“What do you do with it?” I asked.

“Parts, mos’ly. Stuff in dere custom made, sometime I can twis’ it around a little, make it do somethin’ else.”

“He’s working on a robot,” Dak said. “Come on, Jubal, show it to him.”

He took us to the far side of the barn, where the equipment wasn’t quite so eye-catching, but obviously a lot more useful. Tables and shelves were covered with tools and instruments and work in progress. I saw what I was pretty sure was an electron microscope, and a mass spectrometer. There were also more ordinary machines lined against a back wall, drill press, lathe, table saw, stuff like that.

But what my eye went to was a table with a metal skeleton on it. The table was waist high, a good level to work.

“Did you see that video, ‘Frankenstein Meets Madonna’?” Dak asked. “This table was one of the props. Show him, Jubal.”

Jubal spun a wheel at the side of the table and it slowly rotated until it was at a forty-five-degree angle. The thing on the table didn’t have a head, but the torso, hips, arms and legs were all in the right spots.

Jubal picked up a robotic hand from his worktable. He pulled some levers at the base, and fingers twitched. Jubal seemed wildly pleased by each motion, like a kid with a toy. That’s how Jubal seemed to approach all his inventions. Just a big, balding kid on Christmas morning.

“De han’s, dey sto’ bought, from… Sears and Roebuck.”

[77] Dak said, “Like, a catalog. Off the shelf, right, Jubal?”

“Off de shelf, yes! Dese from Universal Positronics. Dey figure out han’s long time ago. Travis, he get ’em cheap, him.”

“So he’s got hands from the Sears, Robot catalog,” I said.

Jubal looked puzzled for a moment, then his eyes widened.

“Sears Robot! From de Sears Robot!” And he laughed so hard he had to grab the table behind him to keep from falling over. And hey, I know it wasn’t all that funny, but his laughing was the worst kind of infectious. You just could not watch Jubal laughing without laughing yourself.

Jubal finally calmed down, but the rest of the day he kept muttering “Sears Robot” to himself, and then laughing aloud.

“We figger, we make a robot can really walk, we make us a fis’ful a money,” Jubal said.

“You bet, Jube, a fistful,” Dak said.

“Here, watch dis, y’all.” He cranked the table so it was perpendicular to the floor. He flipped some switches in the skeleton’s belly. Jubal took the thing by one arm and pulled. It put out one foot, then the other. Now it was standing on its own.

“Gyros,” Dak explained.

“Yessum, but dese don’ hold him up like a… like a…”

“Steadicam?” Dak asked.

“Yeah, dat, what you say. Dese gyros tell him which way up be.”

“Like an inertial tracker,” I said.

“Yeah, what you say.” He gave the thing a shove. Instead of falling backward it put a leg out and placed one foot behind itself, then straightened again. Jubal shoved it again, harder. It staggered, then it stabilized again.

“Pretty good,” I said.

“Yeah, I know what you’re thinking,” Dak said. “You’ve seen it before. We’ve even seen something like this climbing stairs.”

“I’ve never seen one run,” I said.

“Dis one, neither,” Jubal said, sadly. “Need some better sof’ware, me.”

“Well, I think it’s pretty damn fine already,” Dak said, and I agreed.

[74] “Cher, sell him for twenny t’ousand dollah, we make a fis’ful a money!”

“Twenty thousand…” Dak was grinning at me. “What does something like this usually cost?”

“Manny, no need to even walk into the showroom unless you can write a check for half a million. Jubal thinks he can make one for under ten grand.”

“Maybe I kin,” Jubal said, scratching his head. “ ’Course, I done already spend fi’ty t’ousand on dis one!”

It was an awesome idea. A humanoid robot cheaper than a new car? I wondered if it could clean toilets.

“So what all do you figure it will do?” I asked Jubal. “Aside from walk around, I mean. Will it clean windows?”

“I fought long time on dat question, me. Dis t’ing, it could carry roun’ a bag full a dem golfin’ clubs, I t’ink.” He put his fists on his hips and glared at me.

“Robo-Caddy,” Dak said. “I think you got something there, Jube. And we could also walk dogs.”

Jubal frowned at the floor again, and twisted his shirttails.

“Mebbe,” he said. “Mebbe we could.”

He turned away from us and went to a worktable across the room, where he started sorting stuff that had already looked fairly well sorted to me.

‘‘He looks like I hurt his feelings,” I whispered to Dak.

“Not your fault, man. I’d a done the same thing but Travis clued me in. Heck, it’s my fault, I guess, I forgot to tell you.”

“Tell me what?”

“It’s more about… well, Manny, Jubal is some kind of genius, but he don’t have a practical bone in his body. He makes these wonderful things and doesn’t have any idea at all of what to do with them. Travis always figures that out. You and me, we think it over ten minutes, we’ll come up with a dozen things to do with it. Jubal won’t.”

Jubal had taken the top off one of those big glass jars you see in convenience stores with spicy sausages floating around in them. It was half full of shiny silver Christmas tree ornaments.

[79] I took my silver bubble out of my pocket and went over there.

“I found this in your yard the other day,” I said. Jubal’s eyes lit up and just like that, his sulk was over. He took the bubble from me, holding it with fingers loosely curled around it, just like I’d had to do to keep it from slipping away.

“I t’ought I was short a couple. It’s hard to keep ’em all straight, dey jus’ floats away. T’anks, Manny.”

“Sure thing, Jubal.”

He took the lid off the jar and popped my bubble in.

“Less’n you want it,” he said. I looked at him. He seemed completely innocent of any idea that the thing was something special.

“Jubal, what I’d like to know is, what is it?”

He looked down at the big glass jar. He moved it around and the silver bubbles swirled. He let it go and the bubbles kept swirling for a minute, then settled down.

Jubal laughed. “That’s jus’ what I tryin’ to figure, me. Ain’t got no name for ’em.” He looked back at the jar and shook it again. He seemed far away.

“One day my pa, he cut him down a li’l ol’ spruce tree someplace and he brung it home. He set dat li’l tree right in de house. Not much taller dan me, no. An’ when he had dat tree set up, he go out to his pirogue boat and he got him an ol’ towsack. He say ol’ Boudreaux didn’ have no fi’ty dollah he done promised for a gator hide, he only had fo’ty-fi’ dollah, him!” Jubal chuckled at this, and Dak and I smiled.

“So Boudreaux he tellin’ my pa ’bout dis t’ing dey be doin’ down de bayou, in Lafayette or maybe it was all de way to N’awlin, what dey call it Chris’mas.

“Now my pa he say, ‘Boudreaux, you t’ink I’m a fool, me? I know all ’bout Chris’mas. Don’t hol’ wit’ it, is all.’

“Now Boudreaux he say, ‘I don’ mean no such of a t’ing, Broussard. Ev’body on dis bayou know Broussard no fool, you. And dey know Broussard, he don’t put up no lights nor set him up a tree, no. But lookee heah, Broussard.’ An dat when Boudreaux, he show my pa de towsack wid all the Chris’mas pretties in it.

“My daddy, he say he had him a weak moment, Satan mus’ a reach [80] out to him, because he tooken dat towsack full a li’l pretties, him, ’stead of dat fi’ dollah what Boudreaux still owe him.”

Jubal had a good laugh about that, and I laughed with him, because I simply loved the way he told a story. Not laughing at his preposterous Cajun accent, but because of how it just made me listen harder to every word.

“My pa, he brung in dat towsack and open it up on de flo’, an all dese Chris’mas pretties dey tumble out. Dey was lights on wires… and my pa laugh, him, and we all laugh, ’cause we don’t have no ’lectric, no!