Red Thunder (11 page)

"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 hoi' 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 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 père,
he go out jacklightin' 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 the 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.

"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.

"Den I had dis idea, me. An' you watch, it gonna make us a
fis'ful
a money!"

"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."

"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."

"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
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!

But that was later, because first Travis opened the creel and
spilled six big catfish out onto the table, still gasping for air. Dak
was trying not to gape, trying to be cool.

"No bass?" he asked.

"We tossed the bass back," Alicia said. "Decided to let 'em grow a little more."

"So... how do you cook those ugly things?"

"Thought we'd deep-fry 'em in cornmeal, sweetie," Alicia said, and
Dak looked as if he might faint. I probably did, too, because I
realized at that moment I was starving.

Alicia and Travis cleaned the fish... and did most everything else,
none of the rest of us being very good cooks. When it was all done
Travis set out six places. We heaped our plates with golden crisp
catfish filets, mashed potatoes, okra, and hush puppies. I saw Kelly
about to dig in so I patted her hand and shook my head when she looked
up. I had a hunch. Travis saw me, and tapped his glass of white wine.

"This isn't for me, folks, but the fact is, Jubal won't eat any food
that someone other than himself hasn't said a prayer over. I'll do that
now, unless one of you has words you'd like to say."

I bowed my head, and was surprised to hear Alicia's quiet voice. It
was so quiet, in fact, that I couldn't hear the words, but she sounded
sincere. I did hear the last:

" '...and the wisdom to tell the difference.' And bless this food. Amen."

"He won't come down to eat, Travis?" I asked.

" 'Fraid not, Manny. He'll hole up there the rest of the day."

I got up and picked up his plate. Travis grabbed my sleeve as I
passed him, and said, close to my ear, "He won't take it, but don't
leave it on the stoop. It brings the raccoons."

I went on, not sure now if I should have volunteered. But I knocked
on Jubal's door anyway, and he answered on a speaker I hadn't noticed
before.

"Suppertime, Jubal," I said.

"T'ank ya kinely, Manny. Did Travis bless it?"

"Alicia did."

"Den t'ank her kinely, too. Manny, I don' feel so good, me. T'ank whosomever cooked dem vittles, if you please."

"I'll do that, Jubal. And Jubal... we're sorry. We won't let it happen again."

"Not yo doin', not yo fault. I jus' a little crazy, me."