Beautiful Kate by Newton Thornburg Page B

all the door locks, only to come traipsing down to Hollywood later, checkbook in hand. And especially I wonder how the old man would take the news that this least favorite son not only received a forty-two-foot Chris-Craft as part of the divorce settlement, but compounded his guilt by failing to keep up the insurance on the thing, and finally by renting it (dearly) to a Malibu coke dealer who thought to expand his operation by importing a few tons of Colombian marijuana, and then who was so foolish as to keep running while under fire from the U.S. Coast Guard, which had been tipped off to the whole enterprise. My boat, the dealer, his crew of three, and probably a ton of grass all went up in a horrendous explosion of gasoline, leaving the authorities with nothing except me, the yacht owner of record, who fortunately happened to be listening to the radio in his girl friend’s Venice apartment on the night of the explosion.
    And so we came here, as I guess I’ve already said. Let me say further, then, that if the insurance still had been in effect, and collectible, I probably would have stayed and faced the music, that music instead of Jason’s. But then, just imagine, these pages and these words most likely would not exist, except perhaps as some dormant electrochemical potential slumbering inside this suddenly aching head. Enough.

5
    I am not sure just how old we were that summer: nine or ten, I would imagine, which means Cliff would have been about eleven. It was during the dog days of August, when even swimming had begun to pall for us and it seemed there was nothing to do except work and loaf and sweat through the few remaining weeks till school and football came to our rescue. Much like Stinking Joe and Jason himself, the three of us became solitary and petulant, even with each other—until Kate pushed upon us the idea of the treehouse. Now, we had never done much in the way of building forts or treehouses, probably because we had always had the barn and especially the loft with all its haybales, which were easy to fashion into cubbyholes and bunkers that required only our imagination to transform them into fortresses and clubhouses and the like.
    But this time Kate insisted that we go back to the far northwest corner of the farm, to a remote wooded area covered with oak and hickory as well as a scattering of pines. There she had found the “perfect spot,” she said. And it turned out to be just that: an oak tree with a stout, three-limbed fork specifically designed, it appeared, to cradle the floor of a treehouse. In addition it offered a perfect vantage point from which to spy on the Regan place, a run-down little farmette bordering our land, and the home not only of a dozen junked cars and twice that many dogs and cats and squalling geese, but also of Little Tim and Joey, who were schoolmates of ours, a pair of big, dirty, ignorant Irish kids: the bugger-eaters, as Kate called them.
    What little enthusiasm Cliff and I had for the project, Kate more than made up for. She scrounged up most of the wood we needed, got the ladder and tools and nails, and carried more than her share out to the site. From that point on, though, it was Cliff who took over and did most of the building, since he was the only one of us who could pound a nail in straight. And by the time we were finished there were hundreds to pound. First, we had to secure two-by-four steps to the tree’s main branch, between the top of the ladder and the floor of the treehouse, which we fashioned out of a dissimilar assortment of boards nailed onto a triangular two-by-four frame, itself anchored to the three main branches of the tree. Kate then came up with an unusual idea for the walls of the fort: a latticework of evergreen boughs woven through a framework of uprights, connected at the top with another triangle of boards.
    Finished, we had to stock our fortress with provisions, including bread and peanut butter, a canteen, binoculars, blankets, an air