Closer To Heaven - Patrick Sean Lee (rosie project .txt) 📗

didn’t want to come loose, and once I’d gotten them out, I skinned my knuckle trying to pull the cover off. Pretty soon we had the thing all torn apart and all the wires showing. It was like looking at a bowl of black and white and red spaghetti!

“Now, do this,” Jerrick said. “Take all the white ones and twist them together. After you get them all together, do the same with the black ones. I think.”

I tried to twist all the white wires together, but there were so many that it was hard. “Why do I have to do this? I’m not strong enough!” I said.

“Just do the best you can. Make sure all the copper is connected.”

“What’s the copper? There are only white ones and red ones and black ones, and some of those blue ones. But not too many of those.”

Jerrick explained what copper was, and so I twisted and twisted and twisted all of the white wires together. After that, I did the same with the black ones.

“What about the red ones?” I asked.

“Leave them. I don’t know what they do.”

I knew Jerrick was smart, but I began to wonder if this would work. Jerrick handed me a big, fat extension cord that he’d cut one of the ends off of. I saw a black wire, a white one, and a copper one with no color or anything covering it. He had me hook the white wire into the big bunch of white wires I’d twisted a minute ago, and the black ones the same. Finally I twisted the copper ones all together. He had the plug-in end in his hand, and when I finished, he asked me if any of the wires were touching.

“They’re ALL touching,” I said. “You told me to…” He explained that we just didn’t want any white ones touching any black ones, and none of those touching the copper ones without the covering. Just to be safe, he had me wrap this black tape around each bundle so that none of them could touch even if they wanted to. It was all very confusing, but he seemed to know most of the stuff about all those wires, except the red ones, and finally he told me to find a switch on the generator, turn it to on, and then stand way back.

Lashawna had woken by then and had come out to see what we were doing.

“Hi guys. Wow! You hooked it all up?” she said with a big smile on her face.

“I hope we got it right. What will happen if we didn’t do it right,” I called back to Jerrick. He was getting ready to pull the cord that would make the generator go.

“Nothing. If it’s wrong, we just won’t have any electricity. But I think it’s right.”

“Will it explode?” Lashawna said. She grabbed my arm. We were ten of twenty feet away from Jerrick. Jerrick pulled hard on the cord, and the generator engine started to run. Slowly at first, and then faster and faster.

“Go in and try the lights,” he yelled because the noise was a lot. Both Lashawna and I ran into the house. I turned the kitchen light switch on. Nothing happened. I went to the toaster while Lashawna ran to the bedroom to flip switches in there. I pushed the toaster bar down. It stayed down and the tiny wires inside where the bread goes began to glow! And then I noticed the lights on the microwave nearby blinking. I heard the refrigerator come on.

Electricity!

I heard Lashawna scream. “The light is on! The light is on!”

She ran back to the kitchen. We jumped up and down and hugged one another and danced in circles. Now we could make hot soup! Lashawna and I ran outside. Jerrick was still standing next to the generator, with his ear pointed down at it. I think he was happy that it was running! We told him how almost all the lights worked, and that the microwave and the toaster worked, too. I thought of the TV and VCR. If we could get those on, we could watch movies. It was all so exciting.

We were just ready to run back inside and make something hot for breakfast, though none of us was sure what that might be, when the generator started to make a funny, screeching noise. We turned back, and I saw a little puff of gray smoke come out of the top of it. The engine made a few louder screeching noises…Jerrick ran toward it…and then it stopped. More gray smoke came out.

“What the…?” Jerrick said.

“What happened?” I screamed. Lashawna put her hands on her cheeks and made a big “O” with her mouth. Jerrick knelt down next to the generator and I could see him sniffing at it. Then he sat back on his haunches and began shaking his head.

“What is it, Jerrick? Why did it stop? How come there’s smoke coming out of it?”

Lashawna stopped at the generator and stared at it. I knelt down next to Jerrick and put my hand on his knee. He was very sad looking, and his eyes looked like they wanted to cry.

“What?” I said softly.

“I burned it up. I should have thought. I was in a hurry and forgot all about the one thing the generator needs that it didn’t have, and that we were supposed to supply.” He stopped, cringed, and then hit the sides of his head with both hands.

“What?” I asked.

“Oil! The generator is an internal combustion engine—just like a car or a lawnmower! I should have known. I did know! I just forgot to think about that. Now it’s ruined.”

“What if we put some in…where does it go?” Lashawna joined us.

“No use. Don’t you smell it?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Yes,” Lashawna said as well.

“It’s fried. Burned up. It’s gone.”

We were all sad for a while, but not for too long. We’d burned up the generator. We knew that, but it was Lashawna who came to our rescue. We had all gone inside, but no one was hungry. Just sad at first.

“So what if we made a mistake and forgot to put oil inside it? Who cares? We’ll just go back to Home Depot and get another one. This time we’ll put oil in it before we start it up, and then we won’t have to worry ever again!”

“Yes! And I’ll even crawl under a car and get more gas in another bucket, and then help Jerrick fill up the tank so that we don’t spill the gas all over the new one and the grass! We’ll have lots and lots of gas and a brand new generator. And then we’ll make lunch!”

This made Jerrick very happy. He sat back in his chair at the kitchen table and smiled.

“You stay here this time, Jerrick. We won’t need you to help us. We’ll take the wagon and me and Lashawna will hurry back home with the generator. While we’re gone, you can clean the house, okay?”

“Make sure you read the instructions in the generator package. See what kind of oil it needs. Once you know which weight, you can get some from the mini-mart or any gas station. They’ll have lots. If there’s an auto store in the shopping center, they’ll have lots there too.”

Will the things of oil say weight on them? Are they heavy and light, or…” I started to say.

“They’re all marked. 5, 30, and so on. Just get the one we need, and make sure you get enough.”

Both Lashawna and I understood, and so we left Jerrick sitting in the kitchen to go shopping again.

“Should we stop at Target again and get more clothes?” I asked her on the way.

“Only if we promise one another not to spend too much time,” she laughed.

I promised, but I crossed my fingers.

 

I found a wristwatch that I could wind up and make work at Target. It was a Little Mermaid one, which would have to do. I set it at nine o’clock. At ten o’clock we left and went to Home Depot with all our clothes and some toys piled into one of their buggies. By twelve o’clock we had gotten everything back home, and that included ten plastic bottles of number 30 oil, but no gas because we were late already. There was lots left in the big bucket, and I decided to go later and get more if we started to run out.

Jerrick came out as soon as we returned, and he wasn’t angry at all. He had figured something out while we’d been shopping, he said. Lashawna and I pulled our wagon with the new generator in it over beside the burned up one, and Jerrick told us to find the “oil port”.

“It’ll say oil right on top or else below it, I think,” he said.

We found it, pulled the plug out, and then put in as much oil as would go until it ran out the top of the opening, which was very small.

“Done!” I said.

Jerrick plugged the cord into the machine, and then we poured gas into the top with our funnel. Pretty soon this one was puffing away like it was as happy as a kitten. Instead of running inside, though, we stayed beside it and smelled. I looked at my watch. After nine and a half minutes, Jerrick decided that this time our generator would be okay, and finally, finally we all ran into the house to see our lights and toaster and microwave. We were so very delighted and happy and I made hot soup for our lunch. We ate at twelve-thirty, and the vegetable soup I made was so, so good.

After lunch Lashawna and I cleaned the dishes and put them in the cupboard. Jerrick went outside to check the generator. I could hear it chugging away through the open door. That was good, I thought.

Jerrick returned and told us we needed to find out which outlets were working, and which weren’t. We used a lamp to plug into each outlet. All of them were fine. It was just the ceiling lights that wouldn’t come on, but we didn’t mind that so much. We had lots of lamps, and if we wanted more, we knew exactly where to go to find them! After we’d checked all the plugs in the walls, Jerrick picked up the TV remote in Father’s bedroom and clicked “on”. The screen got bright, but all there was only a snowstorm.

“Find the DVR remote,” he said.

Lashawna found it and clicked the power button. All of this was easy. We’d all done it a million times in our old houses. She opened the DVR and put a movie in. “The War of the Worlds” with Tom Cruise. It was a scary movie, but I’d seen it with Daddy and Momma at home, and I liked it. So we spent the afternoon lying on the end of the bed watching it. After I went into the kitchen and made Orville Redenbacher Popcorn, of course! The refrigerator was working again, and so I put water and Pepsis and Cokes inside for later.

We were in heaven.

Jerrick couldn’t see anything, but he listened and asked Lashawna and me to describe the creatures and their spaceships and the boat with all the cars and people on it. And what certain noises were about, too. I felt sorry that he couldn’t see what was going on; only hear it. It must not have bothered him so much, though, because every time I described something, he got a big grin on his face, and seemed to listen harder. Maybe he could see it in a funny, blind way in his head.

We watched two more movies, “Life of Pi”, about a boy and a tiger in a boat. That was good! The other was “Hunger Games,” and I liked it a lot, too.

“We need more things,” Lashawna said later. We had finished watching the movies and Jerrick had me put in another movie from Father’s