are three good examples, but the best example is probably the night. The color black does not reflect light, so a black object actually has the sun’s light kept in it (see BRIGHTNESS OF SUNLIGHT). Photo paper burned with light turns black, a tire is black for a while but then it fades to gray, black is lightning-struck wood and burned buildings. The black of burned wood never fades but starts to shine over time. Black is always the color of your pupil, and black is the color the sun becomes after you’ve looked straight at it for two seconds. The true nature of black will always be up for debate. Sit outside in lawn chairs at dusk or at dawn and watch the transition from day to night, the transition mistakenly referred to as light to dark. Watch the colors that appear during this time of transition. Think of how those colors feel through the sharp eyes of crepuscular animals or through the big, yellow eyes of nocturnal ones, then hear how it sounds to say that something is as black as the night.

  EARLIER HILLBILLIES

  The people who lived in the double-wide trailer a half mile southwest of my uncle’s mansion were hillbillies. This meant they gathered near foul-smelling fires, drank in the daytime, had fights, and played music long into the night. Hillbillies have agreed not to think too much about questions like IS BLACK ACTUALLY BLACK or IS WHITE ACTUALLY WHITE, perhaps because they see things around them as complicated enough as is, or maybe because they think there comes a time in your life when you know all you need to know, or maybe the hillbillies just long for an earlier time: a time with fewer authorities, when things were simpler for hillbillies, when everyone burned their trash and children fell freely from dangerous treehouses built in old trees that are gone now and replaced by mansions.

  ENLARGER

  A five-foot-tall piece of equipment that prints photographs. The photographer uses his enlarger in a pitch-dark closet or in a closet with only a tiny red light because white light messes up his process. He takes his roll of film, which has tiny photographs called NEGATIVES burned into it, and slides it into the mouth of the projector (the slot beneath the enlarger’s lightbulb eye). Then he turns off all the lights (except the red one), takes a sheet of photographic paper from the dark plastic envelope that keeps the paper in darkness, puts the paper beneath the negative and the eye, and turns on the enlarger. The light shines through the negative and gives the special paper an invisible burn in the shape of a picture. Then he turns the enlarger off and puts the special paper in a chemical bath and swishes it around for a while until the photograph emerges from the special paper. It took me a while to figure out how the enlarging process worked, especially since I couldn’t ask my uncle about it, and everything I know comes from a teenager named Brad who works at the photo shop. When Brad asked why I was so curious, it all just came out. You really never know who you will tell things to and who you won’t. My uncle had only ever told me my dad had disappeared and wouldn’t be coming back, I was my uncle’s responsibility and would be until I was eighteen, which was five years away. I had become my uncle’s responsibility when my dad disappeared. That was all I ever got, and I knew not to ask any more. I knew that it had something to do with the fight between my uncle and my dad, the one I saw years ago, in the kitchen, and I knew the fight had something to do with my mom. Some time after I moved in with my uncle I stopped thinking about my dad. I don’t know when and I don’t know why, but I began to think of my father as dead, except being dead, in the case of my mother, meant people thought about you more often than if you’d just disappeared. I know my uncle thought about my mother because he kept a picture of her on the mantel and I saw him look at it a few times. He didn’t keep any pictures of my father on the mantel. After a while it was as if my father had never existed, as if I was the son of my uncle. Then came the day that I found the photo enlarger in the basement along with the old photographs and I needed to make sense of what I saw in the pictures. You need to have been alive to be in a photograph, and so I told Brad that the enlarger was proof that my father had existed and might continue to exist. The discovery of the photographs made my father more than a blurry memory of a man by the banks of a pond.

  EXPECTATION

  The brain spends a huge amount of time expecting things. The brain lives on patterns the way a blade of grass lives on sunlight. When you look at a single leaf on a twig and you know right off the bat you’re seeing a tree, that’s you EXPECTING without KNOWING. Other, more complicated expectations are the more interesting ones because of how often they backfire. For example, one day I was in my tree fort when Ned came up through the trapdoor with a bag of lemons in his backpack. I said something like “Hooray lemonade” and Ned then pointed through the window at a group of kids who played for the Crushers and who were coming at us through the bushes. We had expected to juice those lemons, but it turned out we needed to use them against the Crushers: put a nail through a lemon, whip it out the window of a treehouse, bean a kid with it—that kid will probably move on. My uncle learned to stop expecting things from Isabella because she kept changing her mind all the time. One day she was moving to Florida, the next she was back at my Uncle’s house with the astronaut in tow, the next she had an apartment in the city, the next she was gone, nowhere to be found, then the next she was back again, and so on. When he expected her and the astronaut to move into the mansion
with us, he started building an addition. That was a mistake. People don’t often say what they’re really going to do. Ned told me he was going to help me get revenge on the Crushers, but then a little while later I saw him walking down the street with them like they were his friends. When I told Isabella I’d help get her canoe out of the reeds, though, I helped her. I was six years younger than Isabella, and my boat had less draft, but she knew I could paddle hard and she knew that I liked her so when she saw me coming she expected she’d be saved.

  FACTS

  A FACT is a statement of truth as opposed to a statement that is questionable. Facts make up what we call KNOWLEDGE. On the other hand, lots of people go around living their life with certain facts drilled into their brains, facts that cause them to behave certain ways, facts they’ve either never questioned or have given up questioning. I’ll list a few items that might, at face value, given what you know up to this point, appear factual.

  Horses head for the woods during storms.

  Plastic forts are quickly abandoned.

  Balloons are often lost in the wind.

  My uncle played the bugle.

  Spring comes before summer.

  Animals love the dark.

  In the dark, you print photos using light.

  Gravity exists, but not for balloons, and not if you’ve been turned to smoke.

  Lemons with nails through them hurt when they hit you.

  A wild child can catch a goose by hand.

  Of those ten things, only two are facts. Statement 1, for instance, is not a fact, because it’s not a fact everywhere. That’s another thing about facts—if it’s an actual fact, it will be true everywhere. I’ve heard about horses in Mongolia that seek the shelter of a cave before the shelter of a tree when they feel a storm coming. I’ve heard about a boy in Georgia who slept every night in his plastic fort until one day he grew too large to get back in. Statement 3 is, in fact, a fact. It is a fact that here, and in a different state, and in a different country, balloons are lost by their handlers. The first, sad fact we learn in this life is that balloons fly away. That fact and the fact of gravity are probably the first two facts we’re forced to confront at a very early age. “You must go inside now. No more playing outside,” may sound like a fact, but it isn’t. If instead someone says: “Unless you go inside right now, you’ll be totally vaporized by lightning. Look there—there’s lightning in that cloud,” you will look at the cloud, consider the source (Is he an alarmist or does he often have courage? Fact: not all astronauts are courageous), and decide whether or not to risk it.

  FAULTY WISHING

  You must wish correctly if you want your wish to come true. Let’s say you’re sitting with your uncle on the porch and you’re watching a storm come in. The horses are moving to the cover of the stand of cedars, and a little bunch of blue balloons has come loose from a birthday party somewhere and is flying skyward and sideways. Let’s say your uncle tells you that wishes come true if you wish upon balloons you spot floating off to the balloon afterlife. Let’s say he tells you that he’s already wished on two of those four balloons and that you should wish on the other two, quick, and you wish. You say, “I wish I could find out why my dad left,” and your uncle sighs. He sighs and shakes his head and says that your wish was a dumb one, not just because the wish was dangerous but because—and by reading this you’re learning the easy way—that by saying a wish aloud you are cursing it. This is especially the case with wishing on balloons. After he has corrected you, he might say, “Wish for something sensible if you’re going to wish. Wish for money,” and you don’t want to, but you want to keep the peace with him, and so you pretend to wish for money. He looks at you and believes you are wishing for money. Your fake wish is that your uncle wins at the horse races so that he can pay off the expensive addition to the mansion, but your real wish, the deeper wish, is that everything in your life would change for good. You wish for anything else because your attempts to change your world have so far come to nothing. You place your wish on the fourth balloon just before it disappears behind a distant row of trees and then, in the next instant, at the exact moment when the fourth blue balloon disappears, a bolt of lightning strikes a dead tree by the pond and sets it aflame. From a hole in the flaming tree pop four little balls of fire which go arcing into the pond, landing with sizzles in the water, and then, an instant later, four fish jump from the water in quick succession. You learn, then and there, that flaming birds change to fish when you put them out in a pond, and so you could say that fish live not just in ponds but also in trees.

  FREE FALL

  When she jumps out of a helicopter, airplane, or hot-air balloon, she starts free-falling toward the earth at a tremendous speed. She plunges through clouds. She gets a good look at the fields and the forests, the immense blues and greens and browns, the whites of the clouds below her, and then at some point she deploys her parachute. My uncle and I were waiting there when Isabella landed in the field at the little airport. You couldn’t help but look at her and feel happy. The astronaut landed right after Isabella, but he wasn’t smiling. To him, the free fall was nothing special. After the free fall was the first time Isabella had really looked at me since the day she’d met the astronaut. Her parachute was made from the same stuff as El Hondero’s weather balloons: light, multicolored material that catches the eye from miles away, reflecting sunlight. Parachutes can serve other, secondary functions, such as housing for gypsies. Of all the showy and mysterious sorts of structures human beings live in, the gypsy-style parachute house (see GYPSY PARACHUTE HOUSE) is by far the most wonderful.

  FANDALAHALANAI

  This is a string of syllables you use to stop authorities (or Daddies) who are trying to interfere with your plans. When I was little, before Ned joined the Crushers, me and Ned and Isabella had to use the magic syllables a lot. Me and Isabella had other words, too, and we wrote them down, but now I can’t remember them. Isabella made up a whole fairy tale to explain my existence and why we could do magic. Isabella said that she’d been out in the woods picking berries when she was in third grade and that she’d found me sleeping in a basket. She said she brought me home and hid me in the basement, and that I had special psychic powers which was why people thought I was a weirdo. The story would change a little every time she told it but I’d always go along with it no matter who it was she was telling it to. She once said we could communicate telepathically, and that we dreamed the same dreams, that we’d both had the same Betta Fish nightmare. Then, one day, she stopped telling the fairy tale and started telling the real one, about how my mom had died and my dad had disappeared. FANDALAHALANAI, back when it was a word that had power, was something you could call someone to his face and he wouldn’t know what you were doing to him as long as you said it in a casual way. If you said it while wiggling your left pinky-toe and you clapped twice after saying it, the FANDALAHALANAI was given extra power. If three people did it at once, you were sure to get what you wanted. One time we were in the basement with a bunch of old film we’d found in the closet, the same place where I’d found the enlarger, my uncle’s old skis, and two five-gallon tanks of gasoline. We had the film taped up on a window so we could go through the negatives one by one and try to figure out the story of where my father had taken these pictures when we heard my uncle coming down the stairs. We all did FANDALAHALANAI at once and it worked. He turned around and went back up.

  FALLACY

  A fallacy is something you believe to be true but which is not actually a fact, and believing which brings disaster. To actually believe Fandalahalanai works—instead of just saying you believe it and really knowing that it only worked because of coincidence—would be a fallacy. The ultimate fallacy is the one held by the person who thinks he can fly. In the case of the astronaut floating in space, it is not a fallacy that he can fly, but for everyone else, even pilots, to adopt as a fact the idea that you can fly is to invite calamity. It is a fallacy that you love someone if you say you love him but
then you run away.

  FLIGHT

  The act of moving through the air without touching the ground and without using anything like vines or monkey bars. Also, the act of running away from something or someone quickly, and by any means necessary.

  GYPSIES

  Gypsies travel by means of Winnebagos or similar motor caravans, and they travel in groups. The largest, or “King,” Winnebago will be followed by a collection of beat-up vehicles covered in countless dents both large and small, vehicles belching black smoke, vehicles that appear as if they’ve recently broken down. Gypsies are sort of like hillbillies but much more superstitious and also much more ready to accept alternative ways of thinking. Gypsies excel at finding ways to hustle (see METHODS OF THE HUSTLE). This makes people who aren’t gypsies jealous (see ANGER, JEALOUS), including most of the people living in the mansions near my uncle’s. Often, I’d be on my way back from my treehouse when I’d see a police car stopped at the Winnebago village, the policemen hassling some gypsies about camping there. Getting hassled is nothing new for gypsies, though. They’re used to it. Gypsies get hassled everywhere they go and will just move on to somewhere else once they’re done with their hustle.