Authors: Adele Griffin
“Hey, kid!” Charlie shouts. Rat and I exchange an anxious look. I hope he’s thinking what I’m thinking, that more kids might be hidden inside the tree. The tree crackles and the legs draw up and disappear inside it.
“What are you? Scaredy-cat? Cats climb trees but they can’t get down!” Charlie’s voice picks up confidence. He’s proud of his cat comparison. “Here, kitty kitty kitty!” Charlie’s now leading us all by a few paces. He looks over his shoulder and motions to us. “Come on, guys. There’s seven of us and one of him. Let’s take him!” He breaks for the tree.
“Wait, Charlie. Hang on a second!” My own voice strains my throat. “Maybe there’s more kids, okay, so let’s just see—” But then Dan tears away, too, speeding after Charlie. They reach the tree together. Charlie points up into the leaves; then Dan crouches and makes a stirrup with his hands to give Charlie a leg-up.
“Ooh, they all’re just plumb
loco!”
Mary Jane adjusts her purple sunglasses with her matching grape-painted nails. “It’s kinda like a war!”
“Shut up, Mary Jane,” murmurs Steph. “It
is
a war.”
Charlie swings up from Dan’s handmade rung to grab the lowest branch of the tree. I watch as he squirms, legs kicking at the air, working to thrust his weight onto the branch.
“Here kitty, kitty,” he grunts. Ted snickers. Charlie makes a final heave up to try beaching his stomach on the branch, but he never gets that far. With a surprised yelp of pain, Charlie suddenly lets go of the tree limb and falls to a thud on the dirt. He doesn’t move. I start running.
“Charlie!” I cry out to him. “Charlie, I’m coming!”
I drop down to all fours on the dirt beside him. Dan’s scowling up into the tree. Charlie moans and slowly rolls over on his side, his knees bent up under his chin like a crushed mosquito.
“That kid stepped on my hands,” he wheezes. “Wind’s knocked out of me! Ah, Jeez—my stomach!” But it’s Charlie’s knuckles that look painful and disgusting, all shredded, ripped, and bloody skin.
An angry cry from Dan distracts my attention; I turn to see him gripping his head with both hands.
“Rocks!” he yelps. “Damn kid just hit me with a rock!” It takes me a second to understand what Dan means, but not before something knocks against the back of my head. For a split second I’m numb, and then pain shoots from the base of my skull and spreads down through me like a stain. Charlie’s already back on his feet, bellowing. He rubs his knuckles on the sides of his shorts, leaving dirty marks of blood smudged against the khaki.
“You stupid kid! There’s seven of us and one of you, you freak kid!”
A large green rock whistles from the tree, grazing Charlie’s shoulder. I crane my neck to get a better look and realize it’s not a rock; it’s a green mango.
“Get to the side, over to the side!” Ted is yelling, has been yelling. He waves us in with his arms. He and the others stand in a frozen knot, out of range. Mangoes now are spitting from the tree in rapid fire. One thuds hard on my toes; I stagger to my feet and start moving away from the tree fast.
Idiot that he is, Charlie charges to the base of the tree and starts trying to shinny up its trunk.
“That’s no mango tree either,” Dan yells, jumping up and down. “They must have brought some supplies up there. Charlie, don’t be dumb. We’ll get ’em later.”
“Get back, Charlie!” I call out. “We’ll all come back later!”
“With helmets!” Steph adds. She looks at me. “That kid might have worse than mangoes up there,” she confides. “He could have a whole, you know, arsenal—BB-guns, machetes, blinding sand, you name it.”
“What’s blinding sand?” I ask. I flinch, watching the mangoes beat like green hailstones against Charlie’s back and shoulders. Both his hands are clamped over his head and I feel slightly nauseated as I watch a mango smack against his bloody fingers.
“You don’t want to know. It’s like getting pepper in your eye, and then you’re permanently blinded,” Steph tells me. “For life.”
I prod Ted in the shoulder.
“Do something. Make Charlie get back.”
“What can I do? Move to the side, Charlie,” he shouts so loud that I can see veins tighten in his neck. “You’re acting like a stupid little kid.”
Watching Charlie not listening to us reminds me of this other time, after the accident, when Charlie and I were both in the hospital, placed in the same room in beds side by side because the doctors thought it would be easier for us that way. So much of him was messed up, not just his leg and his shoulder, but in his head he wasn’t exactly right either. Every morning Charlie would thump out of bed and pull back the divider that was rigged up like a shower curtain in the middle of our room. I’d hear the slither of the metal rings push back, and I’d open my eyes to see him standing next to my bed in his green hospital nightshirt.
“I’m going to look for her again. Are you coming to help?”
“You can’t just leave your room, Charlie. It’s a
hospital,”
I always said.
“Are you coming to help?”
“You can’t just leave.”
“Are you coming to help?” Back and forth our words would slide, until he gave up and left without me. I would be by myself for a few minutes, and then I’d hear the nurses’ voices; caught by surprise, yelling at him, delivering him back into our room. Those moments when Charlie was gone made me feel nervous and lonely, but when they’d bring him back I always felt too sorry for him to look at him.
I feel the same way now.
“Do something, Ted,” I say again.
“Charlie, you cretin, report back here double time!” he shouts.
Charlie finally must register Ted’s voice because he looks up.
“We can take him, you and me, Ted,” he calls frantically. A mango bounces solidly off his shoulder and lands by his feet. Charlie winces and touches his hand to the target.
“Yeah, but not now. Forget about it for now.”
Charlie holds Ted in his eyes for a long second; then his eyes pin back on the tree. He starts circling the tree suspiciously like a bear who can’t climb but knows his dinner’s up there somewhere.
“Forget about it,” Ted repeats.
“Come on, Charlie,” Dan adds, with an exasperated look at Ted. “Kid’s a serious head case,” he mumbles.
Charlie finally starts backing away from the tree in slow, careful steps, like he thinks the kid might just leap out of the tree. But the tree is silent and the mango missiles stop.
“Let’s go,” he mutters detachedly, as he joins us. “Let’s just get out of here. I’ll come back.”
“You and me,” Ted answers. “Tomorrow, how about?”
“Yeah.”
Our defeat hurts Charlie most. Even I, rubbing the back of my head in search of blood (there’s none), don’t care so much about revenge. But Charlie’s always distracted by new battles, and knowing he’s losing never makes him think of stopping. I understand that much about Charlie, anyway. Not like it really matters; a person can’t fix Charlie just by explaining him.
“Ted, you still got your first aid kit in the truck?” I ask.
“Yeah. Let’s clean you up, Charleston. That’s your real name, right, Charleston? Isn’t that what the Duchess named you?” Ted elbows Charlie in the ribs.
“Shut up, Ted.” Charlie’s mouth twists up in a kind of smile. “It’s just Charles, you Zone-iguana. Charleston—what am I, on ‘General Hospital’?”
“There’s a Port Charles on ‘General Hospital’,” Mary Jane informs us. “Does your mama lookit ‘General Hospital’?” We are pushing back through the weeds to the truck. None of us looks over our shoulders to the fort and the enemy hidden in the tree.
“Yeah, maybe you were named for Port Charles,” Steph’s face brightens. “My middle name’s Amber, named after a royal lady from this book my mom read. Real royalty, I mean, not like in some fake romance story.”
“I was named for my grandfather, who fought in World War II. Commanding Officer Charles Garfield Fogarty,” Charlie says proudly. “Not for ‘General Hospital,’ Steph, you retard.”
“I wonder,” Steph muses. “That kid in the tree might have been Jason McCullough. In fact, I bet it was.”
“Steph, you’ve got zero idea what you’re talking about,” Ted snaps.
Steph looks hurt, but of course she keeps at it. “How do you know, Zonie? I think I recognized those blue sneakers from soccer camp. It’s not like you know what he looks like.”
“It’s not like blue sneakers prove that it’s Jason McCullough.”
“It’s not like they don’t.”
“Whatever.” Ted looks at Steph in such a way that she decides not to push it. We then walk without talking the rest of the way to the truck.
O
UR OWN FORT SITE
lies between Third and Fourth Streets, on an inclined sweep of field. Ted had checked it out before and picked it for its privacy. Since the location’s close to a swampland near the edge of the jungle, the houses are built far away and the land is too soggy, even for military drills. The grass is kept short as a crew cut, though, because the field technically is Bravo Company property. That, at least, is what Ted says. Ted always seems to know more army facts than anyone else. He’s seen lots of families come and go, and he’s combed the bases his whole life. He can tell me the names of four families who lived in our house before it got stamped #4J LT. COL. BECK.
We post sticks at the four corners of the fort, which we decide to build in the shade of a lanky tree—way too puny for us to use as a climbing hideout plus arsenal. Still, it’ll give our fort some protection from the sun.
Ted ticks off on his fingers who’s responsible for what. Charlie and Dan and he will nail the framework together, Steph and Rat can start shaping the door, and Mary Jane and I will dig out all the weeds and rocks and other junk that’s embedded in what will be our floor space.
We all unload the wooden planks from the truck, making a few trips apiece. As Steph and Charlie tug a heavy board from the flatbed, she peers over at Charlie’s skin-grated fingers.
“He really got you bad.”
“It doesn’t hurt, though. Not like my stomach when I hit the ground.”
“Jason McCullough’s a wild kid. He’s so wild that his dad ties him up outside on a leash like a dog to punish him. Crazy, most likely,” Steph says. Her voice seems to me to be a little bit gleeful. She sure likes that tied-up dog story.
“Hey, Charlie, that reminds me.” Dan sits on the edge of the truck, fishing around for tools in Ted’s toolbox. “Last week at the beach, I think you must’ve accidentally picked up my Steve Martin T-shirt, the one where he’s holding the balloons and it says ‘Wild and Crazy Guy’ underneath. I think I saw you wearing it the other day when you were out bike riding.” Dan doesn’t look at Charlie while he talks. He lifts out different sized screwdrivers from Ted’s tool box and compares them carefully.
“Maybe I have it,” Charlie responds indifferently. “But if I do, it’s in the wash.”
“Whenever you can get it back to me, I kind of want it.” Dan keeps his eyes harmless as a puppy, but now he looks up directly at Charlie, who’s scaling a piece of wood with Ted’s measuring tape.
“If you’re so positive it’s yours, what T-shirt have you got I might like?” Charlie asks, which is his way of saying he’ll exchange the Steve Martin shirt for something else of Dan’s. It’s not exactly a fair trade, except in a Charlie way. Dan knows by now that whatever string he tries to pull, the same tangle of Charlie-logic will fall down on his head. The trick is figuring out how to pull down what you want without yanking Charlie into a fight you know you’ll lose.
“I’ll check around,” Dan says casually. He smiles to himself, so I guess he feels pretty good about the conversation and the swap, and he should. On a bad day Charlie would have denied taking anything.
We work without speaking, except to ask Ted what goes where and how to do certain things. The kid in the tree stole our good mood, but gave us a purpose.
After a while, the space between my shoulder blades starts aching. Between us, Mary Jane and I have heaped up a pretty big pile of crumbly-rooted weeds, and my hands are sore from the effort.
“I need a break,” I tell her. Mary Jane nods.
“I need water,” she chuffs. Ted looks up from his hammering.
“What a couple of lightweights,” he snorts. “I’m glad you’re not on my payroll.”
“Yeah, come on, you two,” Steph agrees. “Get back to it.” I know she’s just talking so that Ted notices she hasn’t stopped working.
Dan looks up from his digging. Sweat has separated his hair into dark bands. “Now I know how bad it must have been to dig the Canal,” he half-jokes. “Phew—the ground is tough to break through.”
“Aw, you don’t have it near as bad as those poor guys who dug the Canal,” Ted says. “People
died
trying to get that thing finished.”
“Wasn’t it a lot of Korean people?” Mary Jane asks. “That’s what my dad told me anyway.”
“A lot of Chinese, not Korean, people, a lot of locals, some Americans; it was a lot of people came down who’d never been here before in their lives. Laborers, man. Serious raw deal, trying to build the Canal.” Ted stops hammering and unscrews the lid from his canteen, takes a long swallow of water and then passes it to Mary Jane. “Tons of people got sick and died from all the stuff they weren’t … prepared for? What’s the word I’m looking for, Lane-brain?”
“Immune?”
Ted snaps his fingers and points at me like a game show host. “Immune, right! They weren’t immune. So they got all these really bad diseases and infections like malaria and yellow fever and dysentery.”
Mary Jane makes a shuddering sound and passes the canteen to me. I take a drink; the water tastes like warm pennies. I recap the bottle and toss it over to Steph.
“Yellow fever’s that disease where you can’t digest anything and so you starve to death, right?” Dan asks.
“Something like that. I don’t really know, but the reason they called it yellow fever was because of the Chinese people being yellow-skinned,” Ted says.
“No, the reason they called it yellow fever was because they thought the sickness came from the sun,” I tell him. “I read that last year in social studies or somewhere.”
“Both you guys are wrong. Yellow is what you call someone if they’re a coward.” Charlie sighs, as if he’s bored having to explain something so obvious. “Cowboys used to say like—you’re yellow, and then that was a total insult. So yellow fever is, uh—different from regular fever, because you know you’re going to die, and so you’re really scared, like a coward. Yellow fever—see?”