The Fort (Aric Davis)

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    The fort was made out of scrap wood that had been harvested from Stan Benchley’s old deck by his son, Tim, after the deck had been torn down to be replaced by a patio. Tammy Benchley, Tim’s mother and Stan’s wife, had decided in what Stan decided mid-project was a fit of madness that her husband could install a patio without professional help. Stan, a teacher by trade and a man who very much valued his summer vacations, found the task to be much harder than his wife had told him it would be. The weather was hot as well, and it quickly became clear to Stan that he would be suffering in the heat of the sun for nearly the entire summer, digging out the earth, replacing it with pea gravel, and slowly leveling the stone patio pavers. By contrast, Tim and his friends Scott and Luke had their project finished much faster.
    The fort was roughly twenty feet off the floor of what the boys thought of as the forest, and what most adults in the area thought of as the “eyesore.” The base of the fort was made by attaching scrapped four-by-fours to three trimmed pine trees growing within a few feet of each other. The boys were able to place these boards by building ladders into the trees using pieces of cut-up two-by-fours, also scrapped, of course. Using the four-by-fours as their attachment point, the boys slowly made the floor of the fort out of more scrap two-by-fours, measuring, cutting, and then attaching each floorboard to the tops of the four-by-fours.
    The first of the three trees was the thickest, and rather than build the fort over the base of a difficult-to-create A-shape, the boys used this larger tree to span as near as possible to the width of the other two. This early step in engineering, suggested by Tim’s dad, made the shape of the fort’s floor closer to a trapezoid than a square, and helped utilize both the strengths and the positions of the three trees to maximum advantage.
    The walls of the fort had been kludged together from a mixture of four-by-fours and a forgotten stack of treated plywood that had been left to rot after a project from another summer, a period Stan Benchley still referred to as the Year of the Shed. The plywood had windows sawed into it at heights appropriate for the boys to look through, and allowed incredible sight lines into the rarely trespassed patch of trees.
    When it was finished on June 29, 1987, the fort’s floor was eight feet by ten feet, give or take an inch or two. Three separate ladders led up to it, one up each tree, and walls a foot taller than the tallest boy—Scott, five feet, five inches—stood to protect them. Windows with crude shutters had been cut into the walls, and a roof was over their heads to protect them from the elements. The roof and walls were afterthoughts, but it was hard to tell, due to the unlikely but really quite skilled construction work done by the three boys.
    At the point of the fort’s completion, summer break was only a month old. The Detroit Tigers were finally gaining ground in the standings after another shaky start, the Red Wings were awful as usual, but Steve Yzerman was starting to become a presence on the ice. The Pistons had done better, only to be eliminated in the playoffs by the Boston Celtics, and the Lions’ season wasn’t being mentioned by anyone but the most die-hard fans. Not that the boys cared about much of that, of course. Summer felt like a living, breathing thing, especially only a third of the way through. It was something to be respected and enjoyed, before its evil sisters, fall and school, came back to haunt them.
    On this Monday afternoon, Scott knelt in the fort, controlling his cheek weld on the rifle the way Luke had assured him snipers in Vietnam did. During the last weeks of school, Luke had read a book about Carlos Hathcock, legendary sniper of the Vietnam conflict, and Vietnam had been the game ever since, especially since the fort was completed. Next to Tim, Luke held a Daisy air rifle that had been pumped to maximum capacity, not quite powerful enough to break skin, but enough to hurt if one were shot with it. On the other side of Tim was Scott, currently aiming out the window. The rifle’s stock was stuffed into his shoulder, and his nontrigger hand was across his chest and supporting the stock from underneath, the way Scott had seen his stepdad do with his deer rifle.
    “You got him lined up?” Tim asked. “He isn’t moving. Take the shot!”
    “Negative,” said Scott. “Still