CHESTER MCBADBAT's Arc

Chapter 4 of 5

Timmy texted that he and AJ were coming out Saturday to see the place. Chester read the message twice, then looked around at what he'd actually built. A tarp held up by rope and hope. A half-framed chicken coop with no chickens. His dad sleeping in a lawn chair. DeShawn doing bench presses in the dirt. He had three days to make the property look less like a joke. First thing was power—he needed something that would run more than his dad's dead phone. Chester drove to the junkyard and found an old turbine pole in the scrap pile, plus three ceiling fan blades someone had spray-painted silver. He hauled them back and spent two days digging a hole deep enough to anchor the pole without concrete. The blades went on crooked, but when the wind picked up they spun fast enough to charge the car battery he'd wired underneath. Not enough for lights, but enough to prove the idea worked. DeShawn watched him test it and said nothing, just went back to his workout. Water was harder. Chester couldn't afford pipe or a pump, so he built a filter box out of plywood and layered it with gravel, sand, and torn T-shirts. He ran creek water through it into clay pots he'd found behind his dad's trailer. It came out brown the first six times, then murky, then almost clear. He tasted it and didn't die. His dad wandered over, looked at the setup, and said it reminded him of something from a survival show. Chester didn't answer. The bunk bed frame came last—two pallets stacked with foam he'd pulled from a dumpster, wedged under a sheet of tin roofing. It didn't look like the farms in his vision board, but it was more than a tarp. Saturday morning, Timmy and AJ showed up and stood at the edge of the clearing. Chester walked them through—showed them the turbine spinning, the water dripping clear, the beds under the tin roof. Timmy looked at the turbine, then at Chester, and asked if it actually worked. Chester plugged in his phone and the screen lit up. AJ nodded slow, like he was doing math in his head. They didn't say it was good, but they didn't leave either. Timmy asked where they'd put the goats. Chester pointed past the chicken coop frame, and for the first time since he'd texted them, he didn't feel like he was selling something that didn't exist.