“Anything else?” I asked. I was trying to be careful, remembering what Dak had told me about Jubal and his limitations in practical matters.
He looked back and forth at us, then smiled like a little child with a secret.
“I got some ideers, me. Come look.” He led us to another workbench across the room. There was a device there, I saw it was made from two video game controllers, one with a couple small thumbwheels, another with a pistol grip. It was held together with twisted copper wire and pieces of duct tape. Small plastic labels had been glued over the places where a particular button’s function used to be.
The only label I could read was on one of the control wheels, and it said SQUOZE and DE-SQUOZE, with arrows pointing to the left for the one and the right for the other.
“Chris’mas, dat be de reason I build de Squeezer,” he said. “Wondered if I could build me a silver ball dat don’ break so easy, me. Done started readin’ on optics, indexes of refraction an’ reflection, stuff like dat…” He looked thoughtful, then scratched his head around the horrible dent and looked confused for a moment, as if he couldn’t remember where he was. Then he smiled again.
“Den I had dis idea, me. An’ you watch, it gonna make us a fis’ful a money!”
[82] “So it’s called the Squeezer?” Dak asked him.
“It is? Who said dat?”
“You did.”
Jubal thought back, then laughed.
“I guess I did. How ’bout dat? De Squeezer. I guess dat’s right. Now watch.”
He took one of the bubbles out of the jar and placed it in the air. It just hung there, drifting in random air currents. But Jubal worked some controls on his device and suddenly it jerked to the left.
Jubal waved it back and forth, and the bubble stayed out there as if it were impaled on the tip of an invisible sword.
“Really neat, Jubal,” I told him.
“Dat ain’t nuttin’. Watch dis.” He turned one of the wheels of the game controller and the bubble shrank down to the size of a marble, then a BB. “Don’ wan’ get her too small, no,” Jubal said. “We lose her for sure.”
Dak moved closer, and he looked at the bubble as if he found it offensive.
“That’s why you call it a Squeezer?” Dak asked.
“Dat’s why. Now, stan’ back, cher.” Dak did. Jubal fired the trigger mechanism on the other game controller…
… and I must have jumped a foot. It sounded like a gunshot.
“Goodness gracious, as my grandma used to say,” Dak breathed. “That was one powerful startlement.”
Jubal laughed. Kids love to sneak up and go “Boo!”, and so did Jubal.
“So where did it go?” I asked.
“Didn’t have nowhere to go to,” Jubal said, “since it not here in de firs’ place.”
“Run that one by me again, Jube,” Dak said.
“Wouldn’t it leave a… a skin or something?” I asked. “Like a popped balloon?”
“ ’Cep’ it ain’t no balloon!” Jubal crowed, enjoying himself.
“Well, it’s something, isn’t it?” Dak asked. Jubal folded his arms and smiled.
“Like I say, never was cain’t go no place.”
[83] “Yeah, that’s where it… where it isn’t. But what isn’t it?”
“Dat depend on what yo definition a isn’t is, cher.”
We finally got him to say the silver bubble was a field of some sort. Nothing could get into it.
“So, ma fren’s, you buy one dese, somebody give you da chance?”
Dak and I looked at each other.
“What, one of the gizmos there, or one of the bubbles?”
Jubal pointed to the Squeezer, still grinning broadly.
“I sure would,” I said. “If I could afford it.”
“I don’ t’ink it cos’ too much, no.”
“Whatever you say, Jube,” Dak said. “If you can build a man-sized robot cheap, why can’t you build a… dammit, Jubal, just what is it? What is it doing?”
But Jubal folded his arms and turned away from us.
“You bes’ be goin’ now, ma fren’s.”
It took me a moment to realize he was kicking us out. Dak had warned me, but it left me off balance. A thing like that ought to come after some argument, or name calling, or something. Dak and I were completely mystified.
“Jubal? Are you okay? Because I didn’t-”
“Y’all jus’ go ’way now, hear? I can’t talk to y’all now.”
“But Jubal…”
“Come back later. A few days, mebbe.”
I took Dak’s elbow and started pulling him away. He didn’t resist, but kept looking over his shoulder all the way to the door.
“Was it something I said?”
“I think so,” I told him. “Travis said something about cursing around Jubal.”
“Sure, and I cleaned my act up. When he’s around I haven’t been saying… Wait a minute. You think we got kicked out because I said ‘dammit?’ ”
“That’s my guess.”
“Well gah-da …” He stopped himself. “How am I supposed to talk if I can’t say… that word?”
“It’ll be tough,” I agreed. “But we can do it.”
[84] “Hel… heck, Manny, I know some dudes can’t put a sentence together without saying motherf-”
“You know, that one offends me, too.”
“-three times. It ain’t my own favorite, tell the truth, but it plain old don’t mean much anymore. If you call someone a moth… a MF, that’s one thing, but mostly people just use it as an all-purpose modifier, ‘MF this, MF that, MF the other thing.’ ”
“You don’t have to sell me on it, Dak. I agree. But it looks like if we’re going to spend any time around Jubal, we’re going to have to really watch our mouths.”
“Crazy, man. Plum crazy.”
“What’s crazy?”
I was startled, and looked up to see Travis, Kelly, and Alicia coming up the path from the lake. The girls had windblown hair, though I don’t recall a lot of wind while we were studying. They must have been really moving along in whatever kind of boat Travis had, the one we’d heard roaring away a few hours ago. Their faces were shiny and flushed from sun, wind, and UV blocker.
Fishing? I doubted it. I was so jealous I could have spit.
Dak told Travis what he’d said, and Travis nodded as he set his rod and reel and tackle box on the big patio table.
“That was it, boys. Jubal won’t hold with ‘blasphemin’, cursin’, swearin’, nor the utterin’ of obscenities.’ Learned that in the cradle, he did. Some of them he can just frown and pretty much ignore, but anything worse than ‘damn’ will send him into a silent depression that can last three or four days, sometimes.”
“Jeez-” I started to say.
“Watch it,” Travis warned. I slapped a hand over my mouth.
“You mean…” Dak had to pause as he contemplated the enormity of it. “You mean ‘damn’ ain’t the bottom of the scale? It ain’t the mildest… cussword there is?”
“Best not to take a chance, Dak,” Travis said, taking a big rattan creel from Kelly, who had slung it over her shoulder. “Myself, I avoid heck and darn and gosh. Jubal feels… more accurately, Jubal’s father felt those were just euphemisms for hell and damn and God. Not that a [85] word like ‘euphemism’ ever had a chance to settle in Avery Broussard’s head, ignorant, pious, brutal, hypocritical swamp rat that he is.”
“So what can we say?” I wanted to know. “I guess we’d just better flush all those expletives we use in a normal day.”
“Not a bad idea. But what I try to do is substitute some harmless word instead. And you know, everybody knows, there are times nothing but an expletive will do. Like, you hit your thumb with a hammer.” He put his thumb on the table and mimed hitting it with a hammer.
“ ‘JEEZ! … us loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so…’ ” Everybody laughed. Travis was not the world’s best singer.
We made lists of words we could safely turn to when we wanted to say something we normally would express with a curse or an oath. Words like swell, and whillikers, and gloriosky, and rats, and glory be!