The Goonies

by James Kahn

  Copper bones,

  Triple stones,

  Westward… foams.

  I looked at Chester Copperpot's copper medallion, shaped like a skull with nose and eye holes. “Here's copper bones,” I said. That seemed right to me. I couldn't quite figure out the rest of the riddle, but I kept running it over in my mind.

  That's when Brand snapped. “I can't breathe! You guys are suckin' all the air out! You sucked it all! Lemme out! Let me out!” Then he began to climb the walls—for real. He tore out big chunks of earth, he scraped away sheets of moss, he snapped off roots and pulled down stones. Man, he wanted out of there.

  We all grabbed him and wrestled him to the ground and piled on top of him. I mean, we didn't want him to hurt himself. He finally relaxed a little, but he couldn't stop breathing like a locomotive with the accent on loco.

  “Anybody got a paper bag?” said Stef. “We gotta get him to breathe back his own carbon dioxide.”

  Data pulled off his backpack and rummaged through it, but he didn't have a bag. Nobody had one, so Stef pulled out her shirt and stuffed Brand's head inside. I tell you, she knew how to handle herself. “Just breathe back in what you breathe out,” she told him. “It's good for you.”

  Data looked away, and Mouth snickered, but Andy just stared at Brand's head buried in Stef's chest and didn't look real happy.

  Stef could've cared less, so she took Brand's head out and stuffed it under Andy's shirt before either of them could say anything. “Andy's probably better equipped for this,” she said, shakin' her head like the rest of us were all kids acting like kids.

  Still, I couldn't help thinkin' maybe Brand wasn't so dumb to breathe too fast after all.

  I noticed the wall Brand had clawed at and walked up to examine it closer. All the dirt was scraped off now, and it was just hard, cold stone, with a lot of irregular metal pegs jutting straight out of it. They looked almost like natural formations, but something about them caught my eye. Like there was a pattern there or something. Like, did you ever see these computer printouts of pictures of people made up of just dots, but if you move farther back, it starts to look like something, and then finally you can see it's a picture of something? Like that. Only I was sort of at that in-between point where I could see it was something, but I couldn't figure out exactly what yet.

  “‘Copper bones, triple, stones…’” I said. I held the medallion up and looked through the holes in it at the higher pegs on the wall. I'm not sure why, it just looked like there was a connection somehow. Like when you're doing a jigsaw puzzle and you see a piece that belongs in a certain section but you're not sure how.

  “Hey, Data, give me a boost,” I said. He hoisted me up to the pegs I wanted.

  I put the medallion up against the wall. Some of the pegs fit into some of the holes sometimes. I kept moving it all around.

  The other guys were watching me.

  “What's he doing?” said Data. I know it looked pretty weird.

  “He flipped,” said Mouth. “Just like his brother. Just like the rest of us pretty soon. We're all gonna go batty. One by one. Pretty soon we'll be eatin' each other's fingers to stay alive. Finger-lickin' good, taste like it should, we're all goin' nuts, knock on wood.” He rapped his head with his knuckles.

  All of a sudden it fit. A perfect fit. Just like a piece sliding into place, the medallion just slipped over three pegs just as snug as a key in a lock.

  It made me gasp, it was so cool. I was really on to something—if I could only figure out the rest of the riddle. “Westward foam… foams… foaming…”

  “My grampa had a dog that foamed after it got bit by a skunk,” said Mouth.

  “How about shaving foam?” said Data. They were all into it now. They could see I was on a roll, and they wanted to get on it with me.

  “There's a foam in the ocean when it breaks on a shore,” said Stef.

  That sounded right. “And the ocean's to the west,” I said. I turned the medallion in the direction I thought was west. And guess what—it turned!

  It turned, and the pegs turned with it, like this perfect doorknob. We heard all these clinking sounds, like gears turning and tumblers falling into place. Man, it was radical.

  And then the cannonball shot out. Didn't actually shoot exactly, but it rolled out of this crack in the wall and down this incline that was obviously cut for it, and it plopped down on this stone plate on the ground—reminded me exactly of the bowling ball device I had rigged to open my front gate at home. It was amazing. I was expecting any second to see some gate in the wall open up to let us pass through—and suddenly this square of floor opened up under Data, and he fell like a rock into the hole, with a wild, kind of bottomless scream, while I held on, dangling, to the doorknob in the stone.

  And then the scream stopped.

  Cut short. Come to a fast, bad end.

  I jumped over the pit, to the ground.

  We ran to the hole and looked down. Nothing but blackness, in a long, vertical shaft.

  “Data?” called Brand. “Data?” He held the flare down the pit, but it was too deep to see bottom.

  Andy turned white in the red glare. “Data! Data!” she shouted. But there was no answer. “Hail Mary, full of grace…” she began whispering.

  Mouth was shakin' his head. “He just went down. I could've grabbed him—I was this close… this close…” He held his hands a foot apart. “He's really—”

  “Gone,” Brand said quietly.

  That was it for me. I mean, it just happened so sudden, it was like one second Data was right there with the rest of us and the next second he was history. And it was totally final, like no asking to do it over. I remember when Grandma died when I was a little kid and I asked Dad when was she comin' back, and he said not ever, and it was too sad to stand that I wasn't ever gonna see her again, so I ran away to cry. And now it was the same thing only I couldn't run away.

  So I just cried.

  Couldn't stop. Everyone was sort of sniffing, in fact. Brand even left Andy's side to come over and put his arms around me. We hugged each other, and it helped a little, and I wasn't ashamed to do it, either. “I'm gonna miss the way he used to shout out the names of all those goofy inventions of his,” I said. I imitated him: “Glasses of Death! Bully Blinders! Smoke Screen!”

  And then a voice shouted up out of the hole: “Pinchers of Peril!”

  We all shouted back down into the shaft.

  “Data! Data!”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Speak to us!”

  He shouted up to us. “I've been saved by my Pinchers of Peril!”

  We cheered and hooted and razzed him, but man, it sure was good to hear his voice.

  I pulled a rope out of his sack and tied it to the flare and lowered it into the pit. About twenty feet down we finally saw Data. His Pinchers of Peril had clamped onto a jutting rock, and he dangled from it by its slinky coil, bobbing up and down a couple feet above these giant wooden spikes sticking up from the floor.

  He shouted again, “Hey, you guys, I found another hole… it's all lit up down here!” I saw him get a foothold on a nearby rock and lower himself all the way down. And then he was out of sight.

  I pulled up the flare. We tied one end of the rope to a grappling hook in his sack, which we secured to a rock. Then, one by one we lowered ourselves on it, down the shaft.

  When I got down to the level of the tips of the spikes, I saw there was a skeleton jammed down onto one. It looked like a screaming mummy. Scared me so much, I slipped and almost fell on the next spike.

  I finally made it down, though. We all did. We hugged Data, or patted him on the back, or shook his hand, or called him a jerk, or whatever. He just smiled the way 007 would.

  We looked around to see where we were. It was a medium-size cave, all damp and covered with this slimy algae stuff that glowed a kind of greenish phosphorescent glow. Water was dripping from the ceiling, from these stalactite deals, and collecting near the corners, all ove
r this dark, rough coral. I wasn't sure, but somewhere in the distance I thought I could hear the ocean—kind of a low whsh, whsh, whsh, like the sound of cars speeding by on the freeway at night just over the hill past my bedroom window.

  My bedroom window—it seemed like ages ago. I wondered if I'd ever hear the freeway from it again. It already seemed like a memory from childhood.

  At one end of the cave were three tunnels, right next to each other. And at the other end a crumbling skeleton was propped up, pointing at them. It was dressed in shredding, tattered pirate clothes.

  We checked it out up close. It had a big chilly grin on its face and a dagger through one eye. Pretty damn freaky.

  Mouth laughed nervously. “Hey, all this trickling water reminds me of somethin' I haven't done in a while—I'm gonna check out the men's room.” He walked into the left-hand tunnel.

  Brand followed while Stef and Andy went into the “ladies' room” in the right-hand tunnel.

  I didn't have to go, so I just stood there, staring at the three entrances. I was absolutely certain one of them led to treasure, another one to the jar full of toothpicks, and the third to…

  I looked at the pirate skeleton with the knife in his eye. It made me shiver. Shiver me timbers. Is that what that meant, that old pirate saying? I looked at where his hand was pointing. It seemed like more toward tunnel three. It had to be the middle tunnel, though, didn't it? Wasn't this like history repeating itself or something? Like my dad had this chance to go with his instincts, and he didn't do it and lost, and now here were the same three doors, right?

  “Everything's behind the second door,” I whispered.

  “Maybe,” said Data. “Maybe not.”

  I heard Andy call out from the right-hand tunnel. “Brand!” Kind of quiet. “Brand, hurry.”

  Brand wasn't back, though. “I'll go see what she wants,” I said, and set off up the passage.

  It was dark and twisty, and I had to feel my way along the wall. I hoped she hadn't sprained her ankle or anything—that would really slow us up. Then I realized I hadn't heard Stef at all, so I got even more nervous, like maybe she'd fallen down a pit or something, or got crushed under a boulder, or something weird had carried her off, or…

  I rounded the next corner, my hands on the wall in the total blackness, more and more afraid, when my palm came to rest on something soft and warm. I'd never felt one before, but I knew immediately what it was. It was a breast.

  In a second Andy pulled me close and whispered, “Oh, Brand,” and put her lips on mine and kissed me with her mouth wide-open.

  She didn't pull away, either. She just kept on keepin' on, with the same long kiss. I opened my mouth. First time I'd ever done that, too, except for the time I started to do it with Cheryl Hagedorn and we locked braces. But this wasn't anything like that.

  Andy stuck her tongue into my mouth and sort of licked around in there. It was pretty weird, but I liked it. I mean, I don't think I'd ever had anything in my mouth that felt anything like her tongue. Even my tongue didn't feel like that.

  Then I realized everything was going on in my mouth, so I stuck my tongue into her mouth and sort of slid it around her tongue, and she started making these little whimpery kinds of noises. My hand was still on her breast, and I pressed down a little harder, but I didn't move it around much. I was afraid she might get mad and make me stop, or tell Brand, and then he'd make me sorry. She didn't seem to mind me just pressin'. down, though. So I did it with my other hand on her other breast, too.

  And for just a few seconds there, I forgot about One-Eyed Willy.

  Finally we broke, and she just leaned back against the wall, kind of out of breath, but it sounded like she was smilin'.

  Suddenly Stef came up from the other direction and stopped short when she saw me—my eyes were used to the dark now, so I could see her, and I guess she could see me. Andy could've seen, too, but she still had her eyes closed. Stef looked surprised, but I guess she figured out what was what pretty quick, because she gave me a wink. Sometimes Stef was like one of the guys.

  I winked back at her, and I hoped that meant, this was our secret. Than I backed out real slow, back toward the main cavern. Just as I got out of sight from the girls, I heard Stef whisper to Andy.

  “Okay, you kissed—now tell.”

  “Well,” said Andy, “he's not what he appears. He's… scholarly. And sensitive. And very, very sweet. But there is something weird.”

  “What's that?”

  I stopped so I could hear better.

  “I think he wears braces,” she said.

  I passed my tongue over the wires on my front teeth. For a minute, with Andy, I'd forgotten that my teeth weren't perfect.

  “Next time,” I heard Stef say, “you gotta kiss him with your eyes open. It's a whole different experience.”

  “Well, if anyone knows, you should,” said Andy. “I wasn't interested in watching, though—I just thought that if this was going to be my last day on earth, I wanted to make Brand my last meal.”

  “Yeah, well I don't intend for this to be my last day, so someday I'll tell you a secret about this.”

  “Meaning what?” said Andy.

  “Meaning apples are tastier when they're not quite ripe.”

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind. Let's get back.”

  I heard them start toward me, so I hurried back to the cavern.

  All the guys were there again, huddled around the pirate skeleton, and a few second later Stef and Andy joined us. Data had the lantern working again. Mouth was looking along the skeleton's arm toward the tunnels.

  “So are we gonna get outta here or what?” said Brand. Andy eased over to him and put her arm around his waist. He put his arm around her shoulder. It made me feel funny—kind of bad and kind of good, like jealous of Brand but full of my secret, too. Stef didn't look at me, and I didn't look at her.

  Mouth said, “Well, this arm's pointin' to Door Number Three, so let's take it and blow this joint.” He walked to the right-hand tunnel. The others followed.

  I just stood there for a second, staring at this mummified buccaneer… and all at once I had an idea. It was like a melody inside my head again. It just started playin' real pretty, just like one of those songs no one could hear but me. Reminded me of Chunk dancing to the tune of that silent jukebox up in the Lighthouse Lounge… when was that? Only earlier today? Seemed like a year ago.

  I wondered where Chunk was now. Did he get the cops? Was he trapped somewhere? Was he…

  Anyway, I had this idea.

  “Hey, guys! Wait!” I shouted.

  They all stopped and looked at me.

  “So this guy has a knife in his eye, right? So it's like he only had one eye, just like One-Eyed Willy. Right?” They all agreed. I went on. “So, if you only got one eye, you sort of see things in a different way.…”

  I looked along the pirate's arm, first closing one eye, then the other. It made the arm point to two different tunnels. When I closed the eye that the dagger was sticking in on the skeleton, his arm seemed to point to the middle tunnel.

  Everyone gathered around me and did the same thing.

  “It's the middle tunnel,” said Brand. “Door Number Two.”

  Mouth had to agree. So without any more discussion we all headed into the middle entrance, Brand in the lead with the lantern.

  After a few steps I remembered Chunk, though. What if he hadn't found the cops but had come down here after us instead? Or what if he had found the cops and they were all looking for us? We had to let them know where we were going. We had to leave them a sign.

  “Hang on a minute, guys,” I said, and ran back into the main cavern.

  I wanted to leave a trail for him that he could follow but no one else could, if there was someone else after us that we didn't want around.

  So I rummaged in my pockets and came up with a pocketknife, a rubber band, a PEZ dispenser, three base-ball cards, some old Kleenex, a Twinkies wrapper, a ticket stu
b from the movies last Saturday, and half a red licorice.

  Then I scratched a one in the dirt in front of the left tunnel, a two in front of the middle one, and a three in front of the right. And then I dropped the Twinkies wrapper near the pirate. I figured Chunk would know there were two Twinkies to a package, and go to Tunnel Number Two. Anyway, that's what I figured.

  I stood up to go back into the tunnel and nearly jumped out of my skin. There were two big, round holes in the rock, high up, one either side of the middle tunnel. I hadn't noticed them before, but with the light on inside the passageway now, it shone back at me through these holes and through the entrance—and with the other two side tunnels kind of like hollowed-out cheeks, the whole wall looked like a giant skull, with two eye sockets above, and the middle tunnel a huge nose hole.

  And now every friend I had in the world was inside that skull.

  I ran through the nose hole to join them.

  Chapter 6

  Chunk's Story

  Thinking of Chunk reminds me that he was having quite an adventure of his own during all this, even though I didn't find that out until later. But now's as good a time as any to tell you about it, I guess. So I'll tell you. Just the way he told me. He said:

  “The last time I see you guys we're in the counterfeiting room in the basement of the lighthouse and the Fratellis are comin' back and there's this frozen dead guy on the floor and I thought it was all over for us and I wasn't that scared, since I had to fight off that wolf up near Vancouver.

  “And then you stuff me into the freezer with the stiff and close the door. I can't believe you guys! I mean, I try to yell, but my vocal cords get frozen up and I can't make a sound. And this damn corpse keeps slidin' down onto me so I'm starin' in his face, which, if you remember, has three eyes on account of the bullet hole between the normal ones.

  “Then the freezer door opens and I'm about to cuss you out, except I notice it's Jake at the door. So I keep real still until I hear 'em leave, and then I'm outta there.

  “So I hear you callin' from inside the fireplace, right, the fireplace, geez. So I tell you to lemme in. So what do you tell me? Take a hike. Well, thanks a whole lot, I'm a sittin' duck out there, and my best friends won't pull me out with a rope when they see me goin' down for the third time. Great friends.