The asphalt beneath Neal’s go-kart was soft black taffy cooking in the June sun, the tires leaving a shallow tread the length of the subdivision. The whine and rattle of the Briggs & Stratton motor rang in his ears and his chinstrap whapped against the ear hole of his helmet; 22 miles an hour was fast enough to bend the red safety flag in a strained arch. Neal was on a mission, the only lieutenant for the job.
     “Corey forgot the hedge trimmers,” Ross had told him. “Run back and get ours.”

     The crew was in Phase 2 of the new subdivision, just a mile up the road, scavenging new home lots for discarded two-by-fours and particleboard. Sometimes they were lucky enough to find an unused section of Sears siding lying around. Earlier in the week Ross had dispatched the crew to gather as many building tools as possible. They had been stockpiling hoes, shovels, rakes, and an axe in the old Boyer barn. Ross had put his brothers, Neal and Peeper, in charge while he scouted locations for the new fort. And today was the day Ross was going to disclose the new location.
     The crew gathered behind a large brown brick house that was almost finished: conical sand piles, broken bits of brick, dried mortar mounds, and saw horses dotted the back yard. Newly planted trees were scattered about the side yard, sitting in shallow holes overflowing with fresh black soil. An army five strong, the crew stood around a semi-circle of four wheelers and go-karts eager to hear Ross make the announcement.
     “When I was 10, we could shoot our BB guns 300 degrees in any direction, but not any more,” Ross said, standing in the middle of the bunch. “With all these houses we’re losing territory.”
     Everyone nodded in agreement. Just last week a new house frame had gone up where their previous fort had stood. An entire swath of trees and brush was leveled in a matter of hours, along with the fort that had weathered a tornado and a flash flood. It was torn down without notice. They lost their collection of snakeskins, a set of Lazer Tag guns, a spool of barbed wire, and their prized Spuds MacKenzie poster. Everything was lost.
     “Yeah, these new homes ain’t good for any of us,” Neal said. A fresh scrape, running lengthwise across his face—just enough to interrupt a patch of freckles on his right cheek—was starting to form a ruddy black scab; the edges of it, zipper-like, were bright pink from the summer sun. He hoped it would leave enough of a scar so he could look tough going into fifth grade.
     “They keep building houses like this, won’t be too long before we can’t ride or shoot anywhere,” Peeper said, spitting a few sunflower seeds to the ground with more spit than seed, the way Ross had shown him, pretending it was chewing tobacco.
     “That’s why we’re building the new fort farther away,” Ross said. “At least we’ve got the free wood.”
     “Where’ve you picked, Ross?” Corey asked, the only kid in the bunch whose parents could afford to buy him Air Jordans. “Up by the racetrack?”
     “Nah, they’re probably going to tear that old thing down next,” Neal said. He already knew the answer. Ross had told him that morning and he felt a tinge of pride at having concealed the secret all morning long.
     Ross waited for it to quiet down. His buzz cut had gotten longer since the start of the summer, fuzzy and in need of a trim. The wind rustled the dead tree limbs in the brush pile behind them.
     “Just before the Vests’ farm begins,” Ross said. “Right alongside their fence. We’ve all got to keep this quiet. It’s already far enough away that Dad won’t like the sound of it.”
     “Or Mom,” Peeper added. He was the only boy going into third grade who still had his baby teeth, and they were worn down to small yellow nubs. Ross had offered to yank both teeth out with kite string, but Peeper wouldn’t let him get close enough to try.
     “Well, we’ll just make sure not to tell her when we visit her, okay,” Ross said, eyeing Neal and Peeper. “It ain’t lying if you happen to leave a detail or two out.”
     “So when are we heading up there already?” Matthew asked.
     “Well, after we gather up all the tools I’ve got something I need to show you first,” Ross said. “Up at the Boyer barn. It’ll put hair under your arms. Like mine.”
     The crew erupted in laughter.
     “That’s just peach fuzz,” Corey said, pointing at Ross’ shoulder, his voice cracking, breaking on the word fuzz.
     “It’s hair, ain’t it,” Neal said.
     “Yeah,” Peeper said, “at least he’s got hair.”
     Neal was excited about building up by the Vests’. When Phase 2 was announced last year it hadn’t taken long for their street to become mud-speckled from the builders and contractors driving in and out of new construction sites. The houses were getting bigger too. Some of them even had Dukakis-Bentsen campaign signs staked into squares of sod; his dad had remarked they were the only blue lawns in the neighborhood. Ross had pulled Neal aside at the start of the summer and told him to get ready for some big changes. This is what he had been talking about.
     
     Normally Neal would pull off the road three houses before his own, just before the Bensons’, and roll to a stop in the ditch, out of sight. He would wedge the safety flag between the seat and the motor. It was a trick Ross had taught him. If you didn’t want to get caught taking Dad’s tools from the barn without permission you simply parked down the street, killed the engine and went around the back of the other houses, hugging the tree line, and slipping in and out of the barn undetected. But Neal needed gas this time and wasn’t strong enough to carry the gas can that far. He would lie to Ross if asked and tell him he pulled off the road, just as he had been taught. “I got in and out, undetected,” he would say. “Filled up, too.” Ross would flash a smile of approval.
     Neal veered into the driveway. His dad was mowing with the precision of a groundskeeper, hugging tidy lines of cut grass on an old Craftsman riding lawnmower. It was the cheapest mower in the neighborhood and the boys were a little self-conscious that it wasn’t green like all the others. His dad told him they couldn’t afford a more expensive one with all the hospital bills coming in.
     “What’s it matter to you about the tractor?” Neal’s dad would ask. “Ross is the only one heavy enough to sit on the Craftsman and mow anyway.” Neal hoped to gain some weight this year so he could operate the mower by next summer. The last time they visited his mom, the last time she could walk up and down the cancer ward without an IV Drip, she said it looked like Neal was getting bigger, almost tractor-ready.
     Neal waved to his dad as he passed him on the driveway, minding his speed. He didn’t want his dad to play with the governor and slow the go-kart down again, like he did two weeks ago. Neal had been driving too fast around their neighbors, who were on a walk with their kid in a stroller, and it brought out the devil in his dad. Screaming and everything. The devil was coming out more often in his dad, Neal thought. And his mom was staying overnight in the hospital more often, which made being around his dad pretty tense. His dad even yelled at Ross over his math homework, telling him compound fractions shouldn’t be that difficult to understand. Peeper had gotten quieter still; he seemed to worry about their mom the most.
     Neal parked the go-kart just outside the big barn door. A decade old by now, the last coat of paint was flaking badly, chips curling and fraying like a bunch of green and white cornflakes. It took every bit of Neal’s energy to slide the twin doors open as they inched along two rusted tracks high above his head. The inside smelled like warm sawdust and oil; in the spring it smelled of damp metal and wet grass. Muddy shoe tracks criss-crossed the cracked concrete floor inside. Neal’s dad had spray painted the floor in gridded white lines, dividing it into visible sections so that nothing was ever out of place. The workbench took up the entire back wall; it was a shrine to tools, and hundreds of them hung in orderly fashion from nail hooks.
     The hedge trimmers hung on the right side of the workbench, and Neal had to strain to reach them; he placed them in a specially designed bed Ross had fashioned on the back of the go-kart, which was a plastic crate tied off with some rope.
     Four gas cans were sitting on the floor just inside and to the left of the barn doors. All of the cans contained unleaded gas except the one with tape on the handle—it was a two-stroke mixture of gas and oil. Neal picked the lightest can and shuffled his feet in quick, strained bursts towards the go-kart. When he set it down a bit of gas sloshed out in a small wave, wetting the ground next to the tires. He ran back inside to fetch a funnel.
     It only took a few seconds to fill the small tank, and it was a race to set the can down before the funnel overflowed. This time Neal timed it perfectly and wished Ross were there to witness such an impressive display of skill.

     When Neal got back to the brown-bricked house he let the engine idle. The back yard was picked clean of scrap wood and the crew was nowhere in sight. The back patio doors, which had masking tape covering the French windows, were wide open, letting in dirt and grasshoppers.
     Neal noticed two wooden crates stacked with brown brick that hadn’t been there when he left. Saturdays were busy delivery days and it was always a gamble to scavenge for wood on any day but Sunday.
     Neal checked to make sure the hedge trimmers were securely fastened in the back bed and spun his tires, heading out of the backyard towards the road.
     The crew had been using the old Boyer barn as an interim meeting place. It was once a pristine facility where Mr. Boyer trained racehorses, strong and graceful, but the bank had foreclosed on the property two years ago. The red dirt on the racetrack hadn’t been touched or tilled since. Neal remembered the way the horses would graze in the pasture. They would accelerate at the sound of his go-kart, hooves pounding the dirt in full gallop as if challenged to race by the weak engine, backfiring like a bunch of wet Black Cats.
     The Boyer barn was double the size of his father’s, and was a faded yellow that had been lightened from years in the sun; the copper roof had greened long ago. It had one long walkway through the center with horse stalls on either side. An old grain pile sat mildewing in one of the stalls in the middle of the barn, providing a pungent smell the crew had gotten used to. There were no doors at either end. The dark timber rafters, which Peeper climbed whenever he got the chance, rose like petrified slats of molasses high into the air.
     When Neal rolled to a stop just outside the west entrance, the sun hung high overhead. After the engine went dead he could hear muffled voices wafting down the walkway towards him. He grabbed the hedge trimmers and made his way inside. Pockets of stale air greeted him and made his lungs burn. Neal coughed, and when he did the voices grew silent.
     As Neal walked to the center of the barn he could make out a burly head of brown hair poking through the lower half of a horse stall just up ahead. It was Peeper.
     Ross climbed the stall wall so that his torso was half above the top.
     “You scared the living daylights out of us,” Ross said.
     Corey and Matthew scaled the wall next to Ross; both of their faces were flush red. Peeper was there too, hiding some new secret behind a smirk, but he couldn’t quite look Neal in the eyes.
     “We thought you might be Rick Benson. You could’ve said something, you know,” Corey said. “He’s always trying to sneak up on us.”
     Neal didn’t mind the chastising; he was happy to be back in the presence of the crew and his two brothers. He tossed the hedge trimmers into the horse stall along with the other tools, which sat piled in a disorganized, tangled mess of metal and wood. Neal climbed the stall wall so he was almost face to face with Ross, standing on the other side. A few open magazines sat face down on the dirt floor next to dried bits of hay. A brown grocery bag filled to the top with magazines sat nearby.
     “I see a delivery truck scared ya’ll away from the brown house,” Neal said. “Anybody get yelled at?”
     “Nah, we made a clean break around the other side of the house,” Ross said. “Matthew just about ran over one of those new saplings in the side yard with his four-wheeler.”
     Peeper kept looking over his shoulder at the stall floor and the rest of the crew was quieter than usual. Neal looked around, confused.
     “Neal, you’ve got to come look at this,” Ross said. “You’re not going to believe it.”
     Neal finished climbing up and over the stall wall. The crew created an opening and let him inside the chain of bodies encircling the bag.
     Two magazines were laying face down and Neal could see the covers clearly now. Both read PLAYBOY and had what looked like a naked person on the cover, though Neal couldn’t be sure his eyes were seeing correctly.
     “What are these, Ross?” Neal asked.
     Ross picked up a magazine from inside the bag. The cover was curled at the edges, faded and brittle from water damage. Peeper made a grab for one of the magazines still face down on the ground.
     “Don’t get ahead of yourself, Peeper,” Ross said, laughing. “Let’s show Neal this one, then we’ll go through the rest of ‘em.”
     Neal was shouldered up to Ross now, inspecting the cover. It was a full color picture of a woman without a shirt. She was wearing too much makeup, Neal thought, and she wore a pair of ruffled underwear he wasn’t familiar with.
     “You get these from dad?” Neal asked.
     “No, and he can’t know about this,” Ross said. “Mom, neither.”
     “So where’d you find ‘em, then?” Neal asked. His eyes shifted from Ross to Peeper and back again.
     “I found them lying on the side of the road heading down to the Vests’ this week,” Ross said. “I’ve been keeping them here until we were ready to break ground on the new fort.”
     “Well, what’s inside?” Neal half-whispered.
     Peeper handed Neal one of the magazines. He then fished another one from the grocery bag, as did the rest of the crew.
     “These’ll put hair under your arms, alright,” Corey said, looking right at Neal.

     The road was no longer paved. The crew rode in a straight line, kicking up a cloud of white dust. Ross led the way and pulled a small red trailer hitched to his Honda; all of the tools fit neatly inside the trailer along with the brown grocery bag, overflowing with nudie magazines. Neal brought up the rear, a responsibility he cherished.
     The sun was almost directly in front of them, floating on the horizon. Flies and gnats were visible in circular swarms when the light caught them just right. Barbed wire fencing divided the road from grassy pasture and plowed farmland on either side. Just ahead, a narrow bridge ran over a steep ravine and large patches of trees hugged the banks.
     The hum of six engines created a sound Neal daydreamed about when the school year was going strong and summer seemed forever away. The rattle of the go-kart seat helped exaggerate the odd sensation that he felt in the small of his stomach that bordered between nausea and the rush of adrenaline.
     Neal had tossed a magazine in the bed of the go-kart before leaving the Boyer barn and suddenly felt self-conscious that it was there. He looked over his shoulder to make sure it hadn’t flown out. It was still there. Before the crew packed up the tools there wasn’t any time to talk to Ross and Peeper alone about the pictures.
     The Vests’ farm was less than a half-mile up the road. The crew had turned off the rock road at an unmarked point. A new trail was emerging below their tires, with dried grass breaking at its base, forging a barely perceptible path. Neal could feel the broken blades of grass rubbing against the bottom of his go-kart as he slowly tapped the gas pedal behind Peeper, whose exhaust was starting to choke him.
     Ross was leading the crew along a fence line populated with trees that made a canopy, touching limb-to-limb the entire length of the field. The line of ATV’s came to a stop in front of Neal; he poked his head around the line in front of him. Ross was directing them to enter the field to their left, where he had just cut a portion of the fence with the hedge trimmers.

     While the rest of the crew was inspecting the new grounds—about an acre or so, with a creek on one side—Neal walked over to the trailer, where Ross and Peeper stood. They were both looking at magazines and occasionally nudging each other. Neal placed his magazine on top of the brown bag and stared at both of his brothers. It took Ross and Peeper a second to notice.
     “What’s the matter, Neal?” Ross asked.
     “Nothing.”
     “Come on, now,” Ross said, “Come out with it.”
     Peeper had hardly looked up, standing with his feet crossed at the ankles. He had been focusing on the same page for at least 30 seconds.
     “Hey, Ross!” Corey yelled from across the way.
     “Yeah,” Ross said, putting his elbow on Peeper’s shoulder to balance.
     “How far would you say we are from home?” Corey asked, his voice cracking in mid yell.
     “About seven minutes from phase one,” Ross said. “Mr. Vest will never know we’re here.”
     “Or our parents,” Peeper said, absentmindedly looking up from the magazine.
     Neal stood looking down at his feet. Ross tousled his hair.
     “Neal, it ain’t a big deal.” Ross said.
     “Why, you seen something like this before?” Neal asked, finally looking up. “The female stuff.”
     “Yeah,” Ross said.
     “I could tell,” Neal said, looking over to Peeper. “You didn’t look as surprised as me and Peeper.”
     “Well, dad’s got a few in his closet, over by the 12 Gauge,” Ross said. “But I never got a real good look, not like with these.”
     “Why not?” Peeper asked. He closed his magazine and joined his two brothers, making a small huddle.
     “Mom came in. I didn’t hear her, not even her slippers shuffling,” Ross said.
     “I bet she pinched your cheek real hard,” Neal said.
     “Nah, she just walked over, real calm, and sat down next to me,” Ross said.
     “Yeah,” Neal said.
     “She didn’t do anything.” Ross said.
      “Where was dad?” Neal asked.
     “Work, or mowing, probably,” Ross said.
     “You say anything to mom?” Peeper asked.
     “Nah, I couldn’t even look at her,” Ross said.
     “What’d you do?” Neal asked.
     “I closed the magazine and started to cry. I’ve never been so embarrassed.”
     “Then why’d you show us these?” Neal asked. He started to blink fast. His eyes were starting to redden, like they’d been scratched in the heat and dust of an attic. The sun was gone.
     “’Cause I wanted you to see. Like me.” Ross said. “Now you’re just like me.”