We were down the hill behind our house, three little boys and the makings of one little tree fort. We had my father’s tools and what scrap we could drag behind us, down the trails we’d cut by trampling thimbleberry bushes the summer before.
I’m sure I was the one carrying the hammer. As the older brother I liked it when Brice carried the nails, or wood that was weighted awkwardly. We had a friend over too, Kenny Macanally from downtown. He carried some board ends, which we hoped to make into a ladder.
The jumble of board ends, bent nails, cracked and flimsy plywood. Our first complication came when we tried to climb our ladder, and discovered that the nails we’d used weren’t long enough to pierce both the wood blocks and the tree’s trunk. Our second complication was that I couldn’t convince Brice to bring me a sheet of plywood from our pile. We argued; Kenny wandered around the brush.
When Kenny put his foot through the fallen wasp nest, Brice wanted to use the hammer, and I was trying to tell him that he should get me that box of nails instead—I’d already carried the plywood over myself—because look, we could make it a race, and I’d time him. Kenny watched the wasps rise around his shoulders, felt the first bites, and screamed.
Fear was instantly contagious. Brice and I dropped our tools and ran before we knew why, but the mud on the trail was slick, and we could hear the wasps catching up. We pulled at roots and they came out in our hands. We tore our knees on rocks. My steps slid me backwards into the swarm exactly like they do in dreams. Sparks and fires in my mind. I was bitten, twice, in the fleshy part of my thigh.
Brice and I reached the top alone. We were sure Kenny was dead.
That was the first time adrenaline got the better of me. The second, in college, came after a sleepless week of papers, when I wrestled my dorm-mates after dinner more and more frantically, until I threw an opponent against the wall with my fist back to hit him. I was yelling nonsense. I left the room, barefoot, and ran the school’s red gravel track by moonlight for an hour and a half, and felt no fatigue, no pain.
When Brice and I burst into the room where our mother was taking coffee, I was irrationally terrified. I pitched and rolled on the ground, screamed about dying, bawled. My nose ran and my snot mixed with my tears, and our mother stripped us to our baggy white briefs to loose the trapped wasps. My shoulder blades dug into the carpet, and I watched my legs twitch and jump. When Mom came with the baking soda they still shook.
Running, running, running.
