Pennywise & The Welder

I'd been talking to Neil Thorson online for six weeks before I agreed to meet him, which for me is basically a record. Usually I last four days, until the guy says something like "I don't really read" and I remember why I've been single since the thing with Isaac ended last year. Isaac was a whole separate problem, and I'm not getting into that.

Neil said he'd be at the main gate at ten, wearing a top hat, and that he'd be the one standing next to a brass skeleton. I thought that was a joke. It was not a joke.

The festival was in a converted warehouse outside Detroit, some old stamping plant that somebody's uncle bought and filled with steampunk vendors and mechanical junk. It was July and it was a hundred degrees outside and the warehouse had an air conditioning system that appeared to have been designed by the same guy who invented the Titanic. I was sweating through a long-sleeved work shirt and a welding vest I'd modified with brass buttons, because I figured if you're going to a mechanical oddities festival, you might as well dress like what you are. I'm a welder. Twenty-eight years old, ten years in the trade, and what's under my sleeves is a better conversation starter than anything I've ever said out loud.

There he was at the gate. Top hat, goggles pushed up on his forehead, brown vest, and next to him, a life-sized brass skeleton mounted on a cart with four spoked wheels. He was waving. He'd been waving for a while, I think, because the wave had this exhausted enthusiasm to it, like a man signaling a rescue plane.

"Darla?" he said. "You look, uh. You look exactly like your photos, except sweating."

"You too," I said. "That's not a skeleton."

"That is Pennywise," he said, with a reverence I'd usually associate with people talking about their firstborn. "Well, a replica. The original's in a private collection in Ohio and the guy won't return my emails." He patted the skeleton on its brass skull. "Nineteen-oh-five, the original. Fortune teller. You put in a penny, it deals you a card, and every card is a different way you're going to die."

I looked at the skeleton. It had a little scroll in one hand and a slot where its heart should be.

"Every card?"

"Every card. Drowning, fire, dissipation, the plague. There's one card that just says UNEXPECTEDLY. Nobody knows what the mechanism does for that one. The wax cylinder that would've explained it is melted." He said all this while looking at me to see if I was going to laugh at him. I've gotten good at telling when people do that. I didn't, because honestly, a machine that dispenses death predictions for a penny is more interesting than anything Isaac ever said in two years.

"So it's a really old scam," I said.

"It's a really old *art form*," he said, and grinned, and I noticed he had good teeth, slightly crooked, the kind you don't get if you had braces at fifteen. Thirty-one years old, structural engineer, restores antique arcade machines in his spare time. His profile had said "I like things that are broken and old" and I'd assumed he meant furniture.

We went in through the main doors. The main hall was huge, all steel trusses and hanging banners, and it smelled like machine oil and fried everything. There were vendors selling goggles nobody needs, corsets made of upholstery fabric, a booth where a man was selling brass keys that opened nothing. One guy had a working Tesla coil and was zapping a balloon and a crowd of maybe forty people were losing their minds about it. Neil narrated the whole time. Not in an annoying way. In a way like he'd been waiting six weeks to have someone to narrate to and had been storing it all up.

"That's a reproduction Wimshurst machine," he said, pointing. "Those are fake rivets. Don't get me started on fake rivets. That, though, that steam engine over there, that's real, that's a 1920s launch engine off a Great Lakes tug, and that guy paid way too much for it and would tell you that's part of the fun."

"You do this a lot?" I asked. "Come to these things?"

"Every one within four hours' drive. I drove three hours today. I left at six in the morning."

"For a skeleton."

"For Pennywise," he said. "There's a guy in tent forty, past the food court, who flew in from Austria and claims to have the original card deck. Not the machine, just the deck. Fifty-two death cards. I've been corresponding with him for two years and he won't sell, won't photograph them straight-on, only at an angle, which he says protects the pigments and I say protects the scam."

* * *

The tin octopi incident happened around noon.

There was a vendor, a woman in goggles and a leather apron, with a table full of little tin octopus sculptures, each one about the size of a fist, arranged in a pyramid that any engineer over the age of six could have told you was a bad idea. Neil leaned over to look at one, put his hand on the table to steady himself, and the table's folding leg buckled, and I watched three hundred dollars of tin octopi go down in a slow silver avalanche. It made a sound like a bicycle falling over, then like a bicycle falling over seven more times.

Neil froze. The woman came around the table at a speed that suggested she'd done this before.

"Every year," she said. "Every year somebody does this. Do you know how long the pyramid takes?"

"I'm so sorry," Neil said, already on his knees picking octopi off the floor. "I'll buy two. Three. I'll buy three, please stop looking at me like that."

"He's having a very bad Saturday," I said, crouching to help. "He drove three hours for a deck of cards and now he's buying octopi."

She softened a little. She made him buy two, which was fair, and he carried them in a paper bag the rest of the day like they were evidence.

* * *

The deep-fried pickles came later, at a picnic table under a tent near the food court. We each had a paper basket and a lemonade as big as a fire extinguisher, and it was the first time all day we'd sat still.

"So the machines," I said. "You live with how many?"

"Three," he said, and then, honest to a fault, "well, three big ones. There's a strength tester in the garage that doesn't count."

"Why doesn't it count?"

"Because it's a strength tester, it's basically furniture." He picked up a pickle slice and examined it like it was a gear. "There's Pennywise, the replica. There's a 1912 shooting gallery called The Rifleman's Rest, which is exactly as cheerful as it sounds. And there's Lulu."

"Lulu."

"A palm reader from 1898. She's got a wax face and a glass eye and a hand that moves when you put your quarter in, and she tells you your fortune, and the fortunes were written by a guy in 1898 who clearly hated women, so they're all either 'you will marry well' or 'beware the sea.'"

"Those are the only options."

"For Lulu, yeah." He laughed. He had a good laugh, quick and surprised, like he hadn't budgeted for it. "The thing about them, the old machines, is they're all about death. Every one of them. Fortune telling, shooting galleries, that diorama stuff, the Mutoscopes. Victorian people walked up to a machine, paid a penny, and asked it how they were going to die. That was entertainment. People saved up for it."

"You realize how that sounds," I said. "Three dead ladies in your house and a garage full of furniture that hits you."

"Two dead ladies and one dead sailor, and Pennywise's technically dead too, he's a skeleton." He counted on his fingers. "Four. I live alone with four dead people and they're the best conversation I've ever had."

"That's the most alarming thing anyone's told me on a first date, and a guy in March told me he was legally required to notify neighbors when he moves."

"Was he?"

"He said he wasn't, which was worse." I dunked a pickle. "Okay, honest question. Why death stuff? Most guys our age collect sneakers or whatever."

He thought about it for real, which I appreciated. Most guys answer that question with whatever's on top of their head. Neil looked at the pickle like it had the answer.

"Because machines that are about death are honest," he said. "Everything old that survives, survived because somebody cared about it every day for a hundred years. Pennywise scared people and took their money and told them they were going to drown, and somebody in 1972 loved that thing enough to keep it in a barn, and now it's in Ohio and I think about it more than I think about most people I know." He shrugged. "Broken old things are just people who waited a long time for somebody to show up."

I didn't have anything to say to that for a second. I ate a pickle. The tent flap was blowing in and out behind him and the heat was sitting on everything like a cat.

"So what do they tell you," I said. "When you put the penny in. Your own fortune."

"Oh, it's rigged. It's all rigged. There's no fortune, it's a random card and a wax cylinder."

"I know. What does yours say?"

He got a strange look on his face, half embarrassed, half something warmer.

"UNEXPECTEDLY," he said. "Every time. I've put in maybe two hundred pennies over the years. Always UNEXPECTEDLY."

"And what do you want it to say?"

"Nothing," he said, too fast, and drank half his lemonade, and that was the moment I started figuring I might actually like this guy, morbid machines and all.