Fort

by Cynthia DeFelice

  I had been standing back, just listening, but I couldn’t help blurting out, “But why would he? There aren’t any other players on red.”

  Al turned to me, scowled, and said very slowly, “That’s not the point. The point is, he can do it—if he wants to.” He raised his hands, palms up, and appealed to everyone. “That’s the whole point of being a king, right? You can do whatever you want, no matter how stupid it is. Wise or foolish, you’re the king!”

  I shrugged, trying to stay out of it. I didn’t want to get on the wrong side of Augie’s uncle, but we were there to mooch stuff off Al, so it was important not to make him mad, either.

  I figured that’s what Augie was thinking, too, because he said, “You can’t argue with that. I mean, the king is the king.”

  “Told ya!” Al crowed.

  Uncle Heindel shook his head. “I can’t believe you’d do me this way, Augie,” he said mournfully. “My own flesh and blood…”

  Al, happy now, said, “So what can I do for you boys?” Turning to me, he added, “And who are you, if I might ask?”

  “Wyatt Jones.”

  “Oh, right,” said Al, nodding. “You and your dad are renting a place from Gloria DeMuth.”

  “Yeah.”

  To Unk, Al said, “Gloria’s kid’s the one everybody says burned down my shed.” He pointed to an empty space at the far end of the gravel parking lot, where I could see on the ground the charred remains of what must have been a little storage building.

  Unk nodded. “How ya doing, Wyatt? It’s good to see you.”

  “Good to see you, too, sir.”

  “Did you hear that?” Al said with a big smile. “‘Sir.’ I like this kid.”

  Augie’s uncle looked at me and rolled his eyes. “You can call him sir, if you want.” He pointed to himself. “Me, I’m Unk.”

  “So I wonder: To what do we owe the honor of this visit?” Al asked.

  “Wyatt and me are gonna build a fort,” said Augie. “Mind if we look around?”

  Al waved his arms expansively. “Look all you want.” After a pause he pointed to his right and added with disgust, “Check over there. My sign says Metal and Auto Parts, right? But every Sunday when I’m closed, some jokers show up and dump off whatever they want to get rid of. Mattresses, armchairs, a sailboat … you wouldn’t believe.”

  Augie and I headed over to where Al had pointed. Tossed in the gravel outside the chain-link fence around the property were a bunch of metal sinks and counters and those big refrigerator things with spigots that serve soft ice cream, some overturned plastic tables and chairs, and some big, messy stacks of wooden siding.

  I looked at the wood and then looked at Augie. “It’s pink,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said glumly.

  “We can’t build a fort out of pink wood.” I might be a city kid, but even I knew that.

  “Yeah,” said Augie. “It would be perfect if only it wasn’t—”

  “Pink,” I finished helpfully.

  “Hey, Al,” Augie called. “This wood is pink.”

  “Hey, Augie,” Al called back. “No kidding. It’s from that custard place they tore down on old Route 9.” He laughed. “Like I wasn’t going to be able to figure out who dumped it here.”

  “But, Al,” said Augie, “we’re building a fort.”

  “So what?”

  “The wood is pink,” Augie said.

  “Again: So what?” Al replied. “It’s free. And I hear real men aren’t afraid of pink.” He guffawed at his little joke. “You can even take the old sign, make the place real classy.” This cracked him up even more.

  I looked next to the stacks of wood, where there was a big metal frame with metal letters that used to hold light bulbs. The sign read The Pink Palace.

  I groaned.

  But Augie was looking thoughtful. “Gram always says we’ve got to make do with what we’ve got,” he said. “I guess we could build the fort with the pink on the inside. Then nobody would see it.”

  “But,” I objected, “we’ll see it. We’re the ones who are going to be in it. And a fort is supposed to be a place where you can, you know, hang out and feel great and relax, right? I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I could relax in a pink fort.”

  Augie considered this. “I see what you mean. But— I know! How about we put up one board with the pink side out and the next one with the pink side in?”

  “That’s even worse!” I said.

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  We were quiet for a while.

  “Why the long faces, boys?” Unk hollered.

  “The pink,” Augie answered, with a shrug. “It’s a problem.”

  “Haven’t you ever heard of paint?” Unk asked.

  “Well, yeah,” said Augie. “But we don’t have any.”

  “What have I been doing for the past thirty-five years?” Unk demanded.

  Augie frowned. “Uh … you were the custodian at the garment plant?”

  “That’s right,” said Al. “He was there for thirty-five years, wrestling with that old furnace, trying to keep the women warm.”

  “That’s what I did eight hours of the day,” Unk went on. “But what did I do every other waking moment?”

  “Um, I don’t know,” said Augie.

  “I painted, that’s what,” Unk said emphatically. “The minute I finished the bedroom, your Aunt Hilda would decide the living room needed ‘a little face-lift.’ Then it was on to the kitchen. Then the basement, for cripes’ sake. It never stopped. As soon as I finished one room, she’d decide it made another room look ‘shabby.’”

  Augie and I just looked at him, not knowing what to say.

  “My point here,” he said, patiently, “is that I have paint. Every crazy color you can imagine. I got Aubergine, Mushroom, Avocado … or how about Moonglow or Fig Leaf?”

  “Do you have any normal colors?” I asked. “You know, like brown?”

  “I bet if you mixed all that crap together, you’d get brown,” suggested Al.

  “I bet you’re right,” I said.

  “Definitely worth a try,” Augie agreed.

  “Go see your aunt,” said Unk. “Tell her I said you can have anything you want.”

  “Really?” asked Augie.

  “Believe me, I’d be very happy to never see another can of paint.”

  Augie and I headed for our bikes.

  “It’s all in the basement,” Unk called after us. “Which you’ll notice is a lovely shade of Spring Cactus with Lime Sorbet trim.”

  When Aunt Hilda answered the door, I again tried but did not succeed in not looking at her bosoms. When we gave her Unk’s message, she directed us to the basement.

  “Man,” I said, looking around. “Your uncle wasn’t kidding.”

  There were homemade shelves covering one whole wall, filled with gallons of paint, rollers, rolling pans, brushes, spattered tarps—the works. Luckily, we didn’t have to go by the weird names they give to paint colors because the cans had all been partially used, and dried paint drips showed on the side of each one.

  Aunt Hilda seemed to favor Easter egg colors, including one that could have been called Pink Palace. We avoided those. Finally, we each picked two cans that looked likely. I took a rolling pan and roller, and Augie grabbed a couple of brushes.

  Aunt Hilda fussed about how we would be able to carry it all on our bikes, but we put the brushes and roller in my basket and the pan in Augie’s, and hung a paint can from each handlebar. Calling “Thanks, Aunt Hilda!” we started off.

  If you’ve never ridden a bike with a paint can hanging from each handlebar, let me just say that it isn’t easy. Actually, it’s pretty much impossible. With every turn of the pedals, my knee crashed into a paint can—“Ow!”—causing me to jerk sideways, causing my other knee to crash into the other paint can—“Ow!”—back and forth—“Ow! Ow! Ow!”—and throwing me all off balance. I was lurching and wobbling along, feeling like a real dork, hoping nobody was watching, esp
ecially J.R. and Morrie, when I noticed Augie was having the same problems. I stopped and stood straddling my bike.

  “This is stupid,” I called to him. “I don’t know about you, but I’m walking.”

  Augie, looking relieved, got off his bike, too. We stood for a minute, looking at each other. Then I cracked up. After a few seconds, Augie did, too.

  We began pushing our bikes down the road, laughing our heads off, Augie imitating my cries: “Ow! Ow! Ow!”

  It took us about a half hour to get to my house, where we wolfed down some peanut butter sandwiches and milk. Dad wasn’t home during the weekdays. He was teaching summer classes at the local college. We had a rule that I was to be home for dinner on the nights Dad was home, home by dark on the nights he taught the late class.

  Dad was cool that way, so different from Mom. She’d freak if she knew how Augie and I ran around doing pretty much whatever we wanted. It wasn’t like we did anything bad. But Mom would want to know where and when and are there any adults home and did you put on sunscreen?

  Dad said a boy needed a little room and he trusted me to use common sense. He didn’t even make me carry a cell phone. He called them electronic nannies, and said kids shouldn’t be plugged into gadgets all the time. “How are you going to learn to think for yourself if you call me every time something happens?” he asked.

  So I’d only used my cell to phone Mom on Sunday nights. She probably thought Dad was checking on me a couple of times a day, like she did, but that wasn’t Dad’s way. He often said things like, “Maybe this ought to be our little secret, eh, Wyatt?”

  We bungeed a cardboard carton onto the rack behind the seat on the back of my bike and put the paint cans into that for the ride back to the junkyard. Al gave us a screwdriver to pry off the tops of the cans, and we started mixing. We ended up with a pretty decent sort of muddy color, which Unk immediately named Duck Droppings.

  3

  We made pretty quick progress painting. There were twelve boards lying in the gravel yard, drying quickly in the sun, when Augie straightened up for a second to stretch his back. He looked at the boards that were left and the remaining contents of the rolling pan and said, “I think we have a problem.”

  I paused and looked at him.

  “Not enough paint,” he explained, gesturing at the stack of pink boards.

  I examined the situation and set down my brush with a sigh. “You’re right,” I agreed. “We’re not going to make it.”

  “We could go back to Unk’s and get more, I guess,” Augie suggested. He didn’t look thrilled at the prospect.

  “Man,” I said dejectedly. “I figured by now we’d have the fort half-built. If we stop to get more paint, the whole day will be gone before we even hammer one nail.”

  We stared at the ground for a while.

  Finally, I said cautiously, “I might have an idea.”

  Augie looked at me with hope.

  “We could just paint squiggles on the rest. You know, like camo.”

  “Pink camo?”

  “Pink and brown,” I said. “The brown would, you know, break up the pink.” As soon as I said it, I tried to picture it.

  I couldn’t.

  Then I could.

  “Never mind,” I said. “Stupid idea.”

  “Hold on,” said Augie. “It might not be as stupid as it sounds.” He thought for a minute. “Deer don’t see colors,” he went on, sounding a little more enthusiastic. “That’s why hunters can wear blaze orange. As long as something has a pattern on it, so it blends in with trees and bushes and stuff, it doesn’t matter what color it is.”

  “So, wait. You’re saying we don’t want deer to see the fort?” I asked.

  Augie shrugged. “Or anybody else.”

  “But,” I said, “people can see color.”

  “Well, duh,” said Augie. “But the human eye can be fooled, you know what I mean? Like one of those crazy pictures where you think you see one thing, but it’s really something else?”

  “An optical illusion?”

  “Exactly! I mean, anybody would see a big pink board out in the middle of the woods, right? But the camo pattern will make it confusing looking, like maybe it’s not a big pink board. You know what I mean?”

  “Kind of,” I said, even though I didn’t, really.

  Augie shrugged again. “I guess it’s a dumb idea.”

  He looked so downcast and sheepish all of a sudden, I wanted to cheer him up.

  “No!” I said. “You’re right. There’s not, like, a rule that says camo has to be green and brown. And, anyhow, it’ll take forever to get more paint, and I want to get going on this fort.”

  “Me, too!”

  “I mean, we only have two weeks ’til I have to go home.”

  “Let’s do it!”

  We started painting like mad, me with a brush, Augie with a roller, making squiggly lines and crazy, random patterns.

  “This is a lot more fun, anyway,” I said.

  “Totally,” Augie agreed.

  Al and Unk had been playing checkers all afternoon, arguing about the best breed of hunting dog (Al favored the pointing breeds, Unk the coonhound), the right way to grill bratwurst (Al said ’til they bust open, Unk said you had to take them off just before they bust open, so they stay juicy), and the correct method for dealing with a skunk living under your porch.

  While they agreed that a skunk under the porch was a very delicate situation, Al maintained there was no good solution. “Face it,” he said. “You’re doomed. Ya just gotta live with the stink until the skunk decides to go somewhere else.”

  Unk said he knew a guy who had success using a live-catch trap baited with cat food. “But ya gotta use a small trap,” Unk warned, “so it can’t lift its tail. It can only blast you if it can lift its tail.”

  I’d been only half listening to them all afternoon, but this was a new and interesting piece of information.

  “So then what do you do?” I asked. “Once you got a live skunk in a trap?”

  Unk shrugged. “The guy didn’t tell me the rest of the story.”

  Al snorted. “Here’s the rest of the story: the guy opens the trap, the skunk comes out, lifts its tail, unloads on the guy, and runs back under the porch.”

  This amused him so much I thought he was going to choke, but he finally recovered and took a swallow of beer. Then he held up the can and shook it. “Empty,” he announced. He looked at Unk. “You?”

  Unk drained his can and stood up, and the two of them headed into the office, I guessed to get more beers.

  Augie and I kept painting. Suddenly he groaned quietly and murmured, “Oh, man. Don’t look now, but Morrie and J.R. are coming.”

  Of course I looked. Sure enough, the two older kids were riding down the road toward us on their bikes.

  “They already spotted us,” I whispered.

  “Hey, look!” called Morrie. “It’s Lame and Lamer!”

  “Looks like Wimpy and Wimpier to me,” said J.R.

  They pedaled hard toward us, then braked suddenly, purposely spraying us with gravel and dust from their rear tires.

  “Aww, look at that pretty pink wood,” said J.R.

  “Whatcha making, girls?” Morrie asked.

  “Nothing,” said Augie, without looking up from his painting.

  I admired how casual and nonchalant he sounded. Meanwhile, I stood frozen, not wanting to call any attention to myself.

  “Looks like a lot of work for nothing,” J.R. observed. So quickly I never saw it coming, he grabbed the brush from my hand and dropped it on the ground.

  Morrie, seeing this, lunged for Augie’s roller, but Augie held on tight. They struggled for a moment, but Morrie was bigger and stronger than Augie. He twisted Augie’s arm so the paint-covered foam end of the roller mushed up against Augie’s cheek, leaving a big brown streak. Then the roller, too, hit the ground.

  “Ew, gross,” said Morrie. “What ya been eating, Augie? It’s all over your face.”
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br />   J.R. snickered. “Looks like—”

  He didn’t finish, because suddenly Al and Unk were standing right there. They moved pretty fast and sneaky for two old guys.

  Al looked a little bit like somebody you wouldn’t want to mess with, with his bulk and his sudden, fierce scowl. But Unk was pretty scrawny. And, in his plaid hat and yellow-and-red-checked Bermuda shorts, with black socks and giant beige sneakers at the ends of his spindly white legs, he didn’t exactly inspire fear.

  “This here is private property,” Al said, his arms folded over his substantial stomach. “And this is a private party.”

  J.R. and Morrie tried to cover their surprise at seeing Al and Unk. “Like we’d want to come to your loser party,” Morrie murmured, just loud enough so Augie and I could hear it, but not Al.

  “So,” said Al, “the two of ya—make like a tree and leave.”

  Morrie looked at J.R. and smirked. “Ooh, I’m scared, J.R. How ’bout you?”

  J.R. pretended to shiver with fear. “Petrified.” He gestured toward Unk. “’Specially of him.”

  They both laughed, but they got on their bikes. As they rode away, Morrie looked back over his shoulder and called, “Sorry we can’t stay and play, girls, but you have fun with your pink boards.”

  The four of us stood there for a minute. I was mad. And, for some reason, I felt kind of embarrassed and ashamed. Which didn’t really make sense, since Morrie and J.R. were the ones who had acted like jerks.

  Almost as if he’d heard me, Augie shouted, “Jerks!”

  “Guys like that,” Al said with a shrug. “Coupla punks. Don’t let ’em get to you.”

  “Sooner or later,” Unk said, “they’ll come up against the wrong people. They’ll pay.”

  I wasn’t so sure about that, but I hoped it was true. And if it was … boy, did I wish those people could somehow be Augie and me.

  But how? J.R. and Morrie were bigger, stronger, and older than us. They were on the football team. I wasn’t a major nerd or anything, but I was better at geometry and chess and computers than I was at sports.

  Glumly, Augie picked up the roller and I got the brush. We walked over to the office and rinsed off the dirt and gravel, and Augie wet his hands and scrubbed at his face. I wasn’t used to seeing him all down like that, and it made me think what a drag it must be to have to live near Morrie and J.R. all year round, not just for the summer.