Red Thunder

by John Varley

  “ ‘… the exact nature of my wrongs.’ ”

  “That’s very good, Travis,” Alicia said. “Did you memorize them all?”

  “I’ve got a good memory.”

  “Well, you’re not the first one to stumble over the God business. Like I told you, just do the ones you can, for a start. That, and concentrate on taking your life one day at a time. Did you go to a meeting?”

  “Part of one,” Travis confessed. “I didn’t speak. Except the part about ‘Hi, my name is Travis.’ ”

  The four of us shouted, “Hello, Travis!” It startled him, and for a moment I thought we’d done the wrong thing. Then he laughed, and really seemed to mean it. For the first time I began to get some idea of how lonely these years of being a drunken failure had been for him.

  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 Posi
tronics. 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.

  “You bet, Jube, a fistful,” Dak said.

  “Here, watch dis, y’all.” He cranked the table so it was perpendicular to the floor. He flipped some switches in the skeleton’s belly. Jubal took the thing by one arm and pulled. It put out one foot, then the other. Now it was standing on its own.

  “Gyros,” Dak explained.

  “Yessum, but dese don’ hold him up like a… like a…”

  “Steadicam?” Dak asked.

  “Yeah, dat, what you say. Dese gyros tell him which way up be.”

  “Like an inertial tracker,” I said.

  “Yeah, what you say.” He gave the thing a shove. Instead of falling backward it put a leg out and placed one foot behind itself, then straightened again. Jubal shoved it again, harder. It staggered, then it stabilized again.

  “Pretty good,” I said.

  “Yeah, I know what you’re thinking,” Dak said. “You’ve seen it before. We’ve even seen something like this climbing stairs.”

  “I’ve never seen one run,” I said.

  “Dis one, neither,” Jubal said, sadly. “Need some better sof’ware, me.”

  “Well, I think it’s pretty damn fine already,” Dak said, and I agreed.

  [74] “Cher, sell him for twenny t’ousand dollah, we make a fis’ful a money!”

  “Twenty thousand…” Dak was grinning at me. “What does something like this usually cost?”

  “Manny, no need to even walk into the showroom unless you can write a check for half a million. Jubal thinks he can make one for under ten grand.”

  “Maybe I kin,” Jubal said, scratching his head. “ ’Course, I done already spend fi’ty t’ousand on dis one!”

  It was an awesome idea. A humanoid robot cheaper than a new car? I wondered if it could clean toilets.

  “So what all do you figure it will do?” I asked Jubal. “Aside from walk around, I mean. Will it clean windows?”

  “I fought long time on dat question, me. Dis t’ing, it could carry roun’ a bag full a dem golfin’ clubs, I t’ink.” He put his fists on his hips and glared at me.

  “Robo-Caddy,” Dak said. “I think you got something there, Jube. And we could also walk dogs.”

  Jubal frowned at the floor again, and twisted his shirttails.

  “Mebbe,” he said. “Mebbe we could.”

  He turned away from us and went to a worktable across the room, where he started sorting stuff that had already looked fairly well sorted to me.

  ‘‘He looks like I hurt his feelings,” I whispered to Dak.

  “Not your fault, man. I’d a done the same thing but Travis clued me in. Heck, it’s my fault, I guess, I forgot to tell you.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “It’s more about… well, Manny, Jubal is some kind of genius, but he don’t have a practical bone in his body. He makes these wonderful things and doesn’t have any idea at all of what to do with them. Travis always figures that out. You and me, we think it over ten minutes, we’ll come up with a dozen things to do with it. Jubal won’t.”

  Jubal had taken the top off one of those big glass jars you see in convenience stores with spicy sausages floating around in them. It was half full of shiny silver Christmas tree ornaments.

  [79] I took my silver bubble out of my pocket and went over there.

  “I found this in your yard the other day,” I said. Jubal’s eyes lit up and just like that, his sulk was over. He took the bubble from me, holding it with fingers loosely curled around it, just like I’d had to do to keep it from slipping away.

  “I t’ought I was short a couple. It’s hard to keep ’em all straight, dey jus’ floats away. T’anks, Manny.”

  “Sure thing, Jubal.”

  He took the lid off the jar and popped my bubble in.

  “Less’n you want it,” he said. I looked at him. He seemed completely innocent of any idea that the thing was something special.

  “Jubal, what I’d like to know is, what is it?”

  He looked down at the big glass jar. He moved it around and the silver bubbles swirled. He let it go and the bubbles kept swirling for a minute, then settled down.

  Jubal laughed. “That’s jus’ what I tryin’ to figure, me. Ain’t got no name for ’em.” He looked back at the jar and shook it again. He seemed far away.

  “One day my pa, he cut him down a li’l ol’ spruce tree someplace and he brung it home. He set dat li’l tree right in de house. Not much taller dan me, no. An’ when he had dat tree set up, he go out to his pirogue boat and he got him an ol’ towsack. He say ol’ Boudreaux didn’ have no fi’ty dollah he done promised for a gator hide, he only had fo’ty-fi’ dollah, him!” Jubal chuckled at this, and Dak and I smiled.

  “So Boudreaux he tellin’ my pa ’bout dis t’ing dey be doin’ down de bayou, in Lafayette or maybe it was all de way to N’awlin, what dey call it Chris’mas.

  “Now my pa he say, ‘Boudreaux, you t’ink I’m a fool, me? I know all ’bout Chris’mas. Don’t hol’ wit’ it, is all.’

  “Now Boudreaux he say, ‘I don’ mean no such of a t’ing, Broussard. Ev’body on dis bayou know Broussard no fool, you. And dey know Broussard, he don’t put up no lights nor set him up a tree, no. But lookee heah, Broussard.’ An dat when Boudreaux, he show my pa de towsack wid all the Chris’mas pretties in it.

  “My daddy, he say he had him a weak moment, Satan mus’ a reach [80] out to him, because he tooken dat towsack full a li’l pretties, him, ’stead of dat fi’ dollah what Boudreaux still owe him.”

  Jubal had a good laugh about that, and I laughed with him, because I simply loved the way he told a story. Not laughing at his preposterous Cajun accent, but because of how it just made me listen harder to every word.

  “My pa, he brung in dat towsack and open it up on de flo’, an all dese Chris’mas pretties dey tumble out. Dey was lights on wires… and my pa laugh, him, and we all laugh, ’cause we don’t have no ’lectric, no!

  “Dere was little angels cut outta tin, an’ my pa he give dem to my li’l sister Gloria and tol’ her to tie ’em up to de tree anywhere she want. And dere was silver strings. And dere be fo’ or fi’ dozen roun’ balls, all colors. I drop one an it break… yessum, it did.

  “An’ den my ma, she tie candles to dat Chris’mas tree, six or seven of ’em, and she say it was de pretties’ t’ing she evah see.”

  He said nothing for a moment, tasting the memory I think.

  “Bedtime, Ma, she put out de candle lights. Ma pere, he go out jack-lightin’ deer with Fontenot an’ Hebert. Junior Hebert, not Alphonse.

  “An’ I got me outta bed and I light dem candle again so Santy Claus kin fin’ de house, him. And what do y’know, dat tree it kotch fire and burn down de whole house. We sleepin’ in leaky tents de res’ a dat winter, we did, till de new house done got build.” He chuckled again. This time I wasn’t tempted to laugh along with him.

  “Pa, he come home firs’ light, see dat ol’ shack jus’ smokin’ ashes and his family standin’ dere in de only clothes dey own. He tole us, ‘Dat’s what Almighty God t’ink a Chris’mas trees, boys. And dere be y’all’s Chris’mas. Yo firs’ an yo las’!’

  “And den he wallop me upside de head!”

  He smiled again, and for the first time I could see, the way th
e light hit him, that there was a dent in the side of his head. I’d thought Dak was exaggerating. It was partly hidden by wispy white hair, but I could have laid three fingers in it.

  I was at a loss what to say. Clearly, the story was over, but Jubal hadn’t answered my question. I wasn’t sure now I wanted it answered.

  [81] “So that’s what those are?” Dak asked him, nodding toward the jar. “Some new kind of Christmas tree ornament?”

  Jubal said nothing, just took the lid off the jar and handed a bubble to Dak.

  … who immediately had it slip from his hand. He quickly reached down to catch it before it hit the floor, but it just hung there.

  His eyes got wide, and he smiled. But the smile didn’t last long. I shut up for the next ten minutes, letting Dak repeat the kind of experiments I’d done already. Finally he gave up and scowled at me. He probably felt like a fool. I know I’d felt that way.

  “So what is it, and what’s it for, Jubal?”

  “Tol’ you I got no name for it, me. You could hang ’em from de Chris’mas tree.”

  “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.