The New Geek Empire
Part 8a
“Lydie? Got a sec?” Jax asked rather tentatively.
I wiped the sweat off my face with a bandana and said, “Sure. Just let me push this wheelbarrow to the compost pile.”
“I’ll do that.”
“Naw, it’s full of rabbit poop and you’ve got Kelly.”
He sighed. “Let me do something Lydie. It’s almost been a week and I’m going crazy.”
I started to panic. I’d sensed he’d been dissatisfied with things. I’d asked what his favorite foods were. I’d showed him how to hook up the TV and game consoles. I’d shown him the computer … no internet access but there were sim games and stuff like that he could play and Dad had a gazillion files saved to disc. He still just didn’t seem happy. “I’ll show you Dad’s movie collection. There are all sorts in there … no chick fliks though, for that you’ll have to get into my mother’s movies.” I was trying to make a funny but he wasn’t laughing.
He snorted instead. “Lydie, stop. I don’t mean I’m bored, at least not the way you’re taking it. I just mean I don’t like sitting around on vacation while I watch you do all of this work. It makes me feel crummy … like a lazy bum or something.”
I stopped and set the wheelbarrow down. “Oh … But you have Kelly to take care of.”
He nodded. “I know but I can do other stuff too. I’ve been thinking about it.”
Sighing I said, “This isn’t working for you is it? You’re thinking about leaving.”
He bumped me just enough to move me from the wheelbarrow and then put on a pair of work gloves that had materialized out of his back pocket. Grabbing the wheelbarrow handles he said, “See? I can have Kelly in the backpack and do other stuff at the same time. We’re used to working this way aren’t we Bumble Bee?”
Kelly giggled and kicked her heels into Jax’s sides and said, “Getty-yup horsie!”
It was hard not to smile so I didn’t bother trying. Kelly was a cute kid and said funny things all the time. It was like living down the hall from a miniature clown. Jax pushed the wheelbarrow but when we got to the compost pile he did let me fork the mess out since I already had the manure shovel in my hands. While I scooped the poop Jax said, “I’m not talking about leaving so stop freaking out about that. I just want to be part of things. I don’t like feeling useless.”
“I’m not freaking out,” I denied but when I looked at him and put myself in his place it actually clicked. “I … uh … I just wanted you to know I wasn’t just after extra muscle.”
He smiled slightly and told me, “Yeah, I figured that out. But I’m a guy Lydie … not a kid. I need to be part of what is going on … allowed to swim in the deep end without floaties on. I don’t want to just wade around in the shallow end of things.”
I gave him an apologetic glance. “I guess I’m not used to that. Dad was like that sure … but he was just Dad. Everyone said he was different. I guess I just figured … I don’t know …” Unable to come up with a good excuse or explanation I shrugged.
“What about Will?” he asked as he took the wheelbarrow once again, this time to roll it back to the tool shed.
“Will had the desire but he was sick so much. Even when the doctors suspected he was going into remission he was still recovering his strength and health and had to be careful not to overdo it. That’s why my parents decided to homeschool him that last year. His immune system was shot after the bone marrow transplant. Dad wanted to homeschool me too but I was already dual enrolled at the College so it wouldn’t have helped anything really.”
“You were the marrow donor weren’t you?”
“Yeah. It wasn’t that big of a deal for me but it could have killed Will and nearly did in the beginning. As bad as the donor thing was – and it wasn’t really all that bad – it was a lot worse for my parents. It killed them to leave Will in the hospital as much as he was there for a while. That’s why I did so much around the house; so my mom could stay with Will as much as possible.”
He nodded. Our story was commonly known and I supposed he knew a lot of it from work for Dad out at the mill. I closed and locked the shed and he asked, “Can you sit down for a while?”
Instead I asked him, “Want to help me get the tomatoes put on the drying screens? We can talk and work at the same time right?”
He nodded, understanding I was trying to include him but really needed to get work done too. We went over to the screened in patio area that Dad had built for Mom to use as her outdoor kitchen. The “counter” space was made from old granite pieces that he’d scavenged from houses that were being remodeled.
Jax asked, “Did your Dad build this?”
I nodded. “Dad and I did together … about … yeah … about seven years ago. It was the year I turned ten. Remember when the mill owners bought that crummy apartment complex and then converted it to condos? Dad got permission to dumpster dive and brought back a lot of stuff. They let him do it for free because he gave them the idea of recycling and selling a lot of the copper wiring and piping that was being torn out and upgraded. Dad said as much as they replaced, they probably recouped the cost of one of the rehabs at least.”
“Cool,” he said, wandering around inside looking at things while I got the tomatoes prepped.
“I know the counters are all mix-n-match but Mom liked it. Dad had wanted to make them stainless steel but he lost the bids he kept putting in at auctions then when the granite didn’t really cost anything except paying someone to help him uninstall them, load, and then reinstall them here it was like a no brainer. The roof is new though … only about two years old anyway. Dad and I did it, the sheds, and the barns the same summer we did the roof on the house. One of Dad’s whacky auction bids finally came in and it was for the contents of an old manufacturing building. Turns out it was used as a storage location for this roofing contractor that went belly up. That’s why all the roofs are that strange green instead of regular roof colored.”
He smiled and said, “Hey, it doesn’t look bad. What’s ‘regular roof color’ anyway? So it isn’t shingles but who cares? A lot of those expensive places along River Road were starting to replace their old shingles with the metal panels.” He looked at all the tomatoes and said, “So tell me what to do.”
I shook my head. “I’m not gonna tell you, I’ll show you. What we’re doing here is making dried tomatoes. First we need to cut all these tomatoes in half, cut out the stem part and any bad spots, then we’re going to put them on these trays and put them into the dryer.”
“That metal drum thing?” he asked pointing to the fifty-five gallon drum that lay on its side.
“Yeah, it’s a wood-fired dehydrator. Dad made it when the solar ones either wouldn’t work because of the weather or they didn’t work fast enough for the amount of produce Mom was processing. He got it out of a Backwoods Home magazine (
http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles/hooker41.html ) and it is a lot more reliable than a solar dehydrator and is meant for large quantities. Not even my mother’s electric Excalibur can keep up with this baby once it gets going.”
I handed him a sharp ceramic cutting knife. “Don’t drop it; you can’t sharpen those once they are chipped or cracked.”
He looked at it then started slicing tomatoes. “Then why use it? Why not use a good ol’ metal knife?”
“Mom always said that ceramic knives didn’t make the food brown around the cuts and it bruised them less so that they’re prettier. Mom liked pretty stuff … including the food she prepared.”
He laughed, “Your Dad used to get kidded a lot about it at work, especially when she would cut his food into shapes … like those curly carrots.”
I smiled glad that someone besides me remembered that sort of stuff. “Hey! I happen to like curly carrots.”
Kelly asked, “Tarrots? Can I has some tarrots?”
Jax groaned, that kid could graze all day long just like a goat if you let her. Instead I told her, “I’ll make some curly carrots for tomorrow’s dinner. For now just drink your sippy. If you are a good girl you can help feed King Kong in the morning.”
Easily pleased, that made her happy and she babbled away about “babbits and chickies” just long enough to go to sleep as Jax and I cut all the tomatoes. I showed him, “I cut an X all across the top of the tomato halves – these are plum tomatoes by the way – so that they don’t curl so much as they dry. Then once we get them on the trays I’ll sprinkle them with a little salt and some Italian seasoning, pop them in and let them go; I’ve already got the dryer warmed up.”
“I can feel it,” he said wiping his upper lip with his shirt sleeve. Then he seemed to sigh in contentment. “See, now this is what I’m talking about. We’re working together instead of me sitting on the porch like a lazy hound.”
“Jax I never thought of you like that,” I told him. “I just figured you would need some time to settle in and get used to things. You’re a townie after all.”
He grunted. “Only half townie. Every summer and most of my spring breaks I went to live on my Granny’s farm. Did that right up until the family put her in that nursing home; she got MRSA and died a couple of months later. That was the winter before I started going with Darlene and you know the rest of it from there. None of this is new to me except for your dad’s gadgets and gizmos.”
Thinking back I realized I did remember that he was usually gone all summer long. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. Seriously though, I never meant to make you feel bad.”
“I know and I hope you’ll understand that what I want to talk about isn’t meant to make you feel bad either.”
Cautiously I said, “Ooo … kay. But you don’t expect me to like it.”
“Maybe, maybe not; I’m not sure. Some of it might sound like criticism but I don’t mean it to be. And part of it is just going to make more work which I think needs to be but which probably isn’t going to sound very fair to you.”
When he stopped talking and just looked at me I finally said, “Well say it already will you. The suspense is killing me.”
He snorted but did finally get down to it. “I’ve had plenty of time to look around and have the surprise wear off. I’m sure there are things I don’t know about and that’s fine but I mean the major stuff. But as pretty and as shiny … and useful … as it all is, I think there are some things that can be improved on.”
“What … what things exactly?” I was trying to keep an open mind but I felt defensive at the same time.
“You admitted you haven’t done any scavenging.”
I shook my head. “No. To be honest it just never … I guess it never really occurred to me. It seems wrong somehow. I felt guilty just taking things from the fruit trees and gardens without permission; like it was stealing.”
“Well, if you were able to go that far then you need to go a little further. We need to go back to the mill. There is still a lot of stuff there that could come in handy. And I’d like to have a look at those houses and those trailers you mentioned.”
Trying to play along I said, “Let’s start with the mill. Just explain the why of it to me.”
“First off, that battery in the shed you asked me to look at is bad … I put the meter on it … and you’ve got a couple of others out there that don’t look like they are charging and discharging properly. Spares need to be found pretty quick. Best place to do that is going to be the mill. We can take the ones off of the company equipment and off the few vehicles that are still in the parking lots.” At my nod of understanding he continued. “I also looked at the schematics in your dad’s shop. I can hook up the water wheel but we need a different kind of wire than what you thought … it needs to be a heavier gauge. They’ve got huge spools of the right type at the mill. Now here is the big deal. I also found in your dad’s notes how he was thinking about using tall oil to make biofuel with.” (
http://www.motherearthnews.com/Renewable-Energy/2003-12-01/Heat-Your-Home-with-Biodiesel.aspx )
Trying to keep up I said, “Tall oil is that stuff they collect out at the plant when they use pulp from pine trees.”
“Exactly. They’ve got huge storage tanks of the stuff. I’m pretty sure I understand the process because they were thinking about making a small biofuel production plant right at the mill to cut down on regular fuel costs within the mill itself. I heard that was another suggestion your dad made by the way, they just never got around to the start up. Your dad’s set up here is sweet but still lo-tech enough that I don’t think I’ll kill it by experimenting but I swear I’ll be careful. We’ll have to figure out storage and all of that …”
“We have underground tanks for the biofuel because it gels at a higher temperature than regular fuel. But here’s another think to think. I use biofuel to heat with during those times a fireplace or wood stove isn’t enough. That usually means most of the winter nights for the furred and feathered out in the animal barn. That reason alone is why I’ve kept things up and running as much as possible. But the chemicals won’t last forever. I ordered more right before things fell apart but only half the order came in.”
“Not a problem. Your dad got most of the chemicals at the mill and I know where those are stored so that’s another thing that should be on our list. The problem is going to be transporting this stuff so that no one notices.”
“That’s not the biggest problem,” I told him. “We can move it at night if we have to. It is getting it down the last bit of road.”
“I’ve already thought of that and think I’ve figured a way around that. First we have to set up a storage container. Then if I bring the small tanker trailer we used to empty the vats with when the pipes clogged or for inspection, we can park that off the road, camouflage it, transfer it a little at a time … it won’t be easy but it is doable and the payoff makes it worth all of the effort.”
I thought about it for a moment and then said, “Alright. I’ll even give when it comes to taking things from the mill since you know for a fact that the owners and their families are gone … I mean dead. But … do you really want to go pawing through people’s houses? What do you need that we don’t have right here already?”
In less than half a second he said, “Clothes for Kelly for one. I hadn’t thought of that until a couple of days before you showed up in town. She’s already grown out of everything I bought for her before things fell apart and she can’t wear just socks once the weather turns.”
A little hesitant to offer I said, “There’s things up in the attic. They … uh … they used to be mine. Mom sewed all of my clothes and they never wore out before I went to the next size. Most of them are denim and cotton jumpers and things like that. I know my old winter coats and boots are still up there. Mom was a labeling fanatic … well you saw what it is like up there. And … um … oh geez.”
“What?” he asked as I sputtered to a standstill.
“Look, I know it isn’t cool but I can sew and quilt and all of that. Mom was on fire about me keeping up with the skills she taught me. It was just easier to give in and sew my own clothes than it was to listen to her lecture about economics and poor quality if I bought something at the store; she’d go over it and point out every little flaw and tell me how much time and money I wasted having to make repairs or alterations.”
He stopped putting tomatoes on the screens and really looked at what I was wearing. “You sewed that?” he asked referring to the shirt and capris that I was wearing.
Nonchalantly I said, “Yeah. What of it?”
Before I knew what he was doing he had stepped over and pulled the collar of my shirt back and said, “There’s no tag.”
I jerked away from him, “No kidding. My mom had these ‘made by’ tags she sewed into her stuff but I never bothered.”
He was still standing too close and when he started looking at my capris a little too close and then reached out a curious finger to touch the flat felled seam that ran along the outside leg seams I popped his hand and asked, “What are you doing?!”
“Huh? I was looo … oh … uh … oh boy.” He stepped back and looked a little bashful but not especially embarrassed. “I really was just … looking. I remember my grandmother making my Easter clothes when I was little and the spare bedroom had boxes of unfinished projects she kept meaning to work on but … I don’t know … I just thought it was …” He cleared his throat and said, “Anyway, next time I’ll warn you when I mean to touch.”
“When you mean to touch? Well, that’s some ego you got there Ajax Remington. I mean really.”
He wasn’t sure how to react at first but then he grinned and stepped back and started putting tomatoes on the screens again. “Did you think I was kidding when I said I would probably think about it?”
I’d never dealt with anything like Jax, at least not in real life and that was a whole lot different than dealing with the make believe gamer world. “Well … I guess now I know for sure don’t I.”
He got quiet when he saw how uncomfortable I was. “Ok, on to other topics. This looks like a lot of food.”
Well, I had to admit he was trying … in a weird guy kind of way. I smiled just a little and said, “I’m not totally against the idea Jax … just not used to you … anyone … being up in my personal space like that.”
“You sure that’s all?” he asked.
I looked at him and then had to smile a little bigger. He had a baby back pack on and his kid was in it dead to the world asleep. Her sippy cup had drenched his shoulder and he hadn’t even noticed. His hair was going every which direction where Kelly had been using it like horse reins. There was a smear of “pea-but” on his shirt where she’d wiped her mouth across his chest at lunch. And this was the guy that used to be too cool for words. “Yeah, I’m sure. Just … uh … just kinda figure into the equation I … I don’t know how I’m supposed to react to that stuff in the real world. Gamer land I would have shot you or thumped you with my sword or something … here … here I don’t know what to do. I really don’t want to thump you but, I don’t know how else I’m supposed to act without looking like a sleeze queen.”
He gave me a lopsided grin. “Just be yourself. And I’ll try to be less … uh … hands on … until you can figure out what that means.”
I looked away and made a face. “This is soooo strange.”
He admitted quietly, “Yeah, for me too. I tried to date a couple of times after Darlene but after a while it just wasn’t worth the challenge. And people kept watching me to see if I was going to ruin Kelly’s life or if I’d wind up like those crazy dads from hell you’d see on the news; shaken baby syndrome, leave the kid in the bathtub to drown in three inches of water, starve her to death or feed her until she weighed as much as a baby elephant. It got old real fast. The guys at the mill, they were about the only ones that didn’t treat me like I was brain damaged. A lot of them only got to see their kids every other weekend so understood where I was coming from. Geez, I sound pathetic.”
I shook my head. “No you don’t. I should have listened more when Dad talked about you to Mom. Sometimes it just felt like he was warning me about what could happen if I didn’t stay focused. But maybe that isn’t what he meant. Maybe he was trying to tell me that there were guys out there that were … were different from Matt.”
He laughed. “Your dad would have fed me to the pulping machine if I’d even thought about asking you out. And he’d been right. I didn’t have my head on straight back then and was barely keeping it together.”
“You don’t seem that way now,” I told him quietly.
He was going to say something cocky but then just gave me a quiet, “Thank you.”
Then I said, “So anyway … about the food. I know it looks like a lot but this is the beginning of September. Harvesting will be over by the end of next month and everything will have to last until next April and May when the next harvest of fresh stuff starts up again.”
Happy to change the subject Jax nodded. “For a while I bussed tables out at the truck stop diner while I was still in highschool; I know how fast food can go. It just seems like a lot for the three of us. My grandmother always had a big garden but she gave stuff to all the family and still had some left over.”
I told him, “We gave stuff to the food pantry and traded with the Mennonites. I’ve just kept gardening like Mom out of habit I guess. I know technically it’s too much but this way if the garden doesn’t make it for some reason, or there’s a hail storm, a drought, a swarm of locusts, or something like that we’ll still eat because we’ll have some left from previous seasons.”
He looked thoughtful. “OK. And on that note one of the things I was wondering about was if you still want to bring in other people.”
His question caught me off guard. I hadn’t thought about it at all since we left town. “Are you?” I asked.
“Technically this is your place and I can’t invite people here.”
“Don’t avoid the question.”
“You just did,” he pointed out.
I rolled my eyes refusing to admit it. Instead I told him, “I honestly haven’t really thought about it. It isn’t on my high-pri right now.”
He seemed to relax. “Ok. Could I ask you something else?”
“Stop asking like you’re some kind of supplicant. It makes me feel … I don’t … creeped out.”
He smiled. “Look … I’d just like to suggest that we focus on some other stuff first and let the idea of more people be put off for a while; at least until we see how the kids shake out in town. How do you feel about that?”
A little exasperated I asked him, “Why do you keep asking me how I feel about stuff? You sound like the school’s psyche counselor.”
It wasn’t the answer he was expecting and he closed his mouth and blinked a couple of times figuring out how to respond to the way I had phrased it. Finally he sighed and said, “One of the conditions my Uncle set for me renting the garage apartment was that I had to go to family counseling with them. You know they had started attending that new age-y church that went into that old car dealership’s building.” At my nod he said, “I guess more of it stuck on me than I expected. Matt’s mom was a bi … uh … bear about things being phrased just right.”
Trying not to show that I’d noticed what he had almost called his aunt I said, “OK, that’s cool. I was just wondering if you thought I was gonna have a melt-down if we don’t exactly think in lockstep. And can I ask you why you and Matt have different surnames if your fathers were brothers?”
He looked at me and then a grin of relief grew on his face. “Thanks for not saying anything about how I should have been grateful for the place my aunt and uncle gave me in their home. I was … am still ... just it wasn’t perfect for any of us. My dad and Matt’s dad are half brothers. My dad was older and when his dad when he was a baby. He had three older half-sisters from his father first marriage that Granny raised like her own. Then a year after he died Granny remarried and had Matt dad. Granny was that man’s third wife and he had kids that Granny raised also. When Matt’s dad died in the war she married a widower that had four kids of his own from another marriage and then they had two daughters together. You think you had to be careful of who you were related to? You should have seen my family reunions. You had to work it backwards to find out if you were blood related or related by marriage … people really did go to our family reunions to find dates sometimes.”
I whooped a surprised laugh then slammed my hand over my mouth to keep from waking Kelly. “Oh man, Dad could tell the same kinds of stories. He always joked that he kept expecting the local schools to be full of three headed and seven toed kids just from all the intermarrying that had to be going on. You are just too funny. It’s nice that someone actually gets that concept without thinking I’m from some redneck hell on earth.”
Matt laughed too and then grinned and it held something I couldn’t really define. Then he had to go and spoil it by embarrassing me. “Matt’s an idiot. I would have come over here even if I had to crawl the whole way with Kelly on my back.”
I blinked, then blushed. “Oh.”
“Yes. Oh.” Making another quick subject change he said, “Now you don’t seem to have a problem with the mill. And you seem like you can be persuaded about checking out the empty houses and trailers around here. I’ve got a few other things in my head but now that I’ve told you some of my ideas, do you have any of your own?”
It didn’t take me but a moment to say, “The goats.”
“Yeah, you mentioned them the first day we got here. What do we need for them?”
“Fencing and feed. Those goats are used to surviving on forage but they’ll need more than that when the weather turns.”
He pulled out a folded piece of paper and a broken pencil. “Anything else?”
“For the goats? Not off the top of my head. But … but I have a list of other stuff.” I explained about reading those books and how I’d thought of things here and there.
When I was finished he said, “What stuff is on your list?”
I grinned in spite of myself and told him, “Well I scratched off cannons and Holy water.” When he grumbled and gave me a look that told me his question had been a serious one I said, “Well … a … a few … personal items.”
“Per … oh … uh … you mean feminine stuff. I heard the girls talking about that back at the school.”
I shrugged and said, “I hope they were smart enough to talk about birth control pills and condoms at the same time.”
He almost choked on his own spit at the way I’d just thrown it into the middle of the conversation. After clearing his throat he said, “Not in so many words.” But then even more serious than he had been before he told me, “They don’t need the kind of trouble they were making for themselves so I started talking about dirty diapers, spit up, and formula for a little bit. The guys gave me dirty looks because apparently it was spoiling their fun but they still weren’t taking me very seriously. One night I simply threw a laundry basket condoms in the middle of what they called the play room and told them all to wear ‘em or wind up like me. That babies couldn’t be turned on and off like their game consoles, they didn’t come with extra batteries or volume controls, and if they killed their kid there wasn’t enough points in the world that would bring them back to life.”
Trying to envision it I said, “Oh … my … gosh! What did they say?!”
“I think a couple of them got the message but most of them just laughed at me and started calling me Father Goose. Matt however got all pinched up asked me not to be so … how did he say it? Oh yeah … not to be so crass about it. That he would speak to each of his ‘men’ privately and impress upon them the importance of things like personal hygiene and protection.”
I shook my head kind of disgusted. “You know, sometimes I wonder what I ever saw in Matt.”
He told me, “You were just doing what everyone expected. Heck, even I expected the two of you to date until highschool was over then as soon as the two of you went away to college the spell would have been broken.” I didn’t want to agree with him but I was starting to think maybe he was right.
We got quiet after finishing the tomatoes and getting them loaded into the dryer. Jax took Kelly to do the daddy thing with the potty and all that and by the time he came back out I was finished with the remainder of my outside chores that were on my list for that day. The problem was one of those chores had been to get another bale of hay out of the stack that was covered with a tarp. Getting it out had been easy. Putting it on the dolly to wheel it back to the barn had been fine. But I’d tripped over something in the animal barn, I never did figure out what, and when I went down it was hard and I scrapped my back on some empty cages that I’d had stacked off to the side.