By that time they’d reached the den, the least historic-looking space Eddie had seen during the tour, though he hadn’t toured the master bedroom or some of the other places where the Fusiliers did most of their everyday living. The den had perhaps as many books as the library, mostly piled against its fading sea-green walls, but they were all about farming and flowers and livestock and they sat on the floor, horizontally on bookshelves, mixed in with newspapers and magazines and crumpled sheets of typing paper, as well as on top of the dirty shoes that lined the windowsill along one wall.
In the far corner on an antique desk by a fireplace sat a beige TV monitor with a floppy-disk drive, which was connected to a beige keyboard with a different floppy drive, which in turn was connected to a dot-matrix printer, a joystick, and a third drive, all of it beneath a layer of newspapers, cigarette butts, and a beer can. An oscillating fan blasted from the opposite corner of the room, but its breeze didn’t dislodge any of the loose leaves; it only made the edges of the papers shiver. Sextus apologized for the mess, almost to himself. Somebody could ransack this joint, he marveled quietly from one side of his mouth, and I’d be none the wiser.
One thing Sextus had in common with Eddie’s dad was that he didn’t have much mechanical skill. Plants love me, he said, and I’m a crackerjack at changing a tire. I can rig up the honey wagon, sorta, but these doggone new electronic gadgets is finna break down whenever they see me coming. Must be some magnetic heebie-jeebies in my body, like these folks in England I heard about who bursted into flames? They just gone FOOM! and it was all over. Wasn’t nothing left behind but a big spot of burnt grease in the middle of a chair. So y’all’ll have to watch out, he warned Eddie and Darlene, raising his index finger, ’cause I could be one of them folks—there ain’t no test or nothing. At any moment I could explode into a ball of hellfire. He was silent for a second. Ha. Y’all would prolly find that right entertaining, now wouldn’t you?
In the den, Eddie’s mother dashed over to the fan and raised her arms, following its beam of air with her torso. She and Eddie had cleaned themselves up to the best of their ability considering how few changes of clothes they had and how frequently they’d had to wear them in the sun and dirt and vegetation, but Darlene had begun to sweat the moment they got out of the truck and her forehead was now jeweled with perspiration. She did a shimmy dance in front of the fan like some kind of old-time performer, singing loudly and groaning her pleasure as the fan cooled off her underarms. Embarrassed, Eddie pushed his way around a table and moved some stuff off a chair, with Sextus’s blessing, so that he could get a better look at what Sextus called the Patient. The Patient was flickering, he said, and had stopped printing entirely. Eddie set about moving all the papers and felt around the sides and back of the monitor and the printer to find the on switch.
Fixing a television had sounded easy to Eddie, but the computer completely flummoxed him. He hadn’t owned one before; he hardly knew what they were supposed to do. To him the Tandy 1000 looked like the mutant child of a TV and a cash register, with its drab tan skin and green screen, blank as a snake’s eye. The one thing he knew machines had in common was that you had to open them in order to fix them, and he went about figuring out the best way to dismantle it and get into its guts.
From the mess behind the chair, Sextus produced a metal toolbox—streaked with paint and containing a crazy jumble of spackle tubes and screwdrivers—and an almost pristine plastic box of ratchet wrenches.
I got all this stuff out and then I remembered that I’m a idiot, he said.
Eddie frowned at the blinking green box on the screen. I don’t know, he muttered.
C’mon, Sixteen! Give it your best shot.
Eddie flinched slightly at hearing the nickname, then began to poke at the keyboard a little bit. Almost immediately the letters and malfunctioning zaps of miniature lightning appearing on the screen fascinated him. He typed some nonsense in order to test out the printer; he didn’t want to open up the computer or the printer if the problem wasn’t particularly severe and he didn’t have to. As he focused on striking the keys, the entire screen skewed and compressed into a single green line for a second, then returned to normal. Even though the problems were exactly as Sextus had said, the sudden flickering jarred him. He felt inept at this type of repair work and wondered if maybe he should give the job up and ask Sextus to find a professional computer repairman. But he found it difficult to admit failure to someone who seemed to have faith in him, especially an inordinate amount of faith. He continued playing with the machine and testing it out shyly, hoping the problem would miraculously fix itself while under his care and keep his reputation intact.
He tested each of the keys in alphabetical and numerical order, then tried them with the shift key and examined all of those characters for a hint at the problem. Once he had exhausted all of the possibilities on the outside, he resigned himself to the idea that he was going to have to open up the computer or the printer or both. The realization that he had a lot more work ahead of him than he might have if he had found some way to deal with the computer on the outside made him growl to himself and sigh. He sat down.
He took a deep breath and puffed his face up like Louis Armstrong, then blew the air despondently and forcefully through his pursed lips and leaned back in the black lacquered chair. He thought about turning to face Sextus and shrugging his shoulders, and his faith in himself sank as he imagined how creases of disappointment would pinch between the older man’s eyebrows. He didn’t know enough about the way Delicious worked to resent such a charming, funny man who told so many jokes on himself, and for a fatherless twelve-year-old, even the worst dad will do.