So Alicia proposed a toast: “To our health!” and we all drank or sipped from the tumblers of glop she had poured us. Travis chugalugged his, then fell off his chair and rolled around for a while clutching his stomach, moaning theatrically.
While most eyes were on Travis I used the opportunity to ditch the rest of my drink in a sickly looking potted palm under the kitchen window.
AFTER LUNCH DAK and I got out our computers and Travis took us through three more lessons. He gave us assignments that would probably keep us busy the rest of the afternoon. Then he and Kelly and Alicia went off down the newly trimmed path to the lake, fishing equipment in hand. They seemed to take an evil delight in looking back at us chained to the laptops until they were out of sight.
Ten minutes later we heard the deep roar of a big outboard. I gritted my teeth and kept my eyes on the screen. Soon the sound faded away.
“I never liked fishing much, myself,” Dak muttered.
“What, when we can be out here improving our minds? Hell, no. [74] Big waste of time. Probably nothing out there but some big ol’ bass, anyway.”
“What you wanna bet all they get is a bad sunburn?”
“I hear you, Dak, I hear you.”
“Maybe some catfish.”
“Ugliest fish in the world, catfish.”
We finally got settled in. We kept at it for two hours without a sign of Kelly and Alicia. I called for a break and Dak wasn’t opposed.
“Let’s go down to the dock,” he suggested.
“You crazy? That’s just what they want us to do. I wanted to talk to that guy, Travis’s cousin, what was…?”
“Jubal. Short for Jubilation. Gotta love the name.”
About halfway to the barn Dak caught my arm, and he looked like he was having second thoughts.
“What’s up?” I asked him. We continued walking, but at a slower pace.
“Jubal’s odd, Manny.”
“I heard that. What, is he dangerous?”
“Oh, hell no. He just takes some getting used to. He’s got some kind of brain damage but he won’t go to a doctor to get it checked out. He’s scared of doctors. He’s scared of a lot of stuff, including meeting new people.”
“Is this a bad idea? We could wait till Travis gets back.”
“Nah, I think we’ll be all right. Just don’t get insulted if he walks off in the middle of a conversation, Jubal is socially challenged.”
We came to the door and there was a piece of cardboard stuck on it with strapping tape. Somebody had written on it with a grease pencil in block letters:
IS NO DORBEL amp; DO NOT KNOKC
IF LOKED DONT DISTRUB
IF UNLOKED YOUR WELCOM COM IN!
“Dyslexia,” I guessed.
“He ain’t illiterate, he just can’t spell worth a damn.” He tried the [75] door handle, found it was not “loked.” He gestured for me to go ahead, and pulled the door wide open. A full-grown bull alligator reared up and lunged at us, roaring like a grizzly bear.
“Very funny,” I said. Dak was leaning against the doorjamb, in the middle of one of those soundless fits of laughter that can make it hard to get your breath. I glanced inside and saw Jubal himself just beyond the alligator. He was smiling broadly.
“Scared you a little, though, didn’t it?” Dak wanted to know.
“A little. Till I saw the eyeball hanging by a wire.”
“I t’ought I fix dat, me,” Jubal said, and bent over his mechanical pet, stuffing the stray eyeball back in its socket. He was dressed like he was the first time I saw him, in khaki shorts, very loud aloha shirt, and flip-flops. A pudgy teddy-bear of a man, with his wild white beard and hairy arms and legs.
“Jubal, this is Manny, my best friend,” Dak said.
“Meet him already,” Jubal said, and turned and waddled off. Dak looked at me and shrugged. We decided to follow him.
Jubal’s barn was full of dinosaurs. Most of them were torn into a lot of pieces with wires and tubes sticking out and metal bones and hydraulic muscles exposed.
“This is where old animatronics go to die,” Dak explained. “When an attraction at some of the theme parks stops being popular, Travis and Jubal go buy it, cheap.”
We moved out of the dino graveyard and in among a bunch of what looked like mad scientist equipment. There were things that made yellow and purple sparks, and racks of tubes and glassware with colored fluids moving through.
“Looks like Doctor Frankenstein’s been here, right?” Dak said. “This is more props and stuff. They bought it off some of the movie studios. Like this Jacob’s ladder, and this Tesla coil. And this Van de Graaf generator. Supposed to make your hair stand on end from static electricity.” He put his hand on a brushed aluminum globe on the end of an aluminum pole. Nothing happened. “Well, it does for you white folks, anyway. Us AAs, our hair too kinky.” He pointed at me and as his finger got close a spark jumped-and so did I.
[76] “Hey, Jube,” he called out, “how about we turn off some of the special effects? We can hardly hear each other talk in here.”
In a moment all the sparking, spitting, popping, and hissing props got quiet. I followed Dak to the only open area we’d seen so far. Standing in the middle of it was Jubal, hands in his pants pockets, rocking back and forth on his heels, looking pleased with himself.
“Manny, how you like dis crazy place, you?”
“It’s fantastic, Jubal.”
“Every boy’s dream clubhouse,” Dak agreed, and Jubal roared with laughter, reminding me again of Santa Claus.
“Jus’ junk, mostly,” Jubal said. “Mos’ dis stuff jus’ git t’rowed away.”
“What do you do with it?” I asked.
“Parts, mos’ly. Stuff in dere custom made, sometime I can twis’ it around a little, make it do somethin’ else.”
“He’s working on a robot,” Dak said. “Come on, Jubal, show it to him.”
He took us to the far side of the barn, where the equipment wasn’t quite so eye-catching, but obviously a lot more useful. Tables and shelves were covered with tools and instruments and work in progress. I saw what I was pretty sure was an electron microscope, and a mass spectrometer. There were also more ordinary machines lined against a back wall, drill press, lathe, table saw, stuff like that.
But what my eye went to was a table with a metal skeleton on it. The table was waist high, a good level to work.
“Did you see that video, ‘Frankenstein Meets Madonna’?” Dak asked. “This table was one of the props. Show him, Jubal.”
Jubal spun a wheel at the side of the table and it slowly rotated until it was at a forty-five-degree angle. The thing on the table didn’t have a head, but the torso, hips, arms and legs were all in the right spots.
Jubal picked up a robotic hand from his worktable. He pulled some levers at the base, and fingers twitched. Jubal seemed wildly pleased by each motion, like a kid with a toy. That’s how Jubal seemed to approach all his inventions. Just a big, balding kid on Christmas morning.
“De han’s, dey sto’ bought, from… Sears and Roebuck.”
[77] Dak said, “Like, a catalog. Off the shelf, right, Jubal?”
“Off de shelf, yes! Dese from Universal Positronics. Dey figure out han’s long time ago. Travis, he get ’em cheap, him.”
“So he’s got hands from the Sears, Robot catalog,” I said.
Jubal looked puzzled for a moment, then his eyes widened.
“Sears Robot! From de Sears Robot!” And he laughed so hard he had to grab the table behind him to keep from falling over. And hey, I know it wasn’t all that funny, but his laughing was the worst kind of infectious. You just could not watch Jubal laughing without laughing yourself.
Jubal finally calmed down, but the rest of the day he kept muttering “Sears Robot” to himself, and then laughing aloud.
“We figger, we make a robot can really walk, we make us a fis’ful a money,” Jubal said.