The Impossible Fortress(3)

Zelinsky’s Typewriters and Office Supplies was the only store in town that sold Playboy. It sat opposite the train station on Market Street, a two-story brick building with antique typewriters in the windows. The awning over the door advertised “Manual Electric Ribbons * Repair,” but most of Zelinsky’s business came from the newsstand just inside the front door. He sold cigarettes and newspapers and hot coffee to commuters rushing for their morning trains.

We left our bikes in a heap on the sidewalk, and Clark went inside to confirm Alf’s story. He emerged moments later, face flushed, looking dazed.

“Did you see it?” I asked. “Are you okay?”

Clark nodded. “It’s on a rack behind the register. Just like he said.”

“And her butt’s on the cover,” Alf added.

“And her butt’s on the cover,” Clark admitted.

We squeezed onto a bench to discuss strategy. It was three thirty in the afternoon and it felt good to be outside; it was the warmest day of the year so far, and summer was just around the corner.

“I’ve got it all figured out,” Alf said. He glanced around to make sure the coast was clear. “We’ll hire someone to buy it.”

“Hire someone?” I asked.

“The magazine costs four dollars, and we need three copies. So that’s twelve bucks total. But we’ll pay someone twenty bucks to buy them. We get the Playboys, they keep eight dollars in profit. Just for buying magazines!”

Alf spoke like this was a magnificent revelation, like he’d hatched a plan to steal gold from Fort Knox. But when Clark and I looked around Main Street, all we saw were moms pushing baby strollers and some old people waiting for the bus.

“None of these people will help us,” I said.

“None of these people,” Alf corrected, putting the emphasis in its proper place. “We just need to be patient until the right person comes along. Operation Vanna is all about patience.”

Alf was the mastermind of all our greatest capers, like Operation Big Gulp (in which we shoplifted music cassettes using sixty-four-ounce soda cups from the 7-Eleven) and Operation Royal Dump (in which we destroyed a school toilet using M-80 fireworks). He got a thrill from breaking rules and challenging authority, and when he set his mind on a goal, he would pursue it for weeks with dogged determination. It was only a matter of time, my mother warned, before Alf was imprisoned or dead.

We sat huddled on the bench, watching the cars drift along Market Street, scrutinizing every pedestrian. We all agreed that we needed a man—but that was the problem, there were no men walking around Wetbridge at three thirty in the afternoon. All the men were busy at work. And every time a guy did come along, we’d invent a reason to disqualify him: “He looks too young.”

“He looks too old.”

“He looks too mean.”

“He looks like an undercover priest.”

This was Alf again—his family was Catholic and he was always warning us about undercover priests, holy men who dressed in plain clothes and patrolled Wetbridge looking for troublemakers. Clark and I told him this was bullshit; there was no mention of “undercover priests” in the dictionary or the encyclopedia or any book in the library. Alf insisted this secrecy was deliberate; he claimed that undercover priests lived in the shadows, completely anonymous, by strict order of the Vatican.

We sat on the bench for well over an hour, and Clark started getting impatient. “This is hopeless,” he said. “Let’s go to Video City. We can rent Kramer vs. Kramer.”

“Not again,” Alf said.

“It beats sitting here all night,” Clark said.

Video City checked for ID and refused to rent R-rated films to anyone under the age of seventeen. But Clark researched their inventory and discovered a number of PG movies with shocking amounts of female nudity: Barry Lyndon, Barbarella, Swamp Thing. The best of these was Kramer vs. Kramer, the 1979 Oscar winner for Best Picture, starring Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep. The story—something about two grown-ups getting divorced—was insanely boring, and we always fast-forwarded to the forty-four-minute mark, when Dustin Hoffman’s hot one-night stand gets out of bed to use the bathroom. What follows are fifty-three seconds of jaw-dropping full-frontal nudity filmed from multiple angles. We had rented the movie a dozen times, but never watched more than a minute of it.

“I’m tired of Kramer vs. Kramer,” Alf said.

“I’m tired of sitting on this bench,” Clark said. “None of these people are going to help us. Operation Vanna isn’t working.”

“Traffic’s picking up,” I pointed out. “Let’s give it a little more time.”

In the late afternoon, the trains started arriving every fifteen minutes, discharging dozens of age-appropriate male passengers, most of them carrying overcoats and briefcases. They filed past Zelinsky’s on their way out of the train station, and a few ducked inside the store for cigarettes or scratch-off tickets. But we watched them march past without saying a word. We couldn’t bring ourselves to ask any of them for help. They looked way too respectable.

“Maybe we should call it quits,” I suggested.

“Thank you,” Clark said.

But Alf was already pointing across the street to the train station. “There,” he said. “That guy.”