After a while I walk down the trail, across the creek, through the young woods to the cabin. Before the baby, Kate and I would sometimes drive up from Atlanta for secret weekends in Jukes Hollow. I’d work on my thesis, she would study for her boards, and we would zip two sleeping bags together and entwine ourselves on the pine floor.
I linger on the cabin porch for a while, recalling those times, then head to Pops’ old truck, still serving faithfully after all these years, and drive toward town to pick up my old camping gear from 22 Chisold. At Route 32, on impulse, I take a left instead of a right and after a few minutes turn into Fink’s Hollow Road. Buzzy and I had not really spoken since I arrived, what with the funeral arrangements and other death duties. I drive up the hill to the houses, with Giggins Hoo sitting proudly in the middle of it all.
I see someone in the shadows of the porch and walk toward the house. In the darkened corner, sitting on the old La-Z-Boy recliner, is Buzzy’s uncle Elwin, now patriarch of the hollow.
Buzzy’s mother doesn’t see much of Buzzy nowadays. He comes around once a month to take her to lunch at Sizzler, but because she and Crystal don’t get along (fight like rabid cats, actually) they stopped visiting as a family around the time Tanner was born. Now, except for the lunches, it’s only Christmas and the boys’ birthdays.
I walk between Giggins Hoo and Buzzy’s old house, now occupied by strangers, past the barn and up the trail to the tree house. I find the rock that marks the path to the old oak. The course is overgrown and underbrushed, but I can still read a faint gesture of trail and follow it along the shelf. After five minutes I tip the slight crest and the huge tree is before me. Buzzy is by the base, as I expected, smoking a cigarette and looking up at the remains of the tree house. He hears the crackle of leaves and turns around.
Shortly after high school started, Mom and my father separated. With everything she had endured in the preceding years, the divorce came as a relief, in some way providing passage on that cut of her life.
Buzzy and I entered tenth grade in September, him in a wheelchair for first semester. Our Glaston Lake adventure and the attending publicity made us local celebrities, and kids in school competed for our friendship. But we stuck together for the next three years as we grew through adolescence.
Cleo’s senior season was another record breaker, but Isak Fink passed in his sleep shortly after Cleo left the hollow for Notre Dame. Buzzy and I watched his father’s slow slide that second summer, never really talking about it, never really needing to.
With no charges filed, Notre Dame quickly forgot the inconvenient circumstances of Cleo’s involvement in the beating death of Paul Pierce. Second string as a freshman behind Tony Rice, then midway through their march to the national championship, Cleo’s throwing shoulder separated during a dorm roughhouse. Surgery, another separation, and he was back in the bedroom he shared with Buzzy, apprenticing at Wickle’s Hauling.
By our own senior year we had abandoned the tree house for more adult pursuits. We secretly bought his cousin Licky’s Dodge Dart for four hundred dollars saved from chopping firewood and selling it out of Pops’ truck in the suburbs of Lexington. The car was registered to Buzzy and we kept it on an old mining road since he never told his grandfather. We hardly ever drove it, but it made us feel emancipated nonetheless.
At homecoming that year we had full rein of Twyla Buford’s sister’s trailer with Twyla and me in one room and Buzzy and Crystal Smith in the other.
For spring break we told everyone we were going camping up at Glaston and instead drove the secret car all the way to Panama City.
The rest of the spring was parties and the run-up to graduation. The excitement of applying to colleges and the quiet that came over Buzzy when I talked about it. Driving all night after prom to Hilton Head, then laughing as Crystal and Twyla got their prom dresses soaked by a big wave. Graduation in the tent on the football field and the look on Pops’ face as I stood to give the valedictory address.
After another summer chopping wood, I went off to Columbia. Buzzy’s uncle got him a job building wood forms for Clemet Construction in Glassville.
We saw each other whenever I was home from school, but gradually, as we put years and divergent experiences between us, we found less reason to meet. During those few awkward visits we always regressed to retelling that first summer together.
Crystal got pregnant when they were twenty, and Buzzy married her in a courthouse ceremony. He bought a suit for the occasion, honeymooned her on a four-day weekend in Myrtle Beach, then moved into Crystal’s mother’s trailer in downtown Medgar.
Once Tanner was born, they rented their own place at the Dew Meadow Park (next to the new Walmart outside Glassville). Even though it was only a single-wide, Crystal was boastful of the trailer because it had one of those retractable awnings that came only with the top-of-the-line double-wides.
The old oak hasn’t changed at all. The years since my last visit growing on it in indiscernible fractions. The tree house is gone, except for a few pieces of the platform. The ruins look like a hunter’s tree stand, alone in the nest of the big branches. Around the base are a few ebbed fragments of the old house; a fleck of a wall; some shingles half buried under the leaves; the arm of a red rocker over by a stump.
Buzzy’s tie is loosened and his jacket is draped over his arm, a sweat blossom across his back.
“Hey, Indiana,” he says.
“I thought you might be up here,” I say.
He turns back to the tree.
“I tried to climb it but couldn’t get much past two foot. Gettin old an fat, I guess.”
“I’m not even going to try,” I say.
“Sorry I wasn’t able to come to Tingley’s. I been workin a double shift last two weeks. We been so busy we had to turn away some jobs.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
We are silent for a minute, trying to rediscover the easy conversation of our youth.
Finally he says, “I never tole you this before, but I used to wish your grandaddy was my grandaddy, too. That we were brothers.” He pauses, then continues. “I used to wonder what it would be like, havin him to look up to.”
“But you looked up to your grandfather. He was a good man.”
“I looked up to him, all right. I just dint have to be lookin up very far.”
I open my mouth to comment but let the thought fade in me instead.
Buzzy breaks the silence.
“You know, I used to envy you, Kevin. You were my best friend, but, man, I used to envy you.”
“Envy me? I’m the one who envied you. You were the most popular kid in school. I was happy just to get your castoffs.”
“Yeah, an look at us now.” He gazes up into the broad branches of the oak. “You see, I knew that summer, when the Glaston story got out an we had all them reporters callin after us. All them people wantin to know us—bein on TV an in the newspapers an stuff. I knew that my life was never gonna get better than right then. We was fourteen years old an in the fuckin Lexington Herald, for Christsake.”
We are silent again, standing under the arch of the oak, pretending to be fascinated with what is left of the tree house. I finally bring the conversation back to a tested topic.
“Remember when Levona Stiles’ hair caught on fire that time? When she and Petunia came up to the Telling Cave with Tilroy and Skeeter?”
He brightens and laughs. “I swear I thought you were gonna wet yourself when she took off her top.”
He shakes his head and kneels to pick up a quarter-size piece of tree-house wall.
We are awkward again, searching our catalog of experiences for common conversation.
“How’s your baby?” he asks. “Heard you had a girl.”
“Not much of a baby anymore; she’s almost three. How are your boys?”
“Great.”
“What are they, seventeen and twenty?”
“Nineteen an twenty-two.”
“Twenty-two! He’s a grown man. How’s Crystal doing?”
He pauses.
“We’ve separated.”
“Sorry to hear that. When did this happen?”
“Last week,” he says, then hesitates again. “It’s been comin.”
The conversation tails. I look up at the sky and see nothing but blue.
“They say it’s going to be a really hot summer. Probably from all that global warming stuff.”
“I heard that,” he says, then pulls a thread of conversation from the comment. “Do you ever watch the Weather Channel?”
I shake my head.
“Oh man, the Weather Channel is great. I watch it all the time. I love watchin what the weather is like in places like Africa or China someplace. Drives Crystal nuts.”
“We don’t have cable,” I add, as if some justification is required for my lack of interest in third world weather.
“No cable?”
“I mean, we can get it if we want. But we decided we wouldn’t really use it.”
“What do you do for sports?”
“I don’t have time to watch it anyway. I never knew how hard teachers worked until I became one.”