As If We Were Prey

The Trees Growing Up Around Us

31 The Trees Growing Up Around Us I’m sitting outside of Willie Carter’s house, or at least it’s the house where he grew up. The place is across from Baldwin Heights Elementary, where both of us went to school. It’s the house his dad, Zip Carter, built: a small white house in a small West Michigan town. My hometown . Nothing remarkable. Just a house across from a school. If I stepped inside it, I imagine it would be just that easy to leave adulthood on the sill and become the child I was again. It’s the kind of house that still looks the same on the outside, a place that inside might still smell like it as if we were prey 32 did thirty years ago: the odor of slipcovers mixed with the scent of lily-of-the-valley perfume. The knickknacks are probably in their original places, along with the trophies and family portraits on the mantle. “Willie Carter was a short kid,” I tell my daughter, who is sitting next to me in the car. “He talked fast, always with a lot of spit in his mouth. He’d follow me around the playground and taunt me for wearing nylon windbreakers and pushing up the sleeves. He didn’t like that, pushing up the sleeves. He said I was trying to look cool, like high school kids, and every day he’d tell me that, and every day I’d push them higher.” But Willie Carter and I were friends, kind of. We were friends in the way that only sixth grade boys can be friends. Surface friends, sports buddies. Teammates when we’d huddle in his yard. I’d call a down and out, and Willie Carter, looking like a fire hydrant that had just torn itself from the ground, would launch himself off the line and head in a crazy pattern for the lilac bush in the corner of his yard. I’d throw a spiral, perfect sometimes, and he’d throttle his short legs until he was under the ball, and he’d score almost every time. We were buddies then, I tell my daughter. No high fives, or end-zone antics back then, just whooping and laughing and then the kickoff for another set of downs for the guys who were always on the other team: Dale Senn, Mike Blanding, Doug Martin, and a big kid who was as slow and unstoppable as God: Art Adkins, 180 pounds the trees growing up around us 33 in the sixth grade. His team was always a man short. Adkins made up the difference. I tell my daughter that tackling Art Adkins was like trying to stop a Cadillac, but I see she’s only mildly interested . Why is that? In my imagination these friends loom, still young, playing out a string of summer days, our lives perfect, almost as if they were painted; they’re still life landscapes able somehow to shift into action, and then fade back into the dying light of an August evening . My daughter just nods, and I think I see part of myself in her face for a minute. Maybe the lips, the line of her cheek, and she asks me again about Carter’s basement. The place I’ve told her about, almost a myth in our family. I can still feel myself going down his stairs almost every recess. Our parents would write us passes and we’d leave school after eating and then head across the street. The same guys who played football after school went down into Willie Carter’s basement to box during recess, where his dad had a workbench with every tool Sears sold: a radial arm saw, a table saw, and a joiner. He had all his tools in perfect rows hanging from sheets of brown pegboard, and a row of Gerber baby food jars, their lids nailed to a board, each one filled with a different size of nail or screw, each jar with a colored Dymo label marking its contents. There was something about those rows of tools, the saws, all of it motionless but capable of such power, just sitting there quietly in the dark. And I’d al- as if we were prey 34 ways make sure when I boxed that I could see them out of the corner of my eye. The...