Kenny was always garbage-picking. He found the most mundane things interesting—wrapping paper, rubber bands, ribbons, paper clips. He was really creative with the junk he scavenged and fashioned all kinds of models out of them—airplanes, birds, you name it. When my dad finally bought some matching appliances for our kitchen to replace the ones that were here when he bought the house, they arrived the old-fashioned way, in enormous boxes. Well, when Kenny saw those boxes he practically went nuts. The delivery men tried to take them back to their truck, but Kenny refused to let go of them. Not only did the men let him keep them, they went to their truck and gave him a bunch more. Kenny laughed and twirled around right there in the street, he was so happy. There were so many boxes they filled the garage, meaning Dad had to park in the driveway. My dad was probably waiting for Kenny to forget about them so they could be tossed, but Kenny got busy right away building something, and Dad finally realized he would be parking in the driveway for quite some time.
The funniest thing was that Kenny wouldn’t let us see what it was he was creating. Whenever he worked in the garage, he would lock himself in. When he was done, he would move a chair to block the garage door off the kitchen, as if that could really keep us out. Dad could have used his remote in his car to open the overhead door, of course, but I think both Dad and I not only wanted to respect Kenny’s wishes, we also kind of liked the mystery of not knowing exactly what it was.
“I’ll bet it’s a big cardboard boat,” I said.
“Could be,” Dad replied. “He is taking a lot of rope into the garage. Maybe it’s a sailboat, with old bedsheet sails.”
Having been a sailor a good part of his life, Dad’s face seemed to glow with satisfaction at the thought.
Kenny didn’t make a whole lot of noise building whatever it was he was building—I mean, how much noise can you make working with cardboard?—but he sure spent a lot of hours in that garage.
And then Kenny stopped, and the kitchen chair sat for days in front of the garage door.
“What’s he waiting for?” Dad said one day after running through the pouring rain into the house because he still couldn’t park in the garage. “Usually when he’s done building something, he’s anxious to show us.”
There was another thing that had grabbed Kenny’s attention that month, even before he got all his boxes. The electric company had come with a big blue bucket lift to work on some overhead electrical lines nearby. They worked on the lines for a couple of days and then parked the lift in the middle of the empty lot between two houses halfway down the block. It sat there for weeks, bucket high up so nobody could mess with it.
“I wonder if they forgot about it,” Dad said as we drove by it on our way to the grocery store one day.
Kenny kept getting in trouble for poking around the lift instead of staying and playing in our backyard like he was supposed to. Mrs. Loomis—whose house was right next to the empty lot—told me that she saw Kenny in the bucket one morning, but he had climbed down before she could call to tell us. I didn’t dare tell Dad about that because I knew he might have told Kenny to stop working on his secret project and throw all that cardboard out as punishment, something I didn’t want to happen.
Kenny’s project was too important then not to let him complete it. In a way, it had taken on a life of its own.
Around midnight that same night, I heard a strange noise coming from outside. It was a motor of some kind—not a car or a motorcycle exactly, but some kind of engine. It revved a few times, but otherwise it was a steady, rather annoying drone.
After a few minutes of listening to it in the dark, I dragged myself up to investigate what it was.
It was then I discovered that Kenny was gone.
I searched the house in near-panic mode, wide awake and kind of scared, hoping that I would find him so I wouldn’t have to wake up Dad to let him know.
Not in his usual places, I wondered if he was out in the garage, working again on his creation. A few times I’ve gotten home late from somewhere or woken up in the middle of the night only to find Kenny quietly involved with something, even if it was just his Game Boy at the kitchen table.
The chair was gone from its usual spot in front of the door to the garage, so I took that as a good sign I would find him there.
I threw open the door, less frightened and more annoyed now. “Kenny, what are you—”
The garage was empty, the overhead door wide open. I stood there in disbelief, then in the faint light from the streetlamps and full moon that night I saw someone much too tall to be Kenny coming hurrying up our driveway, around my dad’s car.
“Kenny?” I asked anyway.
“No. It’s Mrs. Loomis.”
To my surprise she looked wide-eyed, almost happy, despite what time it was. Wearing a pink fuzzy bathrobe with matching slippers and white pajamas, she motioned me to follow her as if inviting me to a slumber party.
“Hurry. It’s Kenny. You’ve got to see this.”
If it involved Kenny, I could believe just about anything. Just the fact that Mrs. Loomis seemed eager to show me what Kenny was doing was both reassuring and unsettling at the same time.
As soon as we passed her house, I realized the sound I had been hearing was the electric company’s bucket lift. We turned the corner and I came to an immediate halt, stunned by what I saw.
“Can you believe it?” Mrs. Loomis asked.
Kenny was high up in the lift, manipulating two boards attached to ropes. And attached to the ropes on the other end was what Kenny had worked so hard and long to create in the garage and now revealed to the world.
A giant cardboard robot, dancing slowly by itself under the glow of the moon to some unheard song.
I moved closer, passing two guys who looked to be in their twenties. They must have been driving by when they spotted Kenny’s oversized puppet show and stopped for a better look.
One of the guys looked at me. “Nice, isn’t it?”
“That’s my brother up there,” I said, not sure if I was proud of that or if I was just offering an explanation.
“Nice,” he repeated.
As I got closer, I saw that the robot had two old hubcaps for eyes and an open mouth cut like a smiling Halloween pumpkin. The nose was an old plastic flowerpot.
If I had to estimate, I’d say the robot was about three times my height, maybe taller. The closer I got, the taller it looked, until my head was craned back almost as far as it would go.
It was amazing how well Kenny made the robot dance. It moved smoothly, its arms and legs swinging in unison as it did a kind of happy soft-shoe shuffle. I had never seen Kenny manipulate a marionette before. It was almost as if he knew instinctively how they worked.
The robot stopped and its giant head came down as if to take a closer look at me. Someone behind me gasped, as if I were in real danger. When I glanced back, I saw there were over a dozen people there now, with more crossing the street, most in bathrobes like Mrs. Loomis.
The robot tilted its head first one way, then the other. I felt like there was an intelligence behind those hubcap eyes, even though I could see through the gaping mouth that the robot’s head was hollow.
When it stood back up, the robot offered me its cardboard hands, each with four stiff fingers and an inoperable thumb. I held onto the thumbs, and the robot began to dance again. I understood then that the robot wanted me as a dance partner, or at least Kenny did. I followed the robot’s lead, and together we shuffled through the weeds and overgrown grass, the robot trampling them down with its giant cardboard boots that looked like the ones astronauts wore.
The growing crowd behind me laughed and then applauded.
We swayed back and forth for a while and then someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was Mrs. Loomis, grinning.
“My turn now,” she said.
I let her take my place.
A few others danced with the robot, and in about twenty minutes I saw the robot begin to droop as if growing weary, its shuffling slower and less precise.
I looked up and realized that it was Kenny who was tired now. It must have taken all his strength to manipulate the robot like that—even though it was hollow, it had taken so many cardboard boxes to create it that it had to be fairly heavy.
The robot stopped, the lift engine revved and the bucket began to descend. As it did, the robot laid down on its back as if to take a well-deserved nap.
The crowd applauded again, the performance clearly over.
When the bucket reached ground level, the engine went off and Kenny got out.
The two young men who had stayed to watch the robot dance came forward.
“Hey kid, how did you get the lift started? Did they leave the key in the ignition?”
Kenny shook his head no. “Kenny made one.”
He handed it to him.
The young man stared at it in disbelief. “You made this? It’s nothing but a couple of thin strips of sheet metal glued together and cut like a key! How did you know how to do this?”
Kenny stared blankly at the young man as if the answer should be obvious.
“Hey, everybody! Look at this! He made his own key for the lift! Isn’t that amazing?”
The two of them seemed more interested in the key Kenny made than the enormous robot, which was now surrounded by about a dozen of our neighbors. Mrs. Loomis lifted one of the robot’s arms by the wrist as if she were taking its pulse and someone else lifted one of the robot’s legs.
Kenny wordlessly held his hand out for the key. The young man seemed reluctant to give it back, but then returned it.
“Nice,” said the other young man again, as if that were the nicest word in his vocabulary.
The two of them turned and strode away.
“Come on, Kenny. It’s almost two o’clock in the morning. Dad would have a fit if he saw us out here.”
The moment I said it, I wondered if that was really true, if Dad wouldn’t have liked to have seen Kenny’s robot in action. At the very least, he would have finally known what it was that kept him from parking the car in the garage for weeks on end.
Kenny nodded and we headed back to the house, leaving the robot to further examination by the neighbors, who ignored us as we walked away.
I woke up late Saturday morning. Dad was up already, reading the paper in the kitchen. I didn’t see Kenny.
“Where’s Kenny?” I asked, wondering if he was planning a daytime demonstration of his robot.
“He’s in the garage. He was up even before I got up. I heard him banging around in there.”
Since there was no chair against the garage door, I opened it a crack and peeked in. The overhead door was wide open, and it appeared that something large had been dragged across the dusty floor.
I immediately thought of the Morlocks dragging the time machine into their underground workshop shortly after the time traveler’s arrival in the far distant future, only our garage was empty. No time machine and no cardboard robot either.
Kenny finished stuffing something into the recycling bin, which was so full the lid wouldn’t close. He turned around and beamed at me as if tremendously pleased with himself.
“Kenny, where’s your robot?”
Kenny pointed to the recycling bin.
“You recycled it?” I nearly staggered into the garage. “Why? It took you weeks to make it!”
Kenny stared with his usual lack of comprehension. “Kenny was done.”
I looked in dismay at the bin, which held neatly cut cardboard panels that were once a magnificent, towering robot. Then I saw the two hubcaps and plastic flowerpot back in the corner of the garage where Kenny had found them. It was as if the robot had never existed, as if the events of last night were just a pleasant dream.
It was silly to mourn a cardboard robot, of course. What would we do with it? Where would we keep it? We couldn’t keep it in the house or the garage, and outside it would be ruined with the first rain. Still, it was sad that the robot hadn’t lasted at least another day or two, but since it was Kenny’s and not mine, how long the robot lasted was up to him.
I had a sudden thought.
“Did Dad see it?”
Kenny shook his head no.
The only thing I could think of was that Dad would be disappointed, and that Onion and Dave would have liked to have seen it too.
“Oh, Kenny,” I said, for no particular reason.
“George?”
I looked into the bright sunlight and saw Mrs. Loomis standing on our driveway, holding her cell phone. She was in her usual sweatpants attire now instead of her nightwear.
“Look. I took a picture last night of you with Kenny’s big marionette.”
“You did?” I hurried to see it.
It was a dim picture of me dancing with the robot, but at least now I had proof it wasn’t all just a dream. You couldn’t see the robot’s head in the picture or anything below my knees, but you could see me holding the robot’s hands, my head craned upward to look at my gigantic dance partner.
“Could you send this to me?” I asked her. “I’ll give you my number.”
“Of course. I thought you might want it. Sorry I only took one picture. I would have taken a few more, but when I looked outside this morning the puppet was gone. Kenny must have gotten up really early.”
Kenny yawned mightily as if to prove her correct.
“Thanks, Mrs. Loomis.”
As she left, Kenny tugged on my shirt. I looked down at him and saw he was trying to hand me something. I took it from him.
It was the key he made for the lift.
“Are you done with this too, Kenny?”
He nodded and yawned again.
“Maybe you should go back to bed. I think you only slept like three or four hours, didn’t you?”
Kenny walked around me and back into the house, apparently not needing to be told a second time.
I looked closer at the key and marveled at how well made it was, just as the young men had done last night. Kenny must have spent hours cutting the smooth, precise grooves with a tiny file. How he knew the pattern and depth of those grooves I had no idea and probably never would. Like the robot itself, despite all Kenny’s work the key was meant to have a single purpose and a short life.
“Dad?” I called out. “You can park your car in the garage again.”
I heard footsteps from the kitchen and Dad appeared at the door.
He looked around. “Good. It’s supposed to rain again next week. I’m tired of making a mad dash for the front door. Say, what was it Kenny made with all those boxes, anyway?”
I looked at him. “It . . . wasn’t a boat.”
He looked surprised. “No? Then what was it?”
“It was a big robot. Kenny cut it up and recycled it this morning.” I pointed at the recycling bin.
“Oh. Well, Kenny always cleans up after himself, I’ll say that. Too bad I didn’t get to see it.” He didn’t sound particularly disappointed.
“Yeah, too bad.” I would have told him more about it, how the neighbors came out one by one to see it and how Kenny used the lift to make the robot come alive, but I was afraid he would only regret not having seen it for himself.
Dad returned to the kitchen. I looked again at the overstuffed recycling bin, the robot’s final resting place, still sorry it was gone.
As I pressed the button to close the garage door, I held tight to the key as something to always remind me of that magical, mystical night when I danced with a giant robot by the light of the silvery moon.