Red Thunder

He greeted Jubal warmly and helped pull him out of his seat. We went over the bike thoroughly and spent a few hours with toothbrushes and soapy water and wax. That spruced it up quite a bit. The frame and tank would need repainting sometime soon, but we’d have [127] to take it apart to do that, and I didn’t have the time, if I was going to get any use out of it before Travis came back.

“Think about this for the tank,” Mr. Sinclair said. “Deep, midnight blue, with a little flake in it so’s it sparkles. Five or six coats ought to do it. Come on in here, let me show you what I’m talking about.” He showed us several books in his office. It was plain that he’d love to do the work just for the cost of the paint.

IT TOOK TRAVIS the full two weeks he had mentioned as an outside estimate, and a few days beyond that. It was one of the best two and a half weeks I’d ever spent.

Jubal had the energy of ten men, and the know-how of a couple dozen. He could fix anything he could reach and take apart. Things around the Blast-Off that hadn’t worked since John Gle

Dak’s dad had a name for it, sort of. He watched Jubal work on a few car engines at the garage and pronounced Jubal a “natural born grease monkey.”

“Some people got perfect pitch,” he said. “Some folks never get lost. Some got what they call a ‘green thumb.’ And some just understand engines.”

But being a grease monkey doesn’t begin to describe Jubal’s skills. He fixed three a

I watched him working on the televisions, and I can’t say how he did it. It was eerie, like watching a faith healer. Jubal would take it apart, stare at it, trace pathways in the air with his fingers, all the time [128] humming music that I later figured out were hymns. He touched his tester wires here and there, and next thing I knew he was snipping a transistor off a circuit board. Then he whipped out his pocket computer-the absolute most up-to-the-minute model, thousands of times bigger and smarter than mine-and pretty soon he’d located a place in Kansas or Oregon or South Africa where you could get that transistor for a few pe

TRAVIS HAD EMPHASIZED Jubal’s social anxieties, and it was true, when Jubal was around people he didn’t know he muttered, hung back, never made eye contact, and just generally seemed to want to be somewhere else. But after he’d had a little time to take your measure he could loosen up quite a bit, and when he regarded you as “family,” which could take as little as a microsecond with Alicia to a couple of days with me and Dak… then all bets were off. With his family Jubal liked to laugh, and sing and dance and generally have what he called a “fais do-do,” which is Cajun for party, I think.

He changed my family a lot in two weeks.

For the first few days we kept the television on during di

After, there was no telling what we might do. I took Jubal to Rancho Broussard to pick up his record collection, which was about fifty vinyl 33-1/3, and his old turntable. All of it was Cajun dance tunes, music from way back in the bayou. Jubal loved to dance to this music, and to sing along. He was a good singer and an enthusiastic dancer, alternating between his “four young ladies,” or just dancing by himself.

Or sometimes we got the Monopoly board out. Jubal had never played but he told us how he’d learned to do his “numberin’ ” using that kind of money. He picked it up easily enough, and he loved it. He was ruthless, and won more often than not. He took the little racing [129] car from the very first, and I never told him that was traditionally my piece. And Mom says I’ve got a lot of maturing to do. I wanted the little racing car, that car was mine, but I let our guest have it. Is that mature, or what?

I remember at the first game, when Kelly was putting a hotel on Pacific Avenue, he asked, “Why the Blas’-Off Hotel ain’t on dis board, hah?” He suggested we rename Park Place or Boardwalk.

“Park Place is more like the Golden Manatee across the street, cher,” Mom said. “The Blast-Off, when they built it, might have been on one of the red properties, Illinois Avenue maybe, or New York at the worst. Now we’re a lot closer to ‘Go.’ ”

Then we started arguing about what space the Blast-Off should be on.

“Oriental,” I said. “One step above the roach motel on Baltic.”

“Hel-… uh, pooh!” Dak said. “Baltic, that’s a SRO, a ‘single room occupancy’ joint, bathroom down the hall. Oriental, that’s where the desk clerk sits in a booth behind bulletproof glass. The ol’ B-O Motel, I figure we’re on Saint Charles Avenue. Which, incidentally, give me two houses on Saint Charles. Next time around, Ma

Probably. I didn’t tell Dak that we’d seriously considered installing one of those Plexiglas booths. After the second time you’re held up by some wild-eyed angel duster I think anyone would. We’d been robbed four times since I’ve been old enough to remember. Mom shot the first one, right in the gun hand, just like in an old cowboy movie. After that, the police and me persuaded her to just hand over the money. It wasn’t enough to die for, or even to kill for. Nobody ever ran out of our office rich.

One amazing thing was that, with Jubal around, we all had more free time. It got to where there sometimes wasn’t anything really urgent to do by the afternoon, so Jubal and I would go for a ride. Mostly we went up and down the beach, because Jubal loved the ocean. We got to be a regular sight. Many a tourist snapped our picture as we roared by, Jubal in his loud shirts and dark sunglasses and white beard and sunburned nose smiling and waving to everyone we passed.

[130] Other afternoons, with Jubal around to help out, Mom and Maria got to go out together for some fun. Mom said she’d pretty much forgotten how.

Mom hit the roof when I gave her the money Travis had pressed on me.

“I told him his credit was good with us, but he gave me his plastic anyway,” she hissed at me after I gave her the roll of hundreds. Mom doesn’t like shouting, but she can make a hiss carry a city block. “You know Jubal’s room won’t come to anything like this much. He could stay four months on this.”

“Travis said it was for food, too.”

She drew herself up and glared at me.

“We don’t run a restaurant here, Manuel. Jubal is a friend. He’s welcome at our table at any time. You don’t charge your friends for food.”

I knew that. I could only shrug.

“It’s just crazy,” she muttered. “The way that man works. We should be paying him. In fact, I offered to, but he wouldn’t take it. Unlike my spineless son.”

I wasn’t going to sit still for that, but she relented and apologized to me. Then she went away muttering about how she’d stuff it up… well, she’d be sure he took it. I decided to make myself scarce for that little scene.

I’m not so sure about the food business, it just seems like common courtesy to pay for your suppers if you’re staying a while. But Mom’s biggest fear was to be thought of as common. She had that prickly pride some chronically poor folks get… actually, far too few of them, in my experience, but some. She was quick to take offense at any suggestion she couldn’t get by on her own, or pull her own weight, and never, never ask for a handout, nor accept charity.