Fort

by Cynthia DeFelice

  “If you say so,” Augie said. But he sounded doubtful.

  “We just have to get in the right mood.”

  “Okay,” he said. “But first—the fort. I was thinking we’d use a tarp for the roof. But then I was thinking it’d flap around in the wind and probably leak. It would be better if we could get some sheets of tin or something like that.”

  “Let’s ask Al,” I suggested. “My dad told me he used roofing tin to build a fort when he was a kid. Maybe we can find some lying around.”

  When we got to the junkyard, Unk’s car wasn’t there yet. We found Al sitting in the office at a metal desk, which was covered with piles of grubby papers.

  “Come over here and look at this, boys,” he said.

  Augie and I went around behind the desk and stood next to him. He pointed down at a calendar open to the month of July. “Now this,” he said, “this I understand.”

  There was a picture of a lady wearing a red, white, and blue bikini, a cowgirl hat, and cowgirl boots, standing in the open bed of a red pickup truck. She was holding a flag in one hand and a bottle of STP motor oil in the other.

  Augie and I looked, not sure what it was that Al understood, but willing to keep looking.

  Then Al flipped past August, September, October, and November, and Augie and I caught quick glimpses of other ladies leaning against cars or getting in or out of cars, or pumping gas into cars, none of them wearing much. He stopped at December and said, “But this? This I don’t understand at all.”

  He pointed a greasy, stubby finger at the picture of a lady wearing a very small red bikini decorated with white fur, a Santa Claus hat, and white furry boots. She was standing by the open door of a car in about six inches of snow, holding a bottle of STP motor oil with a big red bow tied around it. She was smiling like mad, like standing around freezing to death in a bathing suit was about the most fun she’d ever had in her life.

  It was so dumb, Augie and I both laughed. I figured Al was thinking the same thing we were.

  But he said, “Boys, that right there is a 1957 Ford Thunderbird convertible, with the original Colonial White paint job, white leather seats, tricked out with white-walled tires and custom chrome hubcaps!”

  Augie and I looked at him in surprise. I didn’t know about Augie, but I hadn’t noticed the car so much.

  Al put the calendar back down on the desk with a thump, sending papers flying in all directions. “Now I ask you,” he said, “what in the name of your great-grandmother’s girdle is that girl doing taking a car like that out in December with the ice and snow and all the lousy drivers, not to mention the salt they put on the roads? I mean, you gotta ask yourself, is she crazy?”

  I had to admit Al had a point, even if it wasn’t the first one to come to mind.

  “Totally nuts,” I said.

  “Insane,” Augie agreed.

  Al tossed the calendar toward the overfilled wastebasket in the corner. It fell to the floor and he waved at it dismissively.

  “So,” he said, “you kids gonna work on your clubhouse today?”

  “Fort,” Augie corrected him. “Yeah. We got the sides up and we were wondering, are there any sheets of tin roofing or anything like that out in the yard?”

  Al tilted his head back and closed his eyes. I figured he was going over every corner of the junkyard in his mind. After a while he sat up and opened his eyes. “I think there’s something you can use leaning against the fence on the southwest side.”

  Augie looked at me. “Let’s go!”

  As we headed for the door Al said, “Ya might wanna park your bikes behind the office here from now on. Keep those two jamokes Morrie and J.R. from seein’ ’em and bothering you.”

  “Good idea,” I said.

  “Yeah. Thanks, Al,” said Augie.

  As I followed Augie out the door, I watched him dip smoothly and, with one hand, pick up the calendar from the floor.

  What did I say before? Augie’s always thinking.

  “Score!” I said as we moved our bikes.

  Augie grinned, rolling up the calendar and putting it in the basket on his handlebars. “Gotta have something to read in the fort besides comics, right?”

  “Totally,” I agreed.

  Al’s voice came booming from the office. “And don’t think I didn’t see ya swipe that calendar, smart guy.”

  We wandered around Al’s yard. It was interesting. I hadn’t figured a junkyard would be organized, but it was. There was a section full of all different kinds of vehicles: a hearse, a Good Humor ice cream truck, a school bus, an ambulance, and a rusty old hippie van painted with peace signs. Along the wall nearby were washing machines, refrigerators, and all kinds of appliances. There was a whole area devoted to wheels: car, truck, tractor, and steering wheels.

  I started over to check out some pinball machines and arcade games, but Augie said, “Over here, Wyatt!”

  I walked past a car that looked like it had come from a fun house ride. It was sitting all alone, surrounded by weeds, its bright paint faded and peeling. I wanted to check it out, but Augie was pointing excitedly at a stack of corrugated metal sheets piled against the fence.

  “Wow,” I said, “all we need is two or three of those babies, and we’ll have a roof!”

  “You bet,” said Augie. “So that just leaves the front. We could build walls and a door somehow, I guess.”

  “Yeah,” I said slowly, trying to picture how we’d do it. I had no clue, but probably Augie did.

  “Or we could use a tarp for a flap,” he said.

  “That sounds quicker,” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Augie. “Come on, let’s each grab a piece of this metal.”

  We started dragging the metal sheets toward the entrance to the yard. They were pretty thin, so they weren’t heavy. But each one looked to be about eight feet long and four feet wide, so it got kind of tricky maneuvering them through all the junk. Plus, we had to be careful handling the edges, which were really sharp.

  When we finally got back to Al’s office, Unk had arrived, and he and Al were setting up their checkerboard and chairs outside.

  “Okay if we take these?” Augie asked Al.

  “Be my guest,” said Al.

  “And I took some rope,” Augie added. “Is that okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “Oh, and do you have any tarps?”

  “For cryin’ out loud,” said Al, “what do I look like, a junk dealer?” Then he banged his palm against his forehead. “Oh, yeah, I forgot for a second there. I am a junk dealer!”

  This amused him so much it took him a while to recover. “Tarps,” he gasped at last. “I think they’re all being used. But, hey, ya want a tarp, ask a painter.” He gestured to Unk.

  “Oh, yeah,” said Unk, rolling his eyes. “I got tarps. All sizes and shapes. Plastic, canvas, vinyl, you name it.”

  “Awesome,” said Augie. “Could we have one? I mean, borrow one? We’ll bring it back at the end of the summer.”

  Unk echoed Al. “Be my guest. Go see your aunt. I think she’s making brownies today.”

  We decided to get the roof materials out to the fort first. It was even tougher dragging the sheets of tin through the woods than it had been moving them out of the junkyard. They kept getting hung up on the underbrush and low branches.

  When we got to the fort and eyeballed the roofing material next to the wall, we saw we would need two more sheets, so we headed back to Al’s.

  As we were struggling along with our final haul, I felt the metal slipping from my sweaty grasp. I adjusted my hand to get a better grip, and felt a burning pain as the metal sliced open my palm near the base of my thumb.

  Somehow I remembered, for Augie’s sake, not to swear. Dropping the tin, I hollered, “Mama mia! Ay, caramba!!!! Pasta fazool!!”

  I was vaguely aware of Augie laughing hysterically as I sucked away the blood to get a better look. Immediately, I felt like puking. I was looking at the inside of my hand, like the guts of my hand
, the stuff that’s supposed to be inside the skin and out of sight because it is really, totally disgusting and gross.

  Augie must have seen my face, because he got to his feet with a look of concern.

  “Sorry, Wyatt,” he said, getting hold of himself. “Are y’okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said, but I heard my voice coming out kind of wobbly.

  “Is it bad?” Augie asked. “Should we go have Gram look at it?”

  I hesitated. “I don’t think so.” I wasn’t sure, really. But we were so close to finishing the fort. We had to have our first sleep-out that night. “I just need something to stop the bleeding.”

  Augie looked down at his T-shirt. “This thing is really old,” he said, and ripped off a strip from around the bottom. Pointing to my wound, he said, “Let me see that.”

  I held out my hand and he wrapped the cloth around it several times, going around my thumb to leave it free. Then he tucked in the end. It was a pretty neat job, and it didn’t hurt too much. Mostly I was just glad I didn’t have to look at it anymore.

  Using a little extra care, we got the rest of the tin to the fort. Augie sized up the situation and said we needed to add boards to the front walls to make them a little higher than in the back, so we did that. Then we laid a final board across the front and back to make a ceiling beam. We hoisted up the sheets of tin, and overlapped them so they’d fit, and so the edges wouldn’t leak. If it rained, the water would run downhill in the corrugated ridges and off the back.

  “Genius,” I said.

  We nailed the edges of the roof to keep it from blowing away, then went to get the tarp at Unk’s.

  Aunt Hilda was kneeling on the ground weeding her garden when we got there. She waved and we went over. I was holding my hand behind my back so she wouldn’t see it, because if she was anything like my mom, she’d make a ginormous stink about it and want to do the whole first-aid thing, or even drag me to the hospital.

  Augie told her what Unk had said about borrowing a tarp.

  “My hands are all filthy,” she said, waving them in the air so we could see. “You boys go on in and help yourselves to brownies and milk, and take any tarp you like.”

  Inside, as we ate, I said, “Too bad we didn’t bring that owl. We could sneak him back to the attic, no problem.”

  “Yeah, no problem except for him not having a head,” Augie replied.

  “Yeah. What are we going to do about that?”

  “I’m thinking superglue,” Augie said confidently.

  I wasn’t convinced that superglue was going to work, but I didn’t say anything. Maybe he was right. I hoped so.

  On the way out, I forgot about hiding my hand. Some blood had seeped through the T-shirt bandage and Aunt Hilda spotted it.

  “Wyatt, what on earth happened to you? Come over here and let me see that hand of yours.”

  Augie and I exchanged a look, but there was no way out of it.

  “It’s not too bad,” I said.

  She hustled us right back inside, asking a million questions about what had happened, and was the metal rusty (“a little”), and had I had a tetanus shot (I had no idea but said, “Oh, yes.”).

  Aunt Hilda washed her hands at the kitchen sink and came back from the bathroom with her arms full of bandages, gauze, special little scissors, and a bottle of what I really hoped wasn’t alcohol, but was.

  She unwrapped the strip of T-shirt, scolding all the while about how it wasn’t a proper bandage, but in a nice way. She picked up the alcohol and a gauze pad. Then she moved in very, very close, and bent her head down. Her giant bosoms were poking out over the top of her V-neck shirt, right in front of my eyes. They looked like two soft pillows nestled in there.

  “This is going to sting, Wyatt, so you’ll need to be very brave. Think about something else for a minute.”

  She leaned even farther forward to get a closer look at my hand.

  “Something that makes you happy,” she went on.

  No problem there.

  “Are you ready?” she asked.

  “Not quite,” I said, thinking my happy thoughts.

  “Now?” she asked.

  “I guess so,” I said.

  It was over much too soon.

  When she’d finished disinfecting, Aunt Hilda examined the cut and decided I didn’t require stitches. Next she applied a bandage she called a butterfly, which would hold the two sides of open flesh in place so they could heal together. Then she wrapped gauze over that, taped it in place, and patted my hand with a warm smile.

  Dazed and nearly speechless, I managed to thank her. She sent us on our way with the rest of the brownies wrapped in foil.

  Back at the fort, we tucked the tarp under the tin along the front edge. Then we positioned it so it hung almost to the ground and nailed it in place. Augie hammered a couple of big spikes into the front roof board and attached a piece of rope to each one. We rolled up the tarp and tied it there.

  “If it’s raining or we’re doing something, you know, top secret, we just undo the ropes and—” Augie demonstrated and the flap fell.

  I crawled underneath it into the fort. “It’s really dark in here with that down,” I called. “We’re going to need flashlights.”

  Augie rolled up the flap. “It’ll probably be up most of the time,” he said. “But, yeah, we definitely need lights.”

  Occasionally munching on Aunt Hilda’s brownies, we spent the rest of the day riding back and forth from our houses to Al’s, where we piled our supplies: sleeping bags, flashlights, cards, comics, a couple of fishing poles, and matches in a little baggie to keep them dry. Gram gave us some old enamel plates and cups, silverware, a superheavy cast iron frying pan, an empty gallon milk jug, and some duct tape. I asked about those last two things, but Augie said he’d show me later.

  At my house we got food: a jar of peanut butter, a loaf of bread, granola bars, Slim Jims, two bags of Oreos (the world’s best cookie, we both agreed), cheese sticks, some apples and pears, a bag of red licorice sticks (my personal favorite—Augie likes black better, but we didn’t have any), and some bottles of pop and water.

  Augie rummaged in the refrigerator and took out a plastic tub of margarine.

  “Do you think your dad would mind if we take this?” he asked.

  “I doubt it,” I said. “What for?”

  “For frying stuff.”

  I looked at our collection of food. I’d never had fried Slim Jims before but, now that I thought about it, I bet they would taste pretty good.

  Augie grabbed some salt and pepper and added it to the pile. We put it all in our backpacks.

  I wrote a note for Dad and left it on the kitchen counter. I took the rest of the notepad and some pens, and put them in my backpack, too.

  “What’s that for?” Augie asked.

  “Writing down ideas for a song for Gerard.”

  Augie nodded solemnly. “Excellent.”

  All day long we had kept our eyes peeled for J.R. and Morrie. On the way back to Al’s, we had a pretty close call. I spied them getting on their bikes in front of a convenience store near Augie’s house and called to Augie, “J.R. and Morrie ahead. Take evasive action!”

  We turned down a side street and pedaled away without them seeing us. We bumped fists as we rode side by side.

  By then it was around four o’clock in the afternoon, and we were finally ready to start taking stuff out to the woods.

  Al and Unk had been watching with great interest as the pile grew, and had made some useful suggestions and a few contributions, like two lawn chairs even more beat-up than the ones they were sitting on and two orange crates to use as a table and a shelf.

  “Ya want to take this, too,” Al said, unrolling a small square of old linoleum and displaying it for us to see.

  “What for?” asked Augie.

  “Ya ever slept on the ground before?”

  “Not really,” we both admitted.

  “Yeah, well, I have,” Al declared. “It’s ha
rd. And damp. Put this down. You’ll thank me tonight.”

  We thanked him right then.

  Unk, who had been listening, remarked, “That joint gets any fancier, I might ask can I move in.”

  By the time we were about to haul our last load out to the fort, it was close to six o’clock. Al and Unk were packing up for the night. We stored our bikes out of sight inside the fence, and Al locked up.

  “Have fun, boys,” Unk said.

  “Yeah,” said Al. “Have fun. And if you hear some really bloodcurdling screams tonight—like somebody’s getting their heart ripped out by a wild animal while they’re still alive?—don’t worry about it. I hear stuff all the time when I’m here late, and I don’t believe those old stories for a minute.”

  Augie and I looked at each other.

  “Old stories?” I repeated.

  “What old stories?” Augie asked.

  Unk broke in then. “Now, Al, don’t go trying to scare these boys.”

  “Who’s trying to scare ’em?” Al protested indignantly. “Didn’t I just say if you hear something horrible, don’t worry about it?”

  Don’t worry about it?

  “Pay no attention to this joker,” said Unk. “Just go—and have a good time.”

  Augie and I started walking toward the woods. Behind us we could hear Al laughing and Unk scolding him.

  “He was messing with us, right?” I asked.

  “Totally,” said Augie.

  “He made the whole thing up,” I said.

  “I never heard any stories like that.”

  “Nothing to worry about.”

  “Heck, no.”

  We were quiet for a while. I don’t know about Augie, but all I could think about was not thinking about what Al had said.

  Augie got us back on track.

  “Dude,” he said, “we’re about to camp out in the most awesome fort ever!”

  “Darn right!” I said.

  When we reached the fort, we dropped the stuff we were carrying.

  I stretched my back and said, “What do we do now?”

  “How about we get some squirrels for dinner?” Augie asked.