Toby, close in age to the gang in Cleveland was all angular cockiness and studied cool, but where they had been fear and anger, Toby was innocence and interest. For Toby life was an adventure. For Jesus it had been a curse.
“I need tools,” Toby told him. He sat in the middle of the upside down table, tightening bolts for the legs with his fingers. “And I’m hungry.”
“I don’t have any tools,” Adrian said. “Or food either. That was something else I wanted you to help with.”
“I can get my Dad’s stuff. Let’s call for a pizza.”
“I can get my Dad’s tools and order a pizza.”
“I’ll pay for it,” agreed Adrian.
“Cool,” said Toby.
“Cool,” said Adrian,
Toby bounded away, almost skipping across the road. When he returned he exploded into the room.
Adrian watched the couch, chairs and tables get pushed and shoved into position, the bed get dragged in pieces to the bedroom. He guided the assembly, handing pliers and screwdrivers as needed. Toby even made the bed in a rumpled sort of way, and carried out the rest of the trash.
All in all it was like watching a productive hurricane sweep through the rooms. The pizza guy came and Toby paid him while Adrian lurked nervously in the kitchen.
“I got a six pack of Coke,” Toby said as he set a steaming cardboard box on the newly erected table. “Hope that’s all right.”
“It’s great.”
“It’s a deluxe.” Toby opened the box with a flourish and the heavy aroma of tomato filled the room. It was the friendliest smell Adrian had experienced since he’d arrived. It reminded him of college, his parents basement and late nights working on some overdue engineering assignment. Pizza was comfort food. Pizza was the preferred food of the gods.
He sat in his new chair, leg stretched out stiffly, and held a drooping slice in his good hand. Toby sat opposite in a tired sprawl, gangly legs and skinny angles. A weary pride of accomplishment held them both.
“I don’t like peppers,” Adrian said, removing one.
“Or anchovies,” agreed Toby, shuddering in revulsion.
“Have you had pineapple pizza?”
“No way, that sucks.”
Adrian asked questions and Toby answered without apparent reservations. He went to South High school, was a freshman, didn’t like algebra, did okay in Language arts and was ambivalent about sports, He wanted to be a basketball star or in a band on MTV though he didn’t play much basketball or play anything musical. He had a half pipe.
“A what?” Adrian asked
“A half pipe. It’s a ramp you know? For a skateboard.”
Adrian shook his head, absolutely lost.
Toby sighed. “It’s a big round ramp that looks like a pipe, cut in half laying on its side.” He gestured with his hands in general curving motions. “You ride a skateboard down one side and up the other. It’s cool. My Dad helped me make it.”
“Oh.” Adrian pictured something about the size of a wheelbarrow. “How big is it?”
“About sixteen feet high, maybe thirty feet wide. It takes up our whole back yard. Dad got rid of the swimming pool when we made it, but I wasn’t using it anyway.”
“That was you. I saw you over your house.” Adrian said. “You kept rising and falling. I didn’t know what to think.”
Adrian chewed pizza while they contemplated thirty-foot half pipes.
“I like to fix things.” Toby said.
“Yeah? What kind of things?”
Toby shrugged. “Just stuff, you know.” He swallowed half a can of Coke and belched deeply.” I do radios sometimes, and last week I found a television in the garbage and fixed it. I’m pretty good.”
“Do you have any shop classes?”
“Yeah.” His face lit up. “Mr. Braxton is great. He’s the shop teacher. We’re working on a ‘90 Impala. That’s a Chevy—”
“I know.”
“And we’ve taken out the engine. I’m the best in the class, he says. Cars are cool.”
Adrian had worked on cars with his own father but hadn’t thought about them in years as sources of entertainment. He remembered those times with his Dad, working in the garage, handing over wrenches, spilling oil. “I helped my Dad rebuild a DeSoto, when I was your age.”
“What’s a DeSoto?”
“It’s an old car, kind of like a Hudson.”
“What’s a Hudson?”
“It’s another old car, kind of like a Tucker: ‘
“What’s a Tucker?”
“It’s a—”
“I know, I’m just yanking you.” They finished the pizza and drank three Cokes apiece in friendly ease, before Toby asked about Adrian’s injuries.
“How bad’s the scar gonna be?” asked Toby.
“I don’t know.”
“When you gonna get the casts off?”
“I don’t know.”
“How’d the accident happen?”
Adrian stared at the boy until Toby said, “You don’t want to talk about it, right?”
Adrian nodded.
They switched back to high school, a safe subject. Eventually Toby left, fed, paid, exhausted and happy.
Adrian stood at the door, watching until the boy closed his red door and the porch light went out with a dark finality.
He turned away and hopped gently to the bedroom to sleep without blankets on a real bed. Saturday night, he thought; I’ve found a Friday.
15 – There’s a Lark in the Tool Shed
Adrian discovered on Monday morning just after nine that Control-logics held staff meetings every Monday morning—at nine. ‘Attendance is mandatory,’ stated the terse memo on his chair.
Promptly at 9:10, after consulting with Ruth for directions, he entered a large conference room filled with eight men waiting for Wally Clooner. The prevailing attitudes seemed to be apprehension, boredom and anxiety.
The table had a dozen expensively comfortable chairs around it. Adrian picked one at random, settled back and studied the others.
Pieburn had arrived early, and Adrian would have sat with him, but someone else already had the seat. Pieburn nodded formally without warmth.
Wally Clooner emerged from a side door to a noticeable stiffening of spines. As an outsider, newly admitted to the company, Adrian considered the changes. Wally Clooner certainly inspired more fear than loyalty.
The meeting was typical of any engineering meeting held since the dawn of meetings. Job progress was analyzed, problems asked about and solutions discussed. Everyone had his own project and sole authority over it. Sharing of information was minimal, and usually one directional. Nervous tension was rampant.
“Loomis?” Mr. Clooner said, and a man sat forward, elbows on the polished wood. He wore a white shirt, blue tie and a pocket protector holding three pens.
“I’m still working on the Depue project,” he said, which meant something to everyone except Adrian. He filled in details that were accepted without comment, ending with, “I’m about, 75% complete.”
“We can bill that?”
“Sure.”
“All right.” Wally seemed pleased. Billing was money coming in, the top interest item to management. Engineers spent a high proportion of their time explaining their progress while management in turn exaggerated that progress to the customer in order to get larger checks.
Next came a man dressed informally in a white shirt without a tie, who discussed a job somewhere in New Mexico. “I just started last week,” he said.
“I’ll put it down for 60%, Alan?”
“I guess.” Alan, no doubt surprised at how ‘just started’ had become ‘half finished’ looked as if it was anything but all right. However, he swallowed and agreed uncomfortably.
Two more men were questioned with similar results. Clearly, billing was the most important item on the agenda.
Next came Pieburn. “My project is in Utah.” His accent made the State sound far more exotic than it could poss
ibly be.
“What’s your progress?”
“Perhaps 20 percent. Certainly no more.” The tone suggested that Pieburn disapproved of advance billing. Adrian couldn’t decide if the disapproval was based on a desire for honesty or a streak of prudery.
“We couldn’t up that a little, could we?” Wally sounded like a good ole’ boy, inviting Pieburn to loosen up, join the ranks. Adrian noted with interest that there was no trace of the bossiness there had been with the earlier engineers. For some reason Wally seemed to want to placate Pieburn rather than bully him.
“No,” Firm with conviction, his lip curled downward. “Twenty percent.”
“Can’t blame a man for trying.” Wally grinned, though it was certain that Pieburn could and did.
Finally it was Adrian’s turn. Wally introduced him to the room as the new electrical engineer. “He’s been assigned the Meridian project, a couple of others. How far along are you?”
All eyes went to Adrian, who swallowed through a dry throat. “I’m about to design the control panel and will be programming next week.”
“When will you give us the control panel?” asked Zack Pendrick, the design manager.
‘‘I can give you pieces tomorrow if you don’t mind a work in progress,” Adrian said mildly, which resulted in a grim frown of disapproval.
On the basis of this and the three phone calls he’d made to the customer, Adrian was credited with a whopping 60% completion.
The meeting ended, not with the chatting and grumbling expected, but with a soft exodus; scraped chairs, muted rustlings and no conversation. Adrian smiled at Ruth on his way past her desk.
“Message,” she said.
Puzzled, he stopped and accepted the pink paper. Who knew him here? “Maggie Powers of Carlton Electric.” Even her name seemed aggressive.
Adrian took the message and walked the long hallway, tossing it on the edge of his desk, forgetting it almost instantly. “60 percent complete,” he said aloud, with a mix of amusement and annoyance. “And I’ve barely read the proposal.” It was a great deal different than anywhere he’d worked before.
He opened the thick customer file. “Sixty percent.”
He spent the two hours before lunch making pencil lines on large pieces of white paper, intending, when finished, that they would become a central control station for the client in Arizona.
Despite the general policy of non-involvement with co-workers, it was necessary to visit other departments, most especially what would have been the drafting department only ten years earlier. Draftsman, extraordinarily patient artists who sat on stools making perfectly straight lines out of hand drawn chaos, had been replaced by computer technicians who were themselves extraordinarily patient artists.
CAD was an acronym for Computer Aided Design, a software drawing program that made lines, squares, circles, set dimensions to scale, printed. saved and allowed changes in drawings at the flick of a mouse. CAD was to drawing what word processing was to writing.
Adrian collected a stack of scribblings just before lunch and hobbled off to find the CAD department.
He entered a cross between a computer store and a mad scientists lab. Two plotters printed large drawings with whisper quiet hums against the far wall, their ink jet cartridges racing across the paper like electronic spiders, leaving web like tracings on the paper. Walking through the quiet room Adrian became increasingly more impressed. This was state of the art stuff. The plotters alone ran $40,000 each.
A very professional department and Zack Prendick turned out to be its manager. Overweight, dressed in a sweat suit, he slouched in front of an enormous computer screen, eating a bagel with one hand, creating a piping drawing with the other. He looked up when he heard the crutch bang against the doorframe. He saw the papers in Adrian’s hand.
“We can’t get to ’em until Friday.”
“This is my 60% complete,” Adrian said. “Boss wants it billed now.”
“Boss can stick it up his ass—” Zack’s eyes stayed on the screen while his right hand made lines dance and change positions, a maze of reds and blues and yellows.
“Wally—” Adrian said.
Zack sighed at his bagel and asked it, “Do you see what I have to deal with?” ending the foods existence with one huge bite. “How ’bout Wednesday?” he said while chewing.
“To start or finish?”
“Smart-ass, huh? Lemme see.” He studied the papers for a few seconds. “I can get Leroy to start them tomorrow. It’ll probably take him—” He frowned at a job board mounted above his work station, “two days.”
“Wednesday.” Adrian would have settled for Friday, and Zack could have gotten it done Tuesday, a successful bargain all around.
“Thanks,”
“Yeah, right.”
Adrian turned to leave. He hoped the fab shop would be so easy.
Toby knocked on Adrian’s door at ten Sunday morning, beating on the cheap metal screen frame with a cheerful rap beat. Shave-and-a-haircut became ‘Gangsta’s Paradise’.
“Yo, Mr. B. I came to talk to you.”
His wardrobe was casual. Knee length baggy shorts, long basketball jersey that could fit Goliath or Shaq and a backwards baseball cap. He stepped back from the door to let Adrian step outside.
Adrian hopped crutch-less down the single step to the porch.
“Your yard.” Toby gestured. “It’s pretty bad, Mr. B. Momma says it looks like a dump out here and when you gonna take care of it?”
Adrian saw dirty brown weeds in an un-mowed lawn, windblown debris everywhere. Compared to the neighborhood yards, each meticulously maintained, his did indeed look like a jungle.
Adrian mimicked with his broken arm. “How am I gonna take care of it?”
Toby grinned. “That’s what I said. So I told myself, why don’t I go over and give Mr. B. a hand?” He made it sound like a revelation. Adrian had to admire the boys spirit—to Toby he was a miracle opportunity; a man with jobs and money.
“What do you want?”
“Well...” Toby eyed his victim. “Twenty dollars an hour.”
“Are you kidding? Ten.”
“No way, man.” He rolled his eyes like a Turkish rug merchant. “I’ll do eighteen.”
“Twelve. “
“Seventeen.”
“Fifteen,”
Adrian could recall mowing lawns for five bucks total and being glad to get it. Of course, his father used to do it for a quarter and his father did it to avoid getting beaten. Each generation complained.
Toby managed to get a promise of free lunch thrown in somehow and bustled off to work, appearing back at the door moments later (boom-tappa-tappa-tappa) to ask if there was a lawn mower.
“No.”
“Do you have a rake?”
“No.”
“Garbage bags?”
“No.”
Toby’s shoulders sagged in disbelief. “Shovels?”
“No.” Adrian smiled.
“How about shears? A weed-whacker? A trimmer?”
“No. No. No. I just moved here, remember? In Cleveland I lived in an apartment. I rented furniture, you helped set it up.”
Toby wasn’t appeased by this. In his life adults had lawn tools. It was a rule of nature, like cars and rides to everywhere. He sighed and began another round of negotiations in which he tried for a dollar an hour raise if he provided his own tools. He jived happily home while Adrian went to call the landlady.
“Hmmm,” said Mrs. Pocatello. “Maybe in the shed—?”
“There’s a shed?”
“In the back.”
Adrian ducked his head to look through the rear window. Between the overgrown shrubs and thick tree limbs was the faded wooden wall of a building that could be a large shed or a small garage.
“All of Henry’s things are out there still,” she said. “I think he had tools for the lawn.” Her hesitation made it clear that Henry had been responsible for yard work, while the state of the yard made it
equally clear that the late Henry had preferred fishing.
“Use anything you find there,” she said charitably. “But I won’t pay for anything.”
“Thanks.” Adrian hung up and went to the back door.
If the front yard appeared untidy, the back was chaos. The edges of a narrow concrete sidewalk slunk beneath overhanging weeds and encroaching bushes. Thick elm branches and several bushy green evergreens dominated overgrown flower beds, unrestrained by edging, sagging with dying plants. The grass settled thick and mottled underfoot, threatening to trip him.
“Toby will love this,” Adrian thought. He could attend college on what the back yard would cost. Using the crutch as a makeshift machete, Adrian hacked his way across the lawn, ducked under a pine branch and found the shed on the very back corner of the property. Faded white painted walls, red trim and a sagging roof covered by ancient shingles of a very ugly dark green. It had a barn style door secured with a rusted padlock.
Adrian looked to the house and considered the walk back. “Toby!” He yelled. Moments later the boy appeared, materializing through the bushes like a wilderness explorer.
“Hey! What’s this?” He peered at the little building skeptically.
“It’s a shed. Maybe there’s tools.”
“There’s a lock,” Toby said.
“Get something.”
Toby returned with a hammer and capably broke the lock hasp with one blow. He pulled away the broken hasp and the door swung partly open. The interior looked dark and dusty. And cluttered. Adrian was reminded of his father’s garage back in Ohio.
Toby pulled back both doors to let in the light, exposing the back end of a small tan car that filled the entire space. Boxes and bags, piled everywhere in chaotic disarray, covered the trunk. Rusty tools hung on the walls, ancient gray rubber hoses draped like snakes. A moose head gazed down glumly through one glass eye.
Dust wafted around in little clouds, crisp in the morning sun. It was as if they had unearthed the burial chamber of some ancient suburban emperor, liquor boxes and Kings Soopers bags filled with treasures of the afterlife. The car would be the chariot to heaven, the lawn furniture a throne. Adrian couldn’t think of an historical parallel for the moose head.
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