Welding with Children (15 page)

R
ESISTANCE

Alvin Boudreaux had outlived his neighbors. His asbestos-sided house was part of a tiny subdivision built in the 1950s, when everybody had children, a single-lane driveway, a rotating TV antenna, and a picnic table out back. Nowadays, he sat on his little porch and watched the next wave of families occupy the neighborhood, each taking over the old houses, driving up in their pairs of bug-shaped cars, one for each spouse to drive to work. Next door, Melvin Tillot had died, and his wife had sold the house to migrate up north with her daughter. Mr. Boudreaux used to watch her white puff of hair move through the yard as she snipped roses. Now she was gone, and there was no movement on his street that had consequence for him. Today he sat and watched the sky for sailing wedges of birds, or an army of ranked mackerel clouds, or the electric bruise of a thunderstorm rising from the molten heat of the Gulf. Sometimes he thought of his wife, dead now eight years. He was in that time of life when the past began coming around again, as if to reclaim him. Lately, he thought about his father, the sugarcane farmer, who used to teach him about tractors and steam engines.

Two months before, Mr. Boudreaux had watched his new neighbors move in, a young blond woman, overweight, with thin hair and raw, nervous eyes. The husband was small and mean, sat in a lawn chair in the backyard as though he was at the beach, and drank without stopping, every weekend. They had one ten-year-old, a plain, slow-moving daughter.

Mr. Boudreaux could not bear to look at these people. They let the rosebushes die of thirst and left the empty garbage cans sitting at the edge of the street until the grass under them forgot what the sun looked like, and died. They never sat on their porch, and they had no pets that he could see. But after a while, he tried to talk to the wife when she dragged out the garbage bag in the morning. Her voice was thin, like a little squeak against the thumb. She worked somewhere for six hours each day, she told him, running an electric coffee-grinding machine.

One mild afternoon, Mr. Boudreaux was going to visit the graveyard, and he rattled open a kitchen window to air the room out while he was gone. Next door, he saw the daughter come into the yard and show her father a sheet of paper. The father curled up his lip and took a swallow from a tall tumbler, looking away. Mr. Boudreaux felt sorry for the girl when she placed a hand on the father's shoulder and the man grabbed the sheet from her and balled it up. She put a forefinger to her glasses as if to bring the world into focus. The motion showed practice and patience. She was formless and looked overweight in her pleated skirt and baggy white blouse. Her carroty hair was gathered in a short tail above her neck, her lips were too big for her face, and two gray eyes hid behind glasses framed in pale blue plastic, the kind of glasses little girls wore thirty years before. She stepped next to her father's chair again, getting in his space, as Mr. Boudreaux's grandson would say. The father began to yell, something about a damned science project. He waved his arms, and his face grew red. Another child might have cried.

The next afternoon, Mr. Boudreaux was on his knees pulling grass by the backyard fence when he heard the school bus grind up LeBoeuf Street. He was still pulling when the father came home at four-thirty and sat in the lawn chair, next to the back steps. The girl appeared behind the screen door, like a shadow.

“It's got to be turned in Monday,” she said. Even her voice was ordinary, a plain voice with little music in it.

The father put his glass against his forehead. “I don't know anything about it,” he said. “Do you know how tired I am?”

Her half-formed image shifted at the screen, then dispersed like smoke. In a moment, the mother came out and stepped carefully past her husband, not looking at him until she was safely on the grass. “I'd help her,” she said. “But I don't know anything about that. Electricity. It's something a man'll have to do.”

The husband drained his drink and flung the ice cubes at the fence. Mr. Boudreaux felt a drop hit the back of his spotted hand. “Why can't she do something like a girl would do? Something
you
could help her with.”

Mr. Boudreaux peered through the honeysuckle. The man was wearing jeans and a white button-down shirt with some sort of company emblem embroidered on the breast, a gay and meandering logo that suggested a bowling alley or gas station.

The mother looked down and patted the grass in a semicircle with her left foot. “You're her parent, too,” she said. It was a weak thing to say, Mr. Boudreaux thought.

The father stood up, and the flimsy chair turned over on its side. He swung around and looked at it for a moment, then kicked it across the yard.

*   *   *

After dark, Mr. Boudreaux went out on his front porch with a glass of iced tea and listened, wondering whether the girl's parents ever argued. He had never heard them, but then he remembered that since the coming of air-conditioning, he'd heard little from inside anyone's house. When he first moved to the neighborhood, up and down LeBoeuf Street he could hear the tinny cheer of radios, the yelps of children chasing through the houses, a rare yelling match about money or relatives. But now he heard only the breathy hum of the heat pumps and the intermittent
ahhh
of an automobile's tires on the subdivision's ebony streets. He looked over at his fifteen-year-old Buick parked in the single drive. It embarrassed him to drive such a large old car through the neighborhood, where everyone stood out and washed the dust from their Japanese-lantern compacts. Maybe it was time to trade it off for something that would fit in. Next door, the father came out and walked stiffly to his candy apple car and drove away, dragging his tires at every shift of the gears,
irk, irk.

*   *   *

The next morning, Mr. Boudreaux came out for the paper and saw Carmine sitting on her front steps waiting for the bus to appear out of the fog. Her eyes were red. He picked up the paper and began walking back toward the porch, telling himself, Don't look. But at his front steps, he felt a little electrical tug at his neck muscles, a blank moment of indecision.

He turned his head. “Good morning, little miss,” he called out, raising his paper.

“Morning, Mr. Boudreaux.” Her low voice was small in the fog.

“How you doing in school?” He unfolded the paper and pretended to read the headline.

“Okay.”

He bounced once on the balls of his feet. He could walk into the house and not look back. “It's springtime,” he said. “My kids used to have to make their science projects this time of year.”

She looked over at him, her eyebrows up in surprise. “You have kids?”

Mr. Boudreaux realized how impossibly old he must seem. “Sure. A long time ago. They're nurses and engineers and one's a policeman way up in Virginia. They all had their science projects. What about you?”

She looked down at a heavy brown shoe. “I want to do one, but no one can help me,” she said.

He banged the paper against his leg several times before he said anything more. He closed his eyes. “Is your mamma home? Let me talk to her a minute.”

*   *   *

That's how it got started. After school, she rang his doorbell, and he led her into the kitchen, where he fixed her a Coke float. Carmine smelled dusty and hot, and she finished her drink in less than a minute, placing the glass in the sink and sitting down again at Mr. Boudreaux's table, spreading open a spiral-bound tablet. She gave him a blank look of evaluation, an expression she might use on a strange dog.

Mr. Boudreaux sat down across from her. “Well, missy, what kind of project you interested in? Your momma said you needed a little push in the right direction.”

“What did you do when you had a job?” she asked, pushing her hair out of her eyes.

He blinked. “I started as a millwright at LeBlanc Sugar Mill, and when I retired, I was a foreman over all the maintenance people.”

She frowned. “Does that mean you don't know anything about electricity?”

Leaning back, he rubbed a spot over his eye. “I worked on a lot of motors in my time.”

Carmine scooted her chair closer and showed him her notebook. In it were hundreds of
O
's drawn with legs, all running into a narrow cylinder and jumping one by one out of the other end of it. “These are electrons,” she said. Some of the electrons were running through a bigger cylinder and more of them seemed to be coming out the other side. “The tube shapes are resistors,” she instructed. “Some let electrons through fast, some slow.” Her short finger led his attention along the rows of exiting electrons, which had little smiles drawn on them, as though they had earned passage to a wonderful place. She told him how resistors control current and how without them no one could have ever made a television or computer.

Mr. Boudreaux nodded. “So what you going to call this project?”

“Resistance.” She said the word as though it had another meaning.

“And we gotta figure out how to demonstrate it, right?” He closed his eyes and thought back to those late-night projects of his children. His son Sid, the state patrolman, had done friction. Friction, the old man thought. That was right up Sid's alley. “We have to state a problem and show how it's solved with resistors. Then we demonstrate how they work.”

Carmine bobbed her head. “You
have
done this before.”

*   *   *

The next afternoon, they spent on the rug in the den, drawing and brainstorming. When Mr. Boudreaux let the girl out at suppertime, he saw her father standing on the front walk, glowering. The next morning was Saturday, and he and Carmine got into his venerable Buick and drove down to the electronics store at the mall. The girl hardly looked at her list. She spent her time browsing the tall Peg-Board sections hung with diodes and toggle switches, condensers and capacitors, fondling little transistors through the thin plastic bags. Mr. Boudreaux tended to business, buying a pack of foot-square circuit boards, little red push switches, eighteen-gauge wire. Earlier, Carmine had brought him a dog-eared book,
Electricity for Children,
and from it he had memorized the banding codes for resistors. With this knowledge, he selected an assortment of plastic cylinders that looked like tiny jelly beans decorated with red, black, and silver bands, an inch of silver wire coming out of each end.

Their purchases stowed in a loopy plastic bag, they walked the mall to the candy counter, where Mr. Boudreaux bought a quarter pound of lime slices. Carmine took a green wedge from him, saying nothing, and they walked on through the strollers, teenagers, and senior citizens limping along in running shoes. Mr. Boudreaux looked at the children who were Carmine's age. They seemed stylish and energetic as they played video games or preened in the reflections of shop windows. Carmine was mechanical, earnest, and as communicative as a very old pet dog.

When they got back to Mr. Boudreaux's house, Carmine's father was standing in their way, wavering in the slim line of grass that ridged the middle of the driveway. The old man got out of the Buick and greeted him.

The other man had been drinking again. He pointed a chewed fingernail at Mr. Boudreaux. “You should have asked me before you took that girl off somewhere.”

“I asked your wife. You weren't awake yet.”

“Well, let me tell you, I was worried. I called up the police and checked you out.” Carmine came around the car and stood between them, staring down the street as though she could see all the way to Texas.

Mr. Boudreaux passed his tongue along his bottom lip. “The police. You called the police about me? Why'd you do that?”

“You can't tell nowadays. Old guys such as yourself and kids. You know?” The father stuck his pale hands into a pair of tight work pants.

The old man looked at the ground. He was embarrassed because he didn't know what to think, other than that nobody used to imagine such things. Not in a million years. “You think I'm gonna rob your kid or something?” he said at last. “Look.” He held out the plastic bag. “I helped her pay for her stuff.”

Carmine's father pointed a finger at Mr. Boudreaux. “She can pay for her own stuff. You keep your money in your pocket,” he said. “I don't know why you think you got to do this.” He gave the girl a wounded glance and then turned toward his steps.

Mr. Boudreaux looked at Carmine. She pushed her glasses up her nose and looked back at him. “Did you have a little girl back when you were a father?” she asked.

He looked at his house and then back at the child. “Yes, I did. Her name is Charlene. And I have another named Monica.”

For the first time that day, her expression changed and showed surprise. “What would anybody need with two girls?”

*   *   *

That afternoon, he watched her write her report; he helped her decide where to put headings and how to divide the information up. After supper, she came over, and they planned the display. Carmine drew out a design on lined paper with an oversized pencil. “I want those little button switches that work like doorbells here,” she said. “On the first circuit, I want a straight wire to a flashlight bulb in one of those sockets we bought. On the second line, I want a twenty-two-ohm resistor to the same-size bulb. That'll make the bulb glow dimmer.” She stuck out her tongue and bit it as she drew carbon ribbons of circuits. “The third button will turn on a line with two twenty-two-ohm resistors soldered together in series, and the bulb will glow dimmer.” She went on to draw in the fourth circuit, which would be an ordinary pencil wired to show how current can pass through carbon, “which is what resistors are made of,” she told him. A fifth circuit would have a rotary switch controlling a bulb. Carmine drew in the electrical symbol for a variable resistor at this point and put down her pencil.