Spare Parts

by Joshua Davis

  Fredi had an ideal candidate. Oscar Vazquez was in Fredi’s senior Marine Science Seminar and was a standout cadet in the ROTC program. Though Oscar had the hoo-ha spirit, he clearly wasn’t going to be able to make a career in the Army. He enrolled in Fredi’s class to experiment with new opportunities and approached the seminar with typical gusto. He didn’t want to just take the class, he wanted to push himself and everyone around him to do something amazing.

  So when Fredi mentioned that a bunch of the kids were building a catapult in the science-and-technology club, Oscar listened closely. He liked building things and was adept with power tools after countless weekends working with his father at the mattress factory. But more important, he was looking for a new team to lead. He agreed to check it out.

  What Oscar saw impressed him. Hanck’s trebuchet design featured a wooden tower that supported a bench-press bar fifteen feet off the ground. The bar was loaded with 120 pounds, and when released, it whipped a twelve-foot-long two-by-four through a 180-degree arc, hurling whatever was on the end into the distance.

  It looked cool, but Oscar could see a fundamental problem. Because the arm extended twelve feet, the leverage required to pull the 120-pound weight back into firing position was substantial. At 120 pounds, Cristian could dangle off the arm and the structure would barely budge. This bunch of skinny nerds had built a catapult so big, it would be difficult to fire.

  Oscar was well suited to solve the problem. As the commander of the Adventure Training Team, he was accustomed to scaling rock walls and dangling from ropes. He regularly ordered his ROTC squad to crawl on each other’s back to form a pyramid. This would be no different. Oscar grappled up a rope to the top of the trebuchet arm, adding some initial downward motion. Then, with Cristian, Lorenzo, Hanck, and others in the club pulling down, the group’s combined weight was enough to lower the bench-press bar into the firing position.

  The big unveiling of the trebuchet was scheduled for October 2003 at Mother Nature’s Farm in Gilbert, Arizona. The local pumpkin patch hosted an annual pumpkin-hurling contest; cash prizes and bragging rights were at stake. Lorenzo was excited. He had never hung out with seniors, let alone someone as serious and focused as Oscar. He was also impressed by Cristian’s smarts, and the fact that they had built something twice as tall as any of them. The day before the contest, Fredi told the group that they would leave at six the next morning. The pumpkin patch was a half-hour drive, and they needed time to assemble the trebuchet when they got there. Lorenzo couldn’t wait to see it in action.

  But the next morning, Lorenzo slept late and woke up a few minutes before six. He lived ten minutes from the school and leapt on his twenty-speed bike. Unfortunately, only two gears worked, and they were the high gears. He jumped on and strained to get going, but the gearing was tough. He could barely move the bike at first. Once he got going, he flew down the predawn streets, pedaling wildly.

  He was within a block of campus when the school van flew past him and turned onto the freeway on-ramp. The van was pulling the trebuchet on a trailer; Lorenzo watched as it accelerated onto the interstate and disappeared down the ramp. He had spun himself into exhaustion and couldn’t even yell. He was two minutes late. He was furious with himself and his lack of discipline.

  Out at the pumpkin field, the guys didn’t miss Lorenzo. Cristian didn’t have a lot of respect for him to begin with, and his absence only reinforced Cristian’s initial impression. Nor was Oscar impressed with someone who couldn’t wake up on time. That was drilled into every cadet: there’s no excuse for being late. Lorenzo had a long way to go to earn the group’s trust.

  The pumpkin-chucking event began, and Oscar, Cristian, and Hanck struggled to arm the trebuchet. Cristian was wearing black shorts that hung below his knees with white socks pulled up his calves. He sported a white, too-big T-shirt and the wisp of a mustache. He looked like a nerdy gangster. Oscar wore a tank top and a crew cut and muscled his way up the rope to pull the catapult’s arm down. Hanck pulled from the midpoint, while Cristian dangled off the rope at the bottom. It took all three of them to get the arm into position. When they fired it, the device made a satisfying whoosh and flung the pumpkin about one hundred feet.

  By adding more weight, the kids were able to increase the “rate-of-hurl,” inching up to a hundred and fifty feet. That placed them in second, behind a school from a relatively affluent part of East Phoenix. In an effort to overtake their competitors, they added more and more weight to the contraption. Finally, the trebuchet arm snapped in half. Carl Hayden had to content themselves with second place, but everybody agreed it had been a lot of fun. The only problem had been that it was difficult to handle such a large, cumbersome machine. They realized that it would be helpful to have somebody a little bigger on the team.

  LUIS ARANDA STARTED out as a perfectly normal-size six-pound baby. Maria Garcia Aranda, his mother, thought he looked like a beautiful little doll and showed him off to her friends. The family lived in a shack in the Mexican city of Cuernavaca with intermittent running water and power. Looking back, nobody could quite pinpoint why Luis had turned into a giant. Maybe it was toxins in all the nopals and loquats he ate, or something in the water they siphoned off a cistern, but he started to grow and grow. Both his parents were five feet five inches, but by kindergarten, Luis was one of the tallest and heaviest youngsters in the neighborhood.

  Maria Garcia worked as a housecleaner for a Japanese woman. Many days, Maria Garcia would bring Luis to work, and the Japanese woman took a liking to the stout little boy. He was big without exactly being fat. In many ways, he had the solidity and presence of a sumo wrestler. The lady watched as Luis lumbered around the property and played in the dirt. One day, when Luis told his mother that he loved her, the Japanese lady got emotional. “I remember when my children used to say that to me,” she said.

  The Japanese woman knew that the Aranda family was struggling. Luis’s father, Pedro, worked as a construction laborer but left to find work in the United States as a farmworker. Maria Garcia had completed only second grade and got married when she was fourteen. Now she was pregnant with another child. There seemed to be a win-win solution: friends of the Japanese woman approached Maria Garcia and suggested she put Luis up for adoption. The Japanese lady would take good care of him. He’d be well fed, well clothed, and maybe even get to visit Japan.

  But Maria Garcia couldn’t part with her son, even if that meant he’d have limited opportunities. Nonetheless, the conversation forced her to consider what she could do to give Luis a better life. Taking him to the United States felt like the only real option.

  On Sunday, July 21, 1991, Maria Garcia packed a small bag and took Luis by the hand. “We’re going somewhere else,” she said. Together with his grandfather, an aunt, and two cousins, the family set off for Nogales by bus. They walked through a hole in a chain-link fence on the border and took a taxi to Phoenix, where Pedro had found work as a butcher. Eventually, Pedro obtained permanent residency in the United States and was able to get green cards for Maria Garcia and Luis as well. That meant Luis was one of the lucky kids who didn’t have to live in fear of deportation.

  As Luis grew up in Phoenix, he expanded more rapidly. By fourteen, he was taller than his parents, and by sixteen, he was 205 pounds and six feet tall, a full seven inches taller than either of his parents. He was a quiet kid, but it wasn’t a brooding or sullen quiet. He seemed to look out on the world from on high with subtle bemusement, as if everything smaller people did was slightly funny.

  He wasn’t particularly interested in school—reading tended to make him fall asleep—but he knew that his parents had made sacrifices to bring him to the United States, and he didn’t want to let them down. He dutifully went to school, but the family had also grown and there were a lot of mouths to feed. Maria Garcia gave birth to David in 1991, Joselin in 1996, and Miguel in 2000. In middle school, Luis started washing dishes at Amici’s, an Italian restaurant. From age eleven onward, he’d get out of sch
ool at 3:00 and work at the restaurant from 4:00 to 10:00 p.m.

  Compared to school, the kitchen fascinated Luis. Luis silently watched the chefs churn out dishes he’d never seen or heard of: fettuccine Alfredo, chicken lasagna, and shrimp scampi. At home, Luis started watching cooking shows on TV and was entranced by the way Julia Child cooked roast turkey. He asked his mom to make a dinner that way and she did her best. She bought a turkey, boiled it in broth, and served it with a thick mole sauce as was customary in Mexico. Maria Garcia liked to say that her heart was still in Cuernavaca, and she never adapted her cooking. The meal certainly didn’t look like the roast-turkey dinner on TV, but when Luis complained, his mother cut him off:

  “Next time, you do it,” she said.

  So Luis started cooking. In eighth grade, he roasted a turkey, and though his mother thought it could use some mole, he was proud of himself. It was admittedly a little dry, but it was a classic American roast turkey.

  By high school, Luis was working as a short-order cook at a restaurant next to a bowling alley. The pay was low—five dollars an hour—but for a while, the novelty of making food for people was exciting. Senior year, he found a better job at a place called Doc’s Dining & Bar, a place frequented by retirees in Youngtown, a Phoenix suburb. The restaurant was owned by Harold Brunet, who initially hired Luis as a dishwasher. One morning when the kitchen got overwhelmed by retirees looking for French toast and chicken-fried steaks, Luis offered to help out. Brunet was skeptical—Luis rarely spoke and was a bit of a cipher—but when he whipped together a ham-and-cheese omelet, Brunet was impressed. Over Luis’s years of silent observation and TV watching, he had learned a lot.

  At the beginning of senior year, Luis enrolled in Fredi’s Marine Science Seminar. The class was meant to be an opportunity for seniors to work independently on a yearlong project and really get deep into something. Luis thought it would be an opportunity to do little while still getting credit toward graduation. Fredi offered the seniors a bunch of possible topics—ocean currents, marine-animal migrations—but he also gave them the choice of working on robotics. Luis was pretty sure he’d fall asleep in class if he had to read anything. He didn’t want to get in trouble, so he opted for robotics.

  It was also nice that the team seemed to want his help. He didn’t know Cristian or Lorenzo, but he knew Oscar—the cadet was hard to miss in his pickle-green uniform—and they had had classes together. Now that Luis and Oscar were both seniors in Fredi’s seminar, they saw each other throughout the week, and Oscar was friendly. Many people on campus were intimidated by the combination of Luis’s size and silence. But Oscar wasn’t scared and treated him like anyone else.

  “Hagámoslo,” he told Luis during class one day. “We can build something great.”

  Luis nodded and then issued his sole pronouncement on the matter:

  “Okay.”

  IN THE SUMMER of 2003—just before the start of the school year and the trebuchet project—Fredi and Allan traveled to Monterey, California, to learn more about a new robotics competition hosted by the Marine Advanced Technology Education (MATE) Center. The organization was founded in 1997 to encourage students to explore careers in marine technology, from oil-rig construction and military applications to environmental and scientific research. In its first seven years, the center placed 119 students into internships onshore and at sea, but the staff had decided that a competition would be a fun way to entice kids to think about ocean work.

  The inaugural event was held in 2002 at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Jill Zande, the event organizer, styled it as a reimagining of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Coleridge’s poem. In the original poem, a crew member shoots an albatross that simply wants food and a safe place to land. The killing brings doom upon his ship, conveying the message that those looking for refuge shouldn’t be persecuted, as they may often bring good fortune. Zande constructed a parallel narrative, in which a sailor who brings doom upon his ship challenges students with remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to retrieve his sunken treasure.

  “But this I tell / To you, your ROV, and 12-volt battery,” the sailor intoned in the competition mission statement. “Those who pursue marine technology careers / Will find wealth beneath the sea.”

  Zande brought on big-league sponsors, including NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the Office of Naval Research. The hope was to inspire a new generation of astronauts, scientists, and explorers, and Zande was an enthusiastic evangelist. Part of the challenge was to recruit new students, so Zande created a summer program for teachers. She sent e-mails to Dean Kamen’s FIRST teams around the country, and her note caught Allan’s attention. It was a great chance to combine marine science with robotics. It was also a free trip somewhere, and teachers rarely get free trips.

  The weeklong event in Monterey, California, felt like a vacation. Fredi and Allan were traveling on their own and had no obligation to look like responsible, serious adults. For Allan, it was an opportunity to be a boy again. At home, he was a father to three teenage girls. His wife and a couple of female cats rounded out the family: he was a guy in a house filled with women. For Fredi, it was a break from the unpredictable joys and daily strain of raising one boy with autism and another with Asperger’s. There wasn’t a lot of time for friendship in his life. Spending time palling around with another teacher was nice.

  After the summer, Fredi called Allan so often, his wife, Debbie, would hold her hand over the phone and shout, “It’s your other wife.” The guys talked about the trebuchet, and the upcoming FIRST competition, and increasingly about ROVs. Part of the purpose of the summer workshop had been to prepare teachers to start their own underwater-robotics team.

  “It’s kind of ridiculous to think that we’d start an underwater-robotics team in the middle of the desert,” Fredi said, laughing on the phone one night. “All the other teams who’ve competed are from the coasts.”

  Allan agreed: they had no business doing it. Their kids were poor and had little chance of raising significant money. Plus, they really had no idea what they were doing.

  “So you want to do it?”

  Fredi could almost hear Allan smiling. “Yeah, let’s do it.”

  TWO

  0545 HOURS—JUNE 11, 1942—POSITION: DM4388

  JUST OFF THE NORTHERN SHORE OF CUBA

  Korvetten-kapitan Wolf Henne stood on the bridge of his surfaced U-boat anxiously scanning the sky for American air patrols.

  THE MISSION STATEMENT for the 2004 MATE Robotics Competition was a significant upgrade from the inaugural event’s brief riff on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. For this third iteration, Jill Zande had gotten more ambitious and worked with the authors Vickie Jensen and Harry Bohm to create a twenty-two-page short story that fictionalized the demise of U-157, a U-boat that had been torpedoed in the Caribbean in 1942. During the contest, students would explore a mock-up of the submarine in a swimming pool. The story was meant to fire their imagination, and Fredi had asked the teens to read it at home.

  Lorenzo read the story in his bedroom. There were funny-sounding German words and something about a secret agent. Eventually, the German submarine is engulfed by a mysterious explosion off the coast of Florida. The captain is then miraculously rescued by a Spanish-speaking fisherman named Pedro Sanchez.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Lorenzo said to himself. Submarines, explosions—all that was fine. But the mention of Pedro Sanchez caught his attention.

  The next day in class, Lorenzo had a question for Fredi: “So a Mexican saved this guy’s life?”

  “I don’t know if he’s Mexican,” Fredi said. “He’s probably Cuban, since it’s Florida.”

  “They’ll probably say the Mexican sank the sub and put him in jail,” Lorenzo joked.

  Fredi wanted to focus on the robot building and tried to steer the group back to the mission. He ticked off the required tasks. The contest would feature a mock-up of the submarine in a pool on the University of California, Santa Barbara, camp
us. There were seven tasks. Contestants had to build an ROV that could measure the sub’s length, calculate its depth, and navigate inside the structure to recover the captain’s bell. The ROV also had to recover two “lost” pieces of research equipment, sample liquid out of the secret-cargo barrels, and determine the temperature of water seeping from a cold-water spring.

  Lorenzo just chuckled. There was no way they could do any of that. Even Cristian seemed daunted. Luis just looked blankly at the others without saying anything.

  Only Oscar was enthusiastic: “We can do this. We just have to start working on it.”

  “We live in the desert,” Lorenzo said. “We don’t even have a pool to practice in.”

  “We can talk to Scuba Sciences,” Fredi said. As a marine science magnet program, Carl Hayden offered scuba certification through Scuba Sciences, a local dive shop with an indoor pool. “I bet they’d let us come in.”

  Lorenzo didn’t seem convinced. Fredi and Allan glanced at each other. They appreciated Oscar’s enthusiasm, but this would be a difficult undertaking. They were excited to go to Santa Barbara and check out the event. They’d get to see how other, more sophisticated teams operated. They’d learn a lot and be able to apply the lessons to future years. But they feared that the kids might not be able to handle the challenge. They didn’t want to admit it, but both teachers thought their kids might well build a robot that would simply sink to the bottom of the pool and short out.

  It was a problem. The last thing either teacher wanted was to make their kids feel bad about themselves. The whole point was to give the guys a chance to accomplish something beyond what they thought possible. But if they showed up at the event and failed utterly, it would only reinforce the impression that they didn’t belong in the contest in the first place. That could leave a kid such as Lorenzo with a permanent sense of inferiority.