Welding with Children (17 page)

In the garage, he found that there was no more gasoline for the old torch, which had whispered itself empty on the first project. On the front lawn, he cut a short length out of his new garden hose and siphoned fuel from his Buick, getting a charge of gas in his mouth, where it burned his gums under his dentures. Later, as the soldering tool heated in the voice of the torch, he felt he could spit a tongue of flame.

He ran the wires as she had run them, set the switches, mounted the light sockets, soldered the resistors in little silvery tornadoes of smoke. He found the bulbs left over from the first project and turned them into the sockets, wired in the battery, checked everything, then stepped back. The posters and display were duplicates of those the father had destroyed. Though the workshop window showed a trace of dawn, and though Mr. Boudreaux's legs felt as though someone had shot them full of arrows, he allowed himself a faint smile.

*   *   *

He made a pot of coffee and sat out in the dew on the front porch, waiting for the father to come out in his hurting, hung-over fog and drive away. At seven fifteen, he was gone, and Mr. Boudreaux loaded the project into the backseat of his car, started the engine, and sat in it, waiting for the school bus. Carmine came out and stood by the garbage cans, and when the bus came, its seats stippled with white poster boards, for everyone's project was due the same day, she looked up at the opened door, pushed her glasses up her nose, and got on. He followed the bus out of the neighborhood and down the long oak-shaded avenue as the vehicle picked up kids in twos and threes, science projects at each stop. The farther he drove, the more fearful he became, thinking that maybe the girl wouldn't understand, or would think that he was doing this just to get back at her father, which in part, he admitted, he was. Several times he thought he'd better pass the bus, turn around, and head home. But then what would he do with the project? He wouldn't throw it away, and it would haunt him forever if he kept it.

The bus pulled into the school lot, and he followed it and parked. By the time he got to the covered walkway, children were pouring off, carrying jars of colored fluids, homemade generators, Styrofoam models of molecules. He had the bifold project in his arms, and when she came down the bus steps empty-handed, he spread it open for her. She stepped close and looked, lifted a page of the tacked on report and checked the second, the third page.

“Where's the display?” she asked, not looking at him.

“It's in the car here,” he said, sidling off to retrieve it. When he got back, he saw she had hitched her bookbag onto her shoulder and had the posters folded and under an arm.

“Give it here,” she said, holding out her free hand, her face showing nothing.

He handed it to her. “You want me to help carry it in?”

She shook her head. “No. How do the switches work?”

He clicked one for her. “Up is on, down is off.”

She nodded, then squinted up at him. “I'll be late.”

“Go on, then.” He watched her waddle off among her classmates, bearing her load, then he turned for his car. She could have called after him, smiled, and said thank you, but she didn't.

*   *   *

Because he was out so early, he decided to go shopping. He considered his options: the Buick lot, the appliance dealer's, the hardware. After half an hour of driving around town slowly, he went into a department store and bought two small masonry pots filled with plastic flowers. They looked like the jonquils that used to come up in the spring alongside his mother's cypress fence. He drove to the old city graveyard, and after walking among the brick tombs and carefully made marble angels, he placed a colorful pot on the sun-washed slab of his father's grave. His back pained him as he put down the flowers, and when he straightened up, the bone-white tombs hurt his eyes, but still he turned completely around to look at this place where no one would say the things that could have been said, and that was all right with him.

S
ORRY
B
LOOD

The old man walked out of Wal-Mart and stopped dead, recognizing nothing he saw in the steaming Louisiana morning. He tried to step off the curb, but his feet locked up and his chest flashed with a burst of panic. The blacktop parking lot spread away from him, glittering with the enameled tops of a thousand automobiles. One of them was his, and he struggled to form a picture but could not remember which of the family's cars he had taken out that morning. He backstepped into the shade of the store's overhang and sat on a displayed riding lawn mower. Putting his hands down on his khaki pants, he closed his eyes and fought to remember, but one by one, things began to fall away from the morning, and then the day before, and the life before. When he looked up again, all the cars seemed too small, too bright and glossy, more like fishing lures. His right arm trembled, and he regarded the spots on the back of his hand with a light-headed embarrassment. He stared down at his Red Wing brogans, the shoes of a stranger. For a half hour, he sat on the mower seat, dizziness subsiding like a summer storm.

Finally, he got up, stiff and floating, and walked off into the grid of automobiles, his white head turning from side to side under a red feed-store cap. Several angry-looking people sat in hot cars, their faces carrying the uncomprehending disappointment of boiled lobsters. He walked attentively for a long time but recognized nothing, not even his own tall image haunting panels of tinted glass.

Twice he went by a man slouched in a parked Ford sedan, an unwashed thing with a rash of rust on its lower panels. The driver, whose thin hair hung past his ears, was eating a pickled sausage out of a plastic sleeve and chewing it with his front teeth. He watched the wanderer with a slow reptilian stare each time he walked by. On the third pass, the driver of the Ford considered the still-straight back, the big shoulders. He hissed at the old man, who stopped and looked for the sound. “What's wrong with you, gramps?”

He went to the window and stared into the car at the man whose stomach enveloped the lower curve of the steering wheel. An empty quart beer bottle lay on the front seat. “Do you know me?” the old man asked in a voice that was soft and lost.

The driver looked at him a long time, his eyes moving down his body as though he were a column of figures. “Yeah, Dad,” he said at last. “Don't you remember me?” He put an unfiltered cigarette in his mouth and lit it with a kitchen match. “I'm your son.”

The old man's hand went to his chin. “My son,” he said, like a fact.

“Come on.” The man in the Ford smiled only with his mouth. “You're just having a little trouble remembering.”

The old man got in and placed a hand on the chalky dash. “What have I been doing?”

“Shopping for me is all. Now give me back my wallet, the one you took in the store with you.” The driver held out a meaty hand.

The other man pulled a wallet from a hip pocket and handed it over.

In a minute, they were leaving the parking lot, riding a trash-strewn highway out of town into the sandy pine barrens of Tangipahoa Parish. The old man watched the littered roadside for clues. “I can't remember my own name,” he said, looking down at his plaid shirt.

“It's Ted,” the driver told him, giving him a quick look. “Ted Williams.” He checked his side-view mirrors.

“I don't even remember your name, son. I must be sick.” The old man wanted to feel his head for fever, but he was afraid he would touch a stranger.

“My name is Andy,” the driver said, fixing a veined eye on him for a long moment. After a few miles, he turned off the main highway onto an unpaved road. The old man listened to the knock and ping of rock striking the driveshaft of the car. Then the gravel became patchy and thin, the road blotched with a naked, carroty earth like the hide of a sick dog. Bony cattle heaved their heads between strands of barbed wire, scavenging for roadside weeds. The Ford bumped past mildewed trailers sinking into rain-eaten plots. Farther on, the land was too soggy for trailers, too poor even for the lane's desperate cattle. After two miles of this, they pulled up to a redbrick house squatting in a swampy two-acre lot. Limbs were down everywhere, and catbriers and poison oak covered the rusty fence that sagged between the yard and cutover woods running in every direction.

“This is home,” Andy said, pulling him from the car. “You remember now?” He held the old man's arm and felt it for muscle.

Ted looked around for more clues but said nothing. He watched Andy walk around the rear of the house and return with a shovel and a pair of boots. “Follow me, Dad.” They walked to a swale full of coppery standing water that ran along the side of the property, ten feet from the fence. “This has to be dug out, two deep scoops side by side, all the way down to the ditch at the rear of the property. One hundred yards.” He held the shovel out at arm's length.

“I don't feel very strong,” he said, bending slowly to unlace his shoes. He stepped backward out of them and slipped into the oversized Red Ball boots.

“You're a big man. Maybe your mind ain't so hot, but you can work for a while yet.” And when Ted rocked up the first shovelful of sumpy mud, Andy smiled, showing a pair of yellow incisors.

He worked for an hour, carefully, watching the straightness of the ditch, listening to his heart strum in his ears, studying the awful lawn, which was draining like a boil into the trough he opened for it. The whole lot was flat and low, made of a sterile clay that never dried out between thunderstorms rolling up from the Gulf. After four or five yards, he had to sit down and let the pine and pecan trees swim around him as though they were laboring to stay upright in a great wind. Andy came out of the house carrying a lawn chair and a pitcher of cloudy liquid.

“Can I have some?” the old man asked.

Andy showed his teeth. “Nah. These are margaritas. You'll fall out for sure if you drink one.” As an afterthought, he added, “There's water in the hose.”

All morning, Andy drank from the pitcher, and the old man looked back over his shoulder, trying to place him. The shovel turned up a sopping red clay tainted with runoff from a septic tank, and Ted tried to remember such poor soil. The day was still, no traffic bumped down the dirt lane, and the tinkling of the ice cubes and the click of a cigarette lighter were the only sounds the old man heard. About one-thirty he put down his shovel for the twentieth time and breathed deeply, like a man coming up from underwater. He had used a shovel before—his body told him that—but he couldn't remember where or when. Andy drew up his lawn chair, abandoning the empty pitcher in pigweed growing against the fence. The old man could smell his breath when he came close, something like cleaning fluid, and a memory tried to fire up in his brain, but when Andy asked a question, the image broke apart like a dropped ember.

“You ever been beat up by a woman?” Andy asked.

The old man was too tired to look at him. Sweat weighed him down.

Andy scratched his belly through his yellow knit shirt. “Remember? She told me she'd beat me again and then divorce my ass if I didn't fix this yard up.” He spoke with one eye closed, as though he was too drunk to see with both of them at the same time. “She's big,” he said. “Makes a lot of money but hits hard. Gave me over a hundred stitches once.” He held up a flaccid arm. “Broke this one in two places.” The old man looked at him then, studying the slouching shoulders, the patchy skin in his scalp. He saw that he was desperate, and the old man moved back a step. “She's coming back soon, the bitch is. I told her I couldn't do it. That's why I went to the discount parking lot to hire one of those bums that work for food.” He tried to rattle an ice cube in his empty tumbler, but the last one had long since melted. “Those guys won't work,” he told him, pulling his head back and looking down his lumpy nose at nothing. “They just hold those cardboard signs saying they'll work so they can get a handout, the lazy bastards.”

Pinheads of light were exploding in the old man's peripheral vision. “Can I have something to eat?” he asked, looking toward the house and frowning.

Andy led him into the kitchen, which smelled of garbage. The tile floor was cloudy with dirt, and a hill of melamine dishes lay capsized in the murky sink water. Andy unplugged the phone and left the room with it. Returning empty-handed, he fell into a kitchen chair and lit up a cigarette. The old man guessed where the food was and opened a can of Vienna sausages, twisting them out one at a time with a fork. “Maybe I should go to a doctor?” he said, chewing slowly, as if trying to place the taste.

“Ted. Dad. The best job I ever had was in a nursing home, remember?” He watched the old man's eyes. “I dealt with people like you all day. I know what to do with you.”

Ted examined the kitchen the way he might regard things during a visit to a museum. He looked and looked.

*   *   *

The afternoon passed like a slow, humid dream, and he completed fifty yards of ditch. By sundown, he was trembling and wet. Had his memory come back, he would have known he was too old for this work. He leaned on the polished wood of the shovel handle and looked at his straight line, almost remembering something, dimly aware that where he was, he had not been before. His memory was like a long novel left open and ruffled by a breeze to a different chapter further along. Andy had disappeared into the house to sleep off the tequila, and the old man came in to find himself something to eat. The pantry showed a good stock of chili, but not one pot was clean, so he scrubbed the least foul for ten minutes and put the food on to heat.

Later, Andy appeared in the kitchen doorway, wavering like the drunk he was. He led Ted to a room that contained only a stripped bed. The old man put two fingers to his chin. “Where are my clothes?”

“You don't remember anything,” Andy said quickly, turning to walk down the hall. “I have some overalls that'll fit if you want to clean up and change.”