The Fortress of Solitude Read Online Free PDF Page A

home of the woman his mother sometimes, laughingly, called Vendlemachine and Henry called the olelady, and Henry’s own house. It was Dylan’s secret that other squares of slate farther down the block were as good or better but that he preferred this one for being nearer his own house and close also to Henry’s, where the kids gathered, and for the way it was shaded by a particular tree—the dynamics of space and sound, the quality of privacy and access, for a whole series of subtle aesthetical distinctions and that he could still hear his mother if she called for him from the stoop of their house—it would have been impossible to express all that went into his selection and so Dylan instead declared it the best square for skully, on the whole. And he was believed. The kids might scratch a skully board into another square from time to time, testing the principle, but after Dylan’s declaration the principle was in place.
    Then the chalking of the skully board on the slate. Dylan could draw, though he came to understand this only by the inability of the others to match him. They’d drop their chalk at the sight of his skully boards, and he’d be enlisted by Marilla to draw hopscotch diagrams for the girls who’d otherwise scoffed at his shoes and pants—he wore what they called roachsteppers and highwaters . His skully boards were straight and clean, the four corners numbered elegantly, one, two, three, four, the winner’s zone in the center embellished with a double circle, his own innovation. This, like his choice of slate, became institutional, so much that one day Lonnie and Marilla scoffingly insisted it had always been done that way, and Dylan’s authorship of the double-ringed winner’s circle was permanently obscured.
    Other innovations were resisted outright. Dylan one day designed a star-shaped skully board, where players would be expected to shoot their caps from triangular corners into center stage, as in Chinese checkers, a game which Dylan had been taught in his kindergarten class. Nobody understood, nobody played—it wasn’t skully. Dylan wiped the board away but the six heavily chalked points of the star remained etched lightly on the slate to haunt him until the next hard rain.
    Then there was the making of the skully caps. Metal bottle tops from soda or beer were the standard, and the slightly heavier tops lined with cork were best, though from time to time a kid would experiment with a plastic cap, or a wide metal one from some other type of jar or bottle, ketchup, even pickles or applesauce. The notion of a monster cap, one which would drive opponents off the board with crushing blows, haunted the institution of skully. But in practice the bigger caps were unwieldy, tended to hang across the boundary lines, and were painful to shoot hard across the board with flicked fingers. You could fool with a big cap before it was filled with wax but then it would skid and slide right off the board too easily, and anyway a cap not filled with wax wasn’t really skully . You wanted wax. Candles could be bought or “boosted”—shoplifted—from Mr. Ramirez’s bodega, or volunteered by Dylan from his mother’s bedside supply. And Dylan became an expert at melting the candles, an operation always performed on the stoop of the abandoned house in the cause of not freaking out either parents or “little kids”—though Dylan and Earl were still the littlest kids around, apart from a couple of mute girls in severe cornrows—with lit matches. Then damping the wax into the cap, so it hardened into a smooth whole without seams or bumps, one which wouldn’t pop out when struck by an opponent’s cap. Like a tiny factory Dylan made rows of perfect skully caps and lined them up along the stoop: vanilla Yoo-Hoo with pink wax, Coke with green, Coco Rico, the cork of the cap still stinking of sugar, with white.
    Strangely, after Dylan’s rapid rise to chief alchemist and philosopher of skully, nobody seemed to