by Jacob Stone
Noah had taken off his mittens and was blowing on his fingers to warm them up. “I could really use some coffee,” he said. A gleam showed in his eyes as he added, “With maybe this much Irish whiskey added.”
He separated his index finger and thumb so that they were an inch apart.
“I’ll get us coffee, but no whiskey,” Jason said. “The work we’re doing needs precision. I can’t afford any mistakes.”
Noah’s silly grin weakened, but otherwise he hid his disappointment. While he waited, Jason went off to find the Dorsage family live-in housekeeper, Maritza, so he could ask her to make coffee for him and his guest, and to bring it to the basement. With that done, he took Noah downstairs to show him the winding domino and playing card formations that were interconnected with racing car tracks, trip wires, pulleys, ping pong paddles, electric fans, and other components for the contraption that he had built, and he explained how toppling the first domino would trigger each subsequent event. While he did this Maritza brought them a tray holding two mugs of coffee, cream, sugar, and a plate of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. She was from El Salvador, twenty-eight, a petite and pretty dark-haired woman. As she left them to go back upstairs, Noah stared after her. Once she was gone, he asked Jason whether he had special privileges with the help.
“Quit being a pig.”
Noah seemed to take that as a challenge to leer in an especially ugly way. “You need to tell me she at least gives you hand jobs.” He closed his pudgy right hand into a fist and pantomimed giving a hand job.
“You want me to tell her you’re asking about that?”
The shit-eating grin Noah showed disappeared in a heartbeat, and was replaced by a look of alarm.
“I was just kidding around,” he insisted.
“Forget it. Drink your coffee and I’ll show you my plans.”
Jason took his notebook out of his backpack and went over his sketches with Noah while the other boy drank coffee and wolfed down several of the homemade cookies. After that they went to work.
* * * *
One of Mr. Dorsage’s rules was that the family ate dinner together, and so at seven-thirty that night Jason, his father, his two older sisters, and his stepmother, Vivian, were seated at the dining room table. All of them except Vivian were served a prime rib dinner that their private chef, Maurice, had prepared. Vivian, a neurotic thirty-one-year-old blonde who had already undergone numerous cosmetic surgeries and in Jason’s mind looked like a second-rate anorexic porn starlet, claimed to suffer from a number of different stomach ailments, and she was served her usual poached sole, brown rice, and steamed vegetables.
Jason would’ve liked to have invited Noah to dinner, but he knew his father looked down his nose at his friend, thinking the boy was slow-witted, crude, and a poor influence, and Jason couldn’t afford to alienate his father any further. As it was, he had no friends sitting at the table. Both his sisters had always looked at him as if he were some strange alien creature, and neither of them had any interest in him, nor did he have any in them. At seventeen, Lila was closer in age, but even though only two years separated them, it could just as well have been twenty. There was no connection whatsoever. Barbara, five years older, was supposed to be a sophomore at Yale, but claimed she suffered a breakdown of some sort, and was home convalescing. Jason couldn’t remember the last time the two of them had exchanged words. And then there was Vivian. While his sisters mostly acted as if he didn’t exist, they still tolerated him. Vivian, on the other hand, seemed incensed by his presence. Recently she had gotten on a kick that he shouldn’t be allowed to build his Rube Goldberg machine in the basement. She claimed she wanted the space to build a private gym, but Jason understood it was really because she knew building the contraption was important to him.
Jason didn’t have much of an appetite that night; partly because the stunt Witt had pulled still bothered him, partly that he was anxious to get back to building his machine, and partly due to the oppressiveness of the room. As he picked at his food, he felt a prickly sensation, as if eyes were on him. He looked up to see Vivian seething as she glared in his direction. She averted her eyes and turned to his father.
“Richard, I am not happy with you.”
Mr. Dorsage finished chewing a mouthful of food and patted his lips with a silk napkin before acknowledging his wife with a patient smile.
“Now why would that be, my dear?” he asked.
Her voice was like ice as she said, “Because I’ve been telling you for weeks that I have plans for the basement, and you persist in allowing your son to use the space for his foolishness.”
“What I’m doing down there isn’t foolish,” Jason insisted more forcefully than he would’ve liked. Just as Simon Witt could push his buttons, so could Vivian.
Lila and Barbara simultaneously rolled their eyes, both of them bored by the conversation. Mr. Dorsage raised an eyebrow.
“Son, what you’re doing down there might be clever and inventive, but it’s also certainly foolish.”
“I disagree!” Jason could feel the heat rising up his neck, and he forced himself to lower his voice. He said, “Vivian’s already had you convert one of the rooms into a private yoga studio, and another into a Pilates studio. Does she really need every bit of space in this house for herself?”
“You’re going to let him talk about me that way?”
Without turning to her, Mr. Dorsage made several up-and-down motions with his hand for his wife to calm down.
“What’s your fascination with this?” he asked his son.
Jason could’ve told him the full truth. That he was drawn to the predictability of these contraptions. One event triggering the next, with him acting as God. There was an intrinsic beauty to it that took his breath away. But instead he told his father a different side of the truth.
“This is going to be my life’s work,” he said.
Lila broke out laughing, and muttered, “What a moron,” under her breath. Barbara snickered. Mr. Dorsage frowned.
“If you want your trust fund, you have to first go to a college I approve of, and get a job making a substantial income.”
“Because you don’t want us to be loafers?” Lila interjected with a smirk.
“Exactly.” Mr. Dorsage took a swallow of his wine and patted his lips again. He kept his eyes on Jason as he said, “You need to earn your way through life, and not be given everything.”
“I expect to make a substantial income with these machines.”
“How do you expect to do that?”
“I have ideas. How about this for a proposition? If by the time I’m twenty-five I’m not making a hundred thousand dollars a year building these machines, you can keep my trust fund.”
Lila asked Mr. Dorsage if she could have the moron’s trust fund when he failed. He ignored her and instead cut off a small piece of prime rib and chewed it slowly, taking his time studying his son. Even Vivian became unusually still as if she were calculating which would be preferable: the instant gratification of wrecking Jason’s current plans, or being patient and seeing him ruin his life in ten years.
Mr. Dorsage said, “If you’re serious about this then you should be able to tell me right now why these contraptions are called Rube Goldberg machines. If you can’t do that, I want you to clean up what you’ve been doing in the basement, and I never want to hear about this nonsense again.”
Jason smiled because after Noah had left he’d looked up Rube Goldberg in the encyclopedia and he knew the answer.
“Rube Goldberg was a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist. He drew cartoons of zany inventions where a series of events are triggered which eventually accomplish a task, such as his famous self-operating napkin machine. In this cartoon, the action of a man lifting a soupspoon to his mouth causes a ladle to toss a cracker in the air, which causes a parrot to fly off his perch to grab the cracker, which
causes a further sequence of events until a pendulum with a napkin attached is released, and the man’s mouth is wiped clean.”
If Mr. Dorsage was impressed with his son’s presentation, he didn’t show it. His expression remained muted as he chewed and swallowed another piece of the prime rib.
“You’ll go to college and earn a degree,” he declared at last. “By the time you finish your bachelor’s degree you’ll be twenty-two, old enough to make your own decisions, and old enough to suffer the consequences of acting stupidly. Hopefully long before then you will have outgrown this nonsense. In the meantime, you can use the basement to build these contraptions.”
“So we have a deal? I’ll get my trust fund if I prove you wrong?”
Mr. Dorsage’s expression turned exceptionally stern. “If after college you persist in this foolishness, that’s your choice. If you meet your goal, you’ll get your trust fund; otherwise it will be forfeited.”
Jason smiled inwardly, quite pleased with the deal he had just struck. This wasn’t something he’d ever outgrow. Nor was it foolishness. Building the most amazing Rube Goldberg machine was going to be his life’s mission. One that would leave the world breathless.
Chapter 35
Short Hills, New Jersey, 1999, six days later
Jason and Noah were sitting in Avery’s cafeteria engaged in hushed discussions when Simon Witt approached them carrying a lunch tray loaded with split pea and ham soup, a grilled cheese sandwich, and an ice cream sundae. Noah noticed Witt first, and signaled by drawing an imaginary line across his throat that they needed to stop talking. Witt didn’t join them at their table; instead, he leaned in close to Dorsage and whispered, “I know what you’re doing.”
Jason had a near irresistible impulse to upend Witt’s tray so he’d be wearing the soup and sundae on his school jacket. Somehow he controlled himself and told Witt to get lost.
“You’re building one of those mousetrap machines,” Witt said, his overly red lips forming an ugly smirk. “Like that old game. Where one event triggers the next.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Jason tried to stare down Witt, but he was betrayed when he felt a muscle twitch near his right eye. From Witt’s self-satisfied look, he had noticed the twitch also. It shouldn’t matter to him that his archnemesis had found out about his plans, but it did. What was he so worried about? That Witt would try to outdo him by building a more elaborate contraption? Good luck with that! Jason already had a four-month head start. Still, though, he felt a sense of unease knowing that Witt was aware of his project.
“But I do, Duh-sage. Over the last week two of my minions saw you sketching plans for your mousetrap thingamajig. You need to guard your notebook more carefully if you want to keep secrets from me.”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Jason insisted, knowing full well that he only sounded pathetic.
“Maybe so, but someone close to you ratted you out. I know you’ve been spending months building it in your basement.”
Noah flashed Jason a pleading, desperate look that it wasn’t him. Jason returned that with a quick nod. He knew Witt was telling the truth, and he knew who must’ve betrayed him. Lila. She was a junior at Avery, and if Witt asked her about what her brother was doing in their basement each day, Lila wouldn’t think twice about spilling the beans.
“Funny that a rat-faced creep like you would use the term ratted out,” Jason said. “So you know what I’ve been working on. So what?”
“So let me see it.”
“Why?”
“I’m curious.”
There wasn’t a chance in the world Jason would share his pet project with Simon Witt. The idea of it was preposterous. He didn’t bother telling Witt that, and instead turned away to eat his lunch. Seconds later a loud crashing noise startled him. He looked behind to see that Simon Witt had fallen into a neighboring table, his soup and sundae all over himself and Melissa Goldfarb. Melissa’s mouth hung open in shock as Witt worked to disentangle himself from her.
“Dorsage tripped Simon into her!”
Jason stared dumbly at Peter Covington, who had just leveled the accusation against him. Covington was one of Witt’s loyal minions. Jason hadn’t realized Covington had positioned himself nearby. An iciness filled his head as he thought about how far Witt was willing to go to frame him.
Two of Avery’s teachers, Mr. Tremblay and Mr. Langan, came rushing over, demanding to know what had happened. Jason tried insisting that he didn’t do anything, but Covington again accused him. Melissa began crying as she sat covered in Witt’s lunch. Witt successfully disentangled himself and was back on his feet, pea soup dripping from his face and his jacket. His lips trembled as if he were on the verge of bawling, and he told the two teachers that he had stopped to talk to Dorsage, and when he turned to walk away, Dorsage shoved him from behind.
“It was like he bodychecked me,” Witt said, somehow managing several tears to snake down both cheeks. He indicated on his lower back where he’d been pushed. “I don’t know why Jason did it. I only stopped to ask him if we could be friends again. I just want him to leave me alone. I’m so sorry Melissa had to get hurt also because of Jason’s irrational hatred toward me.”
Jason was too flabbergasted to defend himself. One look at Tremblay and Langan was enough to know it wouldn’t have mattered whatever he tried saying. Without waiting for either of them to give the order, he got up and informed them he was off to the headmaster’s office.
* * * *
The cafeteria incident was a big to-do. The upshot was that Jason received a week’s detention, which required him to spend an hour after school each day in the headmaster’s office. As he played the headmaster in chess later that afternoon, Rector acknowledged that he believed Jason’s side of the story.
“If I didn’t you would have been suspended,” Rector said as his half-lidded eyes studied the chessboard. “But I was left no choice. I had to give you some punishment, or there’d be hell to pay given that Ms. Goldfarb is also an injured party, and Master Witt was able to produce a vociferous witness, while your witness, Master English, was less than compelling.”
“Noah’s afraid Witt might start attacking him.”
Rector made a grunting noise that he agreed with Jason. His eyes lit up when he saw what he thought was a three-move combination resulting in winning a knight. What he failed to see was three moves later Jason would be able to take his queen. A thin smile quivered over Rector’s lips as he made what he thought would be a winning move. Jason tried to decide whether this would be the game in which he beat the headmaster. While he understood the dilemma Rector had been put in, he wasn’t happy with the detention.
“Yes, it’s a shame Master English couldn’t have been more forceful in his defense of you, but even if he had it wouldn’t have mattered. Once Ms. Goldfarb got included, I’m afraid the matter was sealed. Let us hope that her parents don’t make too big a stink. If they do, I might have to appease them by adding a suspension to your punishment.”
Jason made up his mind. This wasn’t going to be the day he beat the headmaster. He needed the man’s good will. After the three-move combination completed and he lost his knight, he proceeded to make a losing move. The game ended quickly after that. Rector looked pleased with himself as he checked the time and saw that they’d be able to fit in another game.
Once detention ended, Jason could’ve arranged for a ride home, but he decided to walk so he could clear his head and try to calm down some of the anger that had been choking him since Witt had pulled his latest stunt. While he had remained calm and composed in front of Rector, inside he was seething, and he wanted nothing more than to hurt Witt. But, as he kept trying to tell himself, he couldn’t let himself be distracted. He needed to focus his energies on his Rube Goldberg machine. That was what mattered. He would deal with Witt at another time.
&nbs
p; When he got home and saw Lila in the front parlor reading a fashion magazine, he was tempted to chew her out for what she must’ve told Witt, but he knew she’d be clueless about what she had done. Nor would she care about anything he had to say.
She must’ve heard him enter the room, because she lowered her magazine and gave him a blank stare, as if she didn’t recognize him.
“One of your moronic friends was over earlier,” she said.
That didn’t make any sense. Noah knew he had detention so he wouldn’t have come over. Baffled, Jason asked, “Noah English?”
“I don’t know their names. One of those loser morons is the same as the next as far as I’m concerned.”
“Shorter than me, chunky?”
“No. This one’s your height, skinny like you, kind of gross red lips.”
It had to be Witt. Jason found himself trembling. His voice shook as he asked what Witt wanted.
“What’s your problem? You look like you’re about to go ballistic!”
“What did he want?”
Lila regarded him more cautiously then, like she was dealing with an insane person. “He said that you wanted him to work on your moronic contraption—”
Jason didn’t wait for her to finish, her voice becoming little more than a buzz in his ears. He ran past her to the basement door, and then flew down the stairs three steps at a time. He was panting as he turned the corner and saw that his machine had been torn apart. Witt had used the race car tracks, dominos, playing cards, and other pieces of it to spell out “Duh-Dorsage.”
Murderous rage consumed him. A loud roaring filled his ears, and for several minutes he was incapable of movement as he stood frozen staring at the carnage done to his beautiful machine. When he left the basement, he could barely see through a red haze that filled his vision. He headed straight to his bedroom and sat at the computer and tried to look up how he could buy a gun, because all he could think of was blasting a full clip of bullets into Simon Witt’s face.