Welding with Children

by Tim Gautreaux

  Mr. Arceneaux looked at the ceiling, the corners of his flaccid mouth turning down. “I don’t know. There’s one thing I ain’t told you yet.”

  “Well, it’s now or never.” The priest was instantly sorry for saying this, and Clyde gave him a questioning look before glancing down at his purple feet.

  “I can’t hold just one thing back? I’d hate like hell to tell anybody this.”

  “Clyde, it’s God listening, not me.”

  “Can I just think it to God? I mean, I told you the other stuff. Even about the midget woman.”

  “If it’s a serious sin, you’ve got to tell me about it. You can generalize a bit.”

  “This is some of that punishment we were talkin’ about earlier. It’s what I deserve.”

  “Let’s have it.”

  “I stole Nelson Lodrigue’s car.”

  Something clicked in the priest’s brain. He remembered this himself. Nelson Lodrigue owned an old Toronado, which he parked next to the ditch in front of his house. The car had a huge eight-cylinder engine and no muffler, and every morning at six sharp Nelson would crank the thing up and race the engine, waking most of his neighbors and all the dogs for blocks around. He did this for over a year, to keep the battery charged, he’d said. When it disappeared, Nelson put a big ad in the paper offering a fifty-dollar reward for information, but no one came forward. The men in the Knights of Columbus talked of it for weeks.

  “That was about ten years ago, wasn’t it? And isn’t Nelson a friend of yours?” Nelson was another Sunday-morning lingerer on the church steps.

  Mr. Arceneaux swallowed hard several times and waited a moment, storing up air. “Father, honest to God, I ain’t never stole nothin’ before. My daddy told me thievin’ is the worst thing a man can do. I hated to take Nelson’s hot rod, but I was fixin’ to have a nervous breakdown from lack of sleep.”

  The priest nodded. “It’s good to get these things off your chest. Is there anything else?”

  Mr. Arceneaux shook his head. “I think we hit the high points. Man, I’m ashamed of that last one.”

  The priest gave him absolution and a small penance.

  Clyde tried to smile, his dark tongue tasting the air. “‘Ten Hail Marys? That’s a bargain, Father.”

  “If you want to do more, you could call Nelson and tell him what you did.”

  The old man thought for just a second. “I’ll stick with them little prayers for now.” Father Ledet got out his missal and read aloud over Mr. Arceneaux until his words were interrupted by a gentle snoring.

  * * *

  Vic sat in the lobby, waiting for the priest to come down. It had been twenty minutes, and he knew the priest’s blood-alcohol level was ready to peak. He took off his uniform hat and began twirling it in front of him. He wondered what good it would do to charge the priest with drunken driving. Priests had to drink wine every day, and they liked the taste in the evening, too. A ticket wouldn’t change his mind about drinking for long. On the other hand, Father Ledet had ruined Mrs. Barrilleaux’s sedan, which for twenty years she had maintained as if it were a child.

  A few minutes earlier, Vic had walked down the corridor and peeked into the room where they were treating her. He hadn’t let her see him, and he studied her face. Now he sat and twirled his hat, thinking. It would be painful for the priest to have his name in the paper attached to a DWI charge, but it would make him understand the seriousness of what he had done. Patrolman Garafola dealt with too many people who did not understand the seriousness of what they were doing.

  The priest came into the lobby and the young policeman stood up. “Father, we’ll have to take a ride to the station.”

  “What?”

  “I want to run a Breathalyzer test on you.”

  Father Ledet straightened up, stepped close, and put an arm around the man’s shoulders. “Oh, come on. What good would that do?”

  The patrolman started to speak, but then he motioned for the priest to follow him. “Let me show you something.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “I want you to see this.” They walked down the hall and through double doors to a triage area for emergency cases. There was a narrow window in a wall, and the policeman told the priest to look through it. An oxygen bottle and gauges partially blocked the view. Inside, Mrs. Barrilleaux sat on an examining table, a blue knot swelling in her upper arm. One doctor was pulling back on her shoulder while another twisted her elbow. On the table was a large, menacing syringe, and Mrs. Barrilleaux was crying, without expression, great patient tears. “Take a long look,” Vic said, “and when you get enough, come on with me.” The priest turned away from the glass and followed.

  “You didn’t have to show me that.”

  “I didn’t?”

  “That woman is the nicest, the best cook, the best—”

  “Come on, Father,” Vic said, pushing open the door to the parking lot. “I’ve got a lot of writing to do.”

  * * *

  Father Ledet’s blood-alcohol content was well over the legal limit, so the patrolman wrote him a ticket for DWI, to which he added running a stop sign and causing an accident with bodily injury. The traffic court suspended his license, and since he had banged up the Lincoln before, his insurance company dropped his coverage as soon as their computers picked up the offenses. A week after the accident, he came into the rectory hall drinking a glass of tap water, which beaded on his tongue like a nasty oil. The phone rang and the glass jumped in his fingers. It was Mrs. Arceneaux again, who told him she’d been arguing with her husband, who wanted to tell her brother Nelson Lodrigue that he had stolen his car ten years before. “Why’d you tell him to talk to Nelson about the stealing business? It’s got him all upset.”

  The priest did not understand. “What would be the harm in him telling Nelson the truth?”

  “Aw, no, Father. Clyde’s got so little oxygen in his brain, he’s not thinking straight. He can’t tell Nelson what he did. I don’t want him to die with everyone in the neighborhood thinking he’s a thief. And Nelson … well, I love my brother, but if he found out my husband stole his old bomb, he’d make Clyde’s last days hell. He’s just like that, you know?”

  “I see. Is there something I can do?” He put down the glass of water on the little phone table next to a small white statue of the Blessed Virgin.

  “If you would talk to Clyde and let him know it’s okay to die without telling Nelson about the car, I’d appreciate it. He already confessed everything anyway, right?”

  The priest looked down the hall toward the patio, longing for the openness. “I can’t discuss specific matters of confession.”

  “I know. That’s why I gave you all the details again.”

  “All right, I’ll call. Is he awake now?”

  “He’s here at home. We got him a crank-up bed and a oxygen machine, and a nurse sits with him at night. I’ll put him on.”

  Father Ledet leaned against the wall and stared at a crucifix, wondering what Christ had done to deserve his punishment. When he heard the hiss of Clyde Arceneaux’s mask come out of the phone, he began to tell him what he should hear, that he was forgiven in God’s eyes, that if he wanted to make restitution, he could give something to the poor, or figure out how to leave his brother-in-law something. He hung up and sniffed the waxed smell of the rectory, thinking of the sweet, musky brandy in the kitchen cupboard, and immediately he went to find the young priest upstairs to discuss the new Mass schedule.

  * * *

  On Saturday afternoon, Father Ledet was nodding off in the confessional when a woman entered and began to make her confession. After she’d mentioned one or two venial sins, she addressed him through the screen. “Father, it’s Doris Arceneaux, Clyde’s wife.”

  The priest yawned. “How is Clyde?”

  “You remember the car business? Well, something new has come up,” she whispered. “Clyde always told me he and the Scadlock kid towed the car off with a rope, and when they got it downtown b
ehind the seawall, they pushed it overboard into the bay.”

  “Yes?”

  “There’s a new wrinkle.”

  He put down his missal and removed his glasses to rub his eyes. “What do you mean?”

  “Clyde just told me he stored the car. Been paying thirty-five dollars a month to keep it in a little closed bin down at the U-Haul place for the past ten years.” She whispered louder: “I don’t know how he kept that from me. Makes me wonder about a few other things.”

  The priest’s eyebrows went up. “Now he can give it back, or you can give it back when your husband passes away.” As soon as he’d said this, he knew it wouldn’t work. It was too logical. If nothing else, his years in the confessional had taught him that people did not run their lives by reason much of the time, but by some little inferior motion of the spirit, some pride, some desire that defied the simple beauty of doing the sensible thing.

  Mrs. Arceneaux protested that the secret had to be kept. “There’s only one way to get Nelson his car back like Clyde wants.”

  The priest sighed. “How is that?”

  Mrs. Arceneaux began to fidget in the dark box. “Well, you the only one besides me who knows what happened. Clyde says the car will still run. He cranks it up once every three weeks so it keeps its battery hot.”

  The priest put his head down. “And?”

  “And you could get up early and drive it back to Nelson’s and park it where it was the night Clyde stole it.”

  “Not no,” the priest said, “but hell no!”

  “Father!”

  “What if I were caught driving that thing? The secret would get out then.”

  “Father, this is part of a confession. You can’t tell.”

  The priest now sensed a plot. “I’m sorry, but I can’t help you, Mrs. Arceneaux. Now I’m going to give you a penance of twenty Our Fathers.”

  “For telling one fib to my daughter-in-law?”

  “You want a cut rate for dishonesty?”

  “All right,” she said in an unrepentant voice. “And I’ll pray for you while I’m at it.”

  * * *

  After five o’clock Saturday Mass, Father Ledet felt his soul bang around inside him like a golf ball in a shoe box, something hard and compacted. He yearned for a hot, inflating swallow of spirits, longed for the afterburn of brandy in his nostrils. He went back into the empty church, a high-ceilinged Gothic building over a hundred years old, sat in a pew, and steeped himself in the odors of furniture oil, incense, and hot candle wax. He let the insubstantial colors of the windows flow over him, and after a while, these shades and smells began to fill the emptiness in him. He closed his eyes and imagined the housekeeper’s supper, pushing out of mind his need for a drink, replacing the unnecessary with the good. At five to six, he walked to the rectory to have his thoughts made into food.

  The next evening, after visiting a sick parishioner, he was reading the newspaper upstairs in his room when the housekeeper knocked on his door. Mrs. Mamie Barrilleaux was downstairs and would like to speak with him, the housekeeper said.

  The first thing Father Ledet noticed when he walked into the downstairs study was the white cast on the woman’s arm.

  “Mamie,” he said, sitting next to her on the sofa. “I have to tell you again how sorry I am about your arm.”

  The woman’s face brightened, as though to be apologized to was a privilege. “Oh, don’t worry about it, Father. Accidents happen.” She was a graying brunette with fair skin, a woman whose cheerfulness made her pretty. One of the best cooks in a town of good cooks, she volunteered for every charity work connected with a stove or oven, and her time belonged to anyone who needed it, from her well-fed smirk of a husband to the drug addicts who showed up at the parish shelter. While they talked, the priest’s eyes wandered repeatedly to the ugly cast, which ran up nearly to her shoulder. For five minutes, he wondered why she had dropped in unannounced. And then she told him.

  “Father, I don’t know if you understand what good friends Clyde Arceneaux’s wife and I are. We went to school together for twelve years.”

  “Yes. It’s a shame her husband’s so sick.”

  Mrs. Barrilleaux fidgeted into the corner of the sofa, put her cast on the armrest, where it glowed under a lamp. “That’s sort of why I’m here. Doris told me she asked you to do something for her and Clyde, and you told her no. I’m not being specific because I know it was a confession thing.”

  “How much did she tell you?” The priest hoped she wouldn’t ask what she was going to ask, because he knew he could not refuse her.

  “I don’t know even one detail, Father. But I wanted to tell you that if Doris wants it done, then it needs doing. She’s a good person, and I’m asking you to help her.”

  “But you don’t know what she wants me to do.”

  Mrs. Barrilleaux put her good hand on her cast. “I know it’s not something bad.”

  “No, no. It’s just…” He was going to mention that his driver’s license was suspended but realized that he couldn’t even tell her that.

  Mamie lowered her head and turned her face toward the priest. “Father?”

  “Oh, all right.”

  * * *

  He visited Mrs. Arceneaux on a Wednesday, got the keys, and late that night he sat outside on the dark rectory patio for a long time, filling up on the smells of honeysuckle. The young priest walked up to him and insisted that he come in out of the mosquitoes and the dampness. Upstairs, he changed into street clothes and lay on the bed like a man waiting for a firing squad. Around midnight, his legs began to ache terribly, and the next thing he knew, they were carrying him downstairs to the kitchen, where the aspirin was kept, and as his hand floated toward the cabinet door to his right, it remembered its accustomed movement to the door on the left, where a quart of brandy waited like an airy medicinal promise. The mind and the spirit pulled his hand to the right, while the earthly body drew it to the left. He heard the drone of an airplane somewhere in the sky above, and he suddenly thought of an old homily that told how people were like twin-engine planes, one engine the logical spirit, the other the sensual body, and that when they were not running in concert, the craft ran off course to disaster. The priest supposed he could rev his spirit in some way, but when he thought of driving the stolen car, he opted to throttle up the body. One jigger, he thought, would calm him down and give him the courage to do this important and good deed. As he took a drink, he tried to picture how glad Nelson Lodrigue would be to have his old car back. As he took another, he thought of how Mr. Arceneaux could gasp off into the next world with a clear conscience. After several minutes, the starboard engine sputtered and locked up as Father Ledet lurched sideways through the dark house looking for his car keys.

  * * *

  At one o’clock, he got into the church’s sedan and drove to the edge of town to a row of storage buildings. He woke up the manager, a shabby old man living in a trailer next to the gate. Inside the perimeter fence, Father Ledet walked along the numbered roll-up doors of the storage areas until he found the right one. He had trouble fitting the key into the lock but finally managed to open the door and turn on the light. The Oldsmobile showed a hard shell of rust and dust and resembled a million-year-old museum egg. The door squawked when he pulled on it, and the interior smelled like the closed-in mausoleum at the parish graveyard. He put in the key, and the motor groaned and then stuttered alive, rumbling and complaining. Shaking his head, the priest thought he’d never be able to drive this car undetected into the quiet neighborhood where Nelson Lodrigue lived. But after he let it idle and warm up, the engine slowed to a breathy subsonic bass, and he put it in reverse for its first trip in ten years.

  The plan was to park the car on a patch of grass next to the street in front of Nelson’s house, the very spot where it had been stolen. The priest would walk into the next block to Mrs. Arceneaux’s house, and she would return him to his car. He pulled out of the rental place and drove a back road, past tin-roofed
shotgun houses and abandoned cars better in appearance than the leprous one that now moved among them. He entered the battered railroad underpass and emerged in the better part of town, which was moon-washed and asleep. He found that if he kept his foot off the accelerator and just let the car idle along at ten miles an hour, it didn’t make much noise, but when he gave the car just a little gas at stop signs, the exhaust sounded like a lion warming up for a mating. The priest was thankful at least for a certain buoyancy of the blood provided by the glasses of brandy, a numbness of spirit that helped him endure what he was doing. He was still nervous, though, and had trouble managing the touchy accelerator, feeling that the car was trying to bound away in spite of his best efforts to control it. Eventually, he turned onto the main street of Nelson’s little subdivision and burbled slowly down it until he could see the apron of grass next to the asphalt where he could park. He turned off the car’s lights.

  * * *

  One of the town’s six policemen had an inflamed gallbladder, and Patrolman Vic Garafola was working his friend’s shift, parked in an alley next to the Elks Club, sitting stone-faced with boredom, when a shuddering and filthy Toronado crawled past in front of him. He would have thought it was just some rough character from the section down by the fish plant, but he got a look at the license plate and saw that it bore a design that hadn’t been on any car in at least five years. Vic put his cruiser in gear, left his lights off, and rolled out into the town’s empty streets, following the Toronado at a block’s distance past the furniture store, across the highway, and into little Shade Tree Subdivision. He radioed a parish officer he’d seen a few minutes earlier and asked him to park across the entrance, the only way in or out of the neighborhood.

  Even in the dark, Vic could see that the car’s tires were bagged out and that it was dirty in an unnatural way, pale with dust—the ghost of a car. He closed in as it swayed down Cypress Street, and when he saw the driver douse his lights, he thought, Bingo, someone’s up to no good, and at once he hit his headlights, flashers, and yowling siren. The Toronado suddenly exploded forward in a flatulent rush, red dust and sparks raining backward from underneath the car as it left the patrolman in twin swirls of tire smoke. Whoever was driving was supremely startled, and Vic began the chase, following but not gaining on the sooty taillights. Shade Tree Subdivision was composed of only one long street that ran in an oval like a racetrack. At the first curve, the roaring car fishtailed to the right, and Vic followed as best he could, watching ahead as the vehicle pulled away and then turned right again in the distance, heading for the subdivision exit. When Vic chased around the curve, he saw a white cruiser blocking the speeding car’s escape. The fleeing vehicle then slowed and moved again down Cypress Street toward the middle of the subdivision. Vic raised a questioning eyelid as he watched the grumbling car drive off the road and finally stop in front of Nelson’s Lodrigue’s brick rancher. The patrolman pulled up, opened his door, and pointed his revolver toward the other vehicle.