The Mummies of El Toro (Part 1)
JERRY KNEW EXACTLY where to hammer the boards into the trees, and he also knew what type of nails to use. Jerry’s dad worked in construction, and had let him borrow a few of his tools for the summer. Either that, or Jerry might have just swiped them from the garage when his dad wasn’t paying attention. All I knew was that we had the tools we needed to make just about the grandest treehouse in the history of El Toro.
* * *
The summer of 1988 seemed like one of those endless summers — the kind that just drag on and on forever. Back in those days, we got three full months of summer vacation. I suspect that we got such a long summer vacation because our teachers were tired of dealing with us, and by the last day of school, they did not want to see us for a great long while. Us kids would spend quite a few hot and lazy days doing nothing more than lying around on the sand at Laguna Beach, guzzling one can of Pepsi after another until it felt like our stomachs would explode.
But this summer, Jerry and I had a plan. Oh, I almost forgot to tell you about Chandler. He was a little bit on the goofy side, but Jerry and I had felt sorry for him, so we let him tag along for the summer. Some might say that Chandler had had a rough go of things. It wasn’t just his puny, skinny body that was the problem, but puberty had caused his voice to squeak every time he opened his mouth. When the schoolyard bullies weren’t busy pushing Chandler around the football field at lunchtime, the girls in our class were busy giggling so hard at his squeaky voice that sometimes I wondered if their braided pigtails would fall right out of their heads.
Jerry and I took Chandler under our wings that summer, almost like a project. We figured that we could maybe rough him up a little bit so that no one would mess with him by the time he was headed to high school.
In the summer of 1988, Jerry, Chandler and I had a grand idea to build the most awesome, spectacular, drop dead amazing treehouse in the history of El Toro.
We had Jerry’s dad’s tools, and a massive box of 1,000 nails we bought on sale from old man Thompson’s hardware store. The nails looked old, dirty, and rusty, and some of them were bent, which made me suspect that old cheapskate Thompson recycled them from a construction site somewhere, but we didn’t care. The nails were straight and strong enough to do the job.
We needed wood, though, and lots of it. We couldn’t afford to buy new wood because none of us had any money and none of us wanted to waste any portion of our precious summer vacation working at a real job stocking shelves or mopping up floors or bagging groceries. There was no fantastic plan for finding free wood, but sometimes in life, when you really need something, you will stumble right onto it just when you are about to give up all hope.
Our summer started on June 18, 1988. We spent the first few days of summer vacation hanging around the empty field behind our neighborhood. Chandler had brought a BB gun that his older brother had hidden in the attic. We had spent the day hunting lizards and shooting at old soda cans and beer bottles we found lying around in the field. Usually, when we shot a lizard, it would flop over on its back and start shaking its little lizard legs up and down in the air. Other times, we would shoot one of the legs off, and it would scurry around on its remaining three legs. I had to admit that I started to feel not so fantastic about killing lizards, as all they were doing was lying there in the sun, getting themselves a tan and enjoying the hot summer breeze. When I would pick up a dead lizard, I would admire the beautiful bright blue or yellow coloring on its belly, which would make me feel even worse about killing such an innocent creature.
The field was thick with tall grass, and was surrounded by 80 foot eucalyptus trees, which formed a circle around the entire field, as if we were swimming through a giant fishbowl in the center of the universe. The dirt beneath the tall grass was soft and light brown, and an occasional prickly cactus would poke up here and there along the way. A slow-moving and shallow creek ran through the center of the field, and you could hear an occasional toad croaking in the distance. If you approached the creek quietly enough, you could sneak up on a big, fat, brown toad loafing around in the shade. The middle of the day would get quite hot out in the center of the field, but if you could find some shade under one of the tall eucalyptus trees, you could just lie there and enjoy the warm summer’s breeze, and maybe even doze off and have yourself a little nap. Although we were surrounded by rows and rows of houses, the field was incredibly quiet. So quiet, in fact, that you often would wonder if you were truly alone out there.
Jerry had just finished shooting a row of empty old soda cans on the first Friday of our summer vacation. He hit seven out of eight, not bad. As we made our way through the field to find more cans and bottles to shoot at, Chandler stepped on something.
“Hey guys, come over here. I think I found something,” said Chandler.
I walked over and stood next to Chandler. He was so small, and looked so helpless. We had just graduated from the eighth grade, and Chandler could not have been more than 100 pounds. He looked like a big sack of elbows and knees covered in rice paper. I crouched down onto one knee, placing my left hand onto the hot sun-drenched dirt. After shoving a few dirt clods to the side with my hand, I felt it.
“This looks like a nice piece of plywood, maybe 10 foot x 10 foot. Go over to the other side and help me pick it up,” I said.
Chandler walked over to the other side of the piece of wood, and dug up the corner. He pried his fragile, skinny fingers under the sheet of plywood, but he could not make it budge, not even a tiny bit. Chandler’s feet were set about 2 feet apart, and his knees were completely bent, with his fingers shoved underneath the plywood. He looked like one of those Olympic weightlifters getting ready to attempt to break the world record by lifting 2,000 pounds. Every time Chandler tried to straighten his legs and lift up his end of the plywood, his fingers would shake and the tendons would pop out of his wrist. His face would become cherry red, and I feared that if this went on much longer, that Chandler would simply croak right then and there in the middle of the hot summer field.
“All right, Chandler, give it a rest, let Jerry take over before your face explodes,” I said.
I truly felt bad for Chandler, because he seemed to be giving it his all, but he was just not cut out for physical labor.
Jerry, on the other hand, was built like a Mack truck, with arms so muscular and a chest so wide that he was already wearing adult sized T-shirts.
“No sweat, Chandler, I got this one,” said Jerry, patting Chandler on the back sympathetically.
“I almost had it, you guys, it’s just that the dust is so fine that it made my fingers slippery and I could not get a good grip on the plywood,” said Chandler, breathing so hard that it sounded like a tornado might shoot out of his mouth at any moment.
I lifted that sheet of plywood with Chandler, and it was a beauty. A little bit of wear and tear and a few chips along the side, but otherwise, it looked like someone had dropped it off there maybe a few weeks prior. Jerry and I tossed the plywood aside, then started picking around in the grass for more wood. It wasn’t long before we struck the motherload — piles and piles of brand-new plywood — two by fours, and two by sixes — helplessly lying there only partially hidden in the tall dead grass.
“Man! This is more wood than we could have ever dreamed of. We’re not going to build a tree house, we’re going to build a tree mansion!” shouted Jerry.
Stay tuned for PARTS 2 through 6…
J.S. Lender’s new book They Are Here Now (Short Tales) is available in paperback on Amazon.
