STARTING OVER (35 page)

“Really, that’s what it says?”

“No . . . no . . . that was me. Okay, it says, Mr. R. J. Darby, As you and many of my people already know, I am reducing my workload on several of my inventions.  This decision has been a long time coming.  Deciding what to work on and what to not work on has been very difficult. One of the items I have decided to stop development on is the Telephone to the Dead as you and I have called it.  It has been two years of collaboration which I have greatly valued, but I fear it will not be widely accepted.  In appreciation for your many years of dedicated work for me, I am officially giving to you this device and all rights forever.  You are free to continue its development on your own time and with your own resources as you see fit.  I wish you the best of success as you fine-tune it for commercial use.  Signed, Thomas A. Edison.”

Scott sat in silence staring at the letter almost in disbelief.

“My great-great-grandfather worked for Edison?”  Kelly was equally shocked and impressed.  She had no idea that someone in her family had had such a close brush with greatness.

“He was a
mucker,” Scott said with authority.

“A what?”

“A mucker.”

“Did you make that up?” she asked skeptically, not really knowing if he was insulting or complimenting her distance relative.

“Nope.  That’s the name that Edison gave to his helpers who actually did the metal work, carpentry, you know, all the manual labor on all his inventions.  He had so many inventions going at the same time, he couldn’t do all the work on them, so he hired young men right out of college or technical school to help out.  I’ve talked with a lot of people around here and no one knows where that name came from, but it’s real.”

“Go on.”

“This means that in that box is something Thomas Edison, himself, invented.  He actually worked on it.  He touched it.”  Scott was clearly overwhelmed.

“What did he mean by a ‘Telephone to the Dead’?  That sounds pretty creepy.”

“I don’t know much about it.  There were always rumors that Edison had invented something that could talk to the dead, but no one ever saw it work or even saw any plans.  Everyone thought it was just an urban myth.”  Scott returned to the box and very gently brushed aside old wood shavings and more straw until he uncovered what looked like an old short wave radio and a microphone.  “This must be it.”

“Doesn’t look like a telephone to me.  It looks more like a radio . . . sort of a Spirit Radio,” Kelly suggested.

“Oh I like that, Spirit Radio.  That’s a cool name.  Can we try it out now?”

“I don’t see why not.  Let’s get an extension cord and plug it in.”  Kelly looked along the wall and found an extension cord.  She plugged one end in the socket and unrolled it to reach Scott.  Together they lifted the radio out and placed it on the workbench.  The radio unit was mounted on a metal stand and had no top or walls, just a face with some dials and knobs.  Inside was an intricate collection of wire and glass components, none of which Kelly recognized.

“These glass bulb-like things are vacuum tubes.  They light up when the radio is warmed up enough,” Scott said with authority as he pointed them out.  He carefully dusted around the components and blew on it several times to make it as clean as possible before he plugged it in.

It took several seconds but the vacuum tubes began to heat up and glow as he had predicted.  Scott wiped off the microphone,
then searched through the box to see if there was anything else.

“It needs an antenna, but there isn’t one in the box.”

The tiny wires inside the vacuum tubes had turned a bright orangish-yellow color, and  static could be heard from the small speaker mounted on the side of the radio.  Scott picked up a smaller piece of paper that had been rolled up and tucked in between the layers of straw.  It, too, was handwritten.  He read it aloud, his voice distracted, almost as if he had forgotten she was there.  “The tuner is modified to the optimum unassigned 3 to 5 kilohertz frequency spectrum.”  He held it toward her, and she could clearly see Edison’s distinctive signature.

“Wow, that is so cool,” she agreed, not understanding the meaning of the note, but still very impressed by what she was seeing.

“It’s an unassigned frequency,” Scott explained.  “The FCC thought it was too high.  Even now, they don’t use them for broadcasts of any kind.”  They stood and stared at the speaker as he rotated the tuner up and down the dial.  They strained and were able to hear very faint noises and static and what sounded like an occasional voice fading in and out.  Scott sighed in frustration.  “I’m going to have to build a special antenna for this frequency . . . I can do that tonight, I think.”

“Let me ask Aunt Jane if it’s okay for you to take it home with you.  I’m sure she won’t mind, but I’d better ask since this might be valuable.”

“Okay . . . when will that be?”

“I’m not sure.  She’s in Tampa and won’t be home until late.”

“What are you doing for food tonight?”

“I don’t
know, maybe call out for pizza.  My aunt eats like a rabbit . . . lots of lettuce and spinach.  There’s no real food in the whole house.”

“Why don’t you come over to my house, and you can meet my parents?”

“Shouldn’t you ask your mom first?”

“Yeah, but I’m sure she’ll be okay with it.”

“Let me clean up first and leave my aunt a note.  If your mom says ‘no’, then at least I can use your phone.”

“Sure.  See you in a few.”  With one last, lingering look at the box with the radio repacked in it, Scott walked out of the garage.

“Hey, thanks,” Kelly called after him.  He answered with a jaunty wave.  Kelly gently replaced the letter and the note in the old envelope and took it with her.  She was about to push the buttons to lower the garage doors and go inside to wash years of dust and grime off of her when Scott turned and looked back at her.

“My mom’s always after me to make more friends.”  Scott grinned.  “And here you are.”

Life’s What Happens

A Mainstream Novel

By Bob Kat

Published December, 2012

Prologue

“Try
To Remember [The Kind Of September]” – The Sandpipers

Kent State University – September, 2012

It was an early September weekday afternoon as Don Williams drove his rented candy-apple red Ford Mustang convertible along the narrow, uneven streets of Kent State University.  He kept to the old sections of the campus along the north and west sides where evidence surely still existed of his having been there over four decades ago.  He could feel the warm sun on his balding head and the air turning cooler as it curved over the windshield and into the Mustang’s cockpit-like front seat.  Incredibly young-looking kids walked between the buildings or sat under the huge old trees.  He could remember being out there, his arms filled with books, his head full of dreams.  But God, had he ever looked that young?

He looked around with interest as he toured the campus streets and gradually worked his way toward his old fraternity house.  He hadn’t set eyes on it since May, 1970 when he and 20,000 others were rushed off campus under Martial Law because of the student killings.

He shook his head to clear those thoughts away and double checked the dashboard clock to be sure he wasn’t going to be late for a meeting for which he had no clue why he had even been invited.  Jennifer Kist, the attorney he had been emailing back and forth with, was neither detailed in her explanation nor very responsive to any of his questions.

The Mustang handled smoothly.  It had always been the car of choice back in the day when he had driven these streets.  Not that he had had a Mustang or any other car back then.  He was glad he had splurged when he picked it up from the rental agency.  After all, what better car could carry him into his meeting with the past?

Like almost every small town kid who went away to college, Don’s time at Kent was very different than his early years in Canton, Ohio, even if his hometown was only a few miles away.  It was where he had learned about life, love and brotherhood.

Today, he thought as he drove along, the girls walking the campus were probably glancing his way only because they admired the Mustang.  They were looking at him with age-filtered lenses, not even seeing the middle-aged man at the wheel.  But he had had his day.

A quick check of the Mustang’s dash clock and he realized that his appointment, set for 2 p.m. at his old Phi Psi Kappa house on West Main Street, was but a few minutes away.  He left campus and headed through the middle of the small city of Kent.  Along the way, he mourned the loss of so many of the places from his past.  Gone was the Robin Hood, or the Hood as everyone had known it, The Black Squirrel Grill and many of the old fraternity houses.  The old Kent Hotel still resided on the South side of Main Street and had been notorious because the lounge had provided adult entertainment complete with go-go girls and a more sophisticated crowd if you were twenty-one.  Less than a block west at Franklin Avenue, just before the railroad tracks still stood The Loft bar.  No go-go girls.  No hard stuff.  Not even a band.  The 3.2 beer had been the only beverage on hand.

A left turn south on South Water Street had always gotten him a complimentary 3.2 beer from the Fifth Quarter’s owner when he was with his fraternity brother Cliff who had taken some amazing photos of the campus, but more importantly, art shots of hundreds of willing female students.  He had even earned the nickname
Hef for his ability to make even the most ordinary young woman look beautiful.  The Fifth Quarter had been large enough to hold hundreds on a weekend night and had been an ideal place to display Cliff’s photography.  His photos of now-famous bands had built his portfolio, including Joe Walsh, who had played lead guitar with the Measles, a Kent State student band, before he moved on to the James Gang and finally to the Eagles.  And Cliff was more than happy to include his brothers in his photo events.  He always needed someone to carry his equipment, and free beer, hot chicks and a good band were powerful incentives.

Sadly, as student tastes changed, the Fifth Quarter had become a dive named Filthy
McNasty’s, and then a Honda motorcycle dealer.  Even that was now gone, replaced by non-descript storefronts with neither interesting names nor pasts.

Don shook his head as he wondered how many times he had walked the two and one-half miles back and forth between the house and the campus.  As he approached the tracks, he remembered, as if it were yesterday, how the train would stop around 10 p.m. each night for a crew change-out which would hold him up for an additional fifteen minutes.  Of course, that had only happened in really cold or wet weather.  He smiled, remembering that in that part of Ohio, that had been every night.  That was typical Kent, where forty days and forty nights of continual rain in his sophomore year had created floods of Biblical proportions and contributed to supporting a several-hundred student three-day mud fight.  That war of the dorms and sexes had caused the complete drainage of the campus water tower and the elimination of shitting, showering and shaving on campus for four whole days.

As if on cue, the flashing railroad lights and the sound of the bell scared him back to reality and he hit the brakes, stopping just inches from the lowered arm.  The freight train rolled past and gradually picked up speed, heading south and eventually clearing the crossing.  The gates rose and the lights turned off and the bells were silenced.  He passed over the railroad tracks and the bridge that crossed over a river whose name he had never known.  He was struck by how small the hill leading from town to the fraternity house really was.  Back then, powered by his feet and fueled by an ample supply of 3.2 beer, it had seemed much larger.

He felt a rush of excitement, knowing that just over the horizon was his old fraternity house.  The building was over a hundred years old and had been a funeral home in its past life.  A very generous, successful and Don remembered, quirky benefactor, Brendan
Harrigan, former Phi Psi Kappa fraternity brother at Kent State had bought the building and turned it into a fraternity house.  Brendan had been in his early thirties when he would drop by the house every quarter with his hand out, seeking to get paid his mortgage payment.  Of course, since he hadn’t been wealthy when he was in college, he had to know that it was unlikely that the mortgage payment would ever be made on time or in full.  But that never stopped Brendan from showing up on a regular, if not always timely basis which had led to several frantic money-raising events by the brothers.

Don laughed out loud as he thought about how, in spite of his wealth, Brendan had always worn a crumpled, but clean pharmacist’s smock and drove a partially rusted powder-blue fifteen year old Ford station wagon.  There were better looking beggars on the street.  For a licensed pharmacist, it also seemed pretty odd that Brendan had never been without a mostly smoked but never lit cigar.  The color of the dried out wrapper of the cigar had blended into the color of the sides of his index and middle fingers of his left hand, stained by a long history of togetherness.

Which brought him back to why he had returned to Kent today.  Apparently, Brendan had died recently and had named several of the fraternity brothers in his will.  No one could have been more surprised than Don.  He couldn’t imagine why the old man would have even remembered him, much less left him something.  His dealings with Brendan had been minimal and unremarkable.  Maybe it was some kind of joke after all those late checks and the residual damage to the building the school year always left behind.  Jennifer hadn’t offered any answers in her emails but after he had agreed to come, he had received airfare and ample expense money to attend the reading of Brother Brendan’s last will and testament.