Welding with Children (14 page)

He stared over at a child sticking his fingers into the Jell-O of the salad bar. “I want to find out if I can do it well, if it's what I do best.”

She wiped her mouth and looked at him. “And then what?”

“Then it'll be as though I have a good voice. I guess I should sing.”

“A sense of duty to your talent,” she mused, looking up at a dusty vinyl plant hanging from the ceiling. “My old preacher used to talk about that.”

Brad took a drink of iced tea and looked away. “Yeah?”

“He said that those who could do good work but wouldn't created a vacuum in the world that would be filled by those who could do bad things and would.”

He frowned, jealous of the cleverness of the statement. “Did he really say that?”

“Something like that. A long time ago,” Faye Cooker said, gazing over toward the buffet where people roamed around with empty plates, looking and looking.

*   *   *

That night Brad sat in his stale little room, wondering if fiction was really what he could learn to do best. He was a fair sermonizer, and scores of cheating husbands and alimony dodgers in St. Tammany Parish had at least considered reform as proof of his talents. Faye's rules and tasks began to line up like penances in his head. He wondered if he really wanted to write or if he just wanted to know if he
could
write. There was a big difference. He fired up his laptop and began typing at once, not stopping until Butchie tumbled into the room around three o'clock.

The big man sat down on his bed with a whoop. “Hey, Shakespeare, guess who just scored?”

“You and the little lady from Ohio?”

Butchie ran his forearm back and forth like a locomotive piston. “Banged me a Buckeye!” He collapsed onto the bed.

For several moments Brad tried to think of something appropriate to say. Finally he asked, “You going to have a writing sample by tomorrow afternoon?”

“No problem,” he said slowly. “I'll turn out something on my old portable in the morning.” After a minute, Butchie began to snore, his legs slanted to the carpet like two logs.

It took Brad a while to get back into his manuscript; he began to worry about the slight, smiling, gray lady Butchie had been with. Maybe this was Butchie's talent, though, to share his steamy teutonic self with the world's superannuated wallflowers. But the woman was so thin, he thought, a whisper of a person, like a veteran librarian. He tried not to imagine Butchie Langanstein's bulk pressing out her brittle little self. It would be like Germany invading Belgium all over again.

*   *   *

The next morning he got up early to eat breakfast, and Butchie lumbered behind him to the student union, where they joined up with Faye and the lady from Ohio, whose name was Leda. Her eyes were all over Butchie, who spent a great deal of time staring at his runny eggs. She put a hand on his shoulder once, when she asked a question, and Brad noticed that the skin on her hands was pale and clear, but with veins the color of cheap blue ink. Faye looked back and forth between Butchie and Leda until her mouth fell open just the slightest. When they'd left the table, she leaned over to Brad and asked, “Are those two an item?”

“I guess so,” he said, wincing.

She stared after them as they left the building, shoulder to shoulder. “She's older than I am. That woman probably doesn't even have ovaries anymore.”

“Yes, well.” He took a slurp of coffee. “I don't guess they're doing much writing.”

Faye shook her head. “Lord knows they have something to write about, each of them. Anyway, I feel sorry for big piggy, there.”

He put down his knife. “What?”

“Can you imagine what she's going to do to him after this conference? Phone calls in the night, postcards with flowers drawn in the margins. That old gal's a loose ship looking for a dock.”

“She seems sort of nice to me,” he said.

“This is about the fifth conference I've seen her attend, Brad.” She dragged out his name the way a mother would, and she reached over and patted his hand. “Just because a character is old doesn't guarantee they're harmless.”

He looked out of the union windows to the midget trees of Pine Oil Junior College. “Maybe I should write about her.”

“Not right now,” she said. Then she explained for ten minutes why she'd said that, and he put his head down.

“There's so much I've got to know,” he said. “But I'd like to find out the single most valuable piece of information a writer has to find out, the thing that will set him off in the right direction.”

“The central truth,” Faye said, deadpan.

“I guess so.”

“Like, insert tab A into slot B and write happily ever after?”

He looked up. “Is it a ridiculous notion?”

“Like Mother Theresa tap-dancing. Nobody can teach you how to write.”

“What will?”

Faye sat back and puffed out her lined cheeks. “God and hard work.”

*   *   *

Brad skipped that day's sections on “Making Stories That Sell” and “How to Choose an Agent” to hole up in his room, polishing sentences. At one point, he scrolled back to the start and read the very first of what he'd done:

The farmer stepped out onto his porch and looked off toward the distant tree line, a fence of green, motionless in the noon heat. The crows were not there yet, and he focused on the tomatoes, a hundred rows staked straight as soldiers in the powdery soil. The pumps needed to be primed and run, but there was no help to go out in the blaze and pull the hoses or open the irrigation gates. He thought he saw someone walking at the far end of the rows, and he moved his head with a hopeful motion, but it was merely an anomaly of his cheap bifocals that manufactured little bands of movement out of stillness at the edge of his vision. The motion in the field was like the ghost of his father, or that of his grandfather, or even of his great-grandfather, a legend he barely remembered as a white and withered figure tapping stakes into hills turned up by horses. Now the farmer's wife was dead, his sons gone west to jobs that would not kill them, and he felt like the period at the end of a long sentence. Four crows sailed up into the far trees like black hats thrown against the wind, and he reached to the porch support for the hand-worn shotgun.

Brad bit the inside of his cheek and stared hard at the words. Something new was happening.

Around four o'clock, Butchie came into the room with a folder of loose pages stuffed into an armpit. “Hey, I been over at Leda's using her word processor. Try this on for size.” He thrust a wad of pale dot-matrix lines into Brad's stomach and walked into the bathroom. Brad sat in a vinyl chair and began to read a limping paragraph threaded with clichés and inaccuracies.

Maxwell Smilington was the best agent the government had in Brooklyn. When the phone rang on Sunday morning, he was given by the voice on the line the most dangerous assignment he'd had since he'd busted up the Tong gang at Lennox and Seventy-seventh Street. Maxwell pulled out his shiny revolver and admired his reflection in the polished stainless steel, his straight-back blond mane and his pearly eyes. He went down to street level and got a cab at once, riding down to the Dutch Embassy, where he was to meet Hans Toffler, to get the low-down on terrorists planning to blow up the Empire State Building. The cab driver, a voluptuous blond like himself, watched him in the rearview mirror. “Where to?” she asked, pouting her ruby red lips.

“Dutch Embassy,” he said importantly.

She smiled. “You have friends in Dutch?” she asked.

Brad read on until Butchie came out of the bathroom fastening his buckle like a cinch strap. “What you think?”

The minister looked up and smiled, fashioning a lie. “If this gets published, it'll really sell,” he told him.

Butchie nodded and grabbed the manuscript. “I'm turning this in to that Millicent broad for evaluation. She's got connections.”

Brad made up a smile. “I'm surprised you didn't try to score with her.”

“Yeah, man. She's got so many love handles I'd never fall off.” He slapped Brad on the shoulder, nearly knocking him out of the chair.

*   *   *

That night, the fiction group fearfully turned in their sample chapters and Lamot, Millicent, and Faye scheduled conferences for the following afternoon, the last day of the conference. On the final morning, everyone attended an author's fruit breakfast, and some who had not written a word during the week just packed up and left in cabs, well-fed and entertained. Later, Brad sat in a tiled hallway and talked with two other writers, an old bald fireman and a kid from New Orleans. Down the hall, Butchie came out of Millicent's classroom, his manuscript bunched up in his hands.

“How'd it go, Butchie?”

He seemed surprised to see anyone else in the hall. “All right,” he said. “It went all right.” He squeezed his pages as though he was trying to hide them in his mittenlike hands.

Brad got up and walked him out into the sunshine. “You okay?”

“Oh, yeah. But I had that Millicent pegged all wrong.”

“What'd she say?”

He rocked his big head up and down and expanded his eyes, as though agreeing with something he'd been told. “She said if a garden slug knew how to use a pen, it would write the novel I was writing.”

“Wow.” Brad took a step back.

“She said everything that could be wrong was wrong. I know I didn't spend a lot of time on it, but jeez.”

At this time Leda came around the corner of the building, walking briskly, her white, shoulder-length hair springing like a girl's. “Hey, Butch,” she called. “How'd it go?”

The big man's face bloomed crimson. “Not so good,” he told her. “She said it was pretty bad.”

Leda stepped close to him and smiled, closing a white hand on his elbow. “If it's important to you, I can help you with it.” She sounded as though she would write a whole novel for Butchie in one night, if it would help.

*   *   *

Inside again, waiting, Brad heard the office door open, and he looked up to Faye Cooker's unreadable expression as she motioned for him to come in. The thirty pages he'd submitted to her lay stacked neatly on the desk. He coughed and settled into a chair. She stared at him as though perplexed about what to say.

“You've been waiting a long time?” she asked.

“Not long. I was talking with my roommate and his friend.”

“Ah. Leda and the swine.”

“He didn't get a good review on his story.”

Faye picked up the pages from her desk. “And you were wondering…”

“Was it that bad?”

She shook her head. “I've never told anyone what I'm about to tell you.”

He crossed his arms. “Well, let's have it.”

“I think you should quit whatever it is you do for a year and finish this novel. When you've completed it, I'll help you find an agent in New York.” She looked at him directly and pointed a finger at him. “I'm not doing you a favor by telling you that this is the best thirty pages I've read by a student in as many years.”

Brad began to have a subtle elevation of spirit that he suspected was the result of having come down in the neighborhood of The Answer. He had, with Faye's help, figured something out. At least this time. “Tell me the things I did wrong,” he said, his voice dry, all his energy going to suppress a building excitement.

“Almost nothing. Let me tell you what you did right, and how to keep doing it for years to come.” And she smiled, showing her coffee-stained old teeth, still straight, still able to signal success, when success comes.

*   *   *

Ten years after that meeting, on a Tuesday, Brad was eating in a new bookstore/café that had opened across the street from the church. Since he'd left the Pine Oil Writers' Conference, he'd never written another word of fiction. He'd come home on fire to create, gone into his new little office, stared out into the sky and watched pelicans for days on end. He felt that he had found The Answer, and ultimately, after a few weeks, The Answer didn't matter anymore. He could write well and so what? He tried to funnel creativity into his sermons, but the congregation remained polite and daydreaming as usual, and as their dry cool hands slipped in and out of his at the door to the church, he wanted to ask, What's not quite right?

His wife knew what Fay Cooker had told him, and she seemed to be waiting for the result. Three years passed, and Brad thought she had begun to look at him like a bad investment: a residential lot that was sinking, a slot machine that would never pay off. Eventually an inscrutable glumness began to stick to her like bad makeup, and she divorced him. One day his uncle Ralph, who was really his wife's uncle, showed up and reclaimed his circular saw.

He still read fiction, and while waiting for a complicated Muffelata to be made in the bookstore/café, he scanned the racks. A new display had been set up, and Brad's eye caught sight of a hardback novel by Butchie Langanstein titled
The Machine-Shop Murders,
and he grabbed it at once, turning to the back cover to read a smattering of noncommital reviews. There he saw a photograph of Butchie, graying and a bit thinner, seated on a big veranda next to old Leda, who had dyed her hair and now looked the younger of the two. Brad felt accused of something and stared hard at the photo, studying Butchie's horny smile and the pouches under his eyes. He thumbed to the front and read that the book was in its second printing. Turning to the first paragraph, which contained a rape and a killing, he found the writing to be coarse, borrowed, and plain. Butchie had not evolved a great deal, and Brad wondered how much of the writing was Leda's. He read nine pages, thinking how much better than this he could have done. He kept reading, with each page his mood sinking down, down. He read on even after the counter girl started to bang her little bell repeatedly, calling out his name to please come on and claim what was his.