Drago #5 (#2b). Art Inc. Spinella
on occasion, but not often enough to get the former Colleen O’Shaugnasee’s own Irish temper up.
"How big's a billion?"
Tim Davis thought about the question then pushed away from the table. "Follow me."
Colleen scowled, “Be back in 10 minutes. Dinner’ll be on the table.”
Father and son walked into the yard, across the country lawn to a large wooden barn. The paint was fresh. Brick red. White trim. Neat and thick with 150 years worth of paint.
"Go out to the garden. Mom has a sand pile to mix with dirt for the vegetables. Bring me back one grain of sand. Just one."
Jolly learned long ago that his father always taught a lesson with some hands on demonstration. When he asked how the tractor’s diesel engine worked, pops made him pull a glow plug on his own. Not only did he learn to use a wrench, he began to understand that it took the glow plug to ignite the fuel to make the pistons go up and down.
The 12-year-old grabbed a hand full of sand and pulled his pocket knife from his jeans. Used his teeth to unfold the blade. He licked the tip of the blade and touched the point into the handful of sand. He checked the blade and saw there were quite a few grains stuck to the shiny steel point. Jolly dropped the handful of sand and wiped his palm on his pants. With his tongue clamped between his teeth, Jolly began fingering excess sand from the blade until he had about a dozen grains. He carefully flicked at them until there was only one.
Being careful not to drop the lone grain, Jolly walked back to the barn where his dad stood in the doorway watching.
"Got it," Jolly said, satisfied he'd accomplished a magical feat. "Mighty small, pops."
"How much does it weight, you think?"
Jolly pushed the sand into the palm of his hand and made a weighing motion with his palm. Up and down. Up and down. "Nothing, pops."
"Okay, put it right here," patting the top of a six-by-six that once was a hitching post.
Slowly tipping his palm sideway, Jolly used the index finger on his other hand to carefully scrape the grain of sand onto the post.
"Now get the shovel and those five pails and bring them over to the garden."
Jolly grabbed the old shovel and picked up two steel buckets by their handles. Tim Davis was already standing next to the sand pile, arms crossed, a smile on his lips. His son dropped off the two pails and the shovel and returned to the barn to grab three more containers.
"Line 'em up next to each other," Davis said.
Jolly did as told and set them one by the other in a row.
"Now, fill each of them with sand right up to the top."
It took Jolly only five minutes to shovel sand into the pails then stood waiting for his next order.
"Haul them back to the barn."
It took three trips, but shortly the five containers of sand were hip to jowl next to the hitching post.
"What do you figure those buckets weigh?" Davis leaned against the barn door and watched.
Jolly picked up a bucket and hefted it like someone would a barbell. "Four, maybe five pounds, I'd guess."
"Times five."
The 12 year old knew his multiplication as good as any kid his age.
"20 to 25 pounds."
"Don't guess."
Jolly hoisted one of the buckets to the small weigh scale used for mixing feed. The needle stopped at 4 pounds three ounces. He did the same with each bucket. Using the nub of his pencil to write the weights on the side of the hitching post; he stuck his tongue out of the corner of his mouth and began adding.
"20 pounds, 15 ounces." Jolly finally said.
"And what was the weight of the one grain of sand?"
"Not anything I could weigh."
"Okay, you want to know what a billion is. A teacher once told me -- he was English, so I can't swear to his honesty -- that a billion grains of sand would fill five regular pails that size." Davis licked his fingertip and put it on the lone grain of sand where it stuck fast.
"One grain," holding up his finger and then with a sweep of his arm at the five buckets, "One billion grains."
"That's a lot of grains, pops."
"Want to try for a trillion?"
Jolly turned and looked at the garden.
"Moms don't have that much sand."
Cookie stood in the kitchen doorway, nose flaring. “The house smells of donuts.”
Sal and I, standing over the Lil’ Orbits machine, watching the batter drop into the hot grease in perfect little “o” shapes, float halfway down the bubbling channel of oil, automatically get flipped and continue their journey to the flapper that pushes the delectable tidbits into a receiving tray. My job was to watch. Sal’s job was to sprinkle cinnamon-sugar on the hot mini donuts.
“Ain’t it great?”
Sal’s stomach growled agreement.
“Listen, Drago,” Cookie said, “that machine goes off every morning at seven. By seven-thirty the whole damn house smells like a bakery.”
“And your point?”
Cookie’s eyes turned into slits. “Move it, sluggo, or I’ll move it for you.”
“Aw, jeez, it’s perfect in here.”
“Put it in your den or one of the dozen outbuildings around this place. But get it the hell out of my kitchen! The drapes are beginning to smell of hot grease!” Cookie walked to the end of the donut maker, snatched two and left.
Sal asked, “Twelve enough?”
“It’s a start.”
“Get the coffee. I’ll take these to the picnic table.”
Grabbing the platter of Lil’ Orbits, I elbowed the slider open and stepped down to the deck. Sal put the coffee pot in the middle of the table along with a couple of mugs.
The big man turned somber. “Have you told Cookie?”
Grabbing a donut and popping it into my mouth. Warm. Sweet. Fried. Best purchase I’d made in a long time. “Not yet. But I think your plan is going to work.”
“It had better. Our collective butts are on the line if it doesn’t.”
“The Plan” was one of revenge.
The year previous, Sal and I got enmeshed in the Tree Man fiasco. Gold balls and Celtic symbols and the murder of some innocents by people unknown. Mostly unknown. Government for sure. But we couldn’t determine if it was official or off the books. Whole families disappeared. Entire databases were wiped clean. The mystery centered on the possibility local Indian tribes were predated in America by Europeans. Or were parallel civilizations.
A warning from a friend at Homeland Security to “unwind” from the investigation; we ignored it. And everything began to unravel.
When one of the “innocents” was suddenly and unexplainably dead, someone Sal had grown fond of, someone Sal pulled a couple of strings and had transferred to Walter Reed Hospital, Sal decided to take things into his own hands and get even.
Over the past year, however, he (and I) had moved from the outrage of emotional revenge to a more clinical “get even” attitude. We drifted from finding the maniac behind the deaths so we could rip his arms off to uncovering the face of the kingpin and understanding why. Then ripping his arms off.
Where Sal goes, so do I and vice versa.
“Here’s what we know,” the big man began, taking alternating pulls from his coffee mug and popping another mini-donut.