The Impossible Fortress Read online

She didn’t answer. She just pressed the sandwich into the pan with a metal spatula.

  “It looks like a black brick,” I explained. “With wires coming out of it.”

  I studied her more closely and realized she was upset. It looked like she was channeling her anger into the sandwich; she was leaning so hard on the spatula, I thought the handle might snap.

  “I saw it in your bedroom,” she finally said. “Under your computer desk.”

  “It’s not there anymore.”

  “You’re damned right it’s not.”

  She flipped the grilled cheese onto a plate and then dropped it on the table. I realized my report card was waiting there with the rest of the day’s mail. This is what it looked like:

  “I can explain,” I said.

  “Go ahead,” she said. “Tell me how you get a D in gym. Tell me how you fail a class called Rocks and Streams.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Don’t apologize to me. You’re not hurting me. Three months ago we sat at this table and you promised me you would do better. But look at these marks. You’ve gone from Ds to Fs. You’re failing Rocks and Streams!”

  At the start of my freshman year, my mother dragged me into the principal’s office to protest my new class schedule. She explained I had no place in a class called Reading FUNdamentals. “Billy knows how to read,” she said. “He belongs in Honors English, not a bunch of dummy classes.”

  Mr. Hibble, the principal, smiled and nodded with the patience of a man who had heard it all a thousand times before. When my mother finally finished, he directed her attention to my eighth-grade transcripts (all Cs and Ds) and my state assessment tests (“lowest 25th percentile”). He suggested that a little remedial work would raise my academic performance, and offered to make a deal: “When we get to the end of the first quarter, we’ll look at Billy’s grades. If he earns a B+ or better in any of these classes, we’ll bump him up to the general level equivalent. And if he succeeds there, we’ll bump him up to Honors.”

  My mother shook his hand, satisfied that she’d solved the problem. She felt confident I would be taking Honors Everything by the middle of ninth grade. On the way home we stopped at Dairy Queen and Mom treated us to ice cream. I sat on the hood of our Honda, licking a soft-serve vanilla cone, while she paced back and forth in the parking lot, giving me an animated pep talk. “We’ll show that Mr. Hibble, won’t we? As soon as you get that report card, we’re going to march right back into his office. And I can’t wait to see the look on his face!”

  The next day I returned to school determined to please her. I wanted to bring home a report card that would impress her, the sorts of grades that mothers post on refrigerators. I sharpened all my pencils and organized my Trapper Keeper notebook for maximum efficiency.

  But every time I walked into a classroom, my willpower vanished. I’d try to focus on the teacher; I’d try to listen and take careful notes. But after five or ten minutes I’d be doodling, and eventually one of my doodles would morph into a sprite, an animated shape constructed of 504 bits in a 24-by-21 grid. Or I’d just scribble down a few lines of BASIC code, something to test on my computer when I got home from school. I’d mastered the art of hiding reading material underneath my notebook so I could study the Commodore Programmer’s Guide while my classmates drilled the parts of speech or hunted for common denominators. As long as I sat in the back and kept quiet, my teachers were happy to ignore me ignoring them.

  And now I was failing Rocks and Streams.

  “These teachers think you’re an idiot,” Mom told me. “And all you’re doing is proving them right.”

  “I’ll do better,” I promised.

  “Yes, you will. And I’m keeping that power box until you do. You’re playing too many games.”

  “I’m not playing games,” I said. “I’m making games.”

  “Not anymore. Not until your grades improve.”

  I started to feel nervous. Normally she was too tired to argue with me, but that night she seemed unshakable.

  “Look, Mom, I promise As and Bs, all right? But I really need my computer. Fletcher Mulligan is coming to New Jersey and he’s the king of video games—”

  “I said no more games! You’re fourteen years old, Billy. You’re not a little kid anymore.” She checked the clock—now she was really late for work—then grabbed her car keys and hurried for the front door. “I am busting my butt to take care of you,” she said. “I cook your food, I clean your clothes, I even give you an allowance. But you’re not keeping your end of the deal.”

  She was right, I knew she was right, and I felt terrible. My mother was much younger than all the other moms at my school, only thirty-three years old. Her long brown hair was streaked with gray. All she ever did was work and take care of the house. She never went out for fun; she didn’t really have friends. On her nights off, she watched Dallas and Dynasty, and gabbed on the phone with my aunt Gretchen, who was married to a big-shot Realtor in Manhattan and sent checks every month to keep us afloat.

  “I’m sorry,” I told her. “I’m going to do better.”

  She was so angry, she left the house without saying good-bye. I watched her car pull out of the driveway before going into her bedroom. Most of our house was pretty tidy, but she reserved the right to leave her room an absolute mess. The bed was unmade and there were dirty clothes all over the floor. An ironing board lay toppled on its side; it looked like a tornado had swept through the place.

  I opened her closet and pulled on the light. I reached deep into the back, past shoes and sandals that she hadn’t worn in a decade, and grabbed the handle of the fire safe. It was a heavy white chest with a four-digit combination lock. I set the tumblers to 1129; I had guessed the combination years ago, after learning that November 29 was my father’s birthday. I’d never spoken to my dad; he left Wetbridge before I was born and supposedly moved to Alaska to drill oil wells. He didn’t call or write or send money, and Mom rarely spoke of him, but that birthday combination never changed. This fact led me to wonder if maybe he’d reenter our lives someday. Maybe he’d show up on our doorstep with flowers and money and a plausible explanation for his fourteen-year absence. Because I felt certain he’d have a good explanation. I would be willing to listen.

  But in the meantime, we were on our own.

  I popped the latches on the fire safe and lifted the lid, and there was my power supply box, resting atop tax returns and bank statements. I carried it back to my bedroom, plugged in my C64, and went to work.

  600 REM *** INSTRUCTIONS ***

  610 PRINT "SAVE THE PRINCESS! SHE IS"

  620 PRINT "IMPRISONED IN A DANGEROUS"

  630 PRINT "FORTRESS. YOUR MISSION IS"

  640 PRINT "TO AVOID THE GUARDS, ENTER"

  650 PRINT "THE FORTRESS, AND FIND THE"

  660 PRINT "PRINCESS BEFORE TIME RUNS OUT."

  670 PRINT "HIT ANY KEY TO BEGIN."

  680 GET A$:IF A$="" THEN 680

  690 RETURN

  I SPENT THE NEXT few nights sneaking the power box out of my mother’s fire safe and sneaking it back before bedtime. Yes, this was dishonest, and yes, I felt bad about lying. But I knew that winning the $4,000 IBM PS/2 was more important to my future than anything I’d learn about Rocks and Streams. If I was serious about Planet Will Software, I couldn’t work on a Commodore 64 much longer. Newer computers offered more memory and better graphics, and C64s would be obsolete in another year or two. I needed to upgrade to the latest technology, and the contest was my best chance to do it.

  To keep Alf and Clark from coming around my house, I said I was grounded for bad grades. They came around anyway, tapping on my screen door as soon as my mother left for work, suggesting we watch MacGyver or play Trivial Pursuit or crank-call the girls in our homeroom. I explained that Mom had the neighbors keeping an eye on me, that Mrs. Digby across the street was watching through her lace curtains, so I had to close the door.

  I worked on the code all night, and spent my days
editing printouts during class. None of my changes made a difference. The Impossible Fortress was still maddeningly slow. I tried everything. I crunched the code as tight as possible, rearranging my subroutines and deleting REMarks and eliminating spaces between commands. In a moment of desperation, I even vacuumed the crevices of my keyboard, on the off chance that dust was slowing the circuitry.

  And I thought many times about going back to Zelinsky’s and asking the girl for help. I knew anyone capable of programming Phil Collins on a SID chip would probably have great ideas for speeding up animation. She seemed funny and smart and cool, and I really needed some good advice. But I knew the flak from Alf and Clark would be ridiculous. All the little piggy baby jokes. All the she’s-so-fat put-downs. They would never let me hear the end of it.

  So I worked alone, staying up late every night, getting more and more frustrated. By Friday evening, I was ready to quit—and then I heard a familiar squeak of bike brakes outside my window. I peered out through the blinds and saw Alf and Clark riding into my driveway. They were dressed all in black, like girls in a Robert Palmer video, minus the bright red lipstick.

  “What’s with the costumes?” I asked.

  “Operation Vanna,” Alf said.

  “Take three,” Clark said. “We’ve got a new plan.”

  I realized they were still talking about the Playboy magazine, about the Vanna White photos. I’d been so wrapped up in my game, I’d forgotten about them.

  “You guys are obsessed,” I said.

  Clark looked like I’d hurt his feelings. “You said you wanted to see them, too. You said she was the most beautiful woman in America.”

  “I know.”

  “You said she was a perfect ten!”

  “I know.”

  “So why aren’t you interested?”

  I thought of Fletcher Mulligan, of the $4,000 IBM PS/2, of my hopelessly inept game that still needed hours of work. “Because I’m grounded, remember? My mom has Mrs. Digby watching me.”

  Clark peered across the street to Mrs. Digby’s tiny two-bedroom bungalow. Her porch was empty; her windows, dark. “That old lady went to bed three hours ago. She’ll never know you sneaked out.”

  “And you don’t want to miss this,” Alf promised me. “The sooner we get there, the sooner we start getting rich.”

  This set off plenty of warning bells. Over the years, I’d learned to be skeptical of Alf’s get-rich-quick schemes. Like the time we spent a week pulling a wagon all over Wetbridge, collecting aluminum cans for resale, because Alf read that the scrap metal yard paid ten cents a can. We collected more than eight hundred cans before discovering that Alf didn’t know how to read digits after a decimal point, that the actual rate was just .01, a penny a can.

  “What’s the idea?” I asked.

  “It’s simple,” Alf said. “Do you know the story of Jesus and the fishes?”

  I stared at him, thoroughly confused, trying to understand how a Bible story could relate to photos of Vanna White.

  “It’s like this,” Alf continued. “Jesus goes to this party at Galilee, or wherever, and five thousand guys show up. And everyone’s starving, it’s the middle of a desert, but all they have is one fish. One scrawny little perch on a plate. But Jesus is like, ‘Don’t worry, guys, just pass it around, there’s plenty for everyone.’ And he’s right, it’s a miracle, they keep passing the plate and somehow there’s enough for everyone. He feeds all five thousand people with one fish. That’s the story. But now ask yourself something: What if Jesus charged money for the fish? What if he had a magic machine that turned one fish into five thousand fishes, and he charged two bucks a fish? That’s what I’m talking about, Billy. The magic machine exists! It’s real!”

  I turned to Clark. “Translate to English?”

  Clark gave me a sheet of paper, and I held it under the dim glow of the porch lamp. It was a photograph of Alf’s face, smooshed behind a pane of glass. His eyes were closed, and a blinding white light illuminated the zits on his forehead. It looked like he’d copied his face on a Xerox machine—except the image was rich with color, like a picture in a glossy magazine. I’d never seen anything like it.

  “How did you make this?” I asked.

  “Color Xerox machine. My mother’s office just got one. Copies anything you want in full color.”

  Suddenly I put it all together.

  “You’re going to copy the Vanna White pictures?”

  “Bingo,” Alf said.

  He handed me an index card listing the prices:

  UNCENSORED! VANNA WHITE! UNCENSORED!

  1 photo - $2

  3 photos - $5

  All 10 photos - $10

  Its America’s Sweatheart

  Like You’ve Never Before Seen Her

  “ORDER TODAY”

  “I hate to admit this,” I told Alf, “but you’re a genius.”

  Alf took a little bow. “Thank you.”

  The tabloids and television shows had been talking about the Vanna White photos all month. Every boy in the eighth and ninth grade would be lining up to give Alf their lunch money. He would take a simple four-dollar magazine and Xerox it into a fortune. There was just one problem.

  “Where’s the magazine?”

  “We’re getting it tonight. Tyler Bell wants to help.”

  I was certain I’d misheard him. Tyler was three years older than us, a senior. He was the only kid in town with a motorcycle—a beat-up 1968 Harley with a shovelhead engine. He wore leather in the winter and denim in the summer and he rotated a wardrobe of heavy metal T-shirts all year round: Iron Maiden, Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer. His pants were fringed with safety pins, and his boots were always scuffed because he didn’t give a shit.

  “Since when are we friends with Tyler Bell?” I asked.

  “He’s actually really cool,” Alf said. “Most of the stories about him aren’t true.”

  “Except he did have sex with a teacher,” Clark pointed out. “Señora Fernandez. That story’s totally true.”

  Sex-with-a-teacher was minor-league compared to the other rumors I’d heard. It was said that Tyler rode into New York City on weekends, that he got into fistfights with metalheads and had sex with hookers in Times Square. Surprisingly, none of this prevented the girls in my class from going berserk over him. When Tyler came swaggering past their lockers, they’d fall all over themselves, like he’d just stepped off the cover of a Harlequin romance novel. In another life, he was probably a pirate or a Viking.

  “Why is Tyler helping you?” I asked. “How does he even know your names?”

  “Me and Alf were getting dressed after gym,” Clark explained. “We were talking about Zelinsky in the locker room, and Tyler overheard us. He said for twenty bucks he would get us the magazine.”

  “And you paid him?”

  “No, not yet,” Alf said. “We’re meeting him right now. At the train station.”

  “I didn’t want you to feel left out,” Clark explained. “I thought you’d want to be there when we saw the pictures.”

  Clark was pretty thoughtful that way. Anytime he had good luck, he was always quick to spread it around. In my earliest memory of him, we were little kids, walking home from kindergarten in a snowstorm, and Clark stumbled across a pristine Hershey’s chocolate bar. Any other kid would have pocketed the candy for himself. But five-year-old Clark knelt down in the snow, unwrapped the Hershey bar, and used his claw to snap it into three evenly sized pieces. The chocolate was frozen solid, dusted with perfect white snowflakes, and maybe the purest, most delicious thing I’d ever tasted.

  “I’ll be right out,” I said.

  By the time we reached Market Street, it was nearing eleven o’clock and all of the stores and restaurants were closed. The sidewalks were empty, and there were few cars on the road. At Alf’s direction, we ditched our bikes behind the bank because we’d look cooler meeting Tyler on foot. Motorcycles were badass, but pedal power was for little kids.

  Tyler was slouched
on a bench in front of the train station. The illustration on his T-shirt depicted a toilet bowl with a dagger emerging from the water; a caption in a satanic typeface read “Metal Up Your Ass.” He didn’t say anything when we approached, just stood up and walked around the side of the train station. It was the tallest building in Wetbridge—a three-story structure ornamented with multiple roofs and gables and balconies.

  Tyler stopped in the shadows of the building, a narrow gap between a Dumpster and a chain-link fence.

  “Who’s this?” he asked.

  I realized he meant me.

  “This is Billy,” Alf said. “He’s cool.”

  Tyler seemed skeptical. “You look familiar,” he told me. “How do I know you?”

  “My locker’s next to yours. You’re A29. I’m A28.”

  “You’re shitting me. Seriously?” He shook his head in disbelief. “I always thought that locker was empty, no offense.”

  None taken. I tried to make myself invisible around guys like Tyler Bell, and apparently I’d been successful.

  Alf held out a twenty-dollar bill. “Where’s the magazine?”

  Tyler pocketed the money but ignored the question. “If anybody comes, I want you guys to scatter. Everyone run in different directions. The cops can’t catch all four of us, understand?”

  No, I did not understand, not really. The train station was deserted. The ticket office was closed. No one was waiting on any of the platforms.

  “The coast is clear,” Alf assured him. “Just give us the magazine.”

  Tyler scowled. “I never said I’d bring you the magazine. I said I’d show you how to get it.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Watch and learn.”

  Tyler stepped onto the chain-link fence, wedged his boot into the diamond mesh, and started to climb. For all of his size and bulk, he moved quietly and gracefully, scaling the fence like Spider-Man. When he was eight feet off the ground, he swung a leg over the top rail, straddling it. Then he grabbed an overhanging tree branch, pulling himself into standing position, balancing himself on top of the fence like a trapeze artist.