The Factory Page 3

  Because Grandma Ruth was an early to bed person, she was also an early raiser. At a morning hour that Gary was not accustomed to, Ruth marched into his bedroom and roused a very tired and sleepy boy. Upon forcing sleepy eyes open he was surprised at what he saw. Somehow, the harsh look of an old lady glaring down at him at the front door and scaring him was missing this morning. She sat on the bed next to him and after a kindly smile softly said,

  “These past few weeks must have been hard on you. Yesterday could not have been any easier what with all that traveling. Breakfast is ready but if you want to sleep a little longer, you go right ahead.”

  Accepting the kindness, Gary nodded and without needing any coaxing, both eyes slowly closed.

  In the next few days, Gary slowly started to realize that although looking like a mean old lady from a horrid fairy tale, Grandma Ruth was actually a very nice person. She told him many times that she loved him and she was glad he came into her lonely life. He learned that he also had a grandfather, mom’s dad but he passed away a few years ago.

  In the following days, Gary often felt that something was missing. Something had been torn from him and he wondered if this feeling of desertion and loneliness would ever go away. She was nice enough to cook his meals and wash his clothes but it was never the same way his mother did things for him. Her smile was different and she didn’t sound like his mother at all. Sometimes it was nice to get a hug from his mother and it felt warm and comforting. When Grandmother Ruth hugged him, it seemed mechanical and cold.

  As if his new life was not enough of an adjustment, the first Sunday morning brought on a new surprise. It was the first morning he was not allowed to sleep as long as he wanted. Sunday morning was church time. Not understanding the purpose of the ritual or benefiting from long drawn out sermons, Gary felt that getting up that early and dressing up was a great waste of time. But she insisted. Not only was heaven where her beloved husband now resided but where her daughter was as well. She often claimed that when in church, if you listened in just the right way, one could hear the voices of loved ones speaking from heaven. As hard as he tried, he could not hear his mother’s gentle words.

  Chapter 6

  Two weeks into his new life, Gary had gotten accustomed to the new rules of the house. Sounding harsh at first, he soon fell into the routine. She never had to insist that he brush his teeth or take his baths. He was told many times that this was his new home. It was practically drilled into him as if the more he was told, the easier the transition would be. It was not.

  The rules of the house were simple enough. If he found a friend, they were not allowed in the house. Chores, such as helping with the dishes and taking the garbage out to the shed in the back had to be done before TV. Sleeping late was now a luxury of the past. Now she insisted breakfast was at seven-thirty, lunch was promptly at noon and supper at five-thirty, no exceptions. Her bedroom was out of bounds at all times no matter what and so was the living room. If she needed to come into his bedroom, she promised to knock first.

  There was still three weeks left of summer vacation before school started. Although he was bored sitting around the house, school was something he was not looking forward to. Recognizing his inactivity, Grandma Ruth tried her best to be accommodating but the age gap between them was too overpowering. One day over the dinner table all that changed with one question. She asked,

  “What holds your interest Gary? What did you like doing at home?”

  Aside from living in an overactive and fanciful imagination, there was only one thing he liked to do and that was to randomly solder together all the electronics from Mario’s shop in the mall. Somehow the assorted components always seemed to present themselves as magical and able to be whatever he wanted them to be.

  He assumed she was smiling at him because she thought he sounded silly. But that was not her intent. After dinner, after she washed the dishes and he dried them, she said,

  “Gary, come with me, I want to show you something.”

  He dutifully followed her through the kitchen and down a hall leading to the back door. On the way, she said,

  “You know, there is a lot of your grandfather in you,. He also liked to tinker with tubes and wires and the like. Why, day after day he would scrounge around town looking for discarded radios, TVs and goodness knows what else. If it had wires and things in it, he brought it home and took it apart.”

  At the basement door, she stopped and said,

  “If you promise to be careful, I’ll let you go into the basement and look at what he called his work bench.”

  With added scorn she said,

  “Goodness knows he never did any real work around here.”

  Gary looked down the stairs into a dark mysterious basement. Trepidation made him back away and say,

  “Aren’t you coming down there with me?”

  “Oh no Gary. I am too old for stairs now. I am restricted to this main floor. That’s why every Sunday when your Uncle Ned comes to pick us up for church, he always brings the car to the back door where there is only one step to the ground. I’ll turn on the light. You just go down there and have a look at what he did. If some of it interests you, you bring it up and I’ll let you tinker with it in your bedroom okay.”

  It might have been true that Gary’s overactive imagination was left behind in his mother’s house but there was still enough lingering, making him leery of steep stairs and a dark basement. He didn’t really want to go down there. Some apprehension was removed when she flipped on the light and he saw the bottom of the stairs but only a little. There was still the fear that she would slam the door and he would spend the rest of his life in a dark and cruel basement. With a wink, she said,

  “Go. Go on. You will like what you see down there.”

  With a gulp and absolutely no trust at all, young Gary swallowed hard and took those first scary steps. It did not help his anxiety that each step produced a loud creak and moan. At the bottom, he stood on a dirt packed floor and looked around. Thankfully, at least for now, the light stayed on and when looking up the steps, the door was still open. She called down,

  “It’s there on your right.”

  The basement was cluttered with the antiquities of age and strange things that might have been better off in a museum. A rusted lawnmower and dusty broken furniture lay haphazardly about. It was clear that she never threw anything away. The old furnace stood in the middle of the basement and sprouted great metallic arms reaching upward to disappear into the ceiling like a giant spider hanging upside down. He saw two big wooden chests off to the side but upon inspection discovered that they were locked. Empty and dusty glass jars lined shelves all along one wall.

  To the right, with an overhead light shining bright was the workbench in question. Stepping up to it, his eyes practically popped out of his head. It was cluttered with gutted radios, TV parts and things he did not recognize. It was a clutter of ancient diode tubes from an era that at least to him might as well be from another planet. He saw a jumble of cathodes, resisters, amplifiers, flux capacitors, fuses and goodness only knows what else all this treasure was.

  As much as he tried, it was impossible to gather all of it in his arms and scurry up the stairs with it. At the top, he wanted to hug her but found it impossible without releasing his treasure. He was not about to do that. She delighted in his pleasure and said,

  “You go and put that on your desk in the bedroom and make a couple of more trips. It’s dangerous down there so I don’t want you going down there without me okay. Hurry and I’ll wait for you.”

  Grasping arms made two more trips. Everything that interested a grandfather he never knew he had now transmitted to the next generation.

  Gary now spent most of every day in his bedroom snipping wires off things he did not understand and soldering them onto things that did not need the connection. With his grandmother’s permission, he struggled but managed to pull batteries out of two big flashlights. He understood ‘series’ and ‘para
llel’ connections and managed to get enough power to light up three large diode tubes and a few LED lights. From chaos, at least for Gary, it was a resounding success and he glowed in his imagined accomplishments. He had not realized it yet but what he was doing would change his life forever.

  It was not unusual for him to gulp down his supper, get the chores done and disappear to his room until late into the night. He usually slept slumped over his desk with head resting on wires and tubes. More often than not Grandmother Ruth came into his room and slid him into bed. Because of the way he often fell asleep, she wondered if he wasn’t trying to gain secrets of whatever he was doing by osmosis, absorbing everything directly into his skull. The tubes and wiring were now in his dreams. He dreamt of resisters joining to capacitors and wires magically twisting and bending while joined from tube to tube. It was a most macabre dream of animated electrical components doing a dance of the dammed.

  Chapter 7

  Recognizing his need to get out of the house and into fresh air, Ruth purchased a bike for him. Mostly on her insistence, Gary would reluctantly get on it and cycle around the neighborhood. He saw it as punishment but she saw it as a way to get him out of the house. On occasion he found a trail through the woods and followed it until getting tired. On one of those days, because he was tired he didn’t want to go all the way around an empty block to get home. Knowing that his house was on the other side of the empty lot he decided to take advantage of a narrow trail cutting through it. It was edged by tall grass, trees and bushes. Before taking that first step he saw hand written signs posted everywhere.

  ‘Private property, Trespassers will be arrested and prosecuted’

  He noticed that ‘Prosecuted’ was misspelled.

  Because there was nobody around and it was rough terrain, he dismounted and walked beside his bike. About half way through the block, just at the point where he saw his house in the distance a rough and demanding male voice roared as if from the trees themselves.

  “Get off my property!”

  Startled, he jerked around looking for the source but saw nothing but scary looking trees. The booming voice shouted exactly what a scared Gary wanted to do,

  “Run!”

  His feet obeyed and did not stop until at his back door.

  That evening over dinner, Gary sat strangely silent. He was looking down at his meal as if by concentration he was trying to flick broccoli off the plate. Ruth decided to begin the conversation with a question.

  “How was your ride today? Did you discover anything new?”

  He didn’t want to admit cutting through private property but the words escaped regardless. She heard how he was scared by a monstrous voice. Ruth knowingly nodded and said,

  “Yes, perhaps I should have warned you about that property. I just assumed that you would obey the warning signs posted all around it.”

  He didn’t look up or respond to her reprimand so she continued.

  “The property belongs to a strange family. The husband used to work in the copper mine but went strange after it was shut down. I used to sit behind them in church but they don’t go anymore. Nobody talks to them and even their daughter has been known to act crazy.”

  She made it clear that what she said next was understood as a dire warning.

  “Stay away from that terrible property. Why, sometimes at night I can see strange lights floating through the path and up in the trees too.”

  Her final word on the subject did not miss the intended threat.

  “Best you stay away from there.”

  Whenever Gary fiddled with his octopus-like electrical contraption in his bedroom there were many reasons it held him captive. First and foremost was curiosity. What would happen if he connected this to that. When it exploded or burnt, he wanted to know why. Interest in the unknown consumed him. That was why his ears perked up when hearing that strange lights were spotted in the forbidden property.

  That night, when he was supposed to be asleep, his overpowering curiosity pulled him out of bed. He dragged his chair over to the window and sat in the dark staring out into the empty lot. He was looking for floating lights. The tinges of imagination left over from his old home in Lexington still lingered but by now was mostly destroyed by harsh reality. He hoped he might see fairies or at least flying saucers. He would accept either one. He was far removed from what the light really was. Then he saw it. True to his grandmother’s description, the glow floated around the trees as if following a meandering path.

  Curiosity and a hunger for answers are not always evident in a young boy. Those qualities do not identify themselves when stepping forward. Gary did not hear, ‘you are curious, go and look’, he just responded to the impulse. He wanted to sneak out of the house and investigate. What if it really was a flying saucer? Hoping it was not a ghost, his curiousity was stirred.

  The problem now was how to get out of the house. Grandma always locked the front and back door before going to bed and took the keys into the bedroom with her. He opened his bedroom window and looked down to the ground. Although not very high up, it was still too scary to jump. Besides, he understood that it was easier to get down than back up. He tip-toed up to his grandmother’s bedroom door and waited to gather enough courage to sneak in for the key. However, apparently wanting to do something was different than actually doing it. Not enough courage seeped into his body to let him open her bedroom door.

  He wasn’t sure but the short time he was in the basement he thought he saw a door. Maybe he could get out that way. The wooden stairs leading into the bowels of the basement were just as scary now as before. Venturing down into darkness was high on anybody’s scary list. His flashlight removed some apprehension and allowed for the first step. With his flashlight guiding him through the dark basement he scanned it past the rest of his grandfather’s old television sets and diode tubes that he had not moved upstairs yet.

  After searching the walls and corners he finally located a door on the other side of the furnace. He was disappointed to discover that it was not only locked but had a thick board across the door as if securing a drawbridge at a castle. Disappointed, he returned to the stairs. As he scanned the light, a glow from one of the walls blinked back at him. Upon investigation, it was a window. Although small and half way up the wall, it was still a hope of escape. He pushed one of the crates under the window and climbed up to investigate. A latch on the window was turned and it swung open from a hinge at the top. It was a struggle but heaving and squirming finally set him free.

  A few minutes later he was standing at the edge of the so-called forbidden property. A cloudless night with a full moon produced strange and seemingly moving shadows. After only a few tentative steps into the jungle, fear and apprehension introduced themselves to him. He ignored the voice of common sense telling him to turn around and instead listened to the more powerful voice of curiosity telling him to venture deeper into the dark forest, into the unknown. Waving his flashlight in all directions, including up into the looming branches, revealed no flying fairies or flying saucers.

  He thought it best to turn his light off and hope the drifting light might somehow return. Standing still and wrapped in darkness produced a sudden and great fear. Just as he was about to turn his light back on, the same gruff male voice from before bellowed at him.

  “I told you to get off my property!”

  To run for his life was the paramount demand to his feet but when he spun around to do just that, a bright light shone in his face causing blindness. Not able to see past the glare, he heard the deep voice demand,

  “Who the hell are you?”

  Thinking the worst, a trembling voice responded,

  “My name is Gary and I live with my grandmother in the old house just over there.”

  “Why have you come onto my property again?”

  “I just wanted to see what the light was, that’s all.”

  When he turned his beam back on and the other light was lowered from his face, there was enough
brightness to make out the shadowy figure standing in front of him. He gasped,

  “You are not a monster at all. You are a boy just like me.”

  An angry voice retorted,

  “I’m not a boy you idiot, I’m a girl.”

  Gary could be forgiven his mistake. Standing in front of him was the spitting image of a skinny tomboy. She was a girl about his age with short black hair mostly covered with a baseball cap pulled low over her eyes. She wore a dirty pair of coveralls giving no hint to her gender.

  Recovered from the shock, Gary managed to utter,

  “Why are you pretending to be a mean old man?”

  In a kinder voice more suggestive of her identity she said,

  “Because nobody would be afraid of me if I didn’t sound mean.”

  He asked,

  “Why do you want people to think you are mean?”