The Mechanical Mind of John Coggin (6 page)

“O
H . . . UNDERPANTS
!”

John plucked up his inkpot and hurled it across the caravan. It smashed into the doorsill right above Boz's head. A scatter spray of black dots peppered the rosy hair.

“Something amiss?”

John scrunched up the list of parts.

“This isn't going to work.”

Boz bounded to his side and examined the open manual on the workbench.

“Why, bless my soles! Can it be? Forgive me if I'm misshapen, but you appear to be planning on building a steam carriage with certain similarities to Walter Hancock's patented marvel!”

“Really?” Page charged through the doorway of the caravan and dropped her dog brushes. “Is that what
you're going to do for the induction?”

“Maybe,” John said cautiously, watching Boz pound out a victory dance with his inky footsteps. “I have the plans. The Wayfarers could use it for rides around the big top and publicity tours before the show. People would pay a lot of money—”

“Miraculous idea!” Boz cried, pirouetting back to his right side. Page was already hugging his hip on the left. “So how does this fabulous steam-powered vehicle”—he squinted his eyes to examine the title—“aptly called the Autopsy, work?”

“You see here?” John stuck the tip of his screwdriver on the diagram of the carriage. “This is the engine compartment. First, you feed coal through this feed pipe into a furnace under the boiler. The fire heats up the water in the boiler to make steam. The steam goes through this
other pipe”—he traced a line that went across the top of the compartment—“and gets put under pressure. That pressure pushes the piston back and forth”—he pointed to something that looked like a toilet plunger—“which cranks the crankshaft”—he moved the screwdriver down to a setup of rods and chains and circles—“which rotates the axle that turns the wheels!”

He glanced up. Page looked dazed. Boz's face was as blank as a white page.

“You don't get it, do you?”

Boz shook his head. “Not a pitwit. But that doesn't matter,” he added, thumping the bench with his fist, “because you do!”

John bit his lip.

“Well, I know how it works in theory. But I've never built anything like this before.”

“But you're smart,” Page said. “Look at the box you made for Tiger Lil. You can do anything!”

John appreciated his sister's enthusiasm, even if he didn't quite believe in her judgment.

“And we'll be the magician's assistants! The procurers of pipes. The collectors of crankshafts.” Boz yanked the curtain from the window above them and waved it over the manual. “Abracadabra, let there be steam!”

John reached over and slid the manual out from underneath the fabric.

“It's not going to be that easy.”

“But you remember what happens to the heroes in Dad's stories,” Page prodded him. “It's never easy.”

“Leap, my dear boy, leap! Look not at the cliff below you but at the sky above.”

John reexamined the diagram. It would be incredibly satisfying to show Colonel Joe what he was capable of. He tried to imagine the faces of the audience when a steam-driven carriage came chugging across the field. Maybe he could have all the Wayfarers standing on the platform.

“Okay,” he said, putting up his palm to shut Boz's mouth, “but we're going to start small. Do what the diagram says. I don't want things exploding in my face.”

“Of course,” said Boz, seizing hold of the manual. “It will be simple as huckleberry pie!”

But by early September, John had learned one very important lesson:

When it came to Boz, nothing was ever simple as huckleberry pie.

No sooner had John decided to build the Autopsy than Boz had trumpeted the news to the Wayfarers.

Reactions were mixed. Tiger Lil thought he was brave, the Mimsy Twins thought he was optimistic, and Alligator Dan thought he was delusional. Colonel Joe said nothing—and gave him a starter loan.

Yet eventually, as John and Boz and Page started to assemble the engine compartment, opinions swung around.
Now that the Wayfarers could see a rudimentary boiler and crankshaft taking shape in front of their eyes, some of them began to believe in the Autopsy's possibilities.

Unfortunately, that meant they also wanted to be part of it.

“You should divert some of the steam and stick a pipe organ right here!” Minny pointed to an area on the diagram in front of the engine compartment. “And we can play duets.”

“Add a springboard on the top,” said Porcine Pierre, “and I'll teach Frank and Priscilla to do a high dive.”

“If you can figure out how to harness the smoke from the furnace,” Gentle Giant Georgie noted, “we can have special effects for Tiger Lil's magic show.”

John's response was typical of a new inventor—he attempted to please everyone. But the more he adjusted and fiddled and tweaked, the worse things became. One day the boiler would work, the next night it split. One hour the crankshaft would hum, the next minute it broke. The chains got tangled, the pipes slid sideways, and the piston went
phfft
. The bills for parts were astronomical.

Most galling of all, John knew he could do better. With patience, time, and a finer grasp of engineering, he was confident he could make it work. Yet he had none of those things.

Page did her best to be encouraging, saying how proud Mom and Dad would be, but her praise only made
him feel worse. Every time she helped him rebuild the faltering crankshaft, John remembered Great-Aunt Beauregard's comments about his father's nitwilliness. What if the Autopsy never worked? Wouldn't it be safer to be back at the coffin workshop, doing what he knew best?

After two months of hard labor, John had a nonfunctioning steam engine, a six-year-old shadow, and an induction ceremony that was right around the corner.

On this September day of reckoning he found himself explaining to the Mimsy Twins—again—why the pipe organ wasn't possible. Mabel and Minny were having none of it.

“You're supposed to be creative,” Mabel said. “Why can't you make it up?”

“Because I don't know anything about musical instruments,” John retorted. “Besides, I'd need something like a hundred and one pipes to get started.”

“Then scrounge for some,” Minny said.

“I would,” replied John heatedly, “if we ever went near a city where there were places to scrounge!”

“I don't care what your excuse is,” Mabel said, her eyes filling with stage tears. “I know it's because you don't really want to be a Wayfarer.”

They had barely finished flouncing out of the caravan when Boz hurtled through the entrance, hair sparkling like a constellation, a cloth sack in hand.

“Tally ho, Johnny Jump-Up. The sheep are in the manger, the cows are being born, and all is right with the world.”

“No, it's not,” John said, fiddling with the axle chain.

“Alas, what's bothering the brain of our resident genius? Moan a little my way and I'll do my best to appease ya.”

“Nothing.”

“Now that's not a very original response.”

“All right, fine.” John threw the chain into a box. “You want to know what's bothering me? I'm tired of trying to make everyone happy! Page keeps telling me I'm a genius and the Wayfarers are breathing down my neck about the induction and the stupid steam engine WILL NOT WORK. It's exactly like making coffins. Only harder.”

Boz grinned.

“You, my fine fellow, may be suffering from a galloping case of the responsibles,” he said gravely, seizing John's wrist and cocking his own head sideways. “It begins with an almost invisible twinge to the conscience and results in an insidious rash of the shouldn'ts.”

He dropped John's wrist and peered into John's left ear.

“Yes, there's no doubt about it!” he yelled. “A galloping case of the responsibles.”

“What does that mean in English?” John snarled.

“It means, my dear boy, that you need to stop worrying about other people for a moment and enjoy yourself.
Rest is just what the doctor of enlightenment orders.” Boz shook his head. “A case of the responsibles in a boy of eleven is particularly serious—I'm extremely glad we've caught it in time.”

“So what am I supposed to do? Take a pill?”

Boz grinned again and tossed his sack over his shoulder. “Might I suggest a little field trip instead?”

He bolted out the door. John paused for a fraction of a second, then threw back his stool and followed Boz down the steps.

“Where are we going?”

“Top secret research! Mime's the word!”

Ducking and diving, Boz wove his way between the caravans, flattening himself against walls and skittering under wheels.

If these maneuvers were meant to evade detection, they failed miserably.

“Hey, where are you going?”

Page came running up beside them as they were scaling the fence that marked the boundary of their camp. Tiger Lil's bear came with her.

“Is it for the Autopsy? I wanna come!” She tugged at John's trousers with her free hand.

“We're busy, Page,” John replied roughly, shaking his leg.

“Please, Johnny, please let me come.”

“My dear girl,” said Boz—he was doing an arabesque
on one of the fence poles—“whither we flither is no fit place for a lady.”

“Go play with your bear,” John sniped. “Maybe you two can have a tea party with your horsies.”

Page's cheeks mottled with fury. She slapped John hard on the ankle and sprinted back toward the caravans.

Boz shrugged and backflipped into the adjoining corn field.

“Thin epidermi you Coggins have.”

John refused to respond. There was no law that said he had to do everything with his sister.

A bare ten minutes later, a small hillock appeared in front of them. Unlike the feathery tops of unharvested corn that surrounded it, the area had been mown. This, John assumed, was to accommodate the shed that stood on the top. A set of double doors, bound tight with a padlock, marked the entrance.

And in front of that entrance stood a decidedly disgruntled Alligator Dan.

“What's he guarding?” John whispered.

“An adventure.”

“How do we get in?”

“Elementary, my dear flotsam. I took the liberty of loosening a few boards yesterday. We need only slip our svelte selves between them.”

“But what about Alligator Dan?”

Boz held the sack up against his ear.

“Do you happen to know the one paradoxical point about our reptilian friend?”

“No.”

“He's ophidiophobic.”

“He's what?” John asked.

“He's afraid of snakes,” Boz said, untying the top of the sack and letting a ginormous garter snake slither out over his shoulder.

For a moment, the snake looked bored. Then, suddenly, it raised its head and flicked its tongue in the air. With a quick shimmering spiral, it wound itself down Boz's arm and into the grass. Faster than you can say jackrabbit, it headed straight for Alligator Dan.

“It's almost as if it knows exactly where to go,” John marveled, watching the snake slither closer and closer.

“Naturally,” Boz said. “I tell you . . .” He sighed. “It's not easy hiding six bird eggs and a live newt in a man's pockets.”

By this time, the snake was at Alligator Dan's feet. And Alligator Dan was just beginning to get a vague inkling that something wasn't quite right. Unfortunately for him, he didn't discover what that something was until the snake had made it halfway up the inside of his trousers.

With an almighty screech, Dan launched himself farther than Boz from Betsy. When he finally descended, he came down sprinting. Through the grass he bounded, his
legs and arms whirling like windmills and his chest scales flapping in the breeze.

John was finding it difficult to breathe from laughing, but Boz was all business.

“No time to waste, dear boy, no time to waste.”

Slithering in his predecessor's path, Boz crossed the field and inserted himself between the boards. John quickly followed.

After squeezing through this six-inch space, it would have been smart to exhale. But on seeing what was within, John's breath got lodged somewhere around his larynx.

“Isn't she a beauty?” said Boz. “The mayor of Hayseed's brand-new bundle of joy. Alligator Dan has been hired to see that she's not disturbed before the town celebrations tomorrow. But I thought you might be interested in examining her parts.”

John couldn't speak for joy. He had heard rumors of automobiles when they'd lived in Pludgett, but this was the first time he had seen one in the flesh.

From stem to stern, it was a vehicle built for speed. It had two large wheels at the back and one squat specimen at the front. A buggy seat was provided to hold the driver and passenger, with a large space for luggage between the top of the chassis and the back of the seat. A thin metal rod crowned with a wheel served for the steering.