For some, it takes decades to grow up. For Joshua Rigsby, six centuries aren't enough.
If you live in or grew up in the southern U.S., you've probably experienced racial prejudice in some form. But when I moved to Hawaii in the early 1980s, I discovered the south hasn’t cornered the market on racism, that it’s prevalent everywhere, with Hawaii—a virtual ethnic and racial melting pot—no exception.
While dead still in Oahu freeway traffic one sweltering afternoon, my wife and I began batting ideas around that involved a gadget that could zap rude and dangerous drivers off the road, one day into the future, and to opposite side of the island, leaving them confused but unharmed. In time, the idea incorporated issues dealing with the state’s multilayered racism, how a young Alabama boy and his aging grandfather would adapt to the state, and how a time-zapping gadget could transform the plot into a social and political satire wrapped in a coming-of-age story. The result was Big Daddy’s Gadgets, a novel that encompasses some six centuries and the destruction of the world with a laugh—twice!
Below is the first chapter from the novel. The first half of the book is set in almost-present-day Hawaii. The second half is set some six centuries ahead, following a war that not only destroys much of the world but changes the racial makeup of those who survive to encompass people with skin banana-yellow, penny-copper, and shiny pearl. New races, old problems, similar solutions…? Maybe. Maybe not.
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Chapter One from Big Daddy’s Gadgets
by C.S. Fuqua
published by Mundania Press
Fighter jets screamed over Diamond Head, then shot straight up in tight formation, the islanders below, for the most part, oblivious. Climbing nearly out of sight, the formation split in four directions of billowing slipstreams, blossoming into a smoky hibiscus, a daily display of military might for those who might have secession on their minds.
Big Daddy grunted, foot bouncing lightly on the brake, rocking the old 1966 Mustang forward. Some two million people populated the island of Oahu, and, I swear, most of them existed only to clot the freeways with their cars around the clock. Where could they all be going on such a small island? The Mustang jerked, bobbled, again and again. I couldn’t hold the newspaper still and gave up trying to read the article to him.
Big Daddy gunned the car again, and we sliced into traffic from the on-ramp. A beat-up Celica cut between us and the Nissan pickup ahead. Big Daddy gave a blast on the horn. The Celica spurted into the next lane and sped out of sight. Big Daddy nodded toward the newspaper in my lap. “Read some more.” I tried again. In freeway traffic now, I was able to keep it steady. I found the place I’d left off earlier and, despite the fact that Big Daddy had read the article countless times himself, began to read.
Big Daddy had been a tinker of gadgets all his life, never formally educated in the ways of electronics, but joking from time to time that his small successes would eventually catapult him into riches and fame, though neither fame nor money mattered to him. The journey’s the thing he cherished, not so much the goal. At best, his gadgets had proved little more than oddities, cute curiosities. But when Big Mama died, process suddenly took second seat to goal, each desired gadget now taking on importance he had never before imagined.
The headline—“Time Travel Now Within Reach?”—ran just below the fold, complete with a photograph of a short, bulky man standing next to the refrigerator-size contraption that had piqued Big Daddy’s tinkering curiosity.
“Dr. Timothy Tanaka, University of Hawaii professor and research physicist,” I read aloud, “has sent waves of doubt, dismay, and debate throughout the international scientific community with claims that, based on preliminary tests, time travel is not only possible, but within reach.”
Whatever the reason for his interest, it was good to see Big Daddy excited about something, anything, again. Shortly after Big Mama died, Mom seized the opportunity to ease her worry on two fronts. She sent me to Alabama to live with Big Daddy, placing me in what she believed a more stable and physically safe environment while providing Big Daddy some company now that Big Mama had left him alone. For the last seventeen months, he and I had been room buddies in Red Level, a spit-in-the-road town about thirty miles north of the old Florida-Alabama state line.
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“Keep an eye on him,” Mom had instructed. “Mama could keep him in line, but she’s gone now. Make sure he doesn’t do anything foolish.” Mom didn’t define what she meant by foolish, and I figured Big Daddy had a better idea of how to run his life than I did. Mom was happy—perhaps relieved is a better word—that I’d agreed without protest. She wanted me with her, of course, but, more, she wanted me safe, and back with Big Daddy in Alabama, she figured, was a lot safer than being with her. She’d always been worried about me, traipsing around the world with her and Dad. Then, after what happened to Dad in Palestine, worry over my safety played on her nerves even more than the weight of the negotiations she was involved in. Trying to save the world while being a single mom doesn’t lend itself to the best of work conditions.
Mom had served her country well, representing the U.S. position in conflicts throughout the Middle East, mediating arms talks between countries whose participation and allegiance changed based on the latest terrorist attack. Mom, Dad, and I had lived briefly in Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Kuwait, Iraq, and Palestine. Dad liked the traveling, and he tried to mingle as best he could wherever we landed, but a white American face in the Middle East sticks out like a camel in a herd of gazelles. In those days, after years of U.S. domination in a region that craved to be left alone by the lumbering giant, being an American was not an asset. After Dad died, Dad’s ashes went with Mom, first to Geneva and then to Hawaii, corked up in a small urn that she kept on her office desk and talked to when she needed someone to listen without judgment—more or less the same as when he was alive. Not a week after Dad died, long before she knew she’d end up in Hawaii, Mom announced that she didn’t want to lose me, too, so off to Alabama she shipped me. “Take care of Big Dad,” she told me.
A few months after Dad died, Mom accepted a new assignment from the president, to take up residence in Honolulu as the Fed’s official voice in what had become a new, though slight, boil on the president’s political butt. Hawaii, way off in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, had decided she no longer enjoyed the perks of being a member of the United States, that time for autonomy had arrived, time to be a free and independent nation as it had been long before mainlanders rowed ashore. Mom’s job would be to delay any action on the part of Hawaiians until the president was ready to deal with the situation.
When she got her travel orders to Hawaii, Mom considered having me join her there immediately, but I convinced her that it wouldn’t be a good idea to leave Big Daddy alone. “You just don’t know what he might do,” I told her.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “You told me he was in good spirits.”
“Yeah…”
“Well, if he’s in good spirits, what’s the problem?”
“You don’t really…”
“What is it, Josh?”
I sighed. Best just to say it right out and be done with it. “He’s started talking to Big Mama.”
“Oh, good lord,” she said with relief. “I thought it was something bad. Josh, I still talk to your dad.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but Dad doesn’t talk back, does he?”
She went silent for so long I thought the line had disconnected. Finally, she let out a heavy sigh. “Okay,” she’d said softly. “Maybe you’re right. For now.”
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Big Daddy chuckled, settling back in the Mustang’s seat. “I wonder what we’ll find at that university,” he said.
I didn’t think we’d find much at all, but anything was possible, I suppose. According to a radio report on the local public station, Dr. Henry Tanaka, University of Hawaii physics professor, had been researching for nearly two decades the possibility of time travel. Few scientists outside Hawaii took his research seriously, but, at home, he was considered one of the century’s greatest minds, destined for recognition by all.
At any other time in history, Tanaka might have been taken more seriously outside his immediate neighborhood, but the world had changed rapidly and not for the better. The declining union of the United States of America and the recent breakdown in Middle East and East Asian disarmament negotiations were far-reaching events on everyone’s minds. No one had time to worry about time in general or traveling through it other than getting from one moment to the next.
“Politics,” Big Daddy spat, “is better left to politicians, not to honest folk. For the life of me, I don’t understand why your mom puts up with it.” Big Daddy was eighty-two and I was almost sixteen, my birthday lying only three weeks away. He glanced over at me and laughed. “Josh,” he said, “I’m too old to worry about such nonsense, and you’re just too young.”
That was a long time ago.
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For a free sample eBook, write to me at fuqua.cs[at]gmail[dot]com with “free eBook” in the subject line. Please specify format (ePub, Kindle/Mobi, PDF). Thank you very much for stopping by. In the event that I cannot respond immediately to posts, I apologize, but other responsibilities require me to be away from the computer most of the day on September 3. If you’d like to contact me directly, I would love to hear from you. Please write to me at fuqua.cs[at]gmail[dot]com. And please visit my website at http://csfuqua.comxa.com. For more information on Big Daddy's Gadgets, please visit http://www.mundania.com/book.php?title=Big%20Daddy%27s%20Gadgets. Again, thank you very much for your interest in my work.
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