Red Thunder (17 page)

"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. 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."

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 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 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.

After, there was no telling what we might do. I took Jubal to Rancho
Broussard to pick up his record collection, which was about fifty vinyl
33 1/3 and his old turntable. All of it was Cajun dance tunes, music
from
way
back in the bayou. Jubal loved to dance to this
music, and to sing along. He was a good singer and an enthusiastic
dancer, alternating between his "four young ladies," or just dancing by
himself.

Or sometimes we got the Monopoly board out. Jubal had never played
but he told us how he'd learned to do his "numberin' " using that kind
of money. He picked it up easily enough, and he loved it. He was
ruthless, and won more often than not. He took the little racing car
from the very first, and I never told him that was traditionally my
piece. And Mom says I've got a lot of maturing to do. I wanted the
little racing car, that car was
mine,
but I let our guest have it. Is that mature, or what?

I remember at the first game, when Kelly was putting a hotel on
Pacific Avenue, he asked, "Why the Blas'-Off Hotel ain't on dis board,
hah?" He suggested we rename Park Place or Boardwalk.

"Park Place is more like the Golden Manatee across the street,
cher
,"
Mom said. "The Blast-Off, when they built it, might have been on one of
the red properties, Illinois Avenue maybe, or New York at the worst.
Now we're a lot closer to 'Go.' "

Then we started arguing about what space the Blast-Off should be on.

"Oriental," I said. "One step above the roach motel on Baltic."

"Hel— ...uh, pooh!" Dak said. "Baltic, that's a SRO, a 'single
room occupancy' joint, bathroom down the hall. Oriental, that's where
the desk clerk sits in a booth behind bulletproof glass. The ol' B-O
Motel, I figure we're on Saint Charles Avenue. Which, incidentally,
give me two houses on Saint Charles. Next time around, Manny, those
houses gonna wipe you
out!
"

Probably. I didn't tell Dak that we'd seriously considered
installing one of those Plexiglas booths. After the second time you're
held up by some wild-eyed angel duster I think anyone would. We'd been
robbed four times since I've been old enough to remember. Mom shot the
first one, right in the gun hand, just like in an old cowboy movie.
After that, the police and me persuaded her to just hand over the
money. It wasn't enough to die for, or even to kill for. Nobody ever
ran out of our office rich.

One amazing thing was that, with Jubal around, we all had more free
time. It got to where there sometimes wasn't anything really urgent to
do by the afternoon, so Jubal and I would go for a ride. Mostly we went
up and down the beach, because Jubal loved the ocean. We got to be a
regular sight. Many a tourist snapped our picture as we roared by,
Jubal in his loud shirts and dark sunglasses and white beard and
sunburned nose smiling and waving to everyone we passed.

Other afternoons, with Jubal around to help out. Mom and Maria got
to go out together for some fun. Mom said she'd pretty much forgotten
how.

Mom hit the roof when I gave her the money Travis had pressed on me.

"I told him his credit was good with us, but he gave me his plastic
anyway," she hissed at me after I gave her the roll of hundreds. Mom
doesn't like shouting, but she can make a hiss carry a city block. "You
know Jubal's room won't come to anything like this much. He could stay
four months on this."

"Travis said it was for food, too."

She drew herself up and glared at me.

"We don't run a restaurant here, Manuel. Jubal is a friend. He's
welcome at our table at any time. You don't charge your friends for
food."

I knew that. I could only shrug.

"It's just crazy," she muttered. "The way that man works. We should be paying
him.
In fact, I offered to, but he wouldn't take it. Unlike my spineless son."

I wasn't going to sit still for that, but she relented and
apologized to me. Then she went away muttering about how she'd stuff it
up... well, she'd be sure he took it. I decided to make myself scarce
for that little scene.

I'm not so sure about the food business, it just seems like common
courtesy to pay for your suppers if you're staying a while. But Mom's
biggest fear was to be thought of as common. She had that prickly pride
some chronically poor folks get... actually, far too few of them, in my
experience, but some. She was quick to take offense at any suggestion
she couldn't get by on her own, or pull her own weight, and never,
never ask for a handout, nor accept charity.

Jubal just started cleaning out our little kidney-shaped pool one
day. What are you going to do, just stand there and watch him? Dak and
I joined in—after our regular studies, Jubal would not allow us
to shirk that—and soon the bottom had been caulked and painted,
the pump and filter refurbished, and the pool was filled with water for
the first time in three years. We held a pool party to celebrate and I
saw my mother and aunt in bathing suits for the first time I could
remember. Owners of neighboring businesses came and ate Aunt Maria's
fabulous cupcakes and cookies and sipped Alicia's tofu punch before
tossing it to the potted palms and grabbing a beer. They complimented
us on how great the old joint looked and spoke of their own plans to
renovate, refurbish, and upgrade, often glancing up nervously at the
looming concrete of the Golden Manatee. They knew they were in trouble
and were looking for a way out. Half our neighbors had already sold to
the Manatee's parent corporation, Pillock and Burke. More would sell
soon, you could lay money on it.

We sent an invitation to the Manatee, as a joke. To everyone's
surprise the manager showed up. His name was Bruce Carter. He was
courteous to Mom and Maria and spoke briefly to most of the business
owners there. He even talked to me for a bit. He told me how much he
admired the Triumph. He'd seen me and Jubal going by. He said he'd
owned one, once, so we talked motorcycles for a while. Then he went
back to work, leaving me depressed. I think it's easier if your enemy
is a genuine prick. This guy didn't seem to enjoy what was happening to
us. He never gloated. But he knew as well as we did that the days of
the Blast-Off were numbered. If Pillock and Burke didn't drive us out,
somebody else would.