Alan had once told a first-grader that the ice cream truck played its merry-go-round, migraine-inducing version of "Pop Goes the Weasel" to warn children that it had run out of ice cream. Now, as the sound grew nearer and nearer—in that ice cream truck way, where you can hear strains of the song four blocks away, knowing that with each repetition the truck will overtake another block, only to arrive with strange immediacy outside your home—he thought about how short first-graders were.
"Ice cream truck," Paul said unnecessarily, jumping up from his seat on the floor. The tree house quivered beneath them just the slightest bit. Alan grinned at his friend.
"How many bones do you think we'd break falling out of a tree?" Struck by another thought (that of the both of them in full-body casts at the hospital, spoon-fed ice cream by doting nurses), he laughed. "What would your mom say."
Paul ignored him in a pointed, ten-year-old way that Alan assumed only Paul could manage. He walked deliberately over to the window they'd carved out as an afterthought and Alan, lying on his back, tilted his head against the floor so that the clomp of Paul's footsteps was amplified to an almost painful degree. "You want ice cream?"
"Got any money?" Paul asked with a shrug, hands locked into his pockets. From those pockets, Alan had seen Paul extract bugs (of both the live and dead variety), shattered plastic propellers of toy helicopters, pocketknives, hairpins made unfeminine by the title of "lock pick." It was Alan, though, whose step was marked by a perpetual jingle. He lent money as indiscriminately as he collected it, and could be relied upon to produce a grimy assortment of coins on cue.
Alan turned out his pockets. "Nope," he said as a stray dime collided with Paul's sneaker. He rolled onto his stomach, resting his head in his hands. "It's gone now. Too late." Curling a finger against the floor, he flicked a penny in Paul's direction.
"It's going to rain." Ice cream already forgotten, Paul turned from the window and frowned at Alan as if the other boy had a bad habit of causing inclimate weather.
"Good," Alan said decisively, still sprawled on the floor. "I want to see how she holds up in a storm." He clapped his hand against the tree house with a degree of affection most people reserved for their pets and a force most people reserved for cockroaches found on the kitchen floor.
"It's not a boat, Alan."
"I know." He pressed his face against the planks of wood, squinting at the bright, chemical-green lawn layered over the ground. "Boats don't have holes in the fl—oh!" A fat drop of rain hit his shirt and he sat up quickly, shivering with theatrical embellishment.
He tilted his head back in conscious imitation of Paul, who had ducked into a corner and achieved an awkward-looking balance between staring at the darkening sky and bumping his head on the ceiling. "We need to go inside."
Alan nodded gravely and hooked a foot behind Paul's legs; the other boy teetered but didn't collapse to the floor in quite the way Alan had imagined. Instead he fell back against the wall then to the ground in an abrupt slump. "What was that for?"
"You're no fun today." Paul casually slammed a fist into Alan's stomach, effectively ridding him of any guilt.
"Jerk," Alan accused, the signal for battle to resume after they'd spent a still minute gathering their breath.
Paul scrambled to his feet and was stomping down the ladder before Alan had time to venture another kick. As though on some sort of cosmic cue, a groan of thunder shook the tree house as Paul dropped to the no-man's land of the lawn.
"Paul," Alan peered down from the house with the irrational worry of a child opening his first Christmas
present and, in spite of himself, expecting coal. "Paul!"
Paul squinted up at him through the rain. "Are you going inside?"
After a moment's deliberation, Paul shook his head vigorously, like a dog trying to dry off, and it occurred to Alan that in this weather he could probably get away with sending a wad of spit hurtling in his friend's direction.
The thought vanished the next second, as the sky flashed dark blue, illuminating Paul—now soaked, his shorts and t-shirt drooping towards the ground—with abrupt ferocity.
"Get up here!" Alan called out, his logic veering the way of a steady diet of action movies and Saturday morning cartoons. Paul scrambled back up the ladder, his pace broken every few moments by an abrupt hesitation or a flinch as thunder rumbled once more.
Alan stretched out his hand, straining his fingers as though convinced that quarter of an inch could cross the line between life and death. Two rungs from the top, Paul was within reach. Crushing his hand around his friend's fingers, Alan leaned back as far as he could and, eyes pressed shut in concentration, hauled his best friend to whatever sort of safety could be afforded by a tree house in the middle of a thunderstorm.
"Do you really think this is safe?" Paul asked, hunched against the wall opposite the window and staring fixedly out into the gloom.
Alan caught his breath and ran a hand through his hair, throwing it into wet disarray. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah. We built it."