The Winter of the Robots (17 page)

“That does sound pretty cool,” she said. “Don’t be out too late.”

When Rocky and Oliver and I got there, the Mustang was already up on the car lift.

“I can’t believe he’s letting us use the car,” I said.

“Dmitri said he offered Sergei something in trade,” said Rocky. “He was really mysterious about what it is.”

Serge and Dmitri were talking about torsion rods and rear axles and the best way to disassemble a rolling chassis.

“They might as well be talking French,” I admitted to Rocky.

“I
know
French,” she said.
“Quel moyen de l’arrêt de bus
?
Je vais à la bibliothèque.”

“Absolutely,” I said. I had no idea what I was agreeing to.

I started wondering about the programming side of things. Could we use an ordinary-sized logic controller? What sensors would we use? What would we use for actuators? For that matter, what would the car use for weapons?

I realized Rocky was talking to me.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t get any of that.”

“I was saying that there’s probably something more useful we could do than standing around.”

“Sure,” I said. “I know just the thing.”

As I hoped, Dan Clouts was at Sidney’s. His buddies were on the way out, but Dan seemed glad to have an excuse to hang around a bit longer.

“Sid! Round of sodas for my friends from Wellstone.”

“Thanks, but that’s not necessary—” Rocky tried to protest, but Sid was already plopping two pint glasses of cola on the table.

“Thanks, Captain Kangaroo!” said Dan.

“I told you not to call me that.” Sid grinned anyway and headed back to the kitchen.

“I just call him that because of the—” Dan pointed at the window. “Aw man, I forgot it’s gone.”

“I miss it too,” I told him.

“You know what happened, right?”

“Yeah. Vandals trashed the place. They also hit the Laundromat.”

“The Laundromat—I almost forgot.” He dabbed at his face with a napkin. “They killed Ted Whaley.”

“You knew Ted?”

“He used to work for me.” His voice fell quiet. “I missed the funeral. I should have gone.”

“I went with my dad,” I told him. “They were friends.

Sort of.”

“Poor, crazy Ted.” He brooded in silence for a few seconds and forced a smile. “So what are you kids doing tonight?”

“Funny thing you should ask,” I told him. “Because we’re looking for … well, we’re looking for a demolitions expert.”

“No kidding?” His eyes narrowed. “What are you up to?”

I looked around to make sure nobody was eavesdropping and told him everything we knew. For some reason, I felt like he’d believe us.

“Nomicon,” he said. “You know, that place has traded hands four or five times since the accident? At least one of the owners hired a crew to clean it up.” He pointed at himself with his thumb. “We were the crew. And I can tell you, that place wasn’t right. Equipment disappeared and broke down. Crazy stuff happened overnight. And then there’s what happened to Ted.” He stopped for a solemn moment.

“What happened?” Rocky whispered.

“He was a machine operator before he was a drunk. Well, he was a drinker already, but not on the job, or I wouldn’t have had him around. Two days into the Nomicon job, he was the last one to leave at night. The next morning he didn’t show up for work. Didn’t show up the day after that, either. After six days I went to tell him he was fired. I found him in his apartment, half out of his mind—I think he’d been drinking, sure, but there was something else. He was scared of something. He wouldn’t tell me what it was. But something happened to him at the site. I figured out that
much. He said he didn’t want to come back to work anyway. Well, we dropped the Nomicon project. Too much bad luck.”

“So you believe us?” Rocky asked.

“And you can help?” I added.

“Tell you what,” he said. “Come around Clouts and Sons tomorrow morning around ten.”

“Thanks. We’ll do that.”

“I’m going to make a call,” said Rocky. “Too noisy in here.” She left. A moment later we could see her through the plate glass, talking on the phone.

“Got yourself a keeper there,” said Dan.

“She’s not mine to keep.”

“Hey, be patient. Sometimes things work their way around.”

“Maybe.”

“Yeah, what do I know?” he said. “I’m past forty and single.” He looked at his watch. “You know, let’s make it nine tomorrow, all right? I have a lot of stuff to do.”

“Yeah. Sure.”

Rocky was waiting for me outside.

“Want to head back to the garage?” I asked.

“No, I better go home. My parents will be freaking out.”

“Mine too,” I said. “Did you tell Dmitri?”

“Yeah. He just wanted to make sure you were with me. He didn’t want me to go alone.”

We started walking. The worst of winter was behind us,
but there was a soft, water-globe-style snow falling, shining in the glow of the streetlights. I wasn’t going to get a better chance than this.

“I like you a lot,” I told her when we were almost home.

“I’m glad we’ve become friends,” she said.

Dad had seen us through the kitchen window, looked at me when I came in and took off my boots.

“Was that the Blankenship girl?” He probably didn’t like it, since he didn’t like her dad.

“Um. Yeah. We hang out sometimes.”

“I thought you were with Oliver.”

“I was,” I said. “We both were.”

“You’re kind of young to have a girlfriend,” he said.

“Don’t worry about it. That’s not even close to happening.”

Dmitri messaged me early Saturday morning. Sergei was working at the shop all day Saturday and wouldn’t be able to work on the robot until late that evening. “Not sure what to do until then,” he wrote.

“Want to go look at demolition equipment?” I told him about meeting Dan.

“Sure. I’ll ride in with my bro.”

“I’ll tell R.” I said. I’d forgotten to tell her Dan moved the appointment back an hour.

“I got it,” he said. “Chatting w/her in another window.”

Mom stopped me on the way out.

“What’s up? Where’re you going?”

“We’re going to watch Sergei work on the car some more.”

Penny pretended to go on reading, but I caught her glancing up at us.

“You’re really getting into this, huh?” Mom asked. “What is it with men and machines?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can I go?” Penny asked. “I like machines, too.”

Mom shushed her. “Let Jim spend time with his friends.”

“We’ll do something when I get back,” I promised.

“Be back by two,” Mom said. “I have some errands to run.”

“Will do.”

By the time I got to the service station, Sergei already had a boxy car up on a lift and was working on the underside with a wrench.

“Those cars look like toasters,” I said.

“Toasters have more horsepower.” Dmitri was munching on a donut. “Have one. Serge says nobody eats them anymore.”

Not since Ted stopped coming around, I thought. I took one with chocolate drizzled on top. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t bad. Dmitri was also gulping a foam cup of foul-smelling coffee. I passed on that, but had a couple of paper cones of water to wash down the donut. The owner came in, wearing his grease-monkey coveralls, and started riffling through some papers behind the counter.

“Hey, what happened to the Mustang? Back at your place?” I whispered to Dmitri.

“Sergei rented a storage unit down the street,” Dmitri explained. “He didn’t want to keep towing it back and forth across the river.”

“Good idea.” The Nor-Stor-All was on First Street, a block or two north of Sidney’s.

“Hey, how did you talk Sergei into giving it up?” I asked.

“I have my ways,” he said.

The phone rang, and the owner grabbed it.

“Oh yeah? Well, when are you coming in? We have a tight day as it is. No, that’s not acceptable.” He got more and more worked up as he spoke. He reminded me of Dad.

“Let’s go,” said Dmitri.

“What about Rocky?”

“She’s not coming. Said she wasn’t even dressed yet and didn’t want to hurry out just to look at junk.”

“Oh, OK.” That was surprising. She seemed to like junk.

We went outside. Clouts & Sons was on the other side of the lumberyard, and it only took us a few minutes to walk there. It was an ugly sprawl of gray concrete bunker-looking outbuildings and fences. The main building was closed, the windows dark. We rapped on the front door, and there was no reply.

We were a bit early. We paced to keep warm. Dmitri’s phone beeped. He looked at it.

“Rocky?”

He nodded. “She says happy picking.”

A dark green Dodge Ram turned into the parking lot. It was spattered with the gray-white road funk of salt-melted snow. It was Dan. He parked helter-skelter in the middle of the lot and rolled down the window.

“What we want is around back.” He cruised on and we followed.

Behind the building were a couple of padlocked sheds. He opened one that seemed older and more neglected.

“Most of this stuff is useless to us,” he said. “But it could be useful to you.” He found the light wasn’t working, swore at it, and heaved the door open more so sunlight could angle in. It didn’t do much to illuminate the jumble of rusted metal.

Dmitri looked uneasy. “This is OK with the owner, right?

“Hey, it’s my name on the sign. Don’t worry about it.”

“But are you
the
Clouts, or one of the sons?”

“I’m
the
Clouts,” said Dan. “I inherited some money when I was thirty. All I ever wanted to do was wreck stuff, so I started this business. I let people assume I was the son, that there was some old guy running the show.”

“Just making sure,” said Dmitri.

“Yeah, well. Since you bring it up, you know, I didn’t give you this stuff, OK? It’s mine to give, but I don’t want to get in trouble for giving it to kids. Hey, I think there’s a bulldozer blade back here you can use.” He eased around some equipment and disappeared.

Dmitri’s phone beeped again. He checked it, made an
mm
noise, and texted something back.

“Rocky again?” I asked.

He nodded. “It’s nothing.”

“I found the blade!” Dan shouted from the back. “And I got a surprise for you. Let me get the forklift.”

Oliver had told me to look for anything that could be
used as actuators, the muscles that let the robot’s brain move its parts. I went to work on a backhoe, wrenching off the control panel and stripping the cables. They weren’t much thicker than the gear and brake cables on a bike.

“Need a box for that?” Dan asked.

“Sure.”

He removed a few bottles of motor oil from a case and passed it over.

His surprise was an enormous pear-shaped wrecking ball. It took Dan twenty minutes to unearth it from the rest of the old machinery.

I grabbed the ring on top and tried to move it. It didn’t budge.

“It’s heavy.”

“Four hundred and seventy pounds,” said Dan. “Small for a wrecker. We have a bigger one, but we couldn’t get it on the truck. Not that my truck could haul a two-ton ball.”

“The robot car couldn’t handle that either,” said Dmitri.

“Can you use it?” Dan asked. “It won’t be a picnic getting this over there.” I could see he was beginning to regret having showed it to us.

“We can use it,” I told him. “It’s perfect.”

Dmitri had to get the key to the storage locker from Sergei. He said he’d meet us at the Nor-Stor-All. Dan and I drove over with the first load of stuff. As we waited, we saw a family hauling furniture from a rental truck into one of the
sheds. A teenage girl pulled on her coat sleeves to bury her hands and leaned against the side of the truck while her parents carried battered boxes and garbage bags stuffed with clothes into the shed. A boy Penny’s age tried to be super-helper, carrying a duffel bag as big as he was.

“Maybe they lost their house,” Dan said in a low voice. “Tough times. Come on, let’s help ’em out.”

We got out of the truck. The wind blowing off the river had an icy bite to it and a slight fishy smell.

“We got nothing else to do while we wait,” Dan told the family as he grabbed a box from the U-Haul. I grabbed one too.

“Very nice of you,” said the mom.

The boy slowed down after a couple of loads. Maybe it sank in that his heroism wouldn’t make a difference in the grand scheme of things.

“You’re doing good work,” I told him.

“It stinks!” he said.

“It sure does.” I wasn’t sure if he was talking about the fishy smell or the whole situation.

Dmitri helped when he got there, and the truck was empty in a few minutes. The dad pushed some bills on us, which Dan told us to keep.

“Let the guy have a little pride,” he whispered to me.

Burger money, I thought. I could use it.

“Sergei says to be careful and not scratch the Mustang,” said Dmitri as he unlocked the door.

“It’s going to be wrecked anyway,” I reminded him. In fact, the body of the car was already off the chassis. It was resting there, but not attached.

“He’s still in denial,” said Dmitri.

Dan and Dmitri worked the blade around the Mustang and stored it in the back. They’d also taken the arm from a small excavator. I learned from Dan that the back part of the arm was called the boom, and the front part was called a dipper. The shovel was missing, but we would use the arm to wield the quarter-ton wrecking ball.

“One more trip,” said Dan.

A police car turned into the parking lot, slowly cruised up and down the lanes in front of the storage sheds. I saw through the window that it was Bob, Dad’s friend from the neighborhood association.

“He’s looking for break-ins,” I guessed.

“Or families living in their storage units. It’s been a Steinbeck novel around here lately.” Dan waved hello at the police car and put the truck in gear.

I stopped by Oliver’s on the way home to give him the box of cables. He immediately took the back off the control panel and studied the circuits and switches. “This is perfect,” he said. He hummed a cheerful tune as he started pulling out wires and chips. He had some other stuff already on the table: spools of black cable and a circuit board with a cracked case.