Chapter Four
A Kid Named Leo

                                                                                   
HAT NIGHT AND the following day, the city was alive with misfortune and confusion and worried people trying to find other people who were sometimes hard to find, or completely missing, or not where they were supposed to be. Sirens wailed all over the place, fires broke out here and there, news people from everywhere around the world showed up to take pictures of the devastation and havoc. A bridge collapsed and killed many people. Buildings slid sideways, were nudged off foundations, were splintered and ruined. Nobody had any electricity for days.
     It was the largest earthquake to hit the San Francisco Bay Area since the great quake of 1906. In all, 67 people died and over 3,700 were injured. The damage was catastrophic. But not as catastrophic as it could have been—if not for the efforts of a young boy named Leo Fickett.
     Leo was a student in Warren’s social studies class, a scruffy-looking kid of eleven, his hair the color of dirty sand, never combed, dominated by stubborn cowlicks. He wore baggy clothes that looked like they were seldom washed; his pant legs had holes at the knees, and were frayed at the bottom where they scraped along the ground. His sneakers were worn and held together by shoestrings knotted in several places. A splash of stark brown freckles bridged his nose and sprawled across rosy cheeks. And, once in a while—away from the classroom—he smiled, pushing the freckles up and causing his deep brown eyes to sparkle. In the classroom, however, he never did anything of the sort.
     Like a lot of kids who don’t like school, he wasn’t a very good student. Even though—as you’ll find out—he was really smart.
     A few days after the earthquake, when school started again, Warren walked up and down the aisles of the classroom returning test papers, his footsteps echoing like a prison guard’s at lockdown. Leo had not done well, and when Warren handed him his paper, he told the boy he was very disappointed, that he wanted Leo to stay after class.
     “Leo, what are you doing?” he asked when class was over and Leo had stayed behind.
     “You told me to stay after class, remember?”
     “No. I mean, what’re you doing with your life?”
     The boy shrugged and looked down at his tattered green backpack that was slumped between his knees. He hated it when adults asked questions that had no real answers. What was he doing with his life? He was eleven. He was being eleven. What else could he be doing with his life?
     “You answered three of twenty questions on the test. Why?” Warren was looking at him as if he was looking over the top of invisible bifocals.
     That was another thing adults did that Leo hated. He shrugged again. “Because I knew the answers to those ones.”
     “That’s not what I meant. Why didn’t you answer the other questions?”
      Leo shifted in his seat and moved the broken zipper at the top of his backpack. “Dunno.”
      “How are you going to get anywhere in life if you don’t apply yourself at school?”
      Another shrug.
      “Look, you don’t pay attention in class. You stare out the window when I’m explaining things. Or else you doodle in that sketchpad of yours. No wonder you don’t know any of the answers.”
      “I knew three of them.”
      “Give me the sketchpad.” “What? Why?” “Because I want to see it.” “But why?”
      “Just give it to me.”
      Leo realized there was no way out of this. He sighed to let his teacher know he was not happy about giving up his sketchpad, and then jammed a hand into his backpack, found it and handed it over.
     “Thank you,” Warren said. “I’ll just keep this until the end of the semester.”
     “But—”
     “No buts.” Warren put up a hand to show Leo that he was indeed the person in charge. “And I’m going to call your parents.”
     “Good luck. My dad’s in jail.”
     “Oh.” Warren didn’t know that. “Well, what about your mom?”
      Leo laughed. “My mom split when I was like six.”
      Warren was shocked. “So… who do you live with?”
      The boy knew, at that very moment, that he had given away exactly too much information. He did not want his teacher, or any other adult, getting the idea that he was living alone because, well, kids his age weren’t supposed to live alone. Even though that’s precisely what he was doing. “Uh,” he said, thinking, thinking, “my aunt. Oleta.”
      Warren eyeballed him. “You don’t have an Aunt Oleta.”
     “Yes, I do.”
     “Fine. Then let’s go to the office and call her.”* Warren stood to emphasize his conviction.
     “Wull…” the wheels in Leo’s brain were spinning, “she’s at work… and she can’t take personal calls. At her work.”
     Warren narrowed his gaze. “Uh-huh. Where’s she work?”
     “She works… at a high-security prison.”
     “You’re lying, aren’t you?”
     “Absolutely not.”
     “You’re living by yourself, aren’t you?”
     “No.”
     His teacher continued to stare at him until he felt like an ant on the sidewalk beneath a magnifying glass. It was all entirely uncomfortable and he wished he could slink down in his seat and squirm away, disappear. But he couldn’t. And, finally, it was too much. “Okay, yeah. So what?” His tone was defiant to be sure, but his eyes brimmed with tears that verged on rolling down his cheeks.
     To the So what? Warren didn’t answer right away. He saw that Leo was about to cry, and suddenly his heart broke. He knew that if someone didn’t help this kid, he’d grow up to be a pitiful adult. He’d follow in his father’s rotten footsteps, and there he’d be, one more misguided miserable soul taking up space in the universe and, probably, the nation’s penal system.
     So Warren decided to offer him an alternative: He could stay at Warren’s house—until they figured out something better. But he knew full well that Leo would say no, and that he, Warren, would then have to call Social Services to have him placed in a foster home. It was not something he was looking forward to.  
     Still, he gave it a shot. He asked.  
     “Sure,” Leo said.
     “Then you leave me no choice but to call—” Warren stopped. “Wait, what?”
     “I said sure. I’ll stay with you.”
     “Oh.”
     There it was.
     So Warren took Leo home, where, that night, the boy sat down to his first home-cooked meal in a long time. A long time because, even before his loser of a father went to jail, the man seldom cooked meals. At first, Warren was just going to heat up some take-out food because that was one thing he had plenty of. But when he saw how hungry the kid was, he decided to cook up some hamburgers and make macaroni and cheese. Then after dinner, they made brownies. And, yes, it may sound like an ordinary meal to you—it was hardly chateaubriand or duck l’orange—but Leo loved it, savored every bite of the juicy burger, smothered in mustard and catsup, and, believe it or not, he very nearly came close to actually smiling when he bit into the first of the fresh brownies they’d baked.
     He, of course, would never say how much he appreciated everything, but he did. Even though plenty of kids fantasize about living in a house without parents or adults telling them to do all the useless stuff they tell them to do—like brush their teeth and take out the trash and mow the lawn and pull the weeds—those who really do live on their own don’t seem to like it at all. At all. And Leo was altogether sick and tired of the whole thing. It was a lot of trouble, a lot of work, trying to keep food in the cupboards and the fridge. And he hated having to search through the clothes hamper for shirts and pants and socks that looked less dirty than what he was wearing. He was sick of avoiding phone calls from people who wanted to be paid for things that his father hadn’t paid for and he, Leo, had no idea how to pay for them. The electric company had just shut off the electricity and the water company was threatening to shut off the water and the phone quit working. But, most of all, he’d really had it with trying to keep everything a secret from everyone.   

                                                              * * *

     Beneath a large cozy red comforter, Leo drifted off to sleep on Warren’s couch. Warren smiled when he saw the boy sleeping so soundly, and then turned off the living room lights.
      Then he took Leo’s sketchpad to bed with him. He wanted to find out what Leo was so busy doing when he should have been paying attention to what was being said in class.
      After he brushed his teeth and put on his pajamas, Warren turned on his bedside lamp, pulled back the sheets to his bed, climbed in and began to leaf through the book. But, where he expected to see silly drawings and doodles and the senseless scribbles of an eleven-year-old boy, he saw something quite different. Something astounding in fact.
     He was amazed and captivated, and he became even more amazed as he turned from one page to the next. What he saw were intricate sketches of gadgets and gizmos and incredible machines that didn’t actually exist—at least not in 1989. The boy had drawn them as though they were patents or blueprints for some kind of official government project. And though there were far too many sketches and ideas to describe here, a few of the more spectacular ones included a stationary bicycle that generated more energy than was exerted. The bike was attached to a massive series of interlocking cogwheels and counterweights that created their own “internal tension.” So, according to Leo’s notes, someone could pedal the bike for, say, half an hour, and the internal tension would build exponentially, creating enough electricity to power a home for several months.
      On the following page, Leo had drawn a train that never had to stop to let passengers on or off because of a detachable sidecar that caught up with it, exchanged passengers and then returned to the train station.**  
     There was a telescope that saw into the past. If you pointed it down your street, for instance, you’d see your street the way it looked a hundred years earlier. It worked, as the drawing showed, by a series of concave and convex pieces of glass that “filtered out the faster moleckular [sic] vibrations of newer stuff” until the only images left were those of objects that had been in place for more than a century.
     There were other pages where Leo had written down one incredible idea after the next—with, okay, an awful lot of misspelled words, but incredible nonetheless. One such entry was something he called “Circular Energy.” Warren had to read it twice to figure out if it was just nonsense or too complicated for him to grasp. According to Leo’s writing, time and… well, here’s what Leo wrote:

Which is why—as Leo went on to explain—things change, but seem to stay the same. So that… throughout time, for instance, different people exist in different shapes, different sizes, different bodies… but they’re not really any different than they were.
     Whether nonsense or not, it was all very heady stuff. Brilliant stuff. But here’s the thing that Warren couldn’t shake, the thing that kept gnawing at him: This is the kid who’s failing my social studies class?     

                                                     * * *

     He did not wait until the end of the semester to give the sketchpad back to Leo. He gave it to him the next morning, and asked him how he came up with all of the contraptions and machines and theories. The boy shrugged and stuffed it into his backpack. “Eh,” he said, “my dad thinks it’s stupid.”
     “Well, your dad’s wrong.”


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* This was, of course, in the days before cell phones, and obviously way before the electronic ear chips of the late 21st century.

** These nonstop trains, Streamlines, would of course become commonplace in the United States and most industrialized nations, but not until nearly a hundred years after Leo drew the sketches.

                          Chapter Five

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Copyright © 2009 by Russ Woody

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