Into the wall facing his house he dug a narrow peephole. Now he had a perfect view of the driveway and the front door of his house. He would be ready when Claire’s friends showed up and did their usual thing of standing in the driveway, talking and pretending to know how to chew tobacco and then spitting and drooling the brown juice into the grey snow.
Max looked at his watch, noting that it was 4:15, which meant that he probably had another fifteen minutes before they arrived. Claire’s friends showed up — when they did show up, because sometimes they didn’t, though they said they would — at 4:30 or so every day, because one of the boys who always came, bed-headed and called Finn, had to do after-school detention every day of the year. Who would pick a guy like that up from detention just to enjoy his company? Claire and her idiot friends. They all waited at school for the fumbler named Finn, then came to Max’s house for some reason.
Max used the time to amass a vast arsenal. The snow was a perfect texture, just wet enough to be sticky. All he needed to do was grab a handful and it was already a snowball — snowballs that almost made themselves. Each one he would pack tight from all sides, smooth over, pack again, smooth over again, and then put on the shelf. In ten minutes he had packed thirty-one snowballs and had run out of room on his shelf.
So he built another shelf.
With the remaining five minutes, Max decided he needed a flag on top of his fort, so he left the cave and stood and searched around the surrounding woods for a stick, and found one about four feet tall and as straight as a flagpole. He stuck it into the roof of the fort and then tied his hat onto it. He backed up and was satisfied that it truly almost looked like a flag — a flag raised for a great nation and before a glorious and morally necessary battle.
At 4:30 he was back in the cool comfort of his fort, peering through the peephole, watching for any movement at his house. No, he wasn’t cold. One might think that a boy who was out in the snow for so long would get cold, but Max was not. He was warm, partly because he had on many layers, and partly because boys who are part wolf and part wind do not get cold.
At 4:38, a station wagon pulled into his driveway. It was a car he knew well, an ancient red station wagon one of the boys who came around drove. Two boys and a girl got out. One boy was the bed-headed one named Finn. Another always wore black; this was Carlos. The girl was named Meika, and Max loved her without boundary.
Max could make out parts of a conversation as they walked into his house.
“Did Tonya tell you she didn’t do it?” Meika said.
“Yeah, she did,” Carlos said.
“That doesn’t mean we believe her,” Finn said.
The front door opened and Claire emerged.
“Speak of the devil,” Carlos said.
“What?” Claire said, and they all laughed.
Claire pretended to laugh, too, and they all filed past her and into the house. A minute later they emerged again. They probably wanted to chew tobacco, and Claire knew not to allow it in the house; their mom could always tell, hours or days later. As the boys, and Claire, began their disgusting coughing and spitting, Max knew the stage was set. He knew what he had to do. “Okay. Okay,” he said to himself. “Okay.”
He snaked out of the fort’s entrance, making sure he was undetected by the four targets across the street. Now standing across the street, he looked closely at Claire and her friends and confirmed that he had not been detected. He reached back into the fort for his ammunition. He gathered the snowballs carefully into all of his available pockets. When his pockets were full, he placed the rest kangaroo-style in the front of his coat. He left twenty snowballs in the fort, in case he needed to replenish his supply later.
Now he had to get closer. He needed to cross the street and position himself in the neighbor’s yard. There, he would have a fence to protect himself from the enemy fire. But it was a long way across the street, and surely they would see him running no more than forty feet away.
Then he had an idea.
He took one of his smaller snowballs and threw it as far as he could. He could throw far — he could throw a baseball forty-four miles an hour, according to the radar thing at the batting cages — so the snowball, a small one, sailed over the heads of Claire and her friends and into the far-neighbor’s yard. When it landed, it made a loud scratchy sound and the four teenagers all turned to see where the sound had come from. While they were distracted, Max darted across the street and dove behind the other neighbor’s fence.
The plan worked. He was smarter than he could stand. He advanced quickly.
He was now only about twenty feet away from the enemy, with the neighbor’s fence obscuring them. The four teenagers were doing their business with the chewing tobacco, the boys putting it in their mouths, the girls saying, “That stuff’s nasty,” and then saying other things that were stupid and were not worth saying. All the while, none of them had any idea that they were about to endure a devastating assault.
Max dropped all his snowballs onto the ground below him, and placed a line of ammunition on the lower beam of the fence. He kept seven snowballs in his various pockets, in case he needed to advance on the enemy and finish them off.
Finally he was ready. He took a long breath, heaving out something like dragon steam, and he began.
He unleashed a barrage of five snowballs, one after the other, throwing them faster than even he thought possible. His arm was some kind of machine, like a tennis-ball cannon.
Boom!
Boom!
Boom!
One hit the bed-headed kid in the chest. The sound was incredible, a hollow pop against his puffy jacket.
“What the hell?” he yelled.
Another smacked Meika in the thigh.
“Ah! What the!” she gasped.
One thumped onto the station wagon’s windshield; again the sound was great. Two missed their targets completely but it didn’t matter — Max was already unloading another barrage. Four more left his cannon-arm, and these hit Claire’s shoulder, the car’s roof and door, and Carlos, right in the groin. He doubled over. Fantastic.
“Who is that?” Claire yelled.
Max ducked behind the fence but not before the boys deduced that Max was the source of the assault. They had figured out his position. Max got another arsenal ready, but when he peeked over the fence again — “There’s the little bastard!” one said — he was met by an avalanche of snow, which fell upon his head and back with great force and speed. The boys had been fast, and deposited a boulder of snow over the fence and onto Max. The fight was moving beyond artillery and into hand-to-hand combat sooner than Max had expected.
“How’s that feel, wuss?”
“You hit me in the balls, idiot.”
If Max could run across the street, he would be safe. Even if they followed him across the street, they would never be able to find his well-hidden fort, much less penetrate his defenses. He took off.
“Run, little grasshopper! Run!” they said.
“Look at his little legs go!”
As he began running, he launched one last snowball, arcing it so high it disappeared into the sun before Max could see where it would land.
He ran, and was across the street before the boys had even decided to follow. He zig-zagged through the pines to throw them off the scent, and then heard the last snowball land with an icy smack.
“Max, you freak!” he could hear Claire saying. “You hit Meika in the face!”