Welding with Children

by Tim Gautreaux

  I looked down at him hard and saw that the Bible was turning into one big adventure film for him. Freddie had already watched so many movies that any religion he would hear about would nest in his brain on top of Tanga the Cave Woman and Bikini Death Squad. I got everybody a cold drink and jelly sandwiches, and after that I turned on a window unit, handed out Popsicles, and we sat inside on the couch because the heat had waked up the yellow flies outside. I tore into how Abraham almost stabbed Isaac, and the kids’ eyes got big when they saw the knife. I hoped that they got a sense of obedience to God out of it, but when I asked Freddie what the point of the story was, he just shrugged and looked glum. Tammynette, however, had an opinion. “He’s just like O. J. Simpson!”

  Freddie shook his head. “Naw. God told Abraham to do it just as a test.”

  “Maybe God told O. J. to do what he did,” Tammynette sang.

  “Naw. O. J. did it on his own,” Freddie told her. “He didn’t like his wife no more.”

  “Well, maybe Abraham didn’t like his son no more neither, so he was gonna kill him dead and God stopped him.” Tammynette’s voice was starting to rise the way her mother’s did when she’d been drinking.

  “Daddies don’t kill their sons when they don’t like them,” Freddie told her. “They just pack up and leave.” He broke apart the two halves of his Popsicle and bit one, then the other.

  Real quick, I started in on Sodom and Gomorrah and the burning of the towns full of wicked people. Moonbean was struck with Lot’s wife. “I saw this movie once where Martians shot a gun at you and turned you into a statue. You reckon it was Martians burnt down those towns?”

  “The Bible is not a movie,” I told her.

  “I think I seen it down at Blockbuster,” Tammynette said.

  I didn’t stop to argue, just pushed on through Moses and the Ten Commandments, spending a lot of time on number six, since that one give their mammas so much trouble. Then Nu-Nu began to rub his nose with the backs of his hands and started to tune up, so I knew it was time to put the book down and wash faces and get snacks and play crawl-around. I was determined not to turn on TV again, but Freddie hit the button when I was in the kitchen. When Nu-Nu and me came into the living room, they were in a half circle around a talk show. On the set were several overweight, tattooed, frowning, slouching individuals who, the announcer told us, had tricked their parents into signing over ownership of their houses, and then evicted them. The kids watched like they were looking at cartoons, which is to say, they gobbled it all up. At a commercial, I asked Moonbean, who has the softest heart, what she thought of kids that threw their parents in the street. She put a finger in an ear and said through a long yawn that if the parents did mean things, then the kids could do what they wanted to them. I shook my head, went in the kitchen, found the Christmas vodka, and poured myself a long drink. I stared out in the yard to where my last pickup truck lay dead and rusting in a pile of wisteria at the edge of the lot. I formed a little fantasy about gathering all these kids into my Caprice and heading out north-west to start over, away from their mammas, TVs, mildew, their casino-mad grandmother, and Louisiana in general. I could get a job, raise them right, send them to college so they could own sawmills and run car dealerships. A drop of sweat rolled off the glass and hit my right shoe, and I looked down at it. The leather lace-ups I was wearing were paint-spattered and twenty years old. They told me I hadn’t held a steady job in a long time, that whatever bad was gonna happen was partly my fault. I wondered then if my wife had had the same fantasy: leaving her scruffy, sunburned, failed-welder husband home and moving away with these kids, maybe taking a course in clerical skills and getting a job in Utah, raising them right, sending them off to college. Maybe even each of their mammas had the same fantasy, pulling their kids out of their parents’ gassy-smelling old house and heading away from the heat and humidity. I took another long swallow and wondered why one of us didn’t do it. I looked out to my Caprice sitting in the shade of a pecan tree, shadows of leaves moving on it, making it wiggle like a dark green flame, and I realized we couldn’t drive away from ourselves. We couldn’t escape in the bastardmobile.

  In the pantry, I opened the house’s circuit panel and rotated out a fuse until I heard a cry from the living room. I went in and pulled down a storybook, something about a dog chasing a train. My wife bought it twenty years ago for one of our daughters but never read it to her. I sat in front of the dark television.

  “What’s wrong with the TV, Paw-Paw?” Moonbean rasped.

  “It died,” I said, opening the book. They squirmed and complained, but after a few pages they were hooked. It was a good book, one I’d read myself one afternoon during a thunderstorm. But while I was reading, this blue feeling got me. I was thinking, What’s the use? I’m just one old man with a little brown book of Bible stories and a doggy-hero book. How can that compete with daily MTV, kids’ programs that make big people look like fools, the Playboy Channel, the shiny magazines their mammas and their boyfriends leave around the house, magazines like Me, and Self, and Love Guides, and rental movies where people kill one another with no more thought than it would take to swat a fly, nothing at all like what Abraham suffered before he raised that knife? But I read on for a half hour, and when that dog stopped the locomotive before it pulled the passenger train over the collapsed bridge, even Tammynette clapped her sticky hands.

  * * *

  The next day, I didn’t have much on the welding schedule, so after one or two little jobs, including the bed rail that my daughter called and ragged me about, I went out to pick up a window grate the town marshal wanted me to fix. It was hot right after lunch, and Gumwood was wiggling with heat. Across from the cypress railroad station was our little redbrick city hall with a green copper dome on it, and on the grass in front of that was a pecan tree with a wooden bench next to its trunk. Old men sometimes gathered under the cool branches and told one another how to fix tractors that hadn’t been made in fifty years, or how to make grits out of a strain of corn that didn’t exist anymore. That big pecan was a landmark, and locals called it the “Tree of Knowledge.” When I walked by going to the marshal’s office, I saw the older Mr. Fordlyson seated in the middle of the long bench, blinking at the street like a chicken. He called out to me.

  “Bruton,” he said. “Too hot to weld?” I didn’t think it was a friendly comment, though he waved for me to come over.

  “Something like that.” I was tempted to walk on, but he motioned for me to sit next to him, which I did. I looked across the street for a long time. “The other day at the store,” I began, “you said my car was a bastardmobile.”

  Fordlyson blinked twice but didn’t change his expression. Most local men would be embarrassed at being called down for a lack of politeness, but he sat there with his face as hard as a plowshare. “Is that not what it is?” he said at last.

  I should have been mad, and I was mad, but I kept on. “It was a mean thing to let me hear.” I looked down and wagged my head. “I need help with those kids, not your meanness.”

  He looked at me with his little nickel-colored eyes glinting under that straw fedora with the black silk hatband. “What kind of help you need?”

  I picked up a pecan that was still in its green pod. “I’d like to fix it so those grandkids do right. I’m thinking of talking to their mammas and—”

  “Too late for their mammas.” He put up a hand and let it fall like an ax. “They’ll have to decide to straighten out on their own or not at all. Nothing you can tell those girls now will change them a whit.” He said this in a tone that hinted I was stupid for not seeing this. Dumb as a post. He looked off to the left for half a second, then back. “You got to deal directly with those kids.”

  “I’m trying.” I cracked the nut open on the edge of the bench.

  “Tryin’ won’t do shit. You got to bring them to Sunday school every week. You go to church?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t eat that green pecan—it’ll mak
e you sick. Which church you go to?”

  “Bonner Straight Gospel.”

  He flew back as though he’d just fired a twelve-gauge at the dog sleeping under the station platform across the street. “Bruton, your wild-man preacher is one step away from taking up serpents. I’ve heard he lets the kids come to the main service and yells at them about frying in hell like chicken parts. You got to keep them away from that man. Why don’t you come to First Baptist?”

  I looked at the ground. “I don’t know.”

  The old man bobbed his head once. “I know damned well why not. You won’t tithe.”

  That hurt deep. “Hey, I don’t have a lot of extra money. I know the Baptists got good Sunday-school programs, but…”

  Fordlyson waved a finger in the air like a little sword. “Well, join the Methodists. The Presbyterians.” He pointed up the street. “Join those Catholics. Some of them don’t put more than a dollar a week in the plate, but there’s so many of them, and the church has so many services a weekend, the priests can run the place on volume like Wal-Mart.”

  I knew several good mechanics who were Methodists. “How’s the Methodists’ children’s programs?”

  The old man spoke out of the side of his mouth. “Better’n you got now.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I told him.

  “Yeah, bullshit. You’ll go home and weld together a log truck, and tomorrow you’ll go fishing, and you’ll never do nothing for them kids, and they’ll all wind up serving time in Angola or on their backs in New Orleans.”

  It got me hot the way he thought he had all the answers, and I turned on him quick. “Okay, wise man. I came to the Tree of Knowledge. Tell me what to do.”

  He pulled down one finger on his right hand with the forefinger of the left. “Go join the Methodists.” Another finger went down and he told me, “Every Sunday, bring them children to church.” A third finger, and he said, “And keep ’em with you as much as you can.”

  I shook my head. “I already raised my kids.”

  Fordlyson looked at me hard and didn’t have to say what he was thinking. He glanced down at the ground between his smooth-toe lace-ups. “And clean up your yard.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “It’s got everything to do with everything.”

  “Why?”

  “If you don’t know, I can’t tell you.” Here he stood up, and I saw his daughter at the curb in her Lincoln. One leg wouldn’t straighten all the way out, and I could see the pain in his face. I grabbed his arm, and he smiled a mean little smile and leaned in to me for a second and said, “Bruton, everything worth doing hurts like hell.” He toddled off and left me with his sour breath on my face and a thought forming in my head like a rain cloud.

  * * *

  After a session with the Methodist preacher, I went home and stared at the yard, then stared at the telephone until I got up the strength to call Famous Amos Salvage. The next morning, a wrecker and a gondola came down my road, and before noon, Amos loaded up four derelict cars, six engines, four washing machines, ten broken lawn mowers, and two and one-quarter tons of scrap iron. I begged and borrowed Miss Hanchy’s Super-A and bush-hogged the three acres I own and then some. I cut the grass and picked up around the workshop. With the money I got from the scrap, I bought some aluminum paint for the shop and some first-class stuff for the outside of the house. The next morning, I was up at seven replacing screens on the little porch, and on the big porch on the side, I began putting down a heavy coat of glossy green deck enamel. At lunch, my wife stuck her head through the porch door to watch me work. “The kids are coming over again. How you gonna keep ’em off of all this wet paint?”

  My knees were killing me, and I couldn’t figure how to keep Nu-Nu from crawling where he shouldn’t. “I don’t know.”

  She looked around at the wet glare. “What’s got into you, changing our religion and all?”

  “Time for a change, I guess.” I loaded up my brush.

  She thought about this a moment, then pointed. “Careful you don’t paint yourself in a corner.”

  “I’m doing the best I can.”

  “It’s about time,” she said under her breath, walking away.

  I backed off the porch and down the steps, then stood in the pine straw next to the house, painting the ends of the porch boards. I heard a car come down the road and watched my oldest daughter drive up and get out with Nu-Nu over her shoulder. When she came close, I looked at her dyed hair, which was the color and texture of fiberglass insulation, the dark mascara, and the olive skin under her eyes. She smelled of cigarette smoke, stale smoke, like she hadn’t had a bath in three days. Her tan blouse was tight and tied in a knot above her navel, which was a lardy hole. She passed Nu-Nu to me like he was a ham. “Can he stay the night?” she asked. “I want to go hear some music.”

  “Why not?”

  She looked around slowly. “Looks like a bomb hit this place and blew everything away.” The door to her dusty compact creaked open, and a freckled hand came out. “I forgot to mention that I picked up Freddie on the way in. Hope you don’t mind.” She didn’t look at him as she mumbled this, hands on her cocked hips. Freddie, who had been sleeping, I guess, sat on the edge of the car seat and rubbed his eyes like a drunk.

  “He’ll be all right here,” I said.

  She took in a deep, slow breath, so deathly bored that I felt sorry for her. “Well, guess I better be heading on down the road.” She turned, then whipped around on me. “Hey, guess what?”

  “What?”

  “Nu-Nu finally said his first word yesterday.” She was biting the inside of her cheek. I could tell.

  I looked at the baby, who was going after my shirt buttons. “What’d he say?”

  “Da-da.” And her eyes started to get red, so she broke and ran for her car.

  “Wait,” I called, but it was too late. In a flash, she was gone in a cloud of gravel dust, racing toward the most cigarette smoke, music, and beer she could find in one place.

  I took Freddie and the baby around to the back steps by the little screen porch and sat down. We tickled and goo-gooed at Nu-Nu until finally he let out a “Da-da”—real loud, like a call.

  Freddie looked back toward the woods, at all the nice trees in the yard, which looked like what they were now that the trash had been carried off. “What happened to all the stuff?”

  “Gone,” I said. “We gonna put a tire swing on that tall willow oak there, first off.”

  “All right. Can you cut a drain hole in the bottom so the rainwater won’t stay in it?” He came close and put a hand on top of the baby’s head.

  “Yep.”

  “A big steel-belt tire?”

  “Sounds like a plan.” Nu-Nu looked at me and yelled, “Da-da,” and I thought how he’ll be saying that in one way or another for the rest of his life and never be able to face the fact that Da-da had skipped town, whoever Da-da was. The baby brought me in focus, somebody’s blue eyes looking at me hard. He blew spit over his tongue and cried out, “Da-da,” and I put him on my knee, facing away toward the cool green branches of my biggest willow oak.

  “Even Nu-Nu can ride the tire,” Freddie said.

  “He can fit the circle in the middle,” I told him.

  MISUSE OF LIGHT

  The store’s electric bell rang, and Mel DeSoto saw the young woman come in out of the heat with something under her arm. She looked shyly at the tripods ranked along a shelf, at the racks holding the latest cameras lined up like gleaming robotic eyes, and then she spotted his counter, the one that held the classics.

  “Hello,” she said. “Someone told me you buy old cameras.”

  He realized that though she was tall and blond, and wearing a very serious and knowing expression, she was only about eighteen, at least twenty years younger than he was and a whole lifetime away. “What do you have?”

  She raised a cracked leather case to the counter. “My grandfather died and my parents are getting
rid of his things.” Her eyes slid across his face and bounded off to the back of the store. He suddenly felt big and soft and old.

  Mel opened the case and began to examine a fifties-era Rolleiflex, checking the slower shutter speeds, opening the back and looking for fungus on the lenses. It was a clean camera, the mechanics crisp, almost perfect. He set it on the counter between them and listened to the timer buzz like a wasp until the shutter fired with a snap. He opened it again and pulled out an exposed roll of 120 film. “You want this?” he asked.

  She made a face. “No.”

  He looked at her and wondered about her sense of family history. “Well, this is in pretty good shape. I can let you have two hundred dollars for it.”

  She moved her hips from side to side, a girl’s motion. “I didn’t know if you’d even want it.”

  “This was a fine camera in its day.” He pulled out a form and asked her to sign it. “Some dealers would try to steal it from you. Your parents will be proud you got a fair price.”

  “Nobody cares what I do,” she told him. He paid her from the register, and then she was gone out into the steamy New Orleans afternoon. Mr. Weinstein walked over and handled the camera.

  “Dust it, and it’ll be good as new. This one’ll sell.” Mr. Weinstein owned the store. He was a bald man with lardy skin and a dark brush of hair above his ears. His eyes flicked toward the door. “She seemed kind of sad.”

  Mel shrugged. “This was her grandfather’s.” He sat at his little workbench and began to work with Lilliputian brushes and screwdrivers. He knew old cameras and how to deal with their shiny arms and eyes, their little spring-fed brains. As a young man, he had tried his hand at art photography and took courses at Tulane, but his work was not promising, and his professor would write on his projects, sometimes on the photographs themselves, “Misuse of light.”

  At lunchtime, he walked down the street for a hamburger, and when he reached into his pants pocket for change, he found the old roll of film the girl had left with him. It was wound on a metal spool, and the backing paper dated to the fifties. He decided to try to develop it at home. Mel enjoyed the bad photography of amateurs and always tried to develop the exposed film left in old cameras he’d purchased. Sometimes the film had faded out to nothing; sometimes the emulsion would be cracked and corroded, showing only a dried lake of skin, a quarter-moon of birthday cake. But then there would be the roll that had sat in some dark closet, locked in a Kodak Tourist, or an old Zeiss folder, kept dry by air-conditioning in an upper-middle-class house, and he could develop whatever was there: backyard picnic, lakeside fish fry, the trip to the fat aunt’s house. Now and then, he’d find something artful or otherwise interesting, and he’d put it in a scrapbook he kept for the purpose. He’d try to figure out what was in the minds of the people in the photographs, but he never could. Sometimes he’d try to imagine himself in one of the pictures, and when he would do this and look at the person standing next to him, he’d find only another stranger, like anyone he’d bump into on the street.