Treehouse by Hanwen Zhang

The front door is already locked but I find Dan hanging around the tree in the backyard, legs curled up around the topmost branch as if he’s the Cheshire cat or something.  No stripes, but the swagger to pass as one, all smug and smiling.  Eminently punchable.  He gestures at me to come up, casually, the way someone might give orders to a dog.  The last time I saw him he owned a slobbery mastiff he would feed Grade A beef to.

“There’s a ladder.”  He points behind him.

I find it—rusty, propped against the side of the trunk—and it creaks a little as I ascend.  I haven’t climbed anything since cleaning out the gutters last November, which was hardly as high as this, where I can see the shivering tops of the maples and feel the early fall breeze teasing goosebumps out from my forearms.  I make a mental note to discuss life insurance plans with Monica later tonight.

I hoist myself up into the crotch of the tree, settling for a branch that’s a few inches below his but still within earshot, on the opposite side of the massive trunk.  The bark’s rough and scratchy, and it snags the threads on my khakis.

“Where did you find the ladder?”  I ask.

He shrugs, kicks the air with his feet a little.  “Just found it here.  Anyway, it’s good to see that goody two-shoes finally came.”

“Traffic was bad.”

“Sure it was.”

He puts on this dumb smile and I have to suppress the old urge to strangle him.  He’s sitting too far from me anyways, and I also figure that the fight would be tilted in his favor just by virtue of his size.  We’re both close to that stage of middle-aged flabbiness at this point, but Dan looks as if he’s been saving every calorie he’s consumed for some grand act of hibernation.  His shoulders stretch against his faded Metallica shirt, and the way his jeans wrap around his legs makes me marvel at the bodily contortions he must have undergone to fit into them.  I think he could have also passed for a lumberjack if he wanted to, with his inch-long beard.

“So everything’s taken care of?”

 “Yeah.  The estate sale guys did a pretty good job over the weekend.  They cleaned out everything, even the fucking salad spinner thing.  Remember that?”  He lets out his herky, high-pitched laugh.

I nod.  Mom had purchased the spinner after some New Year’s resolution to diet, though we never used it.  The thing collected dust on the countertop instead, part colander and part bowl, blocky and oddly angled so that it looked like a failed artistic interpretation of a UFO.

Dan whistles some off-tune jingle.  From my seat on the branch I can catch the wafting scent of his body, which smells faintly greasy or industrial, as if something rubbery is being deep-fried within him.  For a while we just sit there, barely moving, watching the sun drift until it’s a few inches above the tree-bristled horizon.  It dribbles down like an egg yolk in a nonstick pan, perfectly circular and unhurried in its descent.

“I talked with the agent, and she has a 5% commission,” he says.  Pause.  “Would you be okay if we do a 70/30 split with the rest?”  Long pause.  “The oil’s running dry, if you know what I mean.”

I pretend not to hear.  “You should swing by sometime.  See the kids, or something.”

He nods.  He swings his feet a few inches higher, in frustration.

I don’t actually know where Dan lives.  Five years ago he had sent an email explaining that he was somewhere in Kansas, and then sent postcards to us from a communal ranch in Angel Fire, New Mexico two years later.  But Monica still uses his officially listed “place of residence,” which is some town in Michigan, when she sends him Christmas cards.

Dan’s hand—uncalloused and unwrinkled, smooth as a baby’s—materializes beside me.  “Wanna joint?”

“I’m good.”

“Suit yourself.”

Out from the corner of my eyes I catch the flash of a lighter, the glowing tip, and then the smoky plume of his first exhale.

“Some tree,” he says, patting the branch.

“Yeah.”

“Too bad they took everything down.”

I look beside my dangling legs, realize that I’m sitting right on one of the branches.  We’re both sitting on branches that had supported the treehouse, actually, judging by the scars on them.  Dad had built the entire thing for us, pecking at his calculator as he tried to predict the strain that 300 pounds of wood and two kids would place on the tree.  I remember how he marked the dimensions of each plank with his tape measure and hand-sawed them, how he created tiny clouds of sawdust with every cut.

“Why did they take it down?”  I ask.

“Safety hazard.  Rotting wood, rusty nails, stuff like that.  Can’t be liable for those kinds of things, apparently,” Dan curls one hand over his mouth and yawns.  “Must have been pretty small and shitty, even though it didn’t feel like that at the time.”

At one point we had holed ourselves up in the treehouse every day, even on rainy afternoons.  There was a small rope ladder that we’d climb to get inside.  Robbie, Dan, and I, the three of us pinning cutouts of model trains and coloring the walls with markers.  We had made slingshots with rubber bands from the kitchen and tossed acorns that we pretended to be dynamite.  We stored our Boy Scouts binoculars in the far corner of the treehouse so that we could spy on Mr. Douglas barbecuing.

“Anyways, the agent said this place is only good for the land,” Dan continues.  “Whoever buys it will be tearing the whole thing down.”

“That’s not bad.”

“Exactly.  I was kind of thinking that, too.  Looks like a total shit hole.”

We’re both silent, breaths bated as though surprised by the mutual consensus.  From high up everything looks sad now, and pathetic, our saggy little rambler with its peephole windows and fading brick crouched like a lumpy dwarf among newly constructed giants.  The lawn looks patchy, and the places that are still green have gone lanky instead, an explosion of stiltgrass taking over.

My old bedroom window is a dark, unlit rectangle to the left of Dan’s.  The funny thing about our rooms was that they’d been designed with the AC vents connected, so if you looked hard enough through the slits, you could see into the other room.  Sometimes, Dan and I would have whispered to each other through the grates at night.  In high school, we used it mostly to eavesdrop on each other’s phone calls.

The bark starts to prickle my ass.  It’s dark now, and the clouds have the color of a bruise.  I can’t see much of Dan anymore, only hear the scratchy sound of his jeans against bark as he scoots up closer to the trunk.

“So, are you good with it?  70/30?”

“I’ll think about it.”

Somehow, we both sense that it’s already an admission of concession.  I know that Dan will prod and poke his way until I give up, needling around with his fake grace and modesty to the point where he exhausts any opponent in his way.  I can’t remember if I have ever won any argument against him.

“Good.  Just let me know by tonight.”  He swings his legs a bit a faster, triumphantly, as if he has detected my surrender and expected the outcome all along.  “Oh yeah, and visiting sometime would be nice.”

“Sure.  Whatever.”

I decide to leave him smoking his joint in the dark.  But my legs have just begun to swivel around and find the ladder when a gust of wind comes along, strong enough to make the tree branches groan.  The car keys fall out my pocket and make their descent.

“Shit.”

Then there’s another gust, almost twice the strength as the one before, the kind that would have sent leaves scuttling across our roof and made the house frame creak.  I lean against the trunk, gripping onto the bark for my life.  Dan yelps and squeals.  We’re both hugging the tree for support, our fingers inches away from touching, encircling the trunk in a weirdly incomplete circumference of human warmth.  It still feels surprisingly good, the way the wind flaps against the folds of my khakis.  Dan screams but his voice is drowned out.

His silhouette relaxes when the gust passes.  He is breathless, probably because he is high, but also possibly from the laughter.  We’re wearing the same freakish grins we would on afternoons when we copied each other’s homework, I think.  Almost like we were accomplices again, or something.

“Pretty cool,” I say.

He nods.  A few seconds later another gust comes along and we hear the ladder falling backwards, the dead thud as it faceplants on the grass.

Hanwen Zhang

Image: Pixabay.com. An old dilapidated tree house made of wood.