The Fort

Life growing up next door to the white-trash family on the block.

 

        When I was thirteen, skipping stones near the fort, I was very nearly killed by my next-door neighbor and "blood brother," Billy McInerny. We had grown up together, Billy and me, and he was always asking me to do what he liked to call “dangerous feats of daring.” Like the time in third grade when he urged me to follow him out onto a frozen river and the ice cracked beneath our boots, plunging us up to our necks in that frigid water. We screamed, coughed, wept, and later -- shivering by the fireplace in our underwear -- we giggled. Nothing delighted Billy more than a good scare.

 

The “fort,” as we called it, was the secret hideout we had constructed out of sticks, plywood and sheet metal scavenged from various places around the neighborhood. Fort construction was our ongoing after school obsession during the spring of our 7th grade year. We scouted many locations in and around our neighborhood. It was critical that our fort be well hidden, Billy insisted, as this would be the place where we would go to hide in the event of a crisis.
   

“When the Soviet troops are coming in hot,” Billy said. “This will be our bunker.”
   

Billy’s vocabulary was replete with military jargon. He shared his father’s fixation with all things military and weapon-related. His most coveted items: his father’s old issues of Soldier of Fortune magazine, which Billy kept in a shoebox under his bed. He spent hours laying in bed slowly perusing every page of the magazine, studying each picture, daydreaming about life on the front lines.

 

In the winter, Billy sported a leather bomber’s hat, complete with earflaps and goggles. All of the clothes Billy wore bore some shade of green, usually olive drab or camouflage, Billy loved to join his father on weekend excursions to the Army Surplus store and firing range. He’d return from these excursions with a newly purchased gadget of some sort: an Army-issue compass, a waterproof wristwatch, a switchblade comb, tubes of camouflage face paint, and he was always giddy with stories of the guns his father let him fire at the range.


We decided the best place for the fort would be beneath the Union Pacific railroad trestle that crossed the St. Louis River, just a 10-minute bike ride from our houses. The space where the riverbank met the trestle formed a cozy “crook” that could fairly easily be turned into a fort. A large plank of scavenged plywood nailed into the underside of the wooden trestle above, formed the roof of our hideout. Large braches propped up “lean-to”-style formed the walls. Leaves and vines served as camouflage ensuring that our fort would go completely undetected by random passersby, or, as Billy called them, enemy combatants.
   

Under this trestle and amid the surrounding environs—woods mostly—is where we spent our summer, playing games of war. We were foot soldiers in the jungles of Viet Nam, big game hunters, cowboys, Indians, whatever we wanted to be.
   

We became blood brothers that summer. We pricked our fingers with a dull Swiss Army knife, bound our wrists with duct tape, recited the Blood Brothers’ Pledge; a pledge which was similar to the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag that we recited in school every morning, only with a few word changes.
   

It was only after this ceremony that Billy started confiding in me. He told me a lot of his deepest, darkest secrets, always making me swear to secrecy on the honor of our blood brotherhood. He told that he sometimes dreamt of killing his whole family. He told me how much he hated his brother for beating him up. He wept as he described a night when his father pointed a gun at him and made him and his brother do things, sexual things, to one another.
   

He said he wanted to run away, join the army,  become a green beret. I told him I would miss him.
   

* * *

 

My parents never really cared much for the McInernys. Billy was born a redheaded, freckle-faced imp, and his older brother, Reid, was a ruffian. Their parents, Judy and Ollie, showed an utter disregard for social mores. Conversely, my parents were upright citizens with a definite fondness for order and harmony. My father, by all accounts a sensible man, was convinced that the McInernys were spying on us. I remember him coming home from work one evening, hanging his overcoat on the coat rack, doffing his hat, stomping the snow from his galoshes and declaring: “That Judy McInerny is one odd lady.”
   

“Why do you say that?” my mother asked.

 

“She’s over there looking out her window again.”
   

I stirred the Swedish meatballs while my mother hurried into the living room to peak through the curtains. “You’re right, there she is,” she whispered. “Whaddaya think she’s doin’ Hon?”
   

“Being nosy,” my dad replied.
   

Yet, were it not for the McInernys, my childhood might have been a prodigious bore. I was 10-years-old when Scooter, their psychotic Pit-bull, munched a portion of my upper lip and cheek: a wound that resulted in fourteen stitches and a scar that has never disappeared. In the emergency room my father held my hand, told me how brave I was, and assured me that later in life my scar would, as he put it, “impress the chicks.” Meanwhile my mother talked to a policeman who nodded gravely and jotted notes.
   

Scars and stitches were old hat to the McInerny clan, Billy’s skin was a canvas of  bruises, scrapes, scabs, burns and sundry wounds. My mother openly pondered the idea of calling child welfare services before my father convinced her that it was best if we stayed out of their business. I was relieved. Billy was my best friend and I didn’t want him to be taken away. Besides, I happened to know that it was actually Billy’s older brother, Reid, who had inflicted most of the damage, an abuse I had experienced firsthand and had my own bruises as proof. Reid greeted me with a punch to my upper arm every time he saw me.
   

Reid McInerny was a mean kid—tough—a bully who loved to torment his younger brother, who he affectionately called “retard;” and me; I was the “butt buddy.” Reid was always looking for excuses to abuse us, verbally and otherwise.
   

Reid’s hands were perpetually coated in grime, evidence of hours spent with his head buried under the hood of his beloved Camero which, much to my father’s chagrin, had been sitting on blocks in the McInerny driveway for more than two years. One Saturday afternoon Reid found fingerprints on his freshly painted car.
   

“You little s***s been touching my car!” he motioned at us from across the yard. “Hey retard, you and yer butt buddy come over here right now.”
   

We walked over to him to face our punishment. Reid was shirtless and seething, a cigarette hung from his lower lip.
   

“F**k off!” Billy protested. “We didn’t do anything.” Billy rarely showed fear of his brother, and I never understood why.
   

Reid dragged Billy by the ear to the front of the car. “ See those finger prints right there,” he said, pointing at the car's hood.
   

“I don’t see s**t,” Billy said.
   

“Lemme give you a closer look,” Reid said, hurling him onto the hood. Billy emitted an audible “oof.”
   

“You see ‘em now?” Reid yelled. “They’re right there in front of you. Greasy little paw prints. Now wipe ‘em off!” Reid threw a rag at Billy.
   

“I don’t see anything! I ain’t cleaning s**t!” Billy said, eyes welling with tears.
   

“Take a closer look,” Reid said, pushing Billy’s face into the car’s hood. “ Right under your f*****g nose. See it now?!”
   

“No,” Billy bbed dripping tears and snot on the car hood.
   

“I just painted this car and now it’s got snot all over it,” Reid whined. He suddenly grabbed Billy’s hair and rammed his face into the car hood. Billy rolled onto the ground crying. Blood drained from his nose.
   
* * *

    The morning after Scooter munched my face, as my family ate waffles, a shriek pierced our solemn breakfast ritual. Together we stepped outside to see what all the commotion was about. I peaked around my mother’s shoulder to see a police officer grappling with Judy McInerny. Meanwhile Ollie casually side-stepped the commotion and guided Scooter into the back seat of the squad car. I remember thinking that it was the first time I’d ever seen Scooter on a leash. My mother wouldn’t tell me where they were taking Scooter, only that he wouldn’t be biting anyone ever again.
   

Billy later gave me his mother’s version of the events: “Mom says Scooter’s dead. The cops took him in the woods and shot him. Now he’s in doggie hell with all the other bad dogs because he never had the chance to repent for his sins.” Billy then told me that his parents promised to buy him bunnies. “Now we’re gonna have a bunny farm,” he beamed. And sure enough, the very next weekend Ollie was in the backyard building a rabbit cage out of plywood and chicken wire.
   

The sounds of construction -- hammers, nails, electric saws -- were familiar to our family. The McInerny yard was a veritable depository of unfinished projects: an rotation of old cars sat on blocks, eager for paint; a once-proud gazebo became an altar to the weed gods; an unvarnished picnic table, a termite buffet. That this unsightly potpourri of rust and decay was adjacent to my parents’ pristine yard only magnified its offensiveness. When he wasn’t banging on things, Ollie managed a furniture store in Duluth. He wore a bow tie to work every day and thick tinted glasses that made his eyes look tiny. Apart from his various yard projects, Ollie’s main obsession was with World War II history. He read obsessively and spoke glowingly about the war to anyone who would listen. He would invite people into his basement to show off his extensive collection of memorabilia: guns, helmets, swords, shell casings, medals, anything related to the Second World War was on display.
   

Judy, on the other hand, didn’t seem to have any hobbies. She was a beefy slab of a woman who spent most of her days conversing with the television. She had arms like legs, legs twice that thick and breasts like basketballs.
   

My mother felt sorry for Billy, whose perpetually dirty hands, grubby clothes and greasy hair illustrated all-too-clearly his parents’ negligence. “That poor child,” she’d say. “It’s just not fair to that boy, growing up in filth like that. Is it any wonder Billy is such a strange child, he has no mentoring, no discipline. I bet he’s never even received a proper spanking.” But I knew there was no shortage of discipline in the McInerny household.
    I

t’s true; things were unconventional around the McInerny house. Judy seemed less like a mother and more like an indifferent babysitter -- she watched TV, painted her fingernails, talked on the phone. She even insisted I call her by her first name. Sometimes I’d accidentally call her “Mrs. McInerny” and when I did she’d refuse to respond. She’d just go on about her business as if she hadn’t heard a thing. “Judy, may I have another Twinkie,” I’d have to ask, and only then she’d reply, “Of course sweetie, help yourself.”
   

The McInernys had only one TV, a tiny black and white with crooked rabbit ears that sat amid the clutter on the kitchen counter next to an olive-colored fridge adorned with crayon sketches Billy had drawn. Inside, their house was a biohazard -- dirty dishes, half-eaten sandwiches, soggy newspapers, petrified dog s**t -- I tried not to touch anything. Judy spent most of her time sitting at the kitchen table in a pink bathrobe, threadbare at the shoulders and deficient in covering her dumpling-white legs. There she’d sit filing her nails and talking at that tiny television and if I entered the kitchen, say for a glass of water, she’d clasp the robe over her chest and comment on whatever game show or soap opera was on the tube. “That Bob Eubanks is so cute I could just eat him with a spoon,” she once told me, referring to the host of the Newlywed Game, and the image her remark conjured in my still-developing mind found it’s way into my nightmares for months to come.
   

I was two months older than Billy, and it was a running joke in our house that he was conceived on the very same day that my mother announced she was pregnant with me. Seven months before I was born my parents threw a Christmas party and, judging by my mother’s photo album, the whole neighborhood showed up. Judy somehow managed to squeeze into a red cocktail dress and there was even a picture of Ollie -- several pounds thinner and practically unrecognizable with a smile on his face. My parents used the occasion to reveal the news that my mother was pregnant with yours truly and, as the story goes, Judy’s eyes grew wide when she heard my mother’s announcement. She grabbed the martini from Ollie’s hand, took him by the elbow and ushered him out the door. Nine months later Billy McInerny was born.

 

* * *
   

When I was in seventh grade all the students in my school took a test to determine our learning aptitude. A week later Billy and I were moved into a special class for so-called “gifted and talented” students. No one doubted Billy’s intelligence, but his social skills left much to be desired. He spent most of his time hunched at his desk drawing pictures of skeletons, guns, soldiers, explosions and little cartoon bunnies. I asked him once why he always drew bunnies and I’ll never forget his reply. “Rabbits are the devil’s emissary,” he said. “He sent them here to observe the behavior of mortals. Their pelts are made of demon hair. Their burrows extend to Hades where they report their findings to Satan himself.”
   

Where does he get this stuff? I remember thinking.
   

At our school’s talent show he performed a magic act that, to most onlookers, belied explanation. Being that I was his only friend and, in most cases, reluctant accomplice, I knew how the trick worked. I was, in fact, a witness to its conception, privy to its deceit and, under penalty of extreme pain, a sworn keeper of its secret.
   

He wore the typical magician garb: cape, top hat, cane, and performed a few tame card tricks, yanked an endless string of handkerchiefs from his sleeve, he even pulled a stuffed rabbit from his hat. (Billy wanted to use a real rabbit, but the school wouldn’t allow it.) For his last act, Billy dramatically announced to the audience that he would make himself  “disappear into the depths of hell.” He stepped into a large box, pulled a curtain behind him and from within proclaimed that he could see the fiery portal to hell. “God help me, it burns!” he cried. “Aaahhh!”
   

After a few tense moments I wandered out from backstage and pulled back the curtain to reveal that Billy had vanished. Where he had stood just moments before there was now a stuffed bunny, headless of course.
   

He didn’t return to class till the next day. Some of the children asked him where he went. “Where does anyone go when they vanish?” he replied. “Oblivion.”
   

I, of course, knew that the box he stepped into wasn’t a portal to oblivion but rather a cardboard refrigerator box that Billy and I had found in a dumpster behind 7-11, dragged to his backyard and spray painted black. Ollie rigged up a mirror inside that made the box look completely empty.
   

As recall it, Billy had an atypical curiosity for all things morbid, especially guns and war. In fact, the things most adolescents hold in the highest esteem -- sports, music, video games -- he considered trifling. But death on the battlefield! —Now that was fascinating. While some kids might be content just poking a dead opossum with a stick, Billy thought nothing of picking it up by the tail and attempting to ascertain a cause of death. “This one was hit by a truck,” he’d say, the carcass dangling inches from his nose. “Here’s the impact wound,” he’d say, pointing to a glob of gook oozing from the animal’s neck.

* * *
   
As the summer wore on Billy and I established a routine. During the day, we’d meet at the fort and swim in the river under the bridge and fire rocks at glass bottles with slingshots. The cool evening breeze was our signal that it was time to go home for supper with our folks. After supper, we’d hop on our dirt bikes and pedal as fast as we could back to the fort. Billy was usually there before me. He’d be hard at work adding branches to reinforce the walls, or doing something to otherwise improve the fort. Sometimes he would have a surprise to show me. It was usually something he pinched from his father or brother. From his father he stole the following: a pair of Navy-issue binoculars, several Army MREs (meals ready to eat), a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes, and a canteen filled with whiskey. From Reid he took a precious four issues of Penthouse magazine, the innards of which served as our fort’s wall art. June 1984 centerfold, Christianna, smiled down at us everyday, seemingly unashamed that she we could see her b***s and full hip-to-hip bush.
   

I was skipping rocks across the river waiting for Billy when I was startled by what I took to be the bang of a firecracker behind me and the whir of wind in my ear. I turned timidly in the direction of the sound.
   

“Freeze comrade or I’ll fill your a*s with lead.” It was Billy, we was standing several paces behind me with a gun pointed at my head.
   

“Are you crazy man,” I said. “Is that even a real gun?” I asked naively, but knew the answer.
   

“Damn right it’s real.” Billy said. “ It’s a Walther PPK. A German officer’s gun from World War II.”
   

“Well how did you get it?”
   

“It’s my dad’s, I borrowed it. He won’t even know it’s missing.”
   

“Could you point it away from me,” I said, tears welled up in my eyes as I was suddenly struck by the fact that he had actually just fired at me, and that the bullet has come so close that I actually felt the whisper of the bullet’s wake on my ear.
   

Billy popped the cartridge out and tossed it on the ground.  “See, it’s not even loaded,” he assured me.
   

“Yeah but just a minute ago you almost killed me.”
   

“Naw man, I’m a good shot you weren’t in any danger.”
   

“But s**t man I felt the bullet pass by my head.”
   

“I just wanted to mess with you, “ he said. “Make you piss your pants.”
   

“Lemme see that thing,” I said, reaching out to grab the gun from him.
   

He handed me the gun with the barrel pointed at himself. I was surprised by how heavy it felt in my hand. “Be careful with that thing,” he instructed. “ There might still be a round in the chamber.”
   

I was tempted to pull the trigger and find out. I inspected the gun, admiring it. “Cool,” I said, and handed it back.
   

“Just think,” Billy said , “this thing has probably killed some people.”
   

“Yeah, like me, almost.”
   

Billy aimed the gun toward a tree in the distance He cocked his head as he squinted down the barrel. “There’s no way I would shoot my blood brother. I’m a good shot. Betcha I can hit that tree from here.”
   

As dusk approached, the lone oak cast a long shadow across a blue-yellow field of aster blooms and prairie grass.
   

I was beginning to have second thoughts about playing with guns. My mothers’ disapproving voice and shame-on-you face played on a loop in my brain.

 

 

“We’ll wait till the train comes,” Billy said, reasoning that the roar of the train would serve to dampen the gun shot blast.
   

The train passed over the trestle every twelve hours, twice a day, early in the morning and late in the evening. Billy checked his waterproof watch. “It’s half-past nineteen-hundred hours,” he said, gun still pointed to the horizon. “It'll be here soon.”
   

The ground vibrated as the train approached. We heard its brake screech as it rounded the bend n the outskirts of downtown Duluth. We had about three minutes before the train was directly overhead. We had timed it once before on the evening we decided we would hang from trestle while the train passed, pitting the strength of our grips against the furious vibration of the bridge. A dumb game. I hung on for dear life, but dropped into the river first after only a few seconds; Billy lasted much longer than I did, and plunged into the river cannonball-style several minutes after the train was gone and later boasted that he could’ve hung on till the morning train came along.
   

“How far away do you think that tree is?” Billy asked. He was attempting to line-up his shot.
   

“I don’t know,” I said, and then guessed: “300 feet.”
   

Billy mumbled calculations to himself, this was serious business to him. The train rumbled closer.
   

As the train roared directly overhead the trestle shook and a shower of dust and timber splinters fell around us amid the thunder. Billy adjusted his grip on the gun handle and as he did his face stretched into that familiar smirk. The gleam was back.
   

He squeezed the trigger.
   

I looked toward the tree half expecting it to fall down I could barely make out a puff of bark explode from the side of the trunk.
   

“I nailed it!” Billy said, smiling ear-to-ear. “Did you see that s**t?”
   

“Yup, you got it,” I confirmed.
   

“It’s getting late,” Billy said. “I’m going home.”
    I

t was unusual for Billy to want to go home before dark. It was as if the excitement of gunfire had worn him out. I seized this momentary competitive advantage.
   

“Race ya home!” I said, sprinting toward my bike.
   

I had only managed to pedal a few meters up the road when Billy passed me yelling, “I hit that s**t from 300 yards away with a pistol! Nailed it!” He popped a wheelie, “Nailed it!”
   

He rode all the way home like that: popping wheelies and yelling.

Later that night, as I slept, my mother burst into my room to wake me up. She was in a panic. She had heard a gunshot from the direction of the McInerny’s house. She tried phoning them to see if they were ok, but no one answered, so she called the police, who were on the way.
   

Within minutes my bedroom flickered red and blue. Dozens of patrol cars were parked outside. I peeked out my window at the chaotic scene outside. I worried about Billy. Had he done something crazy with that gun?
   

Fighting sleep, I watched for as long as I could. I saw a body on a stretcher covered with a sheet loaded into an ambulance. I prayed and prayed that it wasn’t Billy’s body.

 The next day, my mother filled me in . She had spoken to the police and learned that Reid had shot himself. Billy was missing. She asked me if I knew where he was.
   

 

“I have no idea,” I fibbed.
   

   
   

   
   

   
   

 

 

 

Author's Note

This is longer than most stories on this site, but lengthwise I think it's in keeping with most of what gets published.

Reviews

[Kevin Vorshak]

This story truly flows really well. You give amazing insight into the differences between the families while making their relationship more than believable. We all know of or have been friends with people like the McInemy's, which makes this even more of interest. While they might not have devolved into murdering one or all of themselve, it isn't a far stretch to see it happen.

Other than a few minor typos, this is a great piece. The story didn't feel rushed, nor did it feel overly long for the sake of length. Thank you for sharing.

[Little Mouse]

There's something about your writing that captures as I relate on many levels... one perhaps because my brother called me retard, another because I happened to work at a history publishing group with many of those war-obsessed history buffs. There were some unexpected twists. A memorable story. I think my favorite parts were in the fort as they escaped and bonded as well as the note left behind. Upon my second read through, at times the characters (not the story) made me think of "A Christmas Story" which is of course a classic boy tale filled with the vulnerable and best of bullies. I hope you don't mind I made that connection.

I only found one or two misplaced words in this whole thing though I'm no editor: (�For a moment it seemed as if his anger had subsided and "them" he suddenly�) and (shot her in the "hest"), unless that was on purpose to show the hastiness of the letter. If there are others they flew past me.

Several things are funny (lightening some of the darkness) in your writing, per usual, (too many to mention) �bunny farm, vanishing to oblivion, brothers' pledge, popping wheelies, etc.! I didn't think it was too long. A very very enjoyable moving read start to finish.

[W.k.kortas]

The construction is excellent; it flows and moves along at the right pace, it's logical without being predictable, and the characters are believeable without descending into being flat stereotypes. There is a very nice level of detail in this piece. It's a very, very solid piece of work.