The Mechanical Mind of John Coggin (10 page)

Then, as a fitting finale, Leslie farted.

T
HOUGH
L
ESLIE'S FART
faded—slowly—from the house, the memory of his words did not. All through the next day, as Boz was introduced to the workings of the bakery and a temporary room in a closet off the back kitchen, John inwardly panicked.

Nor did his worries end with bed. He lay awake that night going over and over Leslie's revelation, his thoughts tumbling around and around on creaking gears.

They were living with Maria. Which meant that Maria didn't have enough money to pay back Leslie. Which meant that the Pig would sell the bakery. Which meant that Maria would be miserable. And the Coggins would be left homeless, with Great-Aunt Beauregard looking for them and nowhere to go. Again.

John sighed, and Page stirred restlessly in her sleep.

Facts, John, facts,
he reprimanded himself.
Worries don't solve problems.
He smacked himself on the forehead to drive the point home to his brain.

Why doesn't Maria have enough money? Because her oven is dying and she can't afford to pay for fuel. So she should buy a new oven with which she could bake and sell twice as much. But she doesn't have the money to buy a new one. So maybe I could try to fix the old one. But then she would still have to buy the coal. Unless . . .

He sat up.

If I can find a way to build a new oven that runs on something other than coal,
he thought, yanking up his socks.
If I can devise an oven that runs on something everyone wants to get rid of, like vegetable scraps, then Maria won't have to spend anything on fuel. Then she could bake as much as she wants!

The blood in John's head was pumping now, the gears beginning to whirr with excitement. But he made no sound, pausing only to grab a piece of paper and a pencil from the top of the bureau.

Down the stairs he crept to the kitchen, holding his breath all the way. Very carefully, very quietly, he shut the door and lit the candle. The tiny flame flickered over the cookbook shelf as he pulled down the volume that Maria had put there. He laid out his pencil and paper and opened the book to the page on principles of convection. Finally, John began to draw.

He was so immersed in his task that he didn't hear
the door creak open again, nor the
swish swish
of a creature dragging itself across the floor. It was not until the wizened face popped up from under the table that he noticed. And it was all he could do not to yell.

“Whatcha doing?” Boz whispered through a mouthful of crumbs.

“Go away, Boz.” John gave him a not-so-friendly push.

“Now is that any way to treat a
verus amicus
?”

“Why should I tell you? You left me and Page. By ourselves. With my great-aunt Beauregard and a crowd of angry townspeople out to kill us for ruining their festival.”

“Nonsense. Maim, perhaps, but not kill.”

“Go away, Boz!”

“I can see that you're perturbed.” In a moment, Boz had slid past the stool and vaulted onto the table, smushing John's drawings under his butt. “But I had hoped my heroics at Peddington's Practical Hotel would have gone some way toward remedying my remissness.”

John's silence was pardon enough for Boz. He wiggled his torso cheerfully and clapped his hands together. “So what might you be up to?”

“I'm working,” John retorted.

“On what, pray tell? A cure for halitosis? A resurrected Autopsy?”

“No!”

“Then what?” Boz lifted a buttock high in the air and peered at the sheets under it. “You know what comes of thwarting a cat's instinct for curiousness.”

“Fewer furballs,” John said, snatching for the paper.

Boz whipped out a drawing and placed his hand on John's forehead to prevent John from reaching it. “It can't get no satisfaction.”

Boz raised his prize toward the light. Seeing the hopelessness of the situation, John sat back on his stool with a thump. They were silent for a moment as Boz examined the drawing. Then—

“You know, my wee wriggler, this is very interesting.”

John said nothing.

“In fact, if my ocular powers don't deceive me, I'd say that this was a design for a new oven. A new brick oven fueled not by coal, but by some alternative means. A new, supremely efficient oven that will allow Maria Persimmons to blast her bitterest rivals somewhere into the next century.”

“I know it might not work,” John grunted as Boz returned the drawings to him. “But I want to do something more for her.”

“Aha! Do I detect the budding bloom of the genus
crushus cinnamonius
?”

“What are you talking about, Boz?”

“He's saying you're sweet on Maria,” said Leslie from the open door. “Understandable emotion for little boys experiencing the change. Trying your hand at love poetry?” he inquired, swaggering into the room and reaching for the drawings. Boz snatched them from his fingers.

“Yes, he has. Would you like to hear what he wrote?”

Leslie snorted in joy. “Go on, Boz, I haven't had a good laugh in a long while.”

          
“Oh, Maria, mamma mia, your luscious heels are hairy.

          
Your songs are sweet as milk, I do not want for dairy.

          
Your hair's like grass and tarnished brass; it's you I want to marry.”

“Let me see that,” Leslie said suspiciously, reaching again for the paper. But Boz had a different thought in mind. He chomped down, hard, on Leslie's index finger. Leslie howled in pain.

“Oh, I am sorry,” Boz said as Leslie danced round the room, blood spattering his plum-colored nightshirt. “Did I hurt you? Instinct, you know. I always like to
have a bite before breakfast. You ought to put a plaster on that,” Boz advised as Leslie jammed his finger in his mouth to stop the bleeding. “It might become septic.”

In agony, Leslie stumbled out of the kitchen.

John frowned. “Boz, that was a bit much.”

“My profuse apologies, my dear boy, but there was not much else I could do.”

“You tried to eat his finger.”

“A mere flesh wound. He'll soon recover.” Boz flapped his arm dismissively. “In the meantime, I have saved your plans.” He handed them back to John. “And as a sincere token of my esteem, I would like to offer my assistance.”

Boz knelt like a knight of old.

“I, Boz the Malodorous Mendicant, do solemnly swear to help Prince John the Delusional build the most magnificent cooking oven that the world has hitherto seen.”

“No.”

“No?”

“Remember what happened the last time you tried to help me? We ended up facefirst in a vegetable emporium.”

“But this is different!” Boz exclaimed. “We are dealing with things of a stationary bent. There is little risk of adventures in motoring.”

John sighed. It
would
be useful to have another pair of hands.

“Okay. But only if you
promise on your life
to let me be in charge.”

“Right, then, to work!” Boz leaped to his feet. “First things last! Have you decided upon a combustible?”

“A what?”

“Fuel, my dear boy, fuel.”

“I don't know. It needs to be cheap. I was thinking vegetable scraps—”

Boz cut him off.

“While I admire your ecological evangelism, might I suggest a more potent alternative?”

“Like what?”

Boz opened the door to the stove, reached into his pocket, and threw an object into the flames.

A miniature fireball shot past John's nose.

“What was that?”

Boz uncurled his stunted fingers. In his palm lay a dried poo pellet from Maria's Henrietta hens.

“Chicken poo?”

“Chicken poo,” Boz said sternly. “Particularly powerful chicken poo. Of course, it won't be of much assistance in Maria's current configuration, but your new oven should put paid to that particular conundrum.”

John considered the situation. Boz was right. If he could find a way to tap into that energy, Maria would never have to pay for coal again. Seeing his interest, Boz solemnly handed him the pellet.

“Your poo, sir. Now naturally, I am acting under the assumption that you intend to keep this project strictly
on the subterranean QT.”

“What?”

“You want to keep it a secret from Maria.”

“Yes,” John said. “And Page.” He couldn't bear to see a look of disappointment on his sister's face. If he failed again, he would have no one to blame but himself.

“As you wish,” Boz said, rubbing his hands together and pacing round the table. “But we will need a suitable cover story for our nefarious activities. And to keep the warbling warthog from sniffing out the truth. The small vestiges of cells in his cerebrum may have already made him suspicious.”

John was certain of that. Leslie might be dumb, but he wasn't blind. He was going to know something was up if they started building an oven in the backyard.

“‘Wunderbar,' he shouted, in his most eloquent Egyptian, ‘I have it!'” Boz twirled on his toes.

“Shhh!” John clamped a hand over Boz's mouth. “You're going to wake up the whole street!”

Boz crossed his eyes.

“Do you promise to keep your voice down?”

Boz nodded.

“Fine,” John said, removing his hand. “What's your idea?”

Boz leaned in and twirled the imaginary end of an imaginary mustache. “Rubbish.”

“Rubbish?” asked John.

“Rubbish,” answered Boz. “The disintegrating dreck of modern civilization, the garbage of garçons, the picks of literati's litter.”

“I know what trash is,” John interrupted, “but what does that have to do with ovens?”

“Simple, my dear Simon. We pretend we are building an incinerator to burn rubbish!” Boz trumpeted, his voice bouncing off the rafters. “It is square, sturdy, and made like a brick pit house. It will send up a smokescreen wide enough to hide a colossus. And for the coup de pue, it is stinky enough to deflect even the most persistent inquisitors. Masked in this sheep's clothing, our wolf will emerge in the spring with its bellyful of chicken excrement and its throat full of fresh-baked bread.”

John picked at the knife scar on the table. The idea wasn't completely crazy. A trash incinerator would explain the bricks they would need, and the smoke. If it worked, Maria could build an extension onto the back of the bakery and have a whole new kitchen, twice the size of her old one.

But what if it was a bust? What if things went splat all over the kitchen floor? Would he be able to live with himself if his new invention didn't work? Then John remembered. He wouldn't be able to live here at all unless it did.

He took a deep breath.

“Okay. Let's go for it.”

T
HAT WAS ALL
the encouragement Boz needed. Within a day, there was a pile of bricks stacked in the backyard near the chicken coop. Within two, there was enough mortar to patch a volcano.

“Where did you get all this stuff?” asked John, dancing a little to keep himself from shearing apart in the February wind.

Boz waved his palm vaguely in the direction of the street.

“Oh, here and there, here and there,” he offered. “When it comes to acquisition, I am of the firm belief that ethical field posts have always been built on the shifting sands of time. Or, to put it another way . . .” He tossed a brick at John. “Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies.”

John only wished that Page had the same idea. While Maria was more than happy to let them experiment in the backyard, Page was deeply suspicious of their activities.

“Why do you have to build an incinernator?”

“Incinerator,” he corrected.

“Why?”

“Because I want to see if I can.”

“It doesn't make any sense,” she said perceptively. Too perceptively for John's liking.

“You'll understand when you're older.”

That was a red flag to a china bull. Having already gone through feast and famine with her brother, Page was not impressed with being compared to a baby in diapers. For the next twenty-four hours, she hardly spoke to him.

But Page was a doddle compared to the Pig. After a couple of days of observation, and just before the actual construction began, Leslie elected to supervise the project.

“This is one of my future assets you're building,” he told a protesting John. “Bungling boys should not be left in charge.”

“What are we going to do?” hissed John as Leslie started examining each brick in the brick pile. “We can't work with him sniffing around!”

“What we need is a diversionary ally,” Boz replied.
“Someone to distract our bumptious observer during key hours of the afternoon.”

“Like who?”

Boz cast a meaningful glance at the attic window.

“But she'll tell Maria!” John protested. “Or be disappointed when it doesn't work. Or get in my way.”

Boz shook his kaleidoscopic locks and sighed. “You underestimate your sister, my dear boy. You always have.”

That was a hard truth for John to hear. He had been there when Page took her first step and said her first word. Now Boz was telling him that he didn't know his own family? John's thoughts were stormy as he climbed the stairs to the attic.

“Page?”

Page put down Tiger Lil's bear and gazed at her brother with a stern expression. At that precise moment, she looked very much like Colonel Joe. John gulped. This was going to be harder than he had anticipated.

“I think I need your help.”

Without hesitation, Page barrel rolled her brother into a hug. “Took you long enough!”

And so began the great chicken poo conspiracy. The plan was simple: Page would endure two hideous hours of lessons in real estate sales while John and Boz worked like blazes to construct the oven. Whenever Leslie felt the need to inspect the rate of progress, Page would block
him from getting too close, and John would be there to explain away the odder aspects of the incinerator.

But it was at midnight in the attic that the real developments took place. It was then that John honed the details, using Page as his sounding board.

Although his domed oven was based on simple methods of convection—the idea that cooled air could be drawn into a top oven, heated hot by the fire pit below, used to bake bread, and then pulled out through the flue—John had a lot of practical “hows” to consider. How much air should he let in? How big should the fire pit be? How good would the bricks be at radiating heat? The Coggins stayed awake by arguing.

“If you put the flue in this place, then the air can go this way.”

“But hot air rises, Page. It's a simple law of physics.”

“Physics is dumb.”

It was a good thing they had Boz. Perhaps as an act of penance for running away in Hayseed, their friend worked harder than ever before. He helped the Coggins set up experiments to test their ideas; he fetched any materials they needed; he even went sploshing out in a rainstorm to erect a tent over the drying mortar. He returned two hours later looking like a beaver in a mud wrap.

With Page and Boz as John's assistants, the work went quickly. By late March, John had a fully functional, rather handsome brick baking oven.

The only problem was, it didn't work.

At least, not in the way John had hoped it would. The main difficulty was heat. Starting the fire pit with a small amount of wood and dried poo pellets didn't generate nearly enough energy to warm the entire interior of the oven. Somehow, the pellets weren't exploding as they had when Boz had thrown them into Maria's stove.

To combat this problem, John resorted to adding more wood and pellets, then more, then more, until finally, on a weekend when Leslie was scouting for housing opportunities north of the city, John had added enough fuel to cook a loaf of bread.

It took eight hours to bake.

Still, it looked nice enough when it emerged.

“Here's to your first teetering step on the road to immortality!” Boz shouted.

The sky was porcelain blue and the sun was warm enough to seep through John's coat as the trio took their first bites of bread. Boz munched his crust thoughtfully.

“Nutty, with a hint of maple and malt, followed by a crisp and crunchy finish. Though I sense a top note of flavor, something that I can't quite put my taste buds on. . . .”

“It tastes like chicken poo,” Page said.

Boz took another bite.

“Yes, now that you mention it, there is a certain avian chew.”

“This is foul,” said John, throwing his bread on the ground.

Boz tutted.

“Now, now, save the hysterics for the poultry.”

But John was not to be comforted. The bread tasted awful, and even if it didn't, Maria's chickens could never create enough poo to feed the fire day after day.

What was worse, John also had to deal with the fact that the grown-ups now thought he had built an incinerator. Maria began leaving him buckets of trash to take out and burn—buckets that Boz mysteriously disposed of—and Leslie was eager to examine his new asset.

When John protested that it wasn't finished, Leslie became mistrustful about the whole project. One morning, he sneaked out to have a look under the tarp, and it took an “accidental” tackle from Boz to prevent him from discovering their endeavors. Leslie emerged from the scrum with a busted lip and bruised earlobes. Boz emerged minus a large hunk of hair.

The bruised earlobes bought John a few more days without supervision. After an agony of experimentation with Page, he decided that the overall size of the fire pit was the issue. In the cavernous space, the pellets required lots of wood to ignite. Even worse, they soon lost their effectiveness in the frigid air. He had to find a more efficient way to burn fewer pellets.

By Friday night, he was back at his task. The city clock
was tolling one as John quenched the flames from his sixteenth attempt of the evening. He'd sent Page to bed after the tenth. It was cold out in the yard and warm by the bricks. Despite the smell of the chicken poo, John couldn't help himself. He slumped down on the side of the oven and fell asleep.

He dreamed of ladybugs being chased by tomatoes and woke, four hours later, sweating with excitement.

“Boz!” he cried.

“Good morning, my dear boy.” Boz was busy sweeping out the remains of John's experiments.

“I've solved the pellet problem!”

Boz clapped his hands, sending a plume of poo ash flying into the air.

“Do tell.”

“The mayor's baby.”

If a squashed cabbage face can ever look wistful, Boz looked wistful. “Ah, yes. The finale of our bucolic summer sojourn together.”

“You remember how I was telling you that the engine worked by sparking a series of little explosions in a small space—the smaller the space, the bigger the explosion?”

Boz's blue eyes glinted briefly. “Ah. Light is beginning to dawn on marble head.”

“If we start with a really strong explosion from one pellet in a tiny area . . . ,” John said, taking a stick and drawing his idea in the mud. “If we keep the pellets
right next to each other in a kind of generator, then that explosion should make enough heat to explode two more pellets, then four more pellets, and then—”

“And then you will have the most powerful oven in our hyperkinetic universe!”

“We're going to have to find a way to let the heat off gradually, so it can surround a closed-off section where the food will be cooked, but I think if we can spark the first explosion, we've got it!”

“Leave that to me, my dear boy!” cried Boz, snatching his wool cap from his pocket and plonking it on his head. “I know the whereabouts of every overachieving accelerant ever to offend an actuarial heart. I will be back faster than you can say flash flood insurance!”

And before anyone could protest, he did a flying somersault over the fence.

Since John had absolutely no idea what Boz meant, he returned to the problem at hand. By the late afternoon he had built a miniature generator where he could begin the explosions.

The primary materials were mortar, bricks, and metal vents. Once he had a few pellets going, he could open the vents and close the door to the bottom section. That would give the oven more than enough heat to bake the bread in an enclosed top section. Plus, with only a few pellets as fuel, the food wouldn't taste like chicken poo.

It was enough to bring back hope. John was so cheer
ful at dinner that Maria thought he was sick. Though she was due to help a neighbor with a new baby that night, she looked unhappy at leaving him.

“You haven't been this happy in days. Are you running a fever?” she asked.

“Nope,” said John, handing Leslie the last brownie. Boz had yet to return.

Maria put a cool hand on his forehead.

“A little warm, but not burning,” she muttered.

“I feel fine,” said John. He gave Page a mysterious smile. He had decided not to tell her about the generator until he was absolutely sure it worked.

“You'd tell me if anything was wrong?”

“Sure,” John said, eager for the hour when he could return to his experiments.

“I could stay home tonight.” Maria hesitated.

“I'm fine!” John insisted. And he was.

Nevertheless, it was past eleven before Page succumbed to fatigue and Leslie stopped huffing and puffing in his room. When he was certain everyone was asleep, John crept down the stairs and laid out his drawings on the kitchen table.

His main concern was what kind of fuel he would use to kick-start the pellets in the generator. Perhaps he could coat one pellet in an accelerant and then throw a match through a special vent. But would the generator be strong enough to contain the force of the reaction?

“I have returned! By the grace of the almighty sod, my coursers now ride again on this hallowed soil—”

“Shhh!”

“Ooops.” Boz clapped his hand to his mouth. “My apologies,” he squeaked through his fingers. “What are you doing?”

“I'm trying to find a way to light the first pellet without burning out the generator,” said John, sketching in the new vent.

“Can I assist?”

“No.”

“But, my dear boy—”

“Not now, Boz, I need to concentrate. If I can't figure out how to manage the heat, then I won't be able to use any accelerant at all.”

“Fine.” Boz sulked. “I know when I'm not wanted.”

Dragging his feet noisily along the floor, he disappeared out the back door.

Only to return five minutes later.

“Ahem.”

“Go away, Boz.”

“There is something I want to show you.”

“Go away, Boz!”

“But if I could only point out—”

John sighed and threw his pencil down on the table.

“Boz, until I've finished this drawing, don't talk to me unless your pants are on fire, do you understand?”

Surly silence was Boz's reply.

“Why don't you go outside and restock the pellets?” John suggested. “I'll come out when I'm done.”

Boz gave John a brusque nod and stomped outside.

Only to return again five minutes later.

“Ahem.”

John ignored him.

“Ahem. AHEM!”

“What
is
it, Boz?”

“My pants are on fire.”