A Key to Treehouse Living

by Elliot Reed

  VISUAL AID

  I once had a photograph my father took of himself. It wasn’t a vain photograph, at least not in the usual way. In the photograph he was outside the bus we lived in and it was windy so his hair was being blown to the side. I remember he looked a lot like my uncle, and he was looking into the camera like my uncle looked into the mirror.

  VORTEX

  Swirling void, like an eddy, which sucks things into its center. A vortex can appear in all kinds of places. The only requirements for a vortex are the following:

  It must be sucking things into it. Things can include you, a bunch of floating sticks, or even just your mind. I once saw a vortex and felt it suck my mind in. It was a cool, clear night. I was on my belly, lying on an old iron bridge, looking between its rusty iron beams at the surface of the water where the water was still, having pooled up on the bank, where it was reflecting the stars and the shadow of the iron bridge and the shape of my head looking into the water.

  The vortex, to be a vortex, must remain a vortex over time. If, for instance, you look through the iron beams of a bridge at a spot where river water is pooled up on the riverbank and you behold a vortex there, you must be able to return to that spot where you saw the vortex before, lie down on the beams, and see it again.

  A vortex, like a nexus, can be where things come together. A place can be a vortex, and so can a person.

  VULNERABLE

  The white flesh at the base of a turtle’s neck, when it sticks its head from its shell, is vulnerable. Your skin, when it isn’t covered in fabric and you’re floating down a river in the blinding heat of day, is vulnerable to the sun. By night, to the mosquitoes. When someone shows you he’s vulnerable, he’s trusting you not to attack him. When you see that he is vulnerable, and he knows you can see it, you and he will become more deeply connected. For example, I once thought of El Hondero as something like a god. Then he showed me the scars his father had given him as a child. He lifted his shirt and showed me the scars on his back on that afternoon when I returned to the bridge. He showed me his scars and let me feel them with my fingers.

  WEARY

  When you feel you can’t go on, but you must. El Hondero put his hand on my shoulder and said, “My boy, you are weary. Let me help you go on.” It is easier not to be weary in company than it is when you’re alone. Look at the guys who shovel gravel all day. If you’ve ever shoveled gravel, you know how terrible it is. No shovel is the proper shovel for gravel. Shovel gravel alone, you quickly become weary. Shovel gravel with people, take breaks with them, leaning up against the gravel truck, you’re less weary. When you say, “Goddamn it’s hot,” and another gravel shoveler replies, “Goddamn it’s hot,” it somehow cools the air down.

  WINE GARB

  Good wine is properly had by sipping from a wineglass while you are wearing a suit. Good wine is for special occasions, like when you’re reunited with your cousin, and it helps you talk to people if you’re nervous and aren’t sure what to say. Wine is better than the beer that comes in big glass bottles because wine is fine even if it’s warm, and because El Hondero and Isabella bonded over a particular bottle of wine that, evidently, they had both had before, although I had my doubts as to whether or not El Hondero was telling the truth about having had this particular bottle of wine, same as I had my doubts as to whether or not Isabella was truly a fan of the Dom Perrota Fresh-Leaf Cigarillos that El Hondero always carried in the front pocket of his trench coat. It is best for you to leave and go find a park to hang out in if your cousin and your best friend are having a heated discussion about Bolivia, drinking wine, and laughing at things that aren’t funny—especially if outside it’s nearing dusk and there’s a bench you know in the park and you’ve been meaning to write someone a letter.

  WISHING UPON STARS

  It is written in a famous song that if you wish upon a falling star your wish will come true. This is not the case. You make your own wishes come true, and besides that it’s all luck. Maybe if you wish upon a star and believe that your wish will come true you will find whatever it takes to keep waiting for long enough and then, eventually, because you’ve been patient, luck will come your way and help you out. It won’t really be the star that helped you, but in the end it won’t matter if you tell yourself it was. Luck is luck. Maybe there’s more to it than that. Maybe it is the stars. Maybe I accidentally wished upon one once. Maybe I wished upon one and it traveled millions of light-years to come and help me. Maybe it was what guided Sabi Juarez my way, or maybe it was why El Hondero stopped me from getting into the water beneath the bridge that one night.

  WONDER

  The explorer, hacking his way through the jungle, hears his machete ping against rock and finds an enormous granite statue swallowed up in the vines. He falls to his knees before this statue, joyful and in awe: this is wonder. Floating slowly down a river at night beneath a starry sky and a crescent moon, the hills dark curves moving against the lighter darkness of deep space, the seahorse nebula, all the sounds of animals and insects coming from those hills, a thin swarm of lightning bugs flashing over the soggy bottomlands at the feet of the hills: this is wonder.

  WOUNDS, THE HEALING AND REOPENING OF

  A wound is a physical injury that doesn’t necessarily kill you. A broken tailbone sustained after falling out of a treehouse can be classified as a wound, as can rope burn or a dog bite. Wounds can also be emotional. Your heart can be wounded and it can feel like it’s going to kill you. Imagine you find out your friend has changed the treehouse password and won’t give you the new one. That’s going to wound you emotionally, and you may want to wound your friend in return. But it’s best just to leave, wait, and let your wound heal. Imagine your guardian—the person on whom you rely for food and shelter, the source of your basic living requirements—imagine he burns down the house you live in, gets put in jail for arson, and becomes completely unable to help you in any way. You will be wounded. This wound will take a long time to heal and will maybe never finish healing. If you’re sitting in a car with El Hondero and Isabella, and the car is parked outside a big, ugly building with barbed wire around it and a sign that says SCHLITZ CENTER FOR REFORMING ADULTS, and you know that inside the building is your uncle—your cousin’s father, the guy who hurt you both so deeply—you’ll need to decide whether or not to run the risk of seeing him. Seeing him could deepen the wound he made, or it could heal you. If you finally decide to go in, you should go through the jailhouse gate alone.

  WITNESS

  In a court trial, the judge hears a story. Based on this story, he decides what to do with the main characters. The main characters try to make the judge do what they want him to do by telling their sides of the story. When a character tells a story in court, he becomes known as a witness. If you are going to be a witness, you will want to have witnessed something related to the story that the judge is hearing, preferably something big, something meaningful, something that the judge will be moved by emotionally (see OVERBOARD, GOING). Your story must also be believable. You will want to walk into the court with facts. You will want the judge, and everyone else in the court, to know exactly what you mean when you speak your language.

  WITHDRAWAL OF CHARGES

  This is when you’ve done something illegal and go to court as a defendant and stand trial before the judge, and then all of a sudden the plaintiffs stand up and yell WE WITHDRAW THE CHARGES. In movies, this happens because a star witness shows up out of the blue and is able to make the plaintiffs change their minds by telling an amazing story—a story that shows you didn’t really do the illegal thing that everyone says you did—and then the charges are withdrawn, which means you can go free. This is a thing that only happens in movies. This is a thing that does not happen if you burn down your own house in order to collect insurance money and you’ve admitted it. If you’re charged with arson and insurance fraud, nobody stands up and says WE WITHDRAW THE CHARGES, no matter how moving or amazing a story the star witness, who has shown up out o
f the blue, tells. The mansion was worth money, and money is worth more than everything to some people.

  WORK-RELEASE PROGRAM

  But they can let him go on a work-release program. The judge can let him leave jail for a day here, a day there—first to shovel gravel, and then the judge can decide to loan him out more permanently so that he can help you build a special library at a bunkhouse for wards of the state. You will have proposed the library in a document addressed to the judge and to Wilson Carmichael. Your uncle is an excellent candidate for the position of bunkhouse librarian because he has experience. In his mansion he once kept a vast trove of reference materials that he single-handedly kept meticulously organized, although they were, unfortunately, destroyed in the blaze. He is also an excellent candidate because the men on the gravel team will, once they’ve seen him shovel, vouch for his work ethic. Finally, your uncle can bugle the reveille at the bunkhouse every morning. If your uncle is good at all these things, which he will be, the judge might let him go free a little early, and you will have a place to live again.

  XYLOPHONE, HOMEMADE

  Of all the tone-producing percussion instruments, a xylophone is the easiest to make at home. All you need to do is find chunks of flat metal, attach them to a hollow wooden box, and bang on them with sticks or mallets or even just your knuckles. Different metal pieces produce different sounds, and the wooden box that the bars are sitting on amplifies the sounds they make when you hit them with mallets. When I at last got the chance to see my uncle in the Schlitz Center, I beheld a homemade xylophone. A guard led me into the common area of the prison. Isabella and El Hondero were waiting in the car outside. In the common area I saw him at a little table by a barred window, looking outside at the thunderclouds that were rising up in the distance. I guess he didn’t get many chances to look out windows in prison, because he was so fixated on those clouds that he didn’t notice me enter or respond when the guard yelled his name. Around us, at other little tables, other inmates were meeting with their families. I was too nervous to go over to my uncle at first. I stood there, frozen at the door, thinking all of a sudden that I didn’t want to be there, that I didn’t want to meet him. Then I heard the sound of a mallet hitting a homemade xylophone over and over, someone playing out the notes of a song. I found the source: over in the corner, at a table, an old man in jail clothes sat across from a young man my age. Between them on the table was the xylophone, which the old man had made himself and was hitting with his mallets. It was obvious that this old man had worked for many hours on the instrument and on perfecting the song, and that he’d done it all in preparation for this moment. I thought about my uncle’s bugle. I pictured it buried in the ashes of his mansion. That’s when I walked over to my uncle, who was still lost and looking out at that sky, and sat down across from him.

  YONDER, THE WILD BLUE

  What my uncle was looking at out the window when I sat down across from him at the little table in the jailhouse visiting room. The wild blue yonder is where I was headed when I launched my raft. The wild blue yonder is where characters go at the ends of books. We say you’ve gone into the wild blue yonder when you disappear over the horizon and we don’t know exactly where you’re heading. We do know that wherever it is, it’s over that horizon in the yonder, which, if I’m watching you pass into it, is blue, and it looks like you’re walking into the sky.

  I CANNOT SAY HOW MUCH YOU HELPED ME:

  Padgett Powell, the Flamingo Prince, and Johnny Hamm. Also Holly Pratt, David Reed, and MFA@FLA '17 and '18, but especially Trevor Crown, Arthur Thuot, and Glen Lindquist. Thank you Sharon Killfoyle, Joe Dames, Paul Weber, Emily Wright, Lee Malis, Patricia Basurto, Jill Ciment, Amy Hempel, Geoff Demitz, and Neal Thompson. Thank you to the Trimarcos, and thank you to the Reeds in Orangeburg. Thank you to my agent Markus Hoffmann, and such deep gratitude to everyone at Tin House: Masie Cochran, Nanci McCloskey, Sabrina Wise, and Diane Chonette.

  © HOLLY BETH PRATT

  ELLIOT REED received his MFA from the University of Florida in Gainesville and currently lives in Spokane, Washington.

  Copyright © 2018 Elliot Reed

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact Tin House Books, 2617 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210.

  Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon, and Brooklyn, New York

  Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Names: Reed, Elliot, author.

  Title: A key to treehouse living / by Elliot Reed.

  Description: First U.S. edition. | Portland, Oregon : Tin House Books, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018024171 | ISBN 9781947793040 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781947793101 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PS3618.E43556 K49 2018 | DDC 813/.6--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018024171

  First US Edition 2018

  Interior design by Diane Chonette

  www.tinhouse.com