As far as clubhouses go, ours was pretty big, ten foot by twelve foot, half the size of our bedroom. It had a particle-board floor on which we nailed carpet. The ceiling was about six feet high, though it sagged quite a bit in the middle. We clearly lacked our father’s and grandfather’s building skills.

One afternoon Joel and I were taking a lunch break, eating tuna and pickle sandwiches on slices of wheat bread, when Joel said, “It’s going to cave in when it snows.”

“Probably,” I said, with my mouth still full.

I studied the sagging ceiling until I saw a solution. After lunch we dragged a four-by-four beam from the chicken coop, cut six inches off the top with a rusted handsaw, then raised it in the middle of the room to brace the ceiling, pounding it fully upright with a sledgehammer. The pillar was useful in other ways. We put nails in it and used it to hang our flashlight and the transistor radio I got on my last birthday.

The fact that the ceiling was low was not a bad thing. We didn’t plan to do much standing around and it was a certain deterrent to adults, though probably not as much as the size of the entry itself. The clubhouse’s front (and only) door was only three feet high, which made it necessary to crawl into the clubhouse. Joel pointed out that this would be good in case of an attack, as it would make it easier to defend ourselves. I asked him who he thought might be attacking us. He thought about it a moment, then replied, “Well, you never know.”

We did our best to furnish the place with the creature comforts of home. For entertainment we had chess, Chinese checkers, and Monopoly. We hung artwork: a framed paint-by-numbers landscape, a poster of Superman, and a poster my mother never would have approved of—a Vargas pinup. Earlier that year I had started to take an interest in girls (alien as they were to my actual experience), and while we were first exploring the garage, Joel came across the rolled-up Vargas. The poster was pretty tame by today’s standards—a young woman posing in a bright red swimsuit—but for its time it was considered pretty risqué. For us it was definitely taboo. I assumed it was my grandfather’s, which was all the more reason for my mother to never find out we had it.