The Goonies

by James Kahn

  “WATCH YOUR HANDS. TOUCH ME AGAIN AND I'LL BOP YOU A GOOD ONE.”

  Stef had turned to Mouth, who was right behind her, and glared at him kind of hacked off. Mouth looked kind of puzzled and just shrugged. A few seconds later she said, “I warned you,” and lifted her hand to slap him.

  In the second it took her hand to come around, this giant squid shot up out of the water, and no lie, she slapped the squid.

  It slapped her right back, knocking her into the water. It had this giant bloodshot eye and was kind of pinkish-grey. The thing was huge. And then, like it was letting us know what was what, it slapped the water with another tentacle, sounding like a cracking whip.

  It scared me to death. I mean, I knew the thing was a giant squid, but I still screamed “What is that?”

  “Giant sushi!” shouted Data.

  The giant eye moved just above the surface, and Hook's crocodile never looked so mean. Another arm grabbed Andy around the waist, pulling her towards its disgusting beak-mouth. And another arm got me around the ankle. Then the thing opened its beak to gobble on Andy's leg…

  Copyright

  WARNER BOOKS EDITION

  Copyright © 1985 by Warner Bros. Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Warner Books, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition: October 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-446-56768-8

  Contents

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  I will never betray my Goon Dock friends,

  We will stick together until the whole world ends,

  Through heaven and hell and nuclear war,

  Good pals like us will stick like tar,

  In the city, or the country, or the forest, or the boonies

  I am proudly declared a fellow Goony.

  —The Goony Oath

  PROLOGUE

  Astoria Evening Standard, Saturday, October 24

  In a daring daylight escape this morning, convicted armed robber Jake Fratelli broke out of State Prison and fled to a waiting getaway car. Fratelli, 33, apparently faked his own suicide while the other inmates were at breakfast, and when the guard entered his cell to cut the body down from where it was seemingly hanging by the neck, Fratelli knocked him unconscious, exchanged clothes with him, and simply walked out of the moderate-security facility.

  According to guard Emil Yonis, “He looked dead as a jackrabbit road kill to me—hangman's noose, and his tongue stuck out. But when I went to check him, I saw it was just a harness around his waist. That's when he nailed me.” Yonis has been hospitalized for observation.

  Moments after Fratelli left the compound the guard's naked body was discovered, and the alarm sounded. Prison guards gave chase, but a black off-road vehicle was waiting for the escapee just opposite a hill adjacent to the penitentiary. Driving the vehicle was the prisoner's mother, 56-year-old Mama Fratelli, herself a fugitive; and the prisoner's brother, Francis, 31, currently sought for questioning following a string of arsons last winter in Portland.

  The escape had obviously been well planned. As Jake approached the waiting vehicle Francis lit a long stream of gasoline that had been poured twenty yards from the car, creating a wall of flame that effectively cut off immediate pursuit.

  Police were notified, however. As authorities closed in, the escape vehicle was seen again on Route 27 near Hillside, and a high-speed chase ensued, leading across the waterfront area, past the high school, through the Municipal Waste Disposal area, around the marina, and finally—with a stroke of precision bravado by the Fratellis—into the midst of a cross-country race of over 50 other off-road vehicles. It was in the confusion of this camouflage that the Fratellis made their escape.

  There were no license plates on the vehicle, but it can be easily recognized by the numerous police bullet holes in its side. It was last seen heading north toward Janesville, although there are now reports of a similar vehicle sighted near Fresno.

  Prison officials now are conducting an investigation into security procedures at their facility. Guard Emil Yonis has been placed on inactive duty, pending the results of this inquiry.

  The Fratellis are armed and considered dangerous.

  CHAPTER 1

  My Name is Mikey Walsh… The Goonies… Nothin' to do… Chunk's Story… Three Guys in Leisure Suits… Museum Stuff… I Find the Map… X marks the Spot.

  So my name is Mikey Walsh. Michael, actually, except nobody ever calls me that but Grandpa, when he can remember who I am at all. Mostly he just lies in the hammock in the backyard remembering when he was thirteen. That's what I am. Thirteen.

  Short for my age, though. Not like a midget or anything, and I'm no chicken, but on the other hand, you're not going to find me in the parking lot after a football game with Glenoaks West waiting to mix it up with those trolls. Brand calls me a wimp. He's my brother.

  I'm not, though. A wimp, I mean. I've just got better things to do than hoot about who creamed who at the game. Adventures are my game, even though they're usually pretty hard to come by in a junky little town like this.

  Brand says it's not that I'm short for my age, it's that I'm short for my size. He cracks himself up with that one. Mom just says I'm “slight.” I know what they're talking about, though. It's about how I'm not on any of the teams like Brand is, and I've got braces and asthma, and I get colds a lot, more than most of the other kids, especially in the fall. Fall is when this story all happened, but I'll get to that in a minute.

  Actually October's my favorite month, even though Mom freaks out about “flu season” and my “condition” and stuff. October's great for leaves, though. They get these dynamite colors and fall off, and I get to rake 'em into piles to burn and it's the greatest smell. Of course, it rains a lot, too. But when it doesn't, there's this special, mysterious kind of wind that seems to come out of the earth and go right through me, like through my heart or something. I mean I know it doesn't, but that's how it seems. Kind of old-time magic. And, of course, Halloween's in October.

  So I love the fall. What I hate is my braces, especially when Dr. Hoffman tightens them once a' month to correct my malocclusion, which is like an execution done about as slow as marshmallow taffy. Also, once when I kissed Cheryl Hagedorn—actually she kissed me—our braces locked, so we were like joined at the mouth, it was really a gross-out, and I had to unhook us with her eyebrow tweezers in the rearview mirror of her dad's Chevy. After that it turned me off just to look at her, and probably her, me, too. Dr. Hoffman wanted to know if I'd been chewing nails or what.

  The other thing I hate is my asthma, which Brand says is all in my head. Mom says no, it's in my lungs—my brain is in my head. Then Brand generally says something like, “That's not where Mikey's brains are, his brains are where he sits.” Then Mom tells him to button it up and stop being so crude. But he's not, really, he's just being Brand.

  He's actually a pretty cool dude. Only just about half as cool as he thinks he is. He was sixteen when this mess all happened—starting his junior year at Astoria High, already varsity in wrestling but just J.V. in football. Anyway, he's not anything like me—he's blond and blue-eyed and he pumps iron, and he's not just a jock, either. He knows a lotta stuff.

  Mom and Dad are just regular. I mean, they're okay, but they don't know what's goin' on. Dad works at the museum, and Mom's a mom.

  We l
ive in a big old three-story white frame house in the part of town called the Goon Docks. It's not too far from the docks themselves—Astoria is right along the coast, way up Oregon—and it's mostly what Dad calls a blue-collar neighborhood. Mechanics, fishermen, construction workers when there's construction work around—that's who lives here. People like us. If there were any tracks in town, we'd probably be on the wrong side, at least according to the people who belong to the Hillside Country Club. They're the ones who call this the Goon Docks and us the Goons. That's okay with us, though, 'cause we like who we are. That's why we call our gang the Goonies.

  It's not a gang, really. More like a club. Dad calls it an assortment, but then I told you, he works for the museum.

  First there's Mouth Devereux. He's the oldest, and he's definitely the clown of the group. He's always cracking jokes or pulling pranks or just generally mouthin' off. I've like never seen him without a smirk. He used to get Ds in conduct all the time. Just trying to get attention is what the school counselor said. Just trying to get the last laugh is what I say. He can get laughs in different languages, actually. He's like a language expert or somethin'. A man of many mouths. He can tell dirty jokes in French, Spanish, German, and Portuguese, and I don't even know where Portugal is. He's also like a rhymin' fool. Like he can't help himself, sometimes, he just automatically talks in rhymes. And not only that, you can give him any topic, like cows, for instance, and in about five seconds he can come up with a little rhyming song about it. Like “The old brown cow, sure knows how, to pull that plow, without sayin' 'ow.” Only Mouth can do it a lot better than me. And a lot funnier. If there's a joke floating around or a wisecrack begging to be made, Mouth is always the one who can't resist. Anyway, his dad's a plumber, and that might have a lot to do with it, since it seems like that's a business where it's better to have a good sense of humor.

  Then there's Chunk Cohen. You can imagine why he's called Chunk. But the other thing about him is that he's maybe the biggest storyteller in this hemisphere. I mean, we're talkin' major-league fabrications. Don't get me wrong, he's a really great guy—it's just that there's times he can be truly bogus. I don't think he lies, exactly, 'cause he thinks he's tellin' the truth. But somehow the story changes over in his mind from something that he wished happened, to something that might have happened, to something that sort of happened, to something that actually happened. And then once he tells the story, it's like he heard it somewhere, so it really must have happened. Then, once he's convinced himself it happened, he takes liberties polishing the story. The other thing about Chunk is that his parents were rejected from joining the Hillside Country Club, Chunk says, because they're Jewish, and the place is what he calls “restricted,” but I think it's just because they're assholes—the country club, I mean, not his parents. His parents are real nice, even though they dress just as bad as Chunk does. But I wouldn't join that country club if you paid me, and I'm glad Chunk's folks didn't get to drag him over to where he'd have to learn how to play golf instead of how to jump the barrels in Donkey Kong.

  The last Goony's my next-door neighbor, Ricky Wang. We call him Data. The guy's a genius. He knows all there is about computers and electronics and stuff like that, and he's always making things, too—cool stuff like rings that have flashlights in them and belt buckles that shoot smoke bombs. Really cool stuff. Except a lot of it doesn't always work exactly right. He loves 007 movies, and that's where he dreams up some of his gadgets, but I think sometimes he must've gone for popcorn and missed something important.

  So that's the bunch of us. Not too rowdy, but then nothing much ever happened around here. Until last spring when we found out the country club owned most of the land and all of the houses in our section of the Goon Docks—and they were going to foreclose and tear it all down and build a lousy golf course right on the spot where we lived.

  Well, there were public hearings and investigations and impact studies all through the spring and summer, and at one point it looked like some big corporation in Portland actually owned half of it, but then it turned out that was just a holding company, whatever that is, for the country club doodahs, so then it looked like all was lost, especially because those Hillside snobs were known to have a lot of pull in Eugene, but then there was a last-minute court appeal, and the judge said we goonies had the right of first refusal, so we could buy out all our own mortgages if we wanted to and if we had the money, so then we knew all was lost, because if any of us had any money, we wouldn't have been living down in the Goon Docks to begin with.

  So by Labor Day we knew for sure that we were going to be thrown out and would all have to scatter to the winds like dandelions and never see each other again.

  Well, the eviction notice came. October 25, we had to be out. I thought of running away, but it didn't seem right to dump that on my parents too. Mouth was sort of inclined to trash the country club, and I admitted the idea had a ring to it. But somehow, the weeks passed, and we didn't get around to much of anything, and then suddenly October 24 was here, and I mean to tell you, I was really down. And I mean the pits.

  But then that weird October wind blew in through the attic window, and I suddenly knew something was going to happen. And it did.

  So this is the story of what happened that one long day last fall, the day before our eviction. And I know a lot of it's gonna sound hard to swallow, but swear to God, every word is true.

  It started with me and Brand sitting in the living room, staring out the window. Actually I was sitting. Brand was hanging from his ankles by the chinning bar. Brand could always find something to do, but I was so bored, I was ticked off.

  “Nothin' exciting ever happens around here,” I said. Brand didn't answer, he was having too good a time swingin' by his heels. But I was serious. This place was dead. Maybe it wasn't such a bad idea after all to leave. I mean, all these other kids had adventures, like Tom Sawyer and Luke Skywalker and Jim Hawkins. And what did I have? Orthodontist appointments.

  “Who needs the Goon Docks, who needs this house, I can't wait to get outta here,” I griped, and this time it got Brand's attention.

  “Really?”

  He just kept on hangin' there, but he knew what was what—he could see through me like lemon Jell-O, and just the way he said “Really?” made me see through myself the same way.

  “No way,” I told him, “I was just tryin' to make myself feel better. Tryin' to dilute myself.”

  “Delude yourself,” he said. I told you he knew stuff.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Well, I know how you feel, wimp. I sure am gonna miss this place,” he admitted.

  No doubt about it, so was I. I gave myself a puff on the Promotene Mist Inhaler for my asthma—my chest was feeling a little tight—and started to wander around the house.

  Kitchen. Nothin' goin' on. Dining room. Definitely nothin'. Rec room. I turned on the TV, but it was Saturday morning, which means kiddie cartoons, which means nothin'.

  There was a Mad magazine on the couch, so I sat down and picked it up. On the back was this thing called a “fold-in,” which is like a fold-out in a skin mag, only the opposite. What it is, is this picture with words, which says something like “Nuke the Reds,” but then you fold the page in on itself and it suddenly makes this different picture totally, and says “Ban the Bomb,” or something. It's like a secret message sort of buried in the original. You probably don't know exactly what I'm talkin' about if you've never seen it, but you probably get the idea. Anyway, if you know what the deal is, you can look at the back cover and sometimes figure out what the secret picture and message is gonna be when the page is folded in.

  So I figured this one out. Boring.

  There was a half-finished jigsaw puzzle on the table, which I'm definitely good at. I can sort of “see” where pieces go, without really tryin' to figure it out. Like some people put all the blue pieces in one pile, and all the flowers in one pile, and do it scientifically like that. Not me. I just look it over, and it's
like I can almost feel where a piece fits. It's instinctive.

  My guidance counselor in the eighth grade told me I “scored high in analysis of visual relationships” but read below my level. It's not that I don't like to read. I do. It's just that as soon as I start reading, I see it all in my mind's eye and it's like a movie in my head, and I get sorta lost in those “visual relationships,” and my mind wanders a little and then I lose my place.

  Anyway, I picked up a piece of jigsaw puzzle and sort of squinted my eyes and turned it around… and fit it snug into the piece it belonged next to. All instinct. And if there's one thing I learned from Obi-Wan Kenobi, it's to trust your instincts.

  Then Mouth came over. It didn't take a genius to see that me and Brand were depressed, and Mouth was no genius, so he dove right in trying to cheer us up.

  “Wait—what's this, Finklestein's Funeral Parlor? Lookit you guys lyin' around like it was Nuclear Saturday. C'mon, dudes! This is our last weekend together! The last Goony weekend! We should be goin' out in style—cruisin' the coast, sniffin' some lace, downin' the brews…” Without his mouth missing a step he slapped Brand in the belly and shifted into his Saturday Night Live John Belushi imitation: “But noooooo! You had to screw it up. You had to go and flunk your driving test….”

  Brand reached out to swat him royally, but Mouth jumped back—his feet were even faster than his mouth. Still, Brand would've caught him if the bell hadn't rung at the front gate and stopped things short.

  “Jerk alert!” shouted Mouth.

  We all looked out the window and saw Chunk standing at the front gate, wearing his absolutely dumbest Hawaiian shirt, plaid pants, and black socks. If Chunk hadn't been a Goony, he'd have been in serious trouble with clothes like that.

  He was shouting now. “Hey, guys, ya gotta lemme in! I just saw the most amazing thing….”

  Mouth called back, “First you gotta do the Truffle Shuffle.”