The Breakable Fort

THE BREAKABLE FORT

by James A. Heaton

I was only eleven when Billy Tyler died. It was during our summertime break from school and as much as I wonder what life would be without that instance, I try to see how it has changed my life. Out of all the events that were present in the lives of five boys that day I think we all took something different home with us. Our lives were never the same.

Billy Tyler was an only child; his parents were very young, and we all thought his mother was very good looking. His father was big and yelled a lot, but Billy always had the most of everything despite his temperamental father. We were always invited to his birthday parties, which included not just school kids but his family as well. He had both sets of grandparents and some cousins, as well as an occasional aunt and uncle that visited from the mid- north west.

I never complained about my family, my parents were divorced, and I always got twice the gifts of other kids. I never really bragged about it because the gifts were always clothes or trips or other things that Billy could never have appreciated. I always invited Billy to my parties, and he brought a gift, same with me it was nothing special.

I walked home almost every day with Billy, Michael, Jeffery and David. We were the inseparable friends who were always together and who always rode our bicycles everywhere together. We did a lot together; mostly fight, but that was what boys did. Michael and Jeffery were twins and David was the loner of the bunch who participated in all the sports. Davids mother was a model and he lived with his uncle who sold jewelry and real estate. Billy and I were the best of friends, but at times we traded off because of disputes and I sided with one of the twins and he sided with the other.

Not too much was different or special about us but what was special was the land behind old man Grady’s farm. That was where we spent school time weekends and every day of our school vacation. We built forts in the woods that were made to withstand the test of time and dug ravines that channeled the local creek from one place to another. All this in the name of boyhood. We came home late every night dirty and tired and then it started the next day. In the morning time I would go to Billy’s and knock on the door. His parents were always sleeping in on the weekends, so I had to be quiet. Billy had to wait to they got up, so I rode around outside and made do with the time I had, which always seemed like an eternity.

Billy would come out and get his bicycle and off we went to collect the other three warriors. From time to time we all raided the local Army Navy store front, and our wardrobe was very becoming of the war playing woodsmen who preferred trees to girls. I was slowly growing out of the action figure stage and entering into the stage of role play and discovery. War was the easiest game we had, it involved one motivation and that was to destroy the other side. We all had plastic guns that we added things too. I placed a grenade launcher on my UZI and Billy put a strap on his carbine. We would search the local stores for good buys on weapons and build our arsenals. Most of our missions were re-enactments of things we had heard about happening in Vietnam. Movies and cartoons played on Russia being our primary enemy and we knew that capturing the base of the other side was key if we were going to win the war, after all we were eleven and this was serious stuff.

The woods behind old man Grady’s farm were big enough that he couldn’t catch us unless he saw us. He never saw us; we were too scared of the dreaded rock salt. Old man Grady was famous for shooting his shotgun at kids using shot shells loaded with rock salt. At close range it could really hurt you, but when he fired it two hundred feet away it just stung. There were three parts to the woods, the entrance, the creeks and the cow pasture. The entrance was all trees and heavy trees at that. They were thick and mostly pine; heavy vines covered the walking paths but we had an old surplus machete and we cleared trails throughout the entire area. The creeks flowed through the woods trickling from little streams to full flowing creek beds four feet deep, lined with mud and infested with cottonmouth snakes that munched on the frogs. The cow pastures were open area that was lined with of course cow manure. This area we stayed away from because it was easy to get shot or speared by the bull that watched over the cows.

We stayed mostly in the woods building mighty forts. We laid log upon log and covered the inside with discarded plywood and cardboard. We dug deep holes feeling the security of the earth against the savage enemy that shot their imaginary bullets at our forts. We fought for no country, we conquered for no king just the glory of saying we had won once again.

The day it happened was a Thursday, the day before Billy’s eleventh birthday party. He had decided to have his party at the new pizza fun house that had been opened near the mall. He was so excited, and his parents had probably bought him all the new action figures that he had asked for. He never played with them outside, he kept them very clean as each had their place on his shelves in his room.

That morning we met at David’s house. David had to wait for his uncle to get home before we all took off to the woods. He had done this before, he said he needed to talk to his uncle and then we could go. David was like that; he ruled the show and it was hard to tell if he actually believed that we cared what he thought. Billy decided to wait on David. Michael, Jeffery and I rode off through the woods to one of the forts. Looking back, I think that Billy was trying to give David a chance and not leave him because we left Billy a lot when he had to wait. He hated that; it took him forever to find us in the woods.

When we got to the fort I started working on the outside. I dug deep into the ground circling the structure and putting in branches that stuck up three foot. I then tied off more branches to those branches and made them stronger. I can’t say that I used any one style of creation, I just tied a bunch of branches together and hoped to make it stay strong enough to repel storms or neighboring kids who hated us. It must have been an hour and there was no sign of David or Billy, so I told the twins I was going to go get them. They agreed and I set off through the woods to the field where we hid our bikes. We always walked the same way, which is good, or I would have never seen him lying there. I saw him because of his red Converse All-Stars. He always wore those shoes, even when he wore camouflage to play war.

“Billy. Billy!”

I screamed over to him, he didn’t move.

“What’s wrong?”

I started to walk faster, trying to avoid being made a full out of. Still he didn’t answer. I saw his hands moving and then his whole arm lifted up. I knew he wasn’t playing.

“Billy what’s wrong, what happened to you?”

He was in and out of consciousness; he was bleeding out of the back of his head. I tried to understand it all, I tried to plan what to do next as I looked around for help, but I was a good thirty minutes into the woods from the pasture.

“Come on Billy, talk to me what’s going on. How did this happen?”

I ask the question then I saw the answer, it was a pointy rock covered in blood. He must have slipped and hit his head on the rock.

I was wearing two shirts that day, a white t-shirt and a green camp shirt. I took them off and put the camp shirt back on. I tore the bottom off of the t shirt and rolled up the rest. I lifted Billy’s head feeling wet hair and what must have been his cracked skull. I pushed the shirt up under his head and tied the bottom around it. I laid his head in my lap and screamed for the twins.

“Billy, you have to hang in there. I don’t know what to do, I am so scared. Please Billy it’s really bad and I can’t get the twins over here. Is David on his way? Billy is David on his way?”

He looked at me, his mouth moved slightly, and I saw that his ears were bleeding.

“He’s coming. later. I didn’t mean to fall. I was running fast and I…. I stepped on a limb. It hurts.”

“It’s okay Billy, I know that you were running. I gotta get the twins.”

“Don’t move. Don’t leave me alone, okay.”

I was so mad; I had never felt anger like this. I couldn’t leave him, and I couldn’t help him. I was shaking, I was starting to see death.

“Michael! Michael! Help! Billy’s hurt bad!”

I was screaming so hard that my throat was raw and sore.

Billy looked at me and his eyes were tearing up, I turned away and looked at his feet. His right foot was backwards. I didn’t understand and I pulled his pants leg with my free hand. His bone was broken. He had broken his leg when he fell, but the rock had knocked him unconscious.

What had Billy been thinking the time he had been laying and waiting for help? He was looking straight up at the trees, seeing what was above them, only sky. He probably thought about Heaven. He stared at me now with glassy eyes.

“I wish that you had been my brother.”

He was mumbling, he had no idea how much my brother annoyed me, and I knew Billy and I were better off as friends.

“Billy, we are closer than that. We are best friends. Friends are forever, right?”

“I never had a brother, or sister. I never knew, the way you felt about me. Are we like family?”

I heard the twins running toward us, they were closing in.

“Holy cow, what did he do?”

“Yea look at all the blood!”

They were disgusted at the sight of what was Billy’s life leaking from his poor little body.

I was trying to think of what to say without scaring Billy, but I couldn’t think of anything.

“Guys go get help he’s dying, stuffs coming out the back of his head and he’s bleeding bad from the cut.”

“I’ll go get his parents and Jeffery can get Mr. Grady to call the ambulance.”

They were off and the next hour I held Billy close to my chest. He was in and out and I don’t know if he even heard me, but he talked about his mother and father and his party. He wanted to go to the beach again and play with dad like he did when they were younger. He said his dad would put him on a float and ride the waves with him. He told me his mother was pretty and she held his hand when he was scared. Then he talked about being cold and that his legs were numb. I knew he was going to die because he started turning white and his lips were very pale. The last thing he asked me was if his dad would still take him hiking the next week.

“Billy, please don’t leave me. Please just let me hold you and help is coming, I can hear the sirens, they are on the way.”

He was still alive when they tore him from me. I was covered in his blood and they wrapped me up and took me to the hospital in another ambulance. They said I was in shock and I kept talking to him even though he was in the other ambulance.

Billy died on the way to the hospital from massive head trauma. He never felt his leg broken because he would have been paralyzed from the damage to the brain. The doctor questioned me when I said that Billy and I spoke, he said Billy would have been unable to speak. But I know what I heard and saw, and I know what we shared. His parents took it hard, I heard they split up a few years later. As for Michael, Jeffery and David, they kept playing in the woods. I started collecting comic books and never played outside again. I just stayed inside and read my comics, eventually I moved past the trauma and accepted the fact that when I was eleven, I held my best friend in my lap and watched him die. I drove by the old man Grady’s farm last week, his son sold it to a land developer that is going to turn it into a golf community. I got out of my car and walked through the pasture; it was a shorter distance than I remembered it. I saw trees that had been hiding places from the old man and I saw the woods. They were dark and lonely, as I entered them, I felt many things. I felt sorrow for Billy’s parents, they loved him so much. I felt anger for not being able to help him when he needed me the most, but most of all I felt lonely. Twenty-six years later and I’m still trying to find that best friend to replace him. I can’t do it; I can’t replace what I felt with him — he touched my heart.

I found the spot where Billy hit his head, I remember the tree that was hanging over us that day. It was gray and knotty, full of age and moss that covered its rough exterior. I pulled out a flower from inside my coat pocket, it was a small carnation. I laid it on the ground, the red was brilliant as it highlighted the dark brown dirt that covered the ground and hid the rocks.

“Billy, I hope you’re happy where you are. I hope you met someone up there and I hope that you have lots of friends. I hope that what I did was enough for you in the end. I tried to comfort you as much as possible. I really hope that you will remember me when we meet again.”

I touched the dirt and looked around one last time before the machines come in and take away the memories of that horrible day. But as much as they dig and pull, they can’t destroy the fort that Billy and I built around our friendship, that much is forever.