Grow up, he said to his daughter. The sprockets and gears and clinking springs gave life to this old man. He’s a biomedical miracle, and I built him in my garage with my friend Sam. She’s a wicked mechanic and can throw a softball faster than a baseball. Dark blue tint lines this old robot’s eyes and we made his ears super thick to catch all the sound waves. That’s the problem with old people. They have floppy ears. Mr. Henry hung up on his daughter and we continued working. This guy is our ticket, Sam always said. He’ll be great.
No paper pusher in this town could stop me and Sam from our inventions. Yesterday, we disabled my step-father’s cell phone. His name is Glen, and he’s a prick. He works with my mother. He drives a sporty car and has pretty boy hair. His phone wasn’t hard to steal because he never has it on him. It was as big as my forearm and weighed five pounds easy. The best. We took out the motherboard and the receiver and added in a few sparkplugs and some wheels from the bottom of the trashcan. We used the lawnmower to power it and on the lights came real bright and deadly, then nothing. We kicked things and waited. Back at the drawing board, Sam thought of it. We used bubble gum to weld the lower quadrant of the base circuit to the exterior, right below the zero. Once more with the lawn mower, and the thing came to life. It was a certified, trackable homing beacon. Deadly accurate. I regretted making it then and there. Sam put it on Glen’s car and we used a hotwired etch-a-sketch to trace the damn thing. There was a real dark spot on the latitude and longitude of Clark Denham’s house. His mother was divorced.
I had a fox named Tina once. My father bought her for me when I was very young. She stayed in a cage and I fed her celery because I hated the stuff. I grew celery for her and my mother was proud of me for eating it. I never did. Now Tina’s a few hundred pounds and lives in the only tree in the park and no one goes there because it’s older than the swing-sets a few blocks down. Foxes beat swing-sets any day of the week. Sam wants me to train her, build her a saddle, and ride her like a beautiful orange horse at night. I think Tina likes her tree, I say.
Ghosts live in my shoes, the ones my father wore when he was a kid. That’s why I’m fast and can outrun Sam and Tina on Wednesday nights when the street light goes out for a few hours. Sam and I established this pattern while we heaved lumber for Tina on Halloween when our mothers were at the Sampson’s crawfish boil and martini extravaganza. That’s what they called it. It was that night that the lamp went out and we held our breaths and watched the stars get glossy and our eyes got used to the damp blanket of night sweeping the old park. Tina growled.
A few weeks ago, a fat cable man ate straight peanut butter in our living room while my mother tried to call Glen. I heard Sam fidgeting loudly upstairs as my mother paced, waiting. She would never get hold of him, we knew. The cable man wore corduroy and smoked swisher sweets and smacked his lips between “sorries.” Even donuts are good for you, he said to me, your body needs sugars, you know. I played with my checkers and said not a word to him. My mother hung up and lit a cigarette in the kitchen.
Sam peeked from the top of the stairs and gave me that fierce look and her head nod and I shot upstairs, leaving the cable man to his peanut butter. Sam grabbed me and told me we had to do something about this Glen bastard and his scheming. Sam has a filthy mouth for a girl. I’m not sure what we can do, I said, and she looked mean at me.
It’s garage time now and Mr. Henry’s almost finished charging. A couple of spare battery packs line his spinal circuit. I configure his neo-brain functions while Sam tightens his hips, which we replaced a month ago with steel rods and several of my father’s old belts. I seal the shiny skull, clicking it into place, and the old man begins to rattle as the lawnmower loses power.
The morning is dry and the clouds are everywhere. Sam and I watch Mr. Henry walk down the street and turn the corner. Back upstairs, our etch-a-sketch monitor purrs and clicks and our man is nearing the Denham household. Black and white video flickers in and out from the binoculars that feed from Mr. Henry’s glasses. I watch as he hobbles past the grass and homes, never looking away, never stopping. Sam takes a turn looking only for a second or two. She wants to engage the target with full weaponry. There’s no trace, she says, no way to find us. We can’t lose.
I can see his arms and his wrinkling nose, but otherwise I am there. Glen’s sedan is parked in the driveway. Sam squeezes my shoulder and asks permission. I say nothing, hoping for a reason to abort. Sam spits curses at my back and breathes heavy. I only watch from Mr. Henry and see nothing, sweating. I hate this bastard, too, and Mrs. Denham’s prettier than my mother, and she doesn’t smoke. Clark’s not home. I know this because he is with his father in Vermont, fishing or something. He told me in gym.
Sam is pacing now and she hates me for waiting. She gets like this and it’s not normal for anyone, let alone a girl. This scoundrel is making it with a tramp in there and you will do nothing, she huffs. I tell her to wait. This is big.
I looked through Mr. Henry at the sidewalk, the flowers and the little sign by the door. It read, “Peace in the home. Peace in the heart.” I knew then the misery that awaited my mother in the case of Glen’s exposure or demise. We had rockets, bullets, fire, cameras, sensors. We had tools and proof to bury or shame him, but it would end my mother to end Glen’s presence or his life, I was sure of it. I put the binoculars down and stared with my real eyes at the houses below.
From the corner of my vision, Sam twitched. A high pitched whistle came from the etch-a-sketch. The sound of high-powered weaponry heating up. I yelled and slammed the binoculars to my face. Mr. Henry’s arms were raised, like a zombie, his wrists slowly rotating. His fingers blasted off individually in mini-puffs of exhaust, exploding at the front door, the windows and walls. His forearms opened up in rectangles, launchers rising, then trails of smoke and the house began to crumble in flames. My mouth hung open and my face flushed. Mr. Henry’s arms dropped and returned slowly onscreen, replaced by hulking, mounted Tommy guns with golden cylinders coiled around, rotating as rounds were fired for several relentless minutes. The neighborhood shook.
The last time I saw Sam, she was looking at me tragically, her hands shaking by her sides. Over the blasts of rockets and gunfire, she mouthed I’m sorry, she said, I’m sorry, and sprinted down the stairs. I could only watch her leave. I stood at the window ledge and watched thick, black smoke invade the sky. Poison for the clouds.
My mother stayed in her room for nearly three weeks. Wisps of smoke billowed beneath the door. If I listened closely enough, I could hear sobs in between the soft songs of her stereo. My mother. The twice widow. The cursed wife. She never touched another man.
Tina was gone, and I found a note in the old tree: “I took your home, your heart. Forgive me.” I sat in the tree when the light went out, and when it came back on, too. I thought of Sam, riding Tina like she always wanted to. I thought she liked her tree. I thought a lot of things, then. I thought this was growing up.
Luke T. Jones 