The Fort (Aric Davis)

just to be safe. “But when I get back, no more fucking around.” He looked at the clock over the washing machine. It was almost 6:00 a.m.

38
    Despite having snuck out the night before, Tim was the first one up in the house. He dressed quickly, walked to the kitchen, filled a water bottle from the faucet, and went outside. The sun was up, but barely, and Tim opened the garage so he could get to the equipment. He dragged the wheelbarrow and transfer shovel out of their places at the rear of the garage, then filled the wheelbarrow with pea gravel from the slowly diminishing pile and began to push the thing around the house.
    Between his and his dad’s trips around the garage to the site of the patio, they had managed to wear a groove from the heavy wheelbarrow into the lawn. Tim had no idea how many trips around the house they’d made, nor did he really want to. He was still shocked that he had been dragged into the whole thing. His dad had been almost impossibly cool about not treating him like a slave just because he’d been unlucky enough to happen to be born a boy and heavy lifting needed to happen. Of course this happened. It was going to be the perfect summer; something was bound to ruin it.
    How could he bitch about having a bad summer? The thought burned a pit into Tim’s stomach as he dumped the wheelbarrow’s contents into the hole in the yard. Luke was living in a tree fort, some other kid had gotten killed and left at the drive-in, and Molly was still missing. His face went hot. He felt like a total jerk.
    He set the much lighter wheelbarrow down, grabbed a rake that been left leaning against the house overnight, and began spreading the dumped rocks around the hole. When he was done he dropped the rake, grabbed the wheelbarrow, and walked back around to the front of the house.
    This is never going to be finished.
    Tim was on his tenth trip back to the pile when he rounded the house and saw his dad. “Early start?” Stan asked. “Looks like you made another dent—not bad.”
    Tim began filling the wheelbarrow with the shovel. “Yeah, I figured if I wasn’t sleeping I may as well get to it. No time like the present, right?”
    “No, I suppose you’re right,” said Stan. “Is the rake out back?”
    “Yep, I must have missed it last night when I did cleanup. Sorry about that.”
    Tim didn’t see it, but his dad got an odd look on his face when Tim said that, as though an idea popped into his head for the very first time. It was the sort of look that Tim would have described as weird and his mom would have said “uh-oh” about. Stan walked around the house, the look still on his face, and Tim continued filling the wheelbarrow.
    When Tim had bullied the wheelbarrow back to the hole for the fifth time, he saw that his dad had strategically moved the pea gravel he’d been dumping to the corners farthest from the front of the hole. That way they wouldn’t have to make the edge of the hole uneven by running the wheelbarrow in and out of it over and over again.
    “I think we’re almost there,” said Stan, who was using the side of a level to measure the distance between the top of the gravel and the edge of the hole. “We want to leave about an inch gap, then we compress that down to two and a quarter inches and start putting in pavers. When you come back around, grab the tamper, would you?”
    “What’s a tamper?”
    “It’s the metal square with a handle sticking up from it. You’ll know it when you see it. Bring it on back so we can start packing this gravel. At this rate I’ll be calling to get some pavers delivered this afternoon.”
    Tim grabbed the now-empty wheelbarrow and brought it back around to the front of the house. He hadn’t really noticed before, but he’d made a massive dent in the gravel this morning. The pile had at most three or four more loads to go. He set the wheelbarrow down, went into the garage, then walked around to the backyard with what he thought was the tamper.
    “Is this it?” he asked, holding the tamper up. It weighed about twenty pounds or so, and Tim felt sure that some new and horrible labor was to be done with it.
    “That would be the one. Go ahead and bring it on over. We can learn how not to screw this up together.” Tim crossed the sea of loose gravel and handed the thing to his dad. It felt more like a crude club than something from the hardware store, like a modern-day mace or war hammer.
    “Now, I think the basic gist of it,” Stan