The Financial Lives Of the Poets

CHAPTER 12

You Will Need

(ALL PRESSURE-TREATED STOCK)

18 eight-foot four-by-fours

to build the side walls and

30 more for the floor,

6 three-and-a-half footers

for the fort’s side door

(Foundation underpinnings

are 16 four-foot boards)

and 6 two-footers more, for

the other fort door

16 one-footers for top cops

and spacers for the door

12 four-foot galvanized spikes

(although you may need more).

This list, along with the requisite tools-circular saw, framing square, twenty-eight-ounce framing hammer, measuring tape and heavy-duty drill with various bits-constitutes, according to my new friend Chuck, crowned prince of Lumberland, Duke of cuckolding, Earl of Homewrecker, the basic raw materials for the simplest tree fort I can build, Frontier Fort #2, a tree fort so simple it doesn’t even require a tree.

“So wait, it just sits on the ground?”

He looks up from the book? “Hmm? Yeah. It just sits on the four-bys. That’s why you gotta make sure the wood is treated.”

So…Chuck is a Hmm-er, one of those people who hears you but pretends he doesn’t, says Hmm, and then answers your question. Lisa is going to hate that after a few years. She’s going to say, Why do you say Hmm, if you heard what I said? And he’s going to look up from his newspaper in my living room and say, Hmm?

It’s only a beginning, but I am starting to find weaknesses in my opponent.

After the disastrous meeting with Earl I still had an hour to kill before meeting Dave the Drug-Dealing Lawyer. I couldn’t bear taking a meeting with Noreen my unemployment counselor, who would no doubt encourage me to take Earl’s $16,000-a-year job so she could scratch me off her list of unemployables. So I canceled and came once more to the mystical land of lumber for a bit of recon behind enemy lines.

Chuck stands while he types at a plastic-covered computer. This seems unfair to me. I had really hoped to tower above him. As Chuck goes back and forth from the tree-fort book and his computer, I whistle a song I downloaded earlier today. He doesn’t react to it. My whistling is a bit rusty, so the song may not be immediately recognizable, so I try the chorus, which it pains me to sing: “She’s sweet/and oh-so vulnerable/a man’s wet dream/or his worst nightmare.”

Chuck doesn’t say anything. He just runs his finger down the list of supplies I need and then switches back to his computer keyboard.

“You know that song?” I ask.

His brow is wrinkled up in a difficult math problem. For a second, while he calculates, he looks right at me, but it’s as if he doesn’t recognize me, or is looking through me. There is a low hum of space heaters in Lumberland, as all around us men are gathering the materials to build things; it’s what we do at Lumberland. We come get stuff to build stuff. In this way, over time, men like us built all the stuff in the world. “Hmm?”

“The song I was just singing? By the band, Blue Eyed Jesus? You know them?”

Chuck’s lips are still moving as he adds my lumber purchase in his head. When he’s done, he jots down a number. “Hmm? I’m sorry. What?”

“Oh. This band I heard. Supposed to be coming to town? Blue Eyed Jesus? I really like ’em, but I can’t find anyone who has heard of them. I was just wondering if you knew them.”

“What was it again?”

“Blue Eyed Jesus?”

“No,” he says. “I don’t think so.”

This proves, of course…nothing. It could be that the concert is simply a cover story for their rendezvous and so Chuck wouldn’t know the band. It could also be that he’s pretending to not know the band because he’s figured out who I am. Or it could be that Lisa really is going to the Blue Eyed Jesus concert with Dani. It could also be that Jesus really did have dreamy blue eyes, just like Chuck’s. Maybe Chuck is blue eyed Jesus, Prince of Peace and of Lumberland. Maybe Chuck is the emperor of ice-cream. Or maybe life is an illusion, an image shadowed by fire onto a cave wall.

Chuck hits print and when he bends over to pick up the printout I am finally given a gift, the kind of thing that makes me thank Jesus’ blues, the kind of vision that makes me believe that I can turn around this long losing streak, the first sign of light in a very dark tunnel:

Chuck has a bald spot!

The genre calls for me to go coin-size with my estimate-quarter, fifty-cent piece, silver dollar-but it’s hard because Chuck’s bald spot isn’t exactly round. (Who ever heard of an irregular bald spot? Cancer, I think, before the burgeoning Catholic in me scolds with self-directed guilt; after all, the man does have children, and anyway, I’ve never heard of scalp cancer. Okay…how about just an acceleration of this uneven hair loss?)

And then it comes to me: Chuck’s bald spot is roughly the size and shape of a fried wonton. “I don’t suppose there’s any good Chinese food around here?”

“Hmm?” Then, still bent over, reading my printout for the treeless tree fort, Chuck tells me the name of a place nearby.

“They have wontons?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “Probably.”

I have, I should point out, a luscious head of hair. Cut short now, up over my ears, my hair is nonetheless thick and healthy and free of dumpling-shaped islands of skin. The wonton is turning, my friend, decaying Prince of Lumberland, balding boy-wonder of woodwork, male-pattern ninja of wife-thievery. I run my hand through my hair; it bristles like windblown wheat.

And when Chuck straightens up with the printout, I see that the triangular-shaped hole has two allies I didn’t notice on either side of his head: a couple of little lots just being paved on either side of those dreamy Jesus blue eyes. (This is the thing about dreamy eyes; like red paint on a car, they cause buyers to overlook a lot of other problems.) Looks like some very real hair-care disappointment ahead for the blue-eyed Prince of Pine.

“Here you go.”

I look down at the invoice, eyes going straight to the bold

number at the bottom of the page…“Eleven hundred bucks! For a kid’s tree fort! Christ on a bike! How much would it cost if it was actually in a tree?”

“I’m sorry. I said it’s the easiest, not the cheapest,” Chuck says, and he wrinkles his forehead and takes back the estimate and I can see the condescension creep into his face (this jerk’s wasting my time; he was never going to build a tree fort) and it pisses me off-are you really looking down on me, wife-stealer? You can’t possibly be looking down on me, baldy-and my face flushes, and I ball up my fist to smack this asshole and that’s when I notice the phone is buzzing on my waist and I look down at the number, it’s Dave the Drug Dealer, and instead of punching Chuck, I have what can only be called, in the religious sense, an epiphany-

More than a good idea, I see, as clearly as if it’s right in front of my sleep-hungry eyes: a stack of boards sitting on my front yard, the Stehne lumber invoice stapled to it, Lisa walking up, bending over, reading, her eyes going wide (What?) looking toward the neighbors (Do they know?) typing furiously on the keypad of her phone (Did U send this wood?)