“I kin sleep on da couch.”
“Wouldn’t hear of it. I’ll shut that street-side glass door and turn the air on low, unless you think that’d be too-”
“Nah, I be fine.” He looked at me for the first time. “Usually I sleep t’ru anyt’ing. I could fall asleep ’hind de altar, me, while de congregation be moanin’ an wailin’ an feelin’ de spirit. Wake up, fine a little ol’ rattlesnake curl up wit’ me.” He laughed, but sobered quickly. “Jus’ fo’ tonight, Manny. Jus’ fo’ tonight.”
Then he knelt beside the bed and steepled his fingers and closed his eyes and began to pray very softly.
When he was done he lay down and pulled the bedspread over him. [125] He was sound asleep in less than a minute. He didn’t snore, belch, whimper, or fart in his sleep as long as I was awake, unlike a few girls I could mention.
The sun was coming up before I finally drifted off.
THE SUN WAS high when I woke up. Too high. Way too high.
I hadn’t slept until eleven in a long time for a simple reason. At seven Mom or Maria was always pounding on my door.
I jumped up, remembered Jubal had come to my room in the night. But he wasn’t here now. He wouldn’t just wander off in a strange neighborhood, would he? I got a little angry thinking about it. He wasn’t a dog, damn it, that you had to leash or watch every minute. If he was that helpless… well, I hadn’t signed on for that. But I’d better go look.
I found Jubal high on a ladder, leaning through the service hatch of our sign. Mom and Betty were down below, holding the ladder and looking nervous. When I joined them I heard a funny sound coming from inside the sign. It took me a moment to realize it was Jubal, humming and singing. The melody had a definite bayou flavor to it, and the words sounded like Cajun French.
He eased himself out of the hole and held up a frayed length of thick electrical cable like a dead snake. He looked very happy.
“Dis be de rascal, right here!” he boomed. “I’m real lucky dat you found me, yeah. Dis critter ’bout ready to cotch fire, you bet. Burn down de whole place, mebbe. Betty, you flick dat switch yonder, please ma’am.” He glanced over at me and smiled again. “Bonjour, monsieur sleepyhead! Sleep till de noontime, I declare!”
“Did not,” I said. “It’s only elevenish.”
Mom threw the master switch and the sign came to life better than it had been in a few years. Most everything was working except for a few burned-out bulbs that I could replace in five minutes. One of the little neon rockets was cracked.
“We get her recharge, seal her up again. Cheap. Betty, she say dere’s a place on de way over to Dak’s.”
[126] I looked at Mom, and she nodded, maybe a bit reluctantly, meaning I was excused from working my butt off to make up for all the morning work I hadn’t done. I kissed her forehead, and then me and Jubal dragged the Triumph and sidecar out of the small room where we keep janitorial supplies, my tools, a small workbench, and cases of generic soda pop for the drink machine, which we own, and boxes of stuff for the snack machine, which we don’t. Jubal had spread some tools from his own toolbox on the worktable. He’d been busy all morning, it looked like.
We got the ’sickle out of the workroom and spent about twenty minutes bolting the sidecar to the frame. Jubal had a mental checklist for that operation, and he went through it methodically, testing each bolt to be sure it was tight enough. A runaway sidecar might be a funny thing in the movies, but not in real life. Jubal was a careful man.
The great black and chrome beast rattled to life immediately when I hit the starter. It trembled beneath me, ready to go. Jubal squeezed himself down into the sidecar and put on his plain black helmet. I put my own helmet on.
“Want me one like dat, yes sir,” Jubal said. My motorcycle helmet is one of the finest things I own. Ironic for a guy who doesn’t even own a car, much less a cycle, I guess. It was painted by Henry “2Loose” La Beck, king of the Daytona taggers.
It only took me a few blocks to get the hang of handling it. With a sidecar, you have to lean differently. Jubal gave me a few pointers without making me nervous or being a side-seat driver.
I pulled into Dak’s dad’s parking lot the king of all I surveyed. Mr. Sinclair looked at the Triumph with lust in his eyes. He had been a member of a club when he was a young man. He rode a Harley back then, but he had told me how much he liked the Triumph. Most of what I knew about cycles I had learned from him.
He greeted Jubal warmly and helped pull him out of his seat. We went over the bike thoroughly and spent a few hours with toothbrushes and soapy water and wax. That spruced it up quite a bit. The frame and tank would need repainting sometime soon, but we’d have [127] to take it apart to do that, and I didn’t have the time, if I was going to get any use out of it before Travis came back.
“Think about this for the tank,” Mr. Sinclair said. “Deep, midnight blue, with a little flake in it so’s it sparkles. Five or six coats ought to do it. Come on in here, let me show you what I’m talking about.” He showed us several books in his office. It was plain that he’d love to do the work just for the cost of the paint.
IT TOOK TRAVIS the full two weeks he had mentioned as an outside estimate, and a few days beyond that. It was one of the best two and a half weeks I’d ever spent.
Jubal had the energy of ten men, and the know-how of a couple dozen. He could fix anything he could reach and take apart. Things around the Blast-Off that hadn’t worked since John Glenn was in orbit just magically started working again. I’d ask Jubal about it, and he’d say he just saw it wasn’t working and took a few minutes to fix it. He found it hard to walk past something that wasn’t working, or sometimes even something that wasn’t working as well as it should.
Dak’s dad had a name for it, sort of. He watched Jubal work on a few car engines at the garage and pronounced Jubal a “natural born grease monkey.”
“Some people got perfect pitch,” he said. “Some folks never get lost. Some got what they call a ‘green thumb.’ And some just understand engines.”
But being a grease monkey doesn’t begin to describe Jubal’s skills. He fixed three annoying glitches in my old computer that I’d been working around for months, and did it in fifteen minutes. He fixed plumbing and wiring. He fixed small appliances, and three televisions sitting in a storage room because I’d been too lazy to throw them out. He even fixed the toilet in room 201.
I watched him working on the televisions, and I can’t say how he did it. It was eerie, like watching a faith healer. Jubal would take it apart, stare at it, trace pathways in the air with his fingers, all the time [128] humming music that I later figured out were hymns. He touched his tester wires here and there, and next thing I knew he was snipping a transistor off a circuit board. Then he whipped out his pocket computer-the absolute most up-to-the-minute model, thousands of times bigger and smarter than mine-and pretty soon he’d located a place in Kansas or Oregon or South Africa where you could get that transistor for a few pennies plus postage. A few days later it would arrive, and he would solder it in place… and the television worked.
TRAVIS HAD EMPHASIZED Jubal’s social anxieties, and it was true, when Jubal was around people he didn’t know he muttered, hung back, never made eye contact, and just generally seemed to want to be somewhere else. But after he’d had a little time to take your measure he could loosen up quite a bit, and when he regarded you as “family,” which could take as little as a microsecond with Alicia to a couple of days with me and Dak… then all bets were off. With his family Jubal liked to laugh, and sing and dance and generally have what he called a “fais do-do,” which is Cajun for party, I think.
He changed my family a lot in two weeks.
For the first few days we kept the television on during dinner. But everyone was laughing and talking so much that by the third day we just forgot about watching or listening to it. Kelly, Dak, and Alicia started eating the evening meal with us as often as not, and we even got Sam Sinclair, Dak’s Dad, to join us a couple of times.