Illustration by Hayley Faelourn" Millward
It made a kind of squeaking sound and pitched forward—some of the leather parts I guess I hadn’t oiled well enough. Steam puffed out of a valve in its shoulder, and I was too afraid to reach out and close it. It trembled, and a sound came from inside its throat that reminded me of a dog growling. That scared me.
The steam wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t losing too much. And anyway, I knew it probably wouldn’t explode, so that was good.
Then it started to make a sound kinda like “Gah gah gah,” but not like a baby, more like a crow, but lower. I didn’t think I’d made it with such a deep voice. I didn’t really want it to have such a deep voice. I didn’t have a deep voice.
It was looking down with both of its eyes, then it looked up with one of them, its left, but not the right. It looked weird.
“Make the eyes move together,” I whispered to myself so I wouldn’t forget, and it must have heard me.
Its left eye moved to stare at me then its right slowly turned up, rotating a little too freely in its socket, and found me, too. It blinked, brass shutters closing around them—I’d had to use camera shutters, which didn’t look too natural, but when it blinked once it seemed like its eyes fixed together, and I didn’t have to adjust them after that. It didn’t strike me then as particularly weird that it managed to adjust its own eyes. All of it was pretty weird, anyway.
It made another sort of “gah gah gah,” sound as it looked at me. I couldn’t tell what it was trying to say. It didn’t really have any kind of facial expressions. I hadn’t really figured out how to do that. Maybe, like it did with its eyes, it would just figure that out on its own.
“Are you okay?” I asked it. “Can you understand me, and stuff?”
It twitched and that startled me. I laughed as the blood swirled around in my head. I always laughed after something startled me. I couldn’t help it.
“Gah gah gah.”
“I don’t know what that means,” I said. “Do you know where you are?”
“Gah.”
I guess I couldn’t have expected it to know where it was: in my garage in New Jersey.
“Gah,” it said again. “Gah gah gah.”
Well, I thought, anyway, it worked. It was mostly working. I had made a friend.
* * * * *
I had had a few real friends, but not too many. We moved around too much for me to make too many friends. We’d lived in North Carolina—that’s where I was born—and Georgia, and Louisiana, and Texas, and Washington State, and Tennessee, then New Jersey. My father was a sergeant in the army. He was what they called a “career man,” which is when you join the army then never un-join it.
When the War to End All Wars started in Germany, he went there. Almost exactly a year later, a man came to our house and told my mother that my father was a hero, and he had died for his country. I guess she didn’t think that was a good enough reason for him to die, because she spent the next few days crying.
At his funeral she told one of her friends, whose husband was also a career man, that she only hoped that in the end, my father wasn’t too frightened. There was a lot about the funeral I didn’t understand, but that in particular. You see, my father was never frightened by anything. My mother seemed to be frightened all the time, of everything, and I get frightened sometimes, too—of other kids at school, my third grade teacher Mrs. Carmichael, or that dog that lived next door to us in Tennessee—but my father was frightened of nothing. That mouse that got into the kitchen, or spiders, or being in the army—he just took care of them. The war was probably scary for everyone but him.
No one explained to me how he died, exactly, just that it was in the war. Whatever it was, I knew for sure it didn’t scare him. Not him.
Also at the funeral I heard one of my father’s army friends say that there wasn’t enough left of my father to bury. Where had the rest of him gone? Anyway, what they gave to my mother for the funeral was a fancy-looking jar they said was full of ashes. They had burned him up, somehow, all the way, so all he was was ashes. My mother put the jar up on the mantle and used to stare at it and cry.
The funeral was February, 1916, and the war was over in April.
* * * * *
About a year later, in May of 1917, I was in my German class and the teacher assigned us to pick out a German magazine, find an article that interested us, and translate it into English. It was a pretty hard assignment, but the teacher was nice, and I was pretty good at learning German. My mother hated that I had to go to German class, but all the kids had to go, and I kinda liked it.
The article I picked out was about the thing they called “Waffe, um alle Waffen zu beenden,” which means “weapon to finish all weapons,” or “weapon to end all weapons.” Something like that. I had never heard of it before, but it was the thing that finally made the war end.
The Germans were the first to build automatons. They called them Soldat-mechanisch—mechanical soldiers—metal men who were immune to the poison gas. The first generation of them were powered by gasoline, but those exploded, or at least lit on fire when they got shot, and they ran out of gas really soon. Then they started to make them steam powered and they stopped lighting on fire. They could get blown up by bombs or shot by guns, but afterward there wouldn’t be a funeral.
The Weapon to End All Weapons was different, though. It didn’t look like a person. It was just a train, but all of the cars were great big bombs. The Germans drove the train into the middle of Paris and blew it up—the train and Paris. All of Paris. And in a few days the war was over, and though a million people died in and around Paris, which is in France, millions more lives were saved in other places, including New Jersey. The world was saved.
I couldn’t really understand the Weapon to End All Weapons. It was too big for me, and too strange, and too scary, but the mechanical soldiers were different. I stared at the pictures of them, studying every detail. They went to war without ever being frightened, and if they stopped working, no one cried. Maybe they got repaired and were fine, or anyway they never ended up in jars on the mantle. They were perfect.
I started collecting more magazines and even some books about mechanical soldiers and other automatons. For the whole summer, it was all I could think about. Then I started building one.
* * * * *
By Thanksgiving my friend had been working for a week or so, and I kept fiddling with it, but still all it could say was “gah gah gah.” It looked at stuff and staggered around, but didn’t seem to know what to do. When I talked to it, it looked like it was listening to me, but when I told it stuff, nothing seemed to make much of an impression.
Every day on my way home from school I walked by Cannelli’s Pet Shop. I was never allowed to have a pet, because of moving around and stuff, so I never bothered to go in there. One day between Thanksgiving and Christmas I was thinking about my friend and about how stupid he seemed, and was trying to figure out how to fix him, when I went past the pet shop. They had a cat in a cage in the window and inside the store were two girls I knew from school. They were looking at the cat and talking to it, and that made me stop and think.
I looked in the window at them and watched them trying to get the cat’s attention, and sometimes it would glance at them sideways, but mostly it just licked itself and looked around. My friend didn’t lick himself, but he did spend a lot of time just looking around.
One of the girls had once called me a collaborator, so I waited in the alley for them to leave before I went in. The lady who worked there, I guess she was Mrs. Cannelli, didn’t seem to notice me at first but I got her attention and asked her why the cat didn’t seem to be paying attention to the girls. She looked at me funny and so I said, “Why don’t cats understand people?”
Mrs. Cannelli shrugged and said, “It’s cause they ain’t got souls.”
In school once the teacher told us about this guy who sat in a bathtub and had what you call a “eureka moment.” That’s what I had right then. I eurekaed that my friend had no soul.
* * * * *
My mother didn’t like it in New Jersey. She wasn’t from there, and she would say things about the people, like that they weren’t very nice and that they talked funny, but they sounded fine to me. She was right about some of them not being nice, though, like the other kids at school or in German class. Some of the kids used to pick on me and threaten to beat me up because I was good at German. They called me a traitor, which I wasn’t, and a collaborator, which I don’t think I was. I’m still not sure what that word means.
She wanted to move back to where she was from, originally, which is Chicago, but we couldn’t because of something called the economy.
We also stayed because she had a job, and jobs weren’t that easy to find. She worked overtime sometimes, for extra money, and even though we always still didn’t have enough money, that was okay with me. It gave me more time at the library to study spiritualism, which only made the kids at school hate me even more. One of them added the word “atheist” to traitor and collaborator. I didn’t know what that word meant either.
One of the families across the street moved away, and they put a FOR SALE sign in the front window. A couple weeks later a new family moved in. I wasn’t really paying attention, and didn’t see them. I was busy working in the garage. But one day I heard my mother talking about them with one of the other neighbor ladies. The new family had moved from Germany. The father worked in the Reparation Ministry. I’m not sure exactly what that is, but it didn’t sound so bad. It sounded like they repaired stuff.
I saw a boy about my age come out of the house one day when I was leaving for school. I walked on my side of the street and he walked on his. We looked at each other, and I kept waiting for him to say something, but he didn’t. When he walked past the Santellis’ house, Frank Santelli, who was lots older than me, threw something out the window. It hit the kid on the head and burst. The kid made a funny sound, put a hand on his head, and ran over to my side of the street. He looked at me like I was going to shoot him, so I said in German that it was all right, and that Frank Santelli was a jerk, and maybe we should run the rest of the way to school.
“Wir?” he asked, which is German for “we.”
I shrugged and nodded and we started running.
His name was Eugen Offerman, and he was an okay kid. The thing that Frank Santelli threw at him was a light bulb. Eugen was lucky it didn’t cut him. And anyway, who throws light bulbs at people?
* * * * *
On the two year anniversary of my father’s funeral my mother came into the garage when I was working on my friend. I had taken him apart, so you would have to look closely to see he was an automaton. I figured she couldn’t tell what I was working on.
She asked me what I was doing, and called me “honey.” I told her I was working on a project for school. It didn’t seem like she was even listening. She told me I looked skinny, and that I should eat more, so I told her I would, then she said she’d made dinner and I should come in and eat it. I said, “Okay,” put an old sheet over my disassembled friend and went with her to eat dinner. We went in through the living room and I noticed that the urn with my father’s ashes in it was gone. It wasn’t on the mantle anymore.
I sat down and started eating dinner with her and after a while I asked her about the ashes. She said it had been two years, so she’d put them away. Then she wasn’t hungry anymore. She got up, and I think she was crying. I wasn’t hungry in the first place so I went back to the garage.
I didn’t have a chance to ask her where she’d put the ashes.
* * * * *
The next day I left for school at the regular time, but I didn’t wait for the bus. I kept walking and went around the block, came back then ran across the street and hid behind our neighbor’s stoop. I waited there for my mother to come out to go to work. When she came out, she looked old and tired. She looked down as she walked to the bus stop, watching the tips of her toes. I let her turn the corner then I went back into the house.
I started to look for the urn but it wasn’t in any of the places I thought it would be. I was sure it would be in one of the drawers in the old bureau in my parents’ room that used to have my father’s things in them, but it wasn’t. I did find some letters, mostly from him from when he was away with the Army at different times, and there was a bunch of newer envelopes. I don’t know why they caught my eye, but I looked at them and they were all from places named after two, three, or four people who were attorneys at law or realtors. I’m not a hundred percent sure what those are, and why they were writing letters to my mother, but they were all from Chicago.
The letters made me feel weird for no reason, so I left them there and went back to looking for the ashes.
Two hours later I found my father’s ashes on the very top shelf of the pantry. I had to stand on a chair to get them down and almost dropped the urn. That just about gave me a heart attack. But I didn’t drop it. I took the urn to the garage.
* * * * *
Even though it made even more kids call me even more names even more often, Eugen and I started eating lunch together at school. He was having trouble learning English, so I helped him, and he helped me learn more German words. None of the other kids even looked at us after a few weeks—they seemed to be afraid of Eugen for some reason, though he never did or said anything scary.
After a while, I invited Eugen to come over, and I showed him what I was working on. He really liked it and started to help me. He didn’t know much about steam power, but helped me with some of the gear work. I didn’t tell him about the ashes, and the spiritualism. It made me embarrassed. He just thought it was a fun project.
* * * * *
“Can you hear me?” I asked my friend the automaton.
He looked at me. His left eye wasn’t open all the way, but I knew he could see me. He nodded, gears whirring, a little puff of steam escaping from the valve behind his right ear.
“Can you talk?” I asked. “Can you say ‘hello’?”
He blinked at me, and I watched to see if his eyes would fix themselves like they used to, but the left one still didn’t open all the way.
I had a screwdriver in my hand and reached out to look at the shutter on his left eye, but he flinched away and steam hissed out from both sides of his head. It startled me.
My friend said, “Don’t kill me.”
His voice rumbled. It was too deep. I didn’t know how to fix that.
“I’m not going to kill you,” I said. “I made you. I was just going to fix your eye.”
He shook his head and asked, “Where am I?”
I told him he was in my garage, and answered a few more questions. I told him who I was, that we were in New Jersey, stuff like that.
“Do I have a name?” he asked.
I shrugged and said, “Petey,” having just made that up off the top of my head.
He nodded again, and from then on, his name was Petey, and he was my best and only friend. Well, only friend other than Eugen.
* * * * *
For the rest of the school year, I would come home every day and do my homework in the garage with Petey and sometimes Petey and Eugen. I read stuff out loud and Petey was curious about everything we were doing. I taught him how to read, and he learned in just a couple weeks, which was faster than I learned how to read—it was almost as if he already knew how to do it, but needed to be reminded. He was only so-so in math. I was pretty good at it.
“That’s not true,” Petey said one day when I was reading him my history chapter. There was going to be a quiz the next day. “That’s not how that happened.”
“But it’s in the book,” I said.
Petey shook his head, and from then on when we worked on history he would argue with everything, but he never could tell me what the real history was, just that the book was wrong. I have to admit, I believed the books.
When summer vacation came, we stopped reading history all together, and Petey seemed fine with that. But he didn’t seem fine with Eugen. Petey didn’t say much when Eugen was around. I think he was afraid of Eugen. Petey wasn’t used to other people.
* * * * *
I taught Petey how to play hide and seek. He wasn’t very good at it because every time he moved he made loud whirring sounds, but I pretended not to know where he was. We had fun. One day Eugen had come over and I said he should hide, too, but then Petey came out and said he didn’t want to play anymore.
“Come on, Petey,” I said, “it’s more fun with more than two people, anyway.”
“I’m not playing with that Kraut,” he said.
My cheeks got hot and I felt a tingle in my hair. I looked at Eugen then looked away.
“Petey . . .” I said, but wasn’t sure what to say next.
Petey whirred and clicked his way to the corner where he had a stack of old newspapers from when the war was still on. He liked to read them—he spent hours reading them, sometimes the same ones over and over.
“It’s all right,” Eugen said. “I have homework, anyplace.”
“Anyway,” I said.
Eugen nodded and left, glancing at Petey. I could tell his feelings were hurt.
“Petey,” I asked when Eugen was gone, “where did you learn that word?”
“What word?”
“K—” I had trouble saying it. I didn’t like it, and it was against the law to say it, but I whispered it so he knew what I was talking about.
Petey looked at me, his right eye all the way open, his left eye almost completely closed—he still wouldn’t let me fix it.
“He’s German,” I said, “but it’s okay. The war’s over.”
Petey turned away and went back to reading his papers.
* * * * *
A few days later I came home from school and went right to the garage. Petey wasn’t there. I called his name—I could do that because my mother wasn’t home yet. I thought he might be hiding. At first I played along, listening for him to give himself away. I didn’t hear anything, and that made me worried. I looked under everything he might have gotten under, behind everything he might have gotten behind, and on top of everything he might have climbed on. He wasn’t there.
That was when I realized that I hadn’t only made a friend, I’d made a secret. Eugen Offerman was the only other person in the whole wide world that knew Petey existed. The Germans had brought automatons with them, and rich people in New York were starting to buy them to work in their houses or drive their cars, but in my neighborhood in New Jersey, people still didn’t have money for that kind of thing.
“Hi,” Petey said from behind me and I just about jumped out of my skin. When he realized he’d scared me he said, “Sorry.”
“Gee, Petey, where were you?”
His right eye irised closed then open, his left eye opened a little bit more, and a puff of steam came out of the valve on the top of his head. I had come to recognize that as him not wanting to say what was on his mind.
* * * * *
The next day there were police cars, and cars from some of the German ministries, all over our street. All the neighbors came out to see what was going on, including my mother. It was Saturday so a lot of people were around. Right away I had this feeling that Petey had done something bad, even though I didn’t want that to be. If Petey did something bad, was it my fault?
There was a ruckus at Eugen’s house when their front door opened. Eugen came out, holding the hand of a stern-looking man in a black suit with a German flag pin on his lapel. The neighbors started buzzing and more than one of them said something like, “Krauts,” or “Jerrys,” and that kind of stuff—and a few words I hadn’t heard before. Eugen was led by the hand toward a big black car. I’d never seen a car like it before, but the driver was what really caught my eye. The driver was an automaton.
My heart skipped a beat. It was impressive—as big as a grown man and made of smooth leather and polished brass. Very little steam escaped, both its eyes blinked in time, and its head was fashioned like a chauffer’s cap. It was magnificent.
Eugen stopped before he got into the car, and he looked at me. His eyes were red and puffy. I waved at him and smiled, but he didn’t wave or smile back. He just turned away and got into the car with the stern-looking German minister.
“Did you hear what happened?” my mother asked me. I’d forgotten she was standing right next to me. “The German man was murdered.”
“Stabbed with one of his own kitchen knives,” one of the neighbor ladies added.
“Good enough for a lousy Kraut,” her husband said.
All I could think of was Petey, and the look on Eugen’s face.
* * * * *
“I think Eugen is going to tell on us,” I told Petey as soon as I could get back to the garage.
Three puffs of steam came from each side of his head—he was thinking.
I was going to ask him if he’d done something bad to Eugen’s father but it came out: “You did something bad to Eugen’s father.”
Petey closed his right eye completely, but his left eye stayed open a little.
“They’re still counting the dead in Paris,” Petey said. “Did you know that?”
“The war’s over,” I told him.
Petey shook his head with a grinding sound that made me wince and said, “They’re war criminals. They did things and created things that shouldn’t have been created. They murdered whole cities.”
“Just Paris,” I argued, but it sounded strange to say it.
Petey released steam from his head. “Help me,” Petey said.
“I can hide you,” I said. “I can help you hide, if the police come looking for you—if Eugen says anything.”
“No,” Petey replied. “I mean, help me fight.”
“The war’s over,” I said again.
“Not as long as there’s a Kraut alive on American soil.”
I shuddered when he said that, and goose bumps broke out all over me.
“Eugen was our friend,” I told him, not realizing I’d spoken of our friendship in the past tense.
“He was no friend of mine,” Petey said.
“Fine, then, he was my friend.”
“No,” Petey said, and the sound of his voice made my heart sink. “I forbid it.” He sounded just like my father.
“The war’s over,” I whispered.
Petey shook his head and released a little more steam. “I’m not the only one who’s willing to fight for his country. There are patriots left.”
I was breathing funny—only breathing in, in little gasps. I couldn’t say anything, couldn’t tell Petey again that the war was over, that enough people had died, that Eugen was my friend and his father couldn’t be all bad. Eventually it just had to be over, win or lose.
At the exact same second I made the decision to dismantle Petey, I heard my mother calling my name. She sounded frightened. Then a man said something I couldn’t hear, then another man said, “Open it,” in a very heavy German accent.
“Hide,” I said to Petey before I even had time to think.
Petey whirred and squeaked and clanked, but not as loudly as he used to. His left eye still didn’t open all the way.
“Petey,” I said, “don’t hurt anybody.”
Petey turned his back on me and started digging under a pile of old blankets—one of his favorite places to hide when we used to play hide and seek.
“Dad,” I whispered. “Don’t . . .”—and the garage door opened.
The sunlight made me blink.
“I told you there’s nothing in here,” my mother said to the three men with her—two county policemen and another stern-faced German in a black suit. “See, no one’s in here—just my son.”
“This is your son?” one of the policemen said, pointing at me.
“Yes, he is,” my mother answered. She shooed me toward the house, but I didn’t go.
“You have a mechanical boy in here, eh, junge?” the German man asked me. The policemen looked at him with angry faces when he talked to me, and so did my mother. “A little Soldat-mechanisch of your own, eh?”
I shook my head, but I knew he could tell I was lying.
They searched and they searched for hours, but they didn’t find Petey. Finally they gave my mother some papers and went away. She sent me to my room and later that night I could hear her crying again, but still she didn’t believe them.
* * * * *
The next morning, my mother started making breakfast in complete silence and I sat at my place in the table, dressed for school, not hungry, and I had no idea what to say.
She cracked an egg into the skillet and as it hissed and popped she said, “I got a new job.”
I think she was waiting for me to say something, but I honestly didn’t care what her job was. She never seemed to care what her job was, either.
“Did you hear me?” she asked, and I nodded. “I’ll be a secretary in the office of a very prominent attorney. You know what an attorney is, right? A lawyer?”
I didn’t, really, but I nodded again anyway.
“It’s in Chicago,” she said. “We’re moving back to Chicago as soon a possible. They want me to start as soon as possible. We’ll leave as soon as possible.”
I looked up at her but her back was to me. She was cooking the egg too much. I didn’t like them cooked too much. But I nodded one more time. I wasn’t hungry, anyway.
“We’ll take the train,” she promised.
* * * * *
Two weeks later the German Merchant’s Association Hall in Manhattan exploded and a hundred and fourteen people were killed. All over the city, Germans and people the neighbors called collaborators were found murdered. I learned more new words from a newspaper I read on the train to Chicago: “resistance,” “freedom-fighters,” “underground,” and, “terrorist.”
I guess the war wasn’t over after all.
END
