Treehouse Read online

He was a wiry man with a narrow granite face carved into canyons by the broad smile which was his main means of communicating with customers. Three feet behind him stood his wife in her pyramidal rice-paddy hat, gazing benignly at the two men. Kenneth gestured at the knotholed fence which he wished to replace, and Mr. Dan's smile affirmed that the job could be done, and at the right price.

  Pam emerged from the sofa and beckoned Kenneth to an opening in the sliding glass door.

  Ask him to put in some flowers, she said.

  What kind?

  Nice ones, she said, and sipped her mimosa.

  The fence and the flower-bed questions settled, Kenneth stepped over to the oak tree and pointed up at its limbs, then signed a square, meaning "treehouse." Mr. Dan fingered his stubbly chin as he studied the tree through narrowed eyes, calculating, supposed Kenneth, all manner of technical and logistical questions. Uncomfortable with the suspense, Kenneth looked furtively around and noticed Darren watching him through the sliding glass-door. With reddening face he grabbed Mr. Dan's arm and pointed emphatically at the tree's upper branches and mimed pruning. Darren sighed, trudged over to his mom, and flopped face down onto the sofa.

  It was a Wood tradition, the first weekend of summer, for the three generations of Wood males to drive up to Humboldt to visit Great Granma. Darren had something special on his laptop for her, his final school project, a report about an inspiring family member. He had originally intended to use his dad, but had cooled to the idea over the treehouse; then he'd considered Granpa, the number one awesomest man in the clan, but had rejected that idea when Granpa deflected his request for help building a treehouse on vague yet important-sounding grounds which Darren lacked the adult ken to refute, but suspected of having been formulated precisely for that reason. So he choose Great Granpa Eldon, whom he really considered the ultimate awesomest Wood anyway, except that he was dead. "And really," he told Kenneth and Jack as they rolled through the coast redwoods which, to Darren, embodied the spirit of Great Granpa, "Great wasn’t just awesome, he was superhuman, right? I mean he had to be, to defeat the Eebermensh." Eebermensch: Granpa's name for the Germans.

  "The stuff of legends," affirmed Granpa with his usual twisted inflection, which distorted the meaning of words the way the funhouse mirrors at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk distorted Darren's body.

  There was a shrine to Great in the house in Eureka, where Eldon had risen from lumberjack to vice-president of sales for L&M Lumber a mere ten years after the end of World War II. Gran G now lived alone in the house, laboriously knitting sweaters for the grandkids with paralytic fingers and arranging wildflowers plucked from the flowerboxes that covered every inch of the railing of the wraparound porch.

  Darren burst through the paneled oaken front door hollering "Pie!" Gran G, as always, had timed the pie to come out of the oven just before his arrival, and he'd smelled its aroma upon leaping through the car’s open window. He pressed his cheek to Gran G's aproned waist and then ran to Great's shrine, known in his life as The Den, to gaze at the model train set that filled up the room. Great had built the set with his son's help when Granpa Jack was nine through fourteen, and had developed it further for many more years after Jack tired of standing dumbly by while Great worked out the set's increasingly sophisticated electronics scheme. Gran G had switched the set on just before Darren's arrival, and the black locomotive pulled the red, yellow, and brown boxcars, and the fully laden L&N log car, Darren's favorite, through the snow-shed, over the great suspension bridge that spanned the glistening river, past the frozen lake on which tiny people skated on tracks, and through the woodland trees flocked with snow, to the L&N lumbermill and yard, where an actual working crane designed by Great stood poised to load a flat car with logs--and how Darren loved manipulating the levers that lifted the logs onto those cars! No less did he love the working headlights of the engine, the amber glow of the streetlights, the real steam that emerged from the engine's smokestack, the woodsmoke billowing from the chimneys of the two-story houses at the edge of town, or the orange firelight glowing behind the paned windows of those houses, which resembled the Greats' own house--which, like the toy houses, always had a wood-fire burning.

  "You were the luckiest kid in the world, Granpa!"

  Granpa gazed at the train set with a soft little smile, half carefree kid, half careworn oldster.

  "Dad," said Darren, "how come you never had a train set?"

  Kenneth deferred to his dad with a look, and Granpa mumbled something semi-intelligible about feeding the family and the pressures of business, but failed to mention the nightly after-dinner stock-trading marathons in the home office wine-closet situated behind his bedroom and off-limits to Kenneth.

  Kenneth sensed his father's discomfort and changed the subject. "Did you ever notice Great's army uniform, Dare?" He tried to hoist his son by the armpits but couldn't raise him above his shoulders. "Jesus, Dare, you're putting on weight!" He set the boy down and steered him by the shoulders to a wall on which Great's army uniform hung. Darren pressed his cheek to the drab green wool of the jacket-sleeve and breathed deeply the masculine aroma of heroism. A black-and-white photo mounted next to the uniform showed Great at sixteen, awash in bright sunlight, bare-chested and rock-ribbed, hoisting a pickaxe to uproot brush for the CCC. Another showed him bigger and stronger, raising a hammer while building a logging museum for the WPA. "See why you've gotta learn your alphabet?" quipped Granpa, hoisting Darren up into his arms and straining to raise him to the level of the pictures.

  Said Kenneth: "The kid resembles Great, doncha think?"

  Granpa winced, for he believed his grandson looked like him; yet he could not deny the obvious resemblance in the two males' angular bodies, long faces, strong jawlines, and bright eyes.

  Darren sensed his grandfather's discomfort. "Granpa," he said, "what was D-Day?"

  "Darren-Day," grinned Granpa, and Darren smiled wryly at the non-answer, a deferential trick he had learned from his father. Kenneth checked the impulse to furnish a factual answer to his fact-hungry son.

  "What war was Great in, Granpa?"

  "World War II," said Granpa.

  “The Greatest Generation,” noted Kenneth.

  "Greatest pie!" cried Darren, so Granpa lowered him with shaky arms and the boy shot off to the berry-pie kitchen.

  Two days later Granpa drove home; Kenneth, as always, rode shotgun. "Greatest Generation," Granpa grumbled. "Great segregation, great McCarthy Era, great insipid culture, great Vietnam, great Nixon." Kenneth smiled with the pleasure of being his dad's confidant, but his dad's gaze extended miles down the road.

  "D-Day was the largest amphibious operation in military history," Darren said from the backseat, and Kenneth beamed to realize that Darren had just gleaned the information from a World War II learning game which Kenneth had scripted and which Darren was playing on his laptop in lieu of a movie.

  "Granpa," said Darren, "were you in the army?"

  "National Guard," said Jack.

  "Grandpa guarded the nation," explained Kenneth.

  "Did you guard the Eebermensh, Granpa?"

  "I guarded the Constitution," he said, "in America."

  "He kept the streets safe," explained Kenneth.

  "Like drivers, with insurance?" said Darren, who possessed but a sketchy understanding of Granpa's business.

  "Sure," Granpa grinned.

  "Is it fun, keeping people safe?"

  "Sure," Granpa said. "Though I'd rather make wine."

  "Granpa's so good at keeping people safe he can afford to buy lots of wine," said Kenneth.

  "Why is wine so good in Sonoma?" asked Darren. "Is it the weather and the soil? Is it better than Napa?"

  "Jesus," Granpa said with a look at Kenneth, "a chip off the old block. Darrey, let me drive, will you?" But a pop and a flapping came from the rear axle as Jack returned his eyes to the road. The rear end swung hard to the right like a big fish thrashing not to be caught, and Jack spun the wheel hard
to reverse the skid, then straightened the car and steadied the wheel as the car rolled along on three-and-a-half tires. Jack knew they’d be in trouble if the flat wore down to the rim, and he fixed his eyes on the deadly cars approaching on the other side of the two-lane road while applying light pressure to the brake pedal to slow the car in a controlled manner. Even as he stared at an approaching pickup, tapped the break, and steadied the wheel, he was conscious that his son and grandson were pulling for him in suspenseful silence. The tire flapped as Jack edged the car over to a grassy shoulder, and shuddered as the rim chunked against the ground as the car settled into place off the road.

  "Nice job Dad," said Kenneth with blue eyes atwinkle.

  "Still got it," grinned Jack with a floppy mouth. He held up a sixty-two year-old hand whose skin had begun to loosen like Great Granma's and already had a few brown spots like hers. "Still steady," he said.

  Kenny smiled with pride, as if he himself had delivered them from danger.

  "You gonna call the auto club, Granpa? Dad’s a member."

  "I don't think that'll be necessary," said Jack with a self-satisfied grin.

  The trunk of Jack's car was nothing like Kenneth's. Kenneth's was a toy chest: Frisbees, dog toys, beach towels, cd's, folding chairs, picnic basket, water guns, Nerf toys--all in a riotous jumble. Jack's was pristine but for four lidded boxes: a large