MY AUDIENCE for “Refinements and Improvements,” episode forty-three of Dead Air, consisted of the remaining inmates — Lou, Elaine, Clark and Alice, Artie and Nancy, Louise and Miranda, Tony T and Cutie, Loretta, Theodore and Carolina, Mark, Margot, Martha, Martha and Edward, Margot and Daniel, and five lingering dinner guests.
I THOUGHT THAT MY CAREER as a camouflage artist was humming along just fine until the afternoon when I realized that the surface I had so carefully crafted to hide the cave my friends were digging lacked a stump.
I got to work on that right away. When there is no stump handy and a stump is needed, the solution is obvious: create one. I cannot tell a lie: I axed a tree. Then, with a hand saw, I cut the stump off as close to the ground as I could. It took a long time, it was boring work, and it gave me blisters. My plan was to make the stump the entrance to the cave, so I had to build a trap door and mount the stump on it. Building materials were easy to obtain in those days, if scraps would do, because so many houses were being built for the rapidly rising postwar population. In the evenings, when the carpenters, electricians, and plumbers had gone for the day, we would roam among the scraps like rats, scavenging anything that was useless to them but useful to us (and like my boyhood self, I roam the scrap heap of the past now, salvaging memories and impressions to use here). From the scraps we harvested, I was able to construct a lid for the opening, build a framework to support it at the end of the entrance tunnel, cover the lid with tar paper, and cover the tar paper with leaves, attached with the black goop that sat in black buckets at every building site. I screwed the stump to the lid with lag bolts from the underside, and voilà.
When my comrades saw the lid, they were so impressed by it and so eager to be able to use it to go in and out of the cave, that they decided the cave had assumed its final shape.
The digging was finished. What we had at that point, it occurs to me now, was a form without content. The excavationary team had removed the content, which a glacier had deposited long ago, leaving the form, and now we were going to fill that form with new content, ourselves and our stuff. We did this each in his own way. Marvin turned his area into what he called a contemplatorium; Matthew turned his into a sanctum, where he kept secrets not even we were permitted to see; Spike created a research library of contraband publications of a sexual nature; Raskol turned his into a cache for things he had “found”; and I turned mine into an underground center for the detection and transmission of electromagnetic signals from local and extraterrestrial intelligences, equipped with radio transmitter, radio receiver, and flying-saucer detector.
Although the digging was finished, the cave itself would never be quite finished. We continued to add comforts and make refinements. A periscope, built from plans in The Boys’ Book of Homemade Spy Gear and concealed with leaves attached with the aforementioned black goop, allowed us to keep an eye out for the hypothetical interloper. A mirror, in an ornate frame, obtained from a source that I no longer remember, concealed a hollow behind it where we kept the most revealing of the nudist magazines in Spike’s collection and a few new-car catalogs. We ran an extension cord — a heavy-duty model intended for use by professionals in the construction trades that we found snaking across the unfinished floor of an unfinished house, apparently abandoned — from an outlet in my cellar through a narrow trench the length of the back yard to the cave to bring power to the transmitter. We ran an antenna wire from the broadcasting studio through a similar trench to the trunk of a cherry tree not far away, up the trunk of the tree and along the sturdiest of the branches to the top of the tree, and from there along the tops of nearby trees until we ran out of wire. This work, which I describe so easily in a single sentence, was actually the hard part. It was the part where Spike fell from the tree and broke her arm, for one thing.
Every day, I thought of a refinement or improvement for the surface that concealed the cave and all its secrets. I adjusted the contours of the little hills I had created, rearranged twigs, scattered acorns just so, even shifted the leaf cover to try to make it look equally convincing from all angles. I transplanted grasses and wildflowers from other parts of the woods, and I installed a plush carpet of rich green moss on the northern slope of the largest hill. This became the centerpiece of my design, the spot that anyone with an eye for nature who had been wandering through my back yard and happened upon the camouflage would have chosen for a picnic.
[to be continued]
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