The Financial Lives Of the Poets

CHAPTER 29

I HAD A ROUND TIN of those little toy logs when I was a kid. All you could really build was cabins; still…I loved them, the feel, the smell, the way they fit together. In my dream, they’re just as small as I remember them being, but there are tens of thousands of tiny logs, and the cabin I build is massive, big enough for my family and me. It has room after room after room, opening one into the other, three floors of Lincoln Log sunken living room, bedrooms with Lincoln Log Murphy beds, home gym, log theater and game rooms and a Lincoln Log burglar alarm that beeps and beeps and-

– I wake alone, curled up on my side on the floor, staring at my glowing watch, which sits on the floor in front of me, beeping. Did I set the alarm? Did I know the watch had an alarm? The dregs of sleep blow away and I look around at the paneled walls and remember-I am in the basement of Weedland. I agreed to wait down here for an hour before I called Randy and Lt. Reese and told them I was quitting, to give my old dealers a head start-and so I sat down here on the floor, listening to them move around up there, their footfalls on the floor above me as they rushed around packing bags…and I must have-

I sit up, dizzy. Reach for the watch. Turn off the alarm. It’s seven-thirty. I glance outside: daylight. I remember. Dave took my watch. He must’ve figured out how to set the alarm, brought it down here, seen me sleeping and-

Funny. I’ve finally gotten a good night’s sleep, and it’s in the basement of Weedland. Sure. The door to the grow rooms is closed, paneling replaced. I don’t hear anything upstairs.

I groan and ache as I get to my feet. Make my way to the stairs. “Dave? Jamie?”

Nothing. They’re gone. You can tell when you’re in an empty house. I remember when I found Dad in Oregon. I packed up and set him carefully in my car-took one more run through his cold house. There was nothing there either-an emptiness that felt unnatural. I think about all of those foreclosures out there: an empty house is an abomination.

I find my phone and keys on the little Formica table. There is, of course, no sign of my money. I suppose that was asking a lot-getting a $9,000 refund from the dealers you’ve betrayed. I pick up my phone and check the missed calls. Two from my house: one at 6 a.m., and one at 6:30, both from Lisa. One at 6:40 from a number I don’t recognize. And one from Jamie about ten minutes ago. There are no messages.

My car sits outside alone, in front of the house where I pulled up last night. Even the red Camaro is gone. I hesitate before leaving, wondering if I should lock the door behind me. I look up and down the street, at the houses in Weedland. There’s a line of old diseased trees lining the road, their trunks flaking bark, the sidewalk rising and cracking from their roots. I lock the door and go.

I get in my car. I consider calling Lisa-but I’m not sure what to say, where to start. So I just drive. The highway winds and

straightens, flat farmland gives way to clusters of trees and I ease into the squat downtown of my city, a low fog hanging over it like a basement ceiling.

When I pull up to my house, there is a Stehne Lumber flatbed truck parked in front.

What kind of man was I?

I ease past the flatbed, pull into the driveway.

Chuck Stehne is standing at the end of my driveway, in a big brown work coat and brown gloves, thick arms crossed like rope. He looks uneasy, confused. Probably because he sees the same thing I see.

I climb out of my car. “What are you doing, Dad?”

It’s a stupid question; I can see what my father is doing. He’s doing what I should be doing: building his son a treeless tree fort. He’s got the plans open on the sidewalk, a brick holding the pages down; he’s just started to saw wood. An extension cord snakes out from the open front door.

I glance over at Chuck, but he won’t meet my eyes.

“When I pulled up he was already working,” Chuck says. “I told him you wanted me to take all of this back…but he told me to go to hell.”

Before I can remark on Chuck’s going to hell, Dad says, “Hold this,” and I take the end of one of the eight-foot posts and hold it over a corner of the woodpile while Dad scratches a straight line with one of Franklin’s Spiderman pencils. Dad’s hands are raw and red in the cold. He’s still wearing his pajama bottoms and his Go Army sweatshirt. He’s in socks. There’s no sign of his remote control. “Brace it with your leg,” he says. I do and Dad picks up a circular saw that I don’t own and makes a clean cut, straight down his straight line, the wood grain protesting at the end before it breaks and Dad’s end falls softly into the saw-dusted lawn.

When the saw is done humming, I say, as gently as I can, “Dad, where’d you get that?”

He looks up, confused. Then he looks at the saw in his hand. “Isn’t it mine?”

There’s also a framing hammer, and a heavy-duty electric drill. I pick up the drill, turn it over and see my neighbor’s name stenciled on the back.

Chuck Stehne shifts his weight in his work boots. So here we are.

Dad has just started work on the base of the fort, cutting the first eight-foot four-by-four in half. I breathe in sawdust and cool morning air. He hasn’t done enough to keep me from returning the wood, of course; I can always pay for a single cut four-by.

I take another whiff of sawdust. It’s a nice smell, like something cooking. I have a vague memory of the smell, but there’s nothing visual to go with it. “I’m sorry to make you come all the way out here,” I tell Chuck. “But it looks like we’re keeping the wood.”

Chuck nods and his cool, blue eyes drift up to the second story of our house, then back to the woodpile and the senile old man wielding a circular saw. He starts to move away, and then seems to stop; he hasn’t taken a step-it’s more of a flinch. “You know,” he says. “I could help…if you want.” He quickly adds, “Or not.”

Then Chuck Stehne sighs, looks once more at the house and says, quietly, “Look. For what it’s worth? I didn’t tell her about…you know…the whole pot thing?”

I have no idea what to say. Thanks seems a little much.

Dad goes back to reading the plans.

Chuck goes on: “I think you should know…” He sighs. “I mean…I guess I’d want to know…if I was you…first of all, we didn’t…and it wasn’t something anyone…you know…what I mean is…” He screws up his face. “And whatever did…

you know…happen…it was my fault…Lisa, she didn’t…what I mean is…”

“It’s okay,” I finally say-putting myself out of my misery by holding my hands up. Christ, I’d rather he showed me pictures than leave all those unfinished sentences.

Then Chuck Stehne, Prince of Lumberland, nods, sighs again, and starts for his truck, although he still seems desperate to say…something. He pauses, then seems to think better of it, then gives a what-the-hell shrug, and finally says it: “I really do love her.”

There it is. My head falls to my chest.

“It wasn’t something…I mean, we weren’t…Anyway…” And then, when he has done all the damage one person could possibly do with nothing more than sighs, nods and stammering, unfinished thoughts, he starts for his truck again.

Then Chuck Stehne climbs into the cab of his flatbed truck, pulls the door shut, sits for a minute before starting it and-finally-pulls away. And I look up at our bedroom window, but all I get is a flat reflection of the gray sky.

“You gonna help or you just gonna stand there holding your dick?”

And so my father and I continue to build the base of Frontier Fort II. I get him some shoes and gloves. We saw some more posts, then lay two of them on the ground, four feet apart, and then we put two more on top of those, perpendicular to them, and two more on top of those.

I look up every few minutes, and once I catch Lisa in the window, staring down on us. I hold my hands up…in a double wave, or a sign of surrender. But she just backs away from the window. A few minutes later, the boys come out, in coats and hats and gloves. The door closes before I can catch Lisa’s eye.

“I thought you said this wood was a mistake,” Teddy says.

“Sometimes you just make the best of your mistakes,” I say, accidentally parenting.

“So…we can keep it?”

“Sure.”

“No way!” says Franklin, and he picks up one of the spikes and swings it like a sword.

The fort comes together pretty quickly. I’m surprised how often Dad refers to the plans as we work. At first I think it’s the dementia-that he’s forgetting what he reads, but then I flash on a long-ago Christmas, Dad returning every few seconds to the little folded Japanese instructions as he built me a slot-car racetrack. I guess it’s one of those things I’m supposed to learn, maybe the only thing-pay attention to the goddamned instructions. Follow the rules, dipshit. I watch Dad drill 3/16-inch pilot holes, watch the way he eyes it and lines it up so the drill goes straight down through the base beams. He has Teddy hold a framing square on the base to make sure we’re at 90 degrees and then he has Franklin go get one of the six-inch spikes.

“How big is-” Franklin starts to ask.

“Big as your foot,” Dad says.

Steam escapes from the mouths of the Prior men.

Dad drives the first spike through the base of our fort and then the next one. It’s a simple base-sixteen posts, eight going in each direction, spiked crosswise to form a nice, solid foundation. The spikes echo like gunfire as Dad pounds them.

“Floor next,” Dad says, reading the plans. We lay out eight of the longer posts, the eight-footers. Dad shows the boys how to use spikes to make sure the floorboards are uniformly spaced.

We’ve been out about two hours and are about two-thirds done when I look up and see a newer four-by-four Ford pickup truck coming down our street slowly, as if looking for an address. The

truck parks in front of my house. A very unhappy Lt. Reese climbs out, wearing a heavy coat, a watchman’s cap and a scowl.

I set the framing hammer down. “You might have to finish without me,” I tell Dad.

“Well, look here,” Lt. Reese says as he walks up the sidewalk. “If it isn’t the guy who managed, in twenty-four hours, to fuck up a six-month investigation.”

“I’m sorry.”

He laughs bitterly. “Don’t apologize. I told you what would happen if you fucked up.” Then he looks past me. “Hey, I know that pile of shit. Is that Frontier Fort number two?”

“Yeah.”

“I built the same thing for my kids. Ten years ago. Wife didn’t want them falling out of a tree. They played in it for twenty minutes and haven’t been in it since. But the stupid thing will be there fifty years after my house falls down. Why are you making it in your front yard? Who builds a goddamn fort in his front yard?”

“That’s just where my dad started it.”

“And who builds a goddamn tree fort in November?”

“My dad…he’s kind of senile.”

Lt. Reese looks past me. “All that wood.” Shakes his head. “It’s easy to build, but it’s twice as expensive because of all those four-bys. Thing’s a waste of trees.”

Then the lieutenant calls past me. “Hey. Grandpa! You gotta use the twelve-inch spikes for the last row!”

I turn. Dad is, indeed, holding a six-inch spike.

Lt. Reese walks over and picks up the plans. “I know it says to use shorter spikes, but you need this one to go through the floorboards, too. See?” He grabs the drill, puts in the longer bit and deepens the hole, then takes a longer spike and sinks it while Dad swings the hammer and drives the spike through. It makes a sharp

report that echoes down the street. I flinch each time he hits it. Lt. Reese steps away. “See?” he says again.

Lt. Reese sits on the porch and watches us cut the doors. “I can wait,” he says.

And so, with the sun burning off the morning fog, supervised by the surly lieutenant from the regional drug task force-who occasionally calls out instructions (“Reverse the drill!”) my father, my sons and I successfully build Frontier Fort Number Two in my front yard.

We’re leveling the sidewalls when Lt. Reese says, “Hey. You got any coffee in there?”

I go inside to make it, but in the kitchen I see that Lisa has already made a pot. I get a cup for Dad, one for Lt. Reese and one for me. We sit on the front porch, holding the warm cups in our cold hands, watching the boys play in their finished fort. It’s bulky, but not at all roomy; like everything in life, Frontier Fort II is both bigger and smaller than I thought it would be. There are no secret rooms. No Murphy beds or home gyms. Not even a roof. It’s just some square walls sitting on a smaller square a few feet above the ground. Even the boys aren’t quite sure exactly how to “play” in it, or how to play anything without a controller in their hands. It strikes me that I am at least two years late in building my boys their treeless tree fort.

We sit on the cold porch, steam from our coffee in our faces, watching the boys jump from the walls.

“So did you get him?” I ask. “Dave?”

“Get him?” Lt. Reese laughs. “We could’ve arrested him any time we wanted. God, you really are stupid.” Then: a sigh. “Idiots turned themselves in, just like we were afraid they would. Lawyers called this morning. They all want deals. We’re fucked.” He sips at his coffee. In his disappointment, I remember what Randy told me and I think I finally understand: the last thing they wanted

was to arrest Dave and Monte, to shut down the operation. With their grant running out at the end of the year, and their emergency budget presentation coming up, what they really needed was some reason to keep the operation going so the task force could get two more years funding. They needed tape of me pretending to buy Monte’s business, so they could string the thing out for a while. But I panicked and blabbed and ruined the whole thing.

Lt. Reese finishes his coffee. “We should get going. There’s a lot of paperwork.”

I pull the watch from my pocket and hold it out to him. “And this. Is it-”

“Yeah.” He shrugs. “Just a watch. With a backlight. It was Randy’s idea…he figured you’d get suspicious if you didn’t think you were wired up. I wanted to put a fake body wire on you but Randy thought you’d piss your pants so he came up with this James Bond bullshit.” He takes the watch, puts it in his pocket. “I guess this is what happens when you’re pushed for time. You make mistakes.”

“What’s going to happen to those kids,” I say. “To Jamie?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about him,” Lt. Reese says cryptically. I think this confirms what I figured out last night. That if I was OH-2…there had to be a-1. “So Jamie was-”

He just smiles. “Don’t ask me that.”

“None of those guys seemed like criminal masterminds,” I say. “Even Dave wasn’t as bad as you made him out to be. I think he was just caught up in it, like I was, over our heads.”

“Caught up? Over your head?” This is apparently the wrong thing to say to Lt. Reese, who spins on me, his old shitty self. “You were dealing drugs, fuck-nuts! You know the definition of a fucking drug dealer, Slippers? Someone who deals drugs!”

My boys have looked up from the tree fort. I hold up my hand to quiet Lt. Reese.

He continues more quietly: “The only difference between you and Dave? Is that you sucked at it. You think you’re different ’cause…what? You got kids? “Cause you used to have a job?”

Lt. Reese hands me his coffee cup, sighs. “You know the worst part of what I do: nobody ever deserves it. Nobody ever thinks they’re wrong. You’re all a bunch of assholes walking around crying, ‘It ain’t fair…I didn’t mean it…I got a bad deal.’”

“Amen,” says Dad.

Lt. Reese and I both look over at Dad, who rocks back and forth, staring off into space.

Lt. Reese reaches over and pats my father on the back. Then he stands. “You ready?”

“Can I go in and tell my wife?”

Lt. Reese looks at his empty cup. Sighs. “Get your dad and me some more coffee first.”

I get them each a cup. “Five minutes,” Lt. Reese says.

I nod. I don’t see the boys in the fort, so I walk over. They’re sitting on the floor, cross-legged in opposite corners, like boxers between rounds. They’re playing their Gameboys. Fifteen minutes in their new eleven-hundred-dollar fort and they’re back to playing video games.

“I love you guys.”

They look up, confused. “Okay,” Teddy says. I step into the fort. It really is solidly built. I feel strangely…proud. I bend down and hug them. Even Teddy hugs me back, awkwardly, but I’ll take it. They don’t ask where I’m going.

“Bye Dad,” I say. “I’m going to jail.”

He toasts me with his steaming coffee.

Then I start back toward the house. The stairs creak under my feet. The door to our bedroom is closed. I start to knock-then I grab the knob and open the door. Lisa looks startled. She’s staring out the window, chewing her thumbnail, her phone at her ear.

Wearing her heavy coat. She looks back and sees me. Her eyes are red and bleary. “I have to call you back,” she says into the phone. She closes it and turns to face me.

Our big suitcase is open on the bed. Nothing in it. I don’t know what this means. Has she not packed yet? Or changed her mind? Or is she expecting me to go?

She looks up and I catch her eyes-green, frightened.

I look down at the bed underneath that suitcase. “Lisa…I…” What do you say? Where do you start? “I am so sorry.”