The Impossible Fortress Read online

  Now, you don’t get to be a fourteen-year-old boy without getting knocked around a few times. I’d been pummeled in locker rooms, tripped in school hallways, and thrown from my bike; I’d scraped my knees and sprained my ankles and bloodied my nose, but nothing had prepared me for this. This felt worse than all those things combined. This was the kind of hurt that didn’t stop; it just kept getting worse and worse.

  I trudged off in the downpour, walking the long mile from Market Street to Baltic Avenue. When I finally reached home, the cul-de-sac was flooded and the house was silent. My mother was working, of course, and the bulb over our porch had burned out a week earlier. I sloshed through the knee-deep water, wading up to the front door, fumbling for keys in the dark.

  2100 REM *** PAUSE GAME ***

  2110 PRINT "{HOME}{12 CSR DWN}"

  2120 PRINT "{8 SPACES} THY GAME IS PAUSED."

  2130 PRINT "{2 CSR DWN}"

  2140 PRINT "{3 SPACES} HIT Q TO QUIT."

  2150 PRINT "HIT ANY OTHER KEY TO CONTINUE."

  2160 GET A$

  2170 IF A$="" THEN 2160

  2180 IF A$="Q" THEN END

  2190 RETURN

  THE NEXT MORNING, I woke to an empty house. My mother had left a note on the kitchen table, explaining that she was getting her driver’s license renewed and wouldn’t be back until noon. I sat down with a bowl of Frosted Flakes to watch TV, but the shows were all kiddie crap—Care Bears and Punky Brewster and Pound Puppies. Wrestling wouldn’t start for another hour, so I stomped up to my bedroom.

  I knew Mary had lied to me. I didn’t imagine her little game with the 50,000,000 points, with my ranking of MOST AWESOME GUY I KNOW. She’d been toying with me, leading me on, complimenting me. Making me feel good about myself. And then she acted shocked when I tried to kiss her?

  I’m sorry if I gave you wrong signals.

  In a flash of clarity I understood all the stories I’d heard about girls—all the movies and TV shows and pop songs—they were all true! Girls lied. They were manipulative and untrustworthy. David Lee Roth had tried to warn me. So had Eddie Murphy! So had Andrew Dice Clay! But, like a dope, I’d trusted Mary, and gave her half of the credit for MY video game. I’d lost my two best friends—my only two friends—trying to protect her. And now here I was, alone on a Saturday morning with no one to talk to.

  My mind went around and around. The fat bitch.

  It felt good to think of her that way: the fat bitch. I took out a sheet of loose-leaf and wrote the words over and over: fat bitch fat bitch fat bitch. It felt great to write it down, great to channel the anger through a pencil. Fat fat fat bitch bitch bitch. No wonder all her friends ditched her! She probably lied to them, too! Fat fucking bitch.

  I put on my Walkman and lay on my bed and cranked up Van Halen’s “Panama.” I looked up at my posters of Kathy Ireland and Paulina Porizkova and Elle Macpherson, all my gorgeous and willing supermodels with their slender legs and hairless arms and pouting lips. From now on, I would set my sights on one of them like a normal person. My next girlfriend would not be ashamed to walk on the beach in a bikini. My next girlfriend would be gorgeous, a knockout, a perfect 10. And Mary Zelinsky would die a virgin—unloved, unwanted, untouched. I cranked the volume on my headphones all the way up, burning out my eardrums.

  Eventually I became aware of a noise behind the music, a rattling behind the melody. I opened my eyes and saw Clark’s claw tapping on my window screen. I threw off my headphones.

  “We tried the front door,” he said. “You didn’t answer.”

  I’d never been so relieved to see him. “I’ll be right out.”

  I pulled on a clean shirt and went out to the backyard, where I kept my bike leaning against the side of the house. Alf and Clark were waiting in my driveway, perched on their bikes and chugging bottles of Mountain Dew.

  I braced myself for the worst. They were angry and they deserved to be angry, and I deserved every awful insult they’d hurl at me. But as long as they were sitting in my driveway, I knew I had a chance to make things right.

  “Hey,” I said.

  Alf took another swig of Mountain Dew. He started to say “What’s up” but ended up belching, so the words came out: “What’s urrrrggghp?”

  He looked tired. There was a large scrape over his left eye—it looked like someone had massaged his face against a concrete sidewalk—plus several smaller scrapes on his neck and a Band-Aid stretched awkwardly over the top of his left ear.

  “What happened to your face?” I asked.

  “Rob Castro happened to my face,” he said. “Nick Barsanti happened to my neck, and John Simmons happened to my chest.” He lifted up his shirt, revealing a massive gash across his ribs. “They want their money back.”

  “We’ve got a plan for raising the cash,” Clark explained, “but we need your help getting—”

  “Yes,” I said, astonished and grateful and relieved that forgiveness could come so easily. “I mean, sure, I’ll totally help. What we are doing?”

  Alf unzipped his backpack and removed a well-worn 64-ounce Big Gulp cup. It was just like the cup that the battery thief had brought to Zelinsky’s. “I figured we’d hit the record store. Pick up some new tapes and sell them for cash.”

  “You’re going to steal four hundred dollars’ worth of tapes?”

  “No,” Alf said, “I’m going to steal twenty dollars’ worth. Just enough to pay the guys who want to kill me today. Tomorrow there will be new guys ready to kill me, and I’ll steal more tapes to pay them.”

  “Baby steps,” Clark said, nodding. “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

  This didn’t strike me as a very good plan. Stealing four hundred dollars’ worth of tapes would take weeks of careful effort—but this was no time for making arguments. It was my fault we were in this situation, and I didn’t have any better ideas, and I was anxious to get things back to normal. “You guys are geniuses,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  The Wetbridge Mall was an easy bike ride from Baltic Avenue. Within the hour we were standing next to Cinnabon in the second-floor food court, scoping out Musicland from a safe distance. There were four different stores selling cassettes in the mall, but Musicland was the only one that didn’t wrap the cassettes in giant plastic contraptions designed to foil shoplifters. Instead the albums were piled high on giant wire racks, free for the taking.

  “The place is packed,” Clark said.

  “It’s looking good,” Alf agreed. Even with three cashiers working, there was still a line of customers. The manager would likely open another register soon, which meant one fewer sales associate on the floor.

  “So what are we getting?” I asked.

  This was always a highly contested topic. The trick was to set aside your personal preferences and find cassettes that would resell quickly, ideally for five bucks to the twelve-year-old girls hanging around the food court.

  “How about U2?” Clark suggested.

  Alf shook his head. “One-hit wonder,” he said dismissively. “I’m thinking Cutting Crew.”

  “It’s fine with me,” I said. After hours of listening to All Your Favorite ’80s Love Songs, I was feeling out of touch with Top 40.

  We entered Musicland one by one to avoid drawing attention to ourselves, but the aisles were so crowded, it probably wasn’t necessary. Most of the store was dedicated to cassettes and cassingles, and Pop/Rock was the large central aisle that ran down the middle of the store, A to M on one side, N to Z on the other.

  Whitney Houston was on the stereo system, belting out “The Greatest Love of All.” Alf strolled down the center aisle, Big Gulp in hand, fake-sipping just like the kid at Zelinsky’s. Clark and I were supposed to be lookouts, but there wasn’t much to look out for. You could recognize Musicland employees by their red polo shirts, and they were all up front by the registers.

  Alf stopped beside a mom dressed in a baggy white sweatshirt that said I HEART MY PEKINGESE. She was studying the Eric Clapton and didn’t notice him walki
ng up.

  Alf reached for a Cutting Crew album, checked the price sticker on the back of the cassette, and glanced at me. I gave him a nod, and the tape went in the cup. Then he reached for two more. I thought he was pushing his luck, but I looked around and the coast was clear. I nodded, and with another flawless bit of sleight of hand, the tapes dropped into the cup. By this point, Clark was already on his way out of the store. I turned to follow and saw Alf reach for another three tapes. Yes, it was possible to fit six cassettes into a single 64-ounce cup, if you positioned each cassette just so. But up until that day, none of us had ever mustered the courage to try it. I couldn’t bear to watch. I turned and fled.

  Clark was waiting five stores away, on a bench outside the Hickory Farms. We only waited a minute for Alf to join us. He hurried over, Big Gulp in hand, grinning with satisfaction.

  “Six tapes?” Clark asked. “Are you kidding me?”

  “Three Cutting Crews and three Crowded House. That’s money in the bank, gentlemen.” He uncapped the Big Gulp and removed the cassettes, passing two to each of us. “Let’s unload these and we’ll go back for Whitney Houston. Some of that ‘How Will I Know’ crap. We’ll sell a ton.”

  Over his shoulder, through a sea of people saddled with shopping bags, two figures emerged from the crowd, advancing toward us. One was a man in a jacket and tie; the other was the mom in the I HEART MY PEKINGESE shirt. She spoke into a walkie-talkie and then started to run.

  “Shit!” Clark said.

  We dropped our tapes and scattered. We knew the goal of loss prevention (as the stores called it) was preventing losses—so if you surrendered the merchandise, you were much less likely to be chased. I never looked back to see if anyone was following me. I just ran like crazy, darting into the Sears, ducking behind racks of men’s suits, sprinting down an escalator, and finally diving beneath a queen-size bed, where I waited for ten minutes, practically holding my breath. I had managed to escape—but just barely.

  I went outside to the bus stop. All three bikes were still chained to a No Parking sign, but there was no sign of Alf or Clark. After twenty minutes of waiting, I biked home to Baltic Avenue, fearing the worst. Clearly my friends had been caught shoplifting, and now they were on their way to a juvenile detention center. Officer Tackleberry had warned us about these places—he’d spoken of rats and dripping cinder-block walls and basement shower facilities where new inmates were hosed down and dropping the soap had horrific, unimaginable consequences.

  Instead of going home, I biked through the cemetery and stopped at the base of our old tree fort. I climbed the tree and waited in its branches, hoping and wishing and praying that my friends were okay. But an hour passed and still they hadn’t come.

  I felt like I was going to be sick. If I hadn’t promised to get the alarm code, if I hadn’t expressed so much confidence, if I hadn’t lied to Alf and Clark, none of this would have happened. I could trace this whole awful event back to the roof of the train station, back when I promised my best friends I would get the code.

  Eventually I got tired of waiting, so I left the fort and went home. I was unlocking my front door when Alf and Clark came coasting down Baltic Avenue on their bicycles.

  “You’re okay!” Alf exclaimed.

  “We thought you were busted!” Clark said.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Where have you been?”

  Alf produced six wrinkled dollar bills from his pocket. “We hit Sam Goody after you left. The tapes are harder to boost because of those stupid plastic frames, but I managed to stuff a Bon Jovi down my pants.”

  I couldn’t believe it. “You guys went back for more?”

  “We’ll have better luck tomorrow,” Clark promised.

  “No!” I told them. “You can’t keep taking stupid risks. Sooner or later, you’re going to get busted.”

  Alf shrugged. “Sooner or later, Ray Castro is going to kick my ass. Do you have a better idea?”

  I took a deep breath. In fact, I did have a better idea. I’d been keeping it to myself all day because I was afraid to mention it. But when I realized how much Alf needed my help, I didn’t have any choice.

  “I can get you Vanna White,” I said.

  “Where?” Alf asked. “How?”

  “I got the code,” I said.

  “To Zelinsky’s?” Clark said. “The alarm code?”

  “I got it last night.”

  I explained that I had watched Mary punch the access code into the Ademco panel. Shame had etched the moment deep into my memory, like a video I could rewind and replay again and again. If I closed my eyes and concentrated, I could still see the exact placement of her fingers across the twelve-button keypad: Top-left, bottom-middle, bottom-middle, top-middle.

  “One-zero-zero-two,” I said. “That’s the code.”

  “You’re sure?” Clark asked.

  “Positive. I was standing right next to her.”

  “No, I mean, are you sure you want to do this?” Clark asked. “Last time we talked, in Alf’s basement—”

  “I’m sorry about that. You guys were totally right. It’s not stealing if we pay for it.”

  “Exactly!” Alf said. “That’s what we told you!”

  “But we need to be super careful,” I insisted. “We’re going to treat this store like a museum. We don’t touch anything, we don’t disturb anything. We get Vanna White, we leave the money, and we fix the hatch on the way out. So Zelinsky never knows it was us. Is that clear?”

  “Absolutely!” Clark agreed. “We’ll be like ghosts!”

  “Like ninjas,” Alf said. “When are we doing this?”

  I took a deep breath. It was Saturday, May 30, nearly one month after Alf first spotted the magazine and came running to my house to deliver the news.

  “We better go tonight,” I said.

  2200 REM *** FORTRESS IS BREACHED ***

  2210 FOR I=0 TO 24:POKE L1+1,0:NEXT I

  2220 POKE L1,150:POKE L1+1,200

  2230 POKE L1+5,8:POKEL1+6,248

  2240 POKE L1+24,15:POKE L1+4,17

  2250 FOR T=0 TO 100:NEXT T

  2260 POKE L1+4,16

  2270 FOR T=0 TO 100

  2280 NEXT T

  2290 RETURN

  I’M SURE ALF AND Clark staged all kinds of elaborate stunts to sneak out of their houses past midnight. But my mother was working at Food World, so I just sat in front of the TV, watching Odd Couple and Star Trek reruns until it was twelve fifteen and time to go. I walked out my back door wearing black jeans, black Chuck Taylors, and a black Van Halen T-shirt; I carried a flashlight, an adjustable wrench, a twelve-inch crowbar, and the crisp twenty-dollar bill from the night before.

  Wetbridge had a town-wide curfew for teenagers that started at midnight. We agreed to travel to General Tso’s independently to reduce the risk of being spotted. I cut through the Catholic cemetery and stayed off the streets; I hopped fences and crossed through backyards and alleys and vacant lots. The town was silent. All I heard were chirping crickets and the soft shuffle of my sneakers. Now and then a dog barked, but I didn’t see or hear a single person.

  There was a full moon, and I knew the route like the back of my hand, so I kept my flashlight in my back pocket. It felt good to be out in the night, out on a real adventure, away from a computer screen. And I didn’t feel nervous at all. Our plan was solid, and I trusted Alf and Clark to follow the plan. This would be the caper to end all capers, a story we’d be retelling for years.

  I didn’t dare walk down Market Street, not with Tack doing patrols every half hour, so I looped around to the back of General Tso’s, clinging to the shadows of the access road until I reached the empty parking lot. Schwarzenegger’s second-floor window was closed, but I could see the dog napping on the sill, a mop of white fur smooshed against the glass. On the other side of the fire ladder was another window with an enormous air conditioner; it was groaning and rattling and sputtering, and I couldn’t imagine how anyone slept in the same room with it.

&nbs
p; I knew the noise would mask my footsteps, but I was careful to approach the building at an angle—avoiding Schwarzenegger’s sight line—just in case the dog was awake. There was a twelve-inch gap between the garbage Dumpster and the back wall of the restaurant, and this is where I found Alf and Clark, crouched on their knees and waiting for me. I squeezed in beside them and switched on my flashlight. The pavement sparkled with broken glass, like a bed of glittering jewels.

  Clark was dressed in the same T-shirt and jeans that he’d worn to the mall, but Alf had changed into clothes that were full-on Rambo. He wore olive-and-brown fatigues and his face was smeared with grease paint.

  “Are we going to Vietnam?” I asked.

  “It’s called camouflage,” Alf said.

  “I told him not to wear it,” Clark said.

  “I’m invisible,” Alf said. “No one can see me.”

  Clark asked me to turn off the light, explaining that Tack would be making his rounds any moment now. We huddled in darkness, forcing ourselves to stay still. An icy needle sliced the back of my neck, and I jumped. It was condensation dripping from the second-floor air conditioner. I was buzzing with adrenaline; we all were.

  “Let’s go now,” I said. “While the coast is clear.”

  Alf shook his head. “We have to wait for Tyler.”

  I was certain I’d misheard him. “Who-what?”

  “Tyler’s coming.”

  “Tyler Bell? You told him?”

  “Of course I told him,” Alf said. “This was his plan, remember?”

  “This was not his plan,” I said. “Don’t you remember the model? The model had three people: you, He-Man, and Papa Smurf.”

  “Right, but—”

  “There was no Tyler Bell on the model.”

  “I didn’t think he’d actually come,” Alf said. “I figured he’d be off in New York City doing cool stuff. But when I called and told him the code—”

  “You told him the code?”

  “This was his plan,” Alf repeated. “This was his plan all along.”