The Puppet Carver Read online

  Title Page

  The Puppet Carver

  Jump for Tickets

  Pizza Kit

  About the Authors

  Teaser

  Copyright

  Onstage, the banjo-strumming animatronic pig slowed in its movements, emitted a sputtering sound, and then ground to a halt.

  “Really? Another one?” Jack yelled. The stupid pig was the third animatronic to break in less than a month. And fixing those things cost money. Money that Jack didn’t have.

  This place was bleeding him dry. When he bought it three years ago, he had thought that the Pizza Playground, a kiddie pizzeria complete with games and animatronics, would be a great investment. Pizza, games, talking and singing animal characters—those were all things kids loved, right? And parents were always looking for ways to keep their little brats entertained, especially on their birthdays. He had anticipated a lot of birthday business.

  But the fact was, the kids weren’t showing up, and Jack didn’t know why. Was it because parents these days packed their kids’ schedules so full of sports and lessons that there was no time left for mindless entertainment? Or did kids today just prefer mindless entertainment of a different sort on their computers or video game consoles? Whatever the reason, Jack was losing money like it was water pouring through a sieve. Just this morning, he had to order the kitchen staff to throw away expired ingredients for the pizzas nobody was going to eat. And now he had to figure out how to pay for repairs of the animatronics that nobody was going to see.

  “Porter! Sage! Get out here!” Jack yelled. He was so angry and stressed he felt his face heating up. He remembered the doctor telling him to be mindful of his blood pressure, but how could you keep your blood pressure down when everything around you was flying out of control?

  Porter came out from behind the stage, and Sage emerged from the custodial closet. Both were in their early twenties, young enough to be Jack’s sons. But these boys were no sons of his. What a couple of losers, Jack thought as they shambled up to him like dogs making a futile attempt to please their master. Well, Jack wasn’t pleased with either one of them. Porter, the short one with glasses, was a handyman who was supposed to be in charge of the animatronics. He claimed to be some kind of inventor, and when he was not ineptly trying to follow Jack’s orders, he was always tinkering with the tools and equipment in the storage room. Sage, the tall one who wore his long black hair in braids, was supposed to keep the place clean. He fancied himself a writer. He spent his breaks sitting at a table in the dining area, hunched over a notebook, scribbling away on his so-called “novel.”

  Clearly neither of these idiots are going anywhere, Jack thought. They were lucky he saw fit to pay them minimum wage and let them take home leftover pizza.

  “The pig’s busted,” Jack said. “Take it back to storage.”

  “Wow, those things are dropping like flies,” Sage said, looking up at the almost-empty stage.

  “I don’t need your commentary, Captain Obvious,” Jack said. “I just need your muscles to take the porker to the storage room.”

  “Yes, sir,” Sage said, but he looked like he was suppressing the urge to roll his eyes.

  Jack couldn’t stand insubordination.

  “Well, soon all your animatronic problems will be solved anyway,” Porter said, stepping up onto the stage to help move the broken figure. “I’m almost finished with the prototype of my machine. It will create low-cost but highly functional animatronics made from only an inexpensive slab of wood. You’re going to be amazed, Jack!”

  “I’ll believe it when I see it,” Jack muttered. Something about the little guy’s ungrounded optimism was especially irritating.

  Porter grinned like he was being issued a particularly satisfying challenge. “Oh, you’ll see it. And you’ll believe it.” He turned to Sage. “You ready to lift this thing? Let’s do it on the count of three. One … two …”

  * * *

  With Sage’s help, Porter set down the deceased pig animatronic in a corner of the storage room. “I get so tired of the way that ogre talks to us,” Porter said. “Once I get a patent on my invention and find a buyer, I’m going to be out of here so fast I’ll leave a dust trail.”

  “And I’ll be stuck here eating your dust,” Sage said with a sigh. “Maybe someday you’ll take pity on me and invite me to your mansion and feed me a meal. You know, remember your old coworker who’s still living on leathery reheated pizza slices.”

  Porter gave Sage a pat on the shoulder. “Hey, you won’t need my pity. You’ll get your novel published. Your book will be on the bestseller list. You’ll tour the country doing signings. No more reheated pizza for you.”

  Sage grinned shyly. “You really think it’s good enough to be published?”

  “Of course I do!” Porter said. He was happy to give his buddy a pep talk, but it was an honest pep talk. Sage really was talented. “It’s way better than a lot of published books I’ve read. And it’s not just me who thinks so. Your creative writing teacher says so, too, right?” Porter and Sage attended the local community college together, though they majored in radically different fields—mechanical engineering for Porter and English for Sage.

  Sage nodded. “She’s been very complimentary of it, yeah.”

  “Well, there you go! And actually, I’ve got to say, I find your work not just entertaining but inspiring. My invention is partially inspired by your novel.”

  Sage raised an eyebrow. “How’s that?”

  “Well, The Puppet Carver is about a wooden man who wants to be real, right?”

  Sage nodded.

  “Well, my Puppet Carver takes an ordinary piece of wood and transforms it into something that seems alive.” He hadn’t heard Jack yelling, so he figured the grumpy boss must be temporarily distracted. Porter pulled back the glittery purple curtain that hid his invention along with several broken animatronics. “Come check it out. If Jack comes back here, I’ll pretend to be working on the animatronics, and you can pretend to be cleaning something.”

  Sage smiled. “You’re a bad influence, Porter.” He followed the shorter man behind the old curtain that had probably hung in front of the stage once.

  “Here it is!” Porter said, gesturing with a flourish to a clunky-looking piece of equipment. “The Puppet Carver!”

  “It looks kind of like a giant wood chipper,” Sage said.

  “Well, that’s the basic concept,” Porter said in a salesman voice. “But it does so much more!” Like a wood chipper, the puppet carver had an opening where the wood was fed in. But what happened once the wood was inside the machine was far more sophisticated. Once he got a few of the kinks worked out, Porter planned to apply for a patent. He hoped that the Puppet Carver would be the first of many patented inventions. “Here, help me load this log into it, and I’ll show you what happens.”

  “Okay,” Sage said, but he sounded a little unsure. “This is a safe piece of equipment, right?”

  “The safest!” Porter said. “All the sharp parts are on the inside.”

  The machine was a tall, vertical metal cylinder with a sliding door that was opened by pushing a button. When Porter pushed the button, the door slid open, revealing a human-size compartment that was surrounded by metal blades. Together, Sage and Porter hefted a five-foot cedar log and stood it on its end inside the compartment.

  Porter pushed a button. “And now we wait.”

  The machine hummed to life, then grew louder and louder. It whirred, then sputtered, then roared.

  “Is it supposed to be making all those sounds?” Sage yelled over the noise.

  The mechanical noises were like music to Porter. He smiled. “It’s working perfectly.”

  After less than a minute of noisy sha
king, the machine grew quiet.

  “Behold!” Porter pointed to the inner compartment. “Here’s the best part.”

  “I’m beholding,” Sage said, sounding like he wasn’t sure what to think yet.

  Porter pushed the button and the door slid open, revealing a fully jointed, wooden, humanlike figure. “Now I just have to give a gentle tug.” Porter grabbed the wooden figure by its shoulders and pulled, then pulled harder.

  Sage laughed. “It looks like you’re helping the machine give birth.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m doing,” Porter said. He gave a mighty pull, and the figure inside the machine finally turned loose. Porter pulled it the rest of the way out and then set it up on its feet.

  Porter knew that some people would describe the figure as crude, but to him it was beautiful. It was in the shape of a small man. The simple wooden figure reminded him of the drawing models they had used in his high school art class. Even though it was basic, it could still be extremely useful to someone like Grumpy Boss. Put the figure in a fuzzy suit to resemble a bunny or a fox or a bear, and you’d have a low-cost animatronic that would be perfect for the pizzeria.

  “Okay, okay,” Sage said, smiling. “I have to admit that’s pretty cool.”

  “Oh, you haven’t even seen the cool part yet,” Porter said. “Just wait.”

  He pushed a button on the wooden figure’s lower back, and it slowly started to move. It turned its head to the left, then to the right. It lifted its arms so it looked like it was reaching out for a hug.

  “Whoa,” Sage said, sounding amazed. “You made this all by yourself?”

  Porter laughed. “Yup, all by myself like a big boy. It’s incredibly cost efficient. If you can afford a log, you can make an animatronic.”

  “You know, I think Jack might actually be impressed by this,” Sage said, walking in a circle around the animatronic and watching its movements.

  “I hope so,” Porter said, knowing that the boss wasn’t easy to impress. “It would be nice to get some respect around here. And maybe a little money, too.”

  “No doubt,” Sage said. “But if you keep it up with the inventions, you won’t be hanging around this dump for long anyway. You’re on your way, man.”

  “So are you,” Porter said. Sage had let him read the first few chapters of his novel, and Porter had been blown away by his friend’s vivid language and imagination.

  “I hope so,” Sage said. “I sure don’t want to spend my best years in this place.”

  “Oh!” Porter said, looking back at the Puppet Carver. “I almost forgot an important step in the demonstration.” He squatted down beside the machine. “After the puppet comes out, you want to slide out the drawer at the bottom here. It’s full of all the sawdust and splinters left over from the carving process. If you don’t empty it out, the machine won’t work right the next time you use it.” He dumped the contents of the compartment into the trash can.

  “Kind of like the lint filter on the dryer?” Sage said.

  “Exactly.”

  “Are there any people working in this place?” Jack’s booming voice yelled from the dining area. “I’ve got tables that need wiping down and a stage that needs setting up!”

  Sage chucked Porter on the shoulder. “I guess we’re not quite ready for fame and fortune yet, huh?”

  Porter laughed. “Nope. Not when there are tables to be wiped and animatronics to be arranged.”

  They headed for the dining area, prepared for a barrage of verbal abuse from Jack.

  It was a good thing they were prepared.

  “So does anybody besides me work here?” Jack yelled. His face was purple with rage.

  If Porter liked Jack more, he’d worry about his health. The guy’s blood pressure must be through the roof. “Sorry, sir. We were taking care of some stuff in the back.”

  “Well, people don’t see the back! They see the front! And the front is a mess. The tables are dirty. You need to fix things up on the stage so it doesn’t look like there are animatronics missing.”

  “That was actually what we were working on, sir—the animatronics,” Porter said. “Soon all your problems with animatronics will be solved for a fraction of what you’ve been spending.” Porter internally cringed to hear himself sounding like a TV infomercial, but his past experiences with Jack had taught him that the man liked cheesy marketing speech; he thought it “sounded smart.”

  “I won’t hold my breath,” Jack harrumphed.

  “Well, you won’t have to. How about I let you see it on Friday morning before we open?” Porter said. “I think I should have all the bugs worked out by then.”

  “You’d better,” Jack said, which Porter decided to take for Jack’s version of a yes. “So what are you standing around for? Get to work.”

  “Yes, sir.” Sage grabbed a bucket of bleach water and a rag and started wiping down the tables. Porter climbed up on the stage and started fiddling with the animatronics.

  Jack got up from his table. “I’ve got to take care of some things in the office, but I’ll be back to check up on you.”

  “Yes, sir,” Porter said, dragging an animatronic center stage.

  Once Jack was safely out of earshot, Porter muttered, “Somebody must’ve spit in his oatmeal this morning.”

  “This morning and every morning,” Sage said. “Have you ever seen the man in a good mood?”

  Porter rolled his eyes. “Not once. I wonder if he ever is. Maybe when he’s not a work? Do you think there’s anything he does for fun?”

  “Sure,” Sage said, looking up from the table he was wiping. “He kicks puppies, robs grandmothers, makes orphans cry.”

  Porter laughed. “We’d better be quiet or we’ll get in trouble.”

  Sage grinned. “When aren’t we in trouble?”

  They worked quietly for a while. Once Porter had things working on the stage, he felt a strange presence in the room. The hair on the back of his neck prickled. He felt like he was being watched.

  He turned around and saw he had been right. A little girl around four years old was standing right at the edge of the stage. She looked up at Porter with big brown eyes. “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi,” Porter said. A few feet behind her were a man and a woman, presumably the little girl’s parents. “Hi, folks,” he added awkwardly. Customers had become such a rarity that it was always a surprise when they showed up.

  The little girl pointed at the animatronic bear. “Is that Baron von Bear?”

  “Yep, that’s the baron,” Porter said. Really, he should’ve had the curtain closed so that any kids who might show up wouldn’t have seen the characters in their dormant state.

  “Is he gonna sing?” the little girl asked.

  “Yes,” Porter said. “The first show’s in fifteen minutes.”

  “Is there pizza?”

  “Of course there’s pizza.” Porter swiped a few menus from the host’s station and handed them to the family. “Why don’t you folks sit at any table you want, and I’ll go find you a server?”

  Angie, the only server left in the place, was sitting in the kitchen doing her homework. She was studying to be a licensed practical nurse, she had told Porter, because this restaurant gig was obviously a dead end. Edwin, the cook, was playing on his phone.

  “Hey, Ang,” Porter said. “You’ve got a table of customers.”

  Angie looked up from her textbook. “Really? You mean I might actually earn a tip tonight?”

  Porter grinned. “It’s looking like it. Don’t spend it all in one place.”

  “Hey, and I might actually get to cook something,” Edwin said, pocketing his phone. “We need to use some of these ingredients. Half of them are about to go bad anyway.”

  Angie was on her feet. “I won’t share that information with my one table of customers.”

  Edwin laughed. “Good idea.”

  A few more families trickled in over the course of the evening, but business was still slow, and Porter spent mo
st of the night trying to look busy so Jack wouldn’t yell at him too much. The mood in the place was all wrong. A children’s pizza emporium was supposed to be loud and lively and full of laughter. But the only thing you were likely to hear in this place were Jack’s outbursts.

  It was always such a relief to walk out in the fresh night air after closing time. Porter, Sage, Angie, and Edwin left Jack and his anger inside, and instantly the mood was lighter.

  “Say, do you guys want to get something to eat?” Porter asked. He probably should save what little money he had, but he couldn’t face the thought of bolting down another pot of instant ramen noodles in his apartment.

  There were murmurings of agreement.

  “What do you want?” Porter asked.

  “Not pizza!” everybody yelled in chorus.

  It was a running joke. They ate so many leftover slices that they were all sick of them, but they kept on eating them because they were free. Actually paying to eat pizza—even good pizza—had become unimaginable.

  They ended up at the Golden Heifer even though none of them had enough money for burgers and had to settle for grilled cheese or BLTs instead. They shared an order of fries between the four of them, which the tired-looking waitress placed in the middle of the table.

  “Hey, you guys aren’t looking for a cook, are you?” Edwin asked the waitress as she set down the ketchup bottle.

  “Not right now, hon,” she said. “But if you want to fill out an application, we’ll put it on file.”

  “Thanks. I’ll do that.” Edwin flashed her a charming smile. After the waitress left, Edwin’s smile faded. “I tell you what, guys. I’m pounding the pavement to find another job. If y’all want to keep on eating, you should start looking, too.”

  “You think Jack’s going to fire us?” Angie asked, pouring out a puddle of ketchup on the fry plate.

  “Well, that’s a possibility, too,” Edwin said, sipping his coffee. “But I think the place is gonna close down before Jack has a chance to fire us. I’ve worked in the restaurant business a lot longer than you kids have. I can tell when a place isn’t long for this world. It gets the stink of death on it.”