Fort Wars

It all starts way before it should. Turf Wars.
Karl was just a plain old garden variety, low class, bully. Not smart enough to be truly dangerous. He was also the arch enemy of Steve who lived on the other side of the ditch. Brian could sway with either depending on who was offering the best advantage that day or until his father found out. Most days, during the Fort Wars, the group who had the larger supply of M-80s was the odds-on champion.

Karl's fort was in the right rear corner of his Mother's snarly backyard. Karl's accomplices were Susan's older brother - a sleepy-eyed cloud of a teen whom was rarely seen in daylight and Dennis, the neighborhood's youngest candidate for the juvenile detention facility. Dennis was much younger, so he had to work harder to be convincing as an equal threat. The Fort was at one time a detached garage, but neglect, hoarding, unfinished moves and the anticipation of immanent eviction had turned the garage into a receptacle of 'might-be' complete with broken windows, ineptly covering torn and sagging, dingy curtains that had at one time been new, dark, spider-infested shelves and Karl's projects. At 16, he was the man of the house. The garage revealed his discontented, irresponsible self hurled into the task of family protector without a strategy, tool or brain cell to his name.

Steve was smaller, red-haired and smart enough to realize that Karl's true advantage wasn't in the currency of explosives, but in his ignorant ability to continue to cope with faulty equipment, poor support and weakly constructed plans. If he was going to beat Karl, he'd simply have to outlast him. Outsmarting him was too easy. It would all be over and then what would there be to do?

The day that Steve decided to build his fort from the remains of a few barn-stained, discarded picnic tables was truly an event. However, the time he decided to paint his bedroom black (and his parents let him) rocked through the kitchen ashtrays of many of the families on our block. Judy, Sylvia and Pat all left with pinched faces waving cigarette smoke away - leaving Father's shaking their heads, Mother's wringing their hands and children silently awestruck and envious to their cores.
Steve's fort was just a simple square box. There was a door, one window and a flat roof that you could climb up the outside wall to get up to. From here, you could see over the hedge, across the ditch and into Karl's territory.
Most of the time, when both forts were occupied, hollering profanities across the ditch was as much as any kid might expect. But one day, with Dennis's inspiration and Susan's brother's brooding incentive, Karl and his tribe constructed what amounted to a crude version of a Molotov cocktail. They began hurling them from their fort towards Steve's by hand. Thankfully, Karl's unsophisticated approach left their bombs sunken and fuming in the mud of either bank of the ditch.

We laughed hysterically but for me, it was the beginning of understanding regarding boundaries, access and the map of the world I lived in that didn't look anything like the one that lay folded up, stained with coffee and worn in the glovebox of the old blue Cutlass.