The Impossible Fortress(13)

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. “Se?ora 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.