Walter Andrews
The boy was weird, that's all there was to it. Don't get me wrong, you know, I had a fondness for him, we were flesh and blood and all that. But there was something always off about him. Didn't seem to like his brothers much.
Q. And you didn’t attend the science fair during his fifth grade. Is that correct?
No, I didn't go to the science fair that time — wish I had now. I heard it was quite the spectacle, been telling people the story ever since. We had to live by candle for days afterwards. He was pretty upset, I guess, but I would have gone no questions asked if it was a soccer or baseball game, anything like his brothers. But he never played sports or games with the rest of ‘em.
Q. What did he spend most of his time on?
Once he could read he mostly did that. I don't know where he got all the books from. Either his mother was buying them for him secretly or he was stealing ‘em from the library. Even before that, the kid was a destructive force in my house, you know?
Maybe ‘destructive’ is wrong. I’m trying to be even-handed here, don’t want to come off like some bitter old man in your interview. But he would take things apart — the phone, our old hi-fi, one time the whole goddamn TV. Soon as we turned our backs, something that used to work was suddenly in pieces across the living room. And no, he could never put ‘em back together again. Not the way they had been. After he'd finally rebuilt the TV, the colors were all psychedelic and blurred, the thing only picked up stations from Mexico. His mother was worried. Thought he would electrocute himself one day. Meanwhile, I come home from work and can’t watch anything on the tube except telenovellas. He'd use the parts on something else sometimes. Robots.
Q. What do you mean when you say robots?
Not real robots, they never worked — this was still before the kid could even read. He'd take apart his brother's Gameboy. A few days later we’d see pieces of it taped to a cardboard box filled with circuit boards and wires glued to everything, with a — what do you call, a Lite-Brite? — one of those on top as the head, bulbs all arranged to look like a face. He got savvier. Started putting tape-recorders inside, so it would seem like the thing was talking. But they never did anything and there'd be the missing belt from my old turntable, strapped right to the front.
No wonder he didn't have a lot to do with other kids.
