Welding with Children (16 page)

“Now what?” Mr. Boudreaux asked, rubbing his eyes with his long forefingers. Since he'd reached his late seventies, he'd been going to bed around eight-thirty. At the moment, his knees were aching like great boils.

“Now we have to solder this together on the perforated circuit board.”

“Ow. I don't know about that.”

She didn't look up. “Don't you have a soldering iron?”

“I haven't seen it in years.” They got up and Carmine helped him down the back steps into the moonlit yard. Built onto the rear of the garage was a workshop. Mr. Boudreaux opened the door, and the glass in its top rattled. At one time he had spent long hours here fixing the house's appliances or rebuilding bicycles and gas-powered airplanes. Now he came in once or twice a year to look for a screwdriver or to store a box. Carmine found the light switch.

“A workbench,” she sang, going over to a vise and turning its handle around.

Mr. Boudreaux looked for the soldering gun while she dusted the maple counter with a rag and spread out the components. “Here it is,” he said. But when he plugged the instrument in and pulled the trigger, a burst of sparks shot from the vents and a smell of melting Bakelite filled the shop. Holding it by its cord, he unplugged it and then threw it into the yard. The girl looked after the soldering iron sorrowfully.

“Do you have another one?”

“No, honey. And it's too late to go to the store. We'll have to finish tomorrow.” He watched her look to the counter and purse her lips. “What you thinking?”

“Sundays are not good days,” she told him.

He shook his head at the comment. “You'll be over here.”

She stared at her blocky leather shoes. “Mom and I have got to be there, and we've got to stay quiet.” She looked up at him and her face showed that she was smarter than he ever was. “We've always got to be in the corner of his eye.”

“What's that?” He bent a furry ear toward her.

“He wants us around, but kind of on the side. Never the main thing he looks at.”

The old man searched above his head and on a rusty sixteenpenny nail found his Turner gasoline blowtorch. “If this thing'll work, we'll try to get our soldering done the old-fashioned way.”

She clapped her hands together once. “What is it?” She put a forefinger on the brass tank.

“Well, you open it up here,” he told her, unscrewing a plug in the bottom and shaking out a few spoonfuls of stale, sweet-smelling gas. “Then you put some fresh lawn-mower gasoline in, turn it over, and use this little thumb pump on the side.”

“To make pressure?”

“Yeah. Then you light the end of this horizontal tube and adjust the flame with these old knobs.” He dug around in a deep drawer under the counter, coming up with an arrow-shaped tool with a wooden handle on one end and an iron rod running out of that into a pointed bar of copper. “You got to set this heavy point in the flame, and when it gets hot enough, you touch it to the solder, which melts onto the wires. That's what holds the wires together.”

The girl grabbed the wooden handle and waved the tool like a weapon, stabbing the air.

*   *   *

In a few minutes, the blowtorch was sputtering and surging, humming out a feathery yellow flame. It had been over thirty years since Mr. Boudreaux had used such a torch for soldering, and it took several tries before the first wires were trapped in melted silver. He and the girl strung wire and turned screws into a circuit board, and for a minute, he was a younger man, looking down on the head of one of his own daughters. He felt expert as he guided Carmine's short fingers and held the circuit board for her to thread the red wire through to the switch terminals. He felt back at work, almost as though he were getting things done at the mill.

The girl avoided his eyes, but she did give him one glance before asking a question. “Why're you helping me with this?”

He watched her fingers pull a wire under the board. “It just needed doing.”

“Did you really help your children with their projects?”

“I don't remember. Maybe their momma did.”

She was quiet as she turned in a stubby screw. “Did
you
ever have to do a science project?”

He looked out the workshop window and closed one eye. “I don't think science had been invented yet.” He checked her face, but she wasn't smiling. Then he remembered something. “When I was in fifth grade, I had to read a novel called
Great Expectations.
The teacher said we had to build something that was in the book, like an old house, or Miss Haversham's wedding cake, or some such foolishness. I forgot all about it until the night before, and knew I was really going to catch it the next day if I showed up without it.”

Carmine took the hot copper away from the torch and soldered a joint herself. “What did you do?”

He rubbed his chin. “I think I cried, I was so scared. My mother would whack me with a belt if I ever failed a course, and I wasn't doing so good in English. Anyway, my daddy saw my long face and made me tell him what was wrong. He asked me what was in the book.” Mr. Boudreaux laughed. “I thought that was strange, because he couldn't read hardly two words in a row. But I told him about Pip, and Pip's father, and the prison ship. That caught his ear, and he asked me about that ship, so I told him. Then he went outside. That night, I went to bed and couldn't sleep hardly a wink. I remember that because I've always been a good sleeper. I go out like a light about nine, ten o'clock, you know?” The girl nodded, then placed a bulb in a socket. “When I got up for school, Daddy had left for work at the mill, and on the kitchen table was a foot-long sailing boat, painted black, three masts, all the rigging strung with black sewing thread, deck hatches, gun ports, and a bowsprit. It was all done with a pocketknife, and it was warm to the touch, because my momma said he had put it in the oven to dry the paint so it would be ready for school.”

The girl seemed not to hear him. “I want the battery tied in with wire,” she said.

“The old man was like that,” Mr. Boudreaux told her. “He never asked me if I liked the boat, and I never said anything to him about it, even when I brought home a good grade for the project.”

When they were finished, all the lightbulbs lit up, as she had predicted. He built a hinged wooden frame for the two posters that held her report and drawings. They set everything up on the workbench and stepped back. Mr. Boudreaux pretended to be a judge and clamped his fingers thoughtfully around his chin. “That's a prizewinner,” he said in a mock-serious voice. Then he looked down at Carmine. Her lips were in a straight line, her eyes dark and round.

*   *   *

The next day was Sunday, and Mr. Boudreaux went to eleven o'clock Mass, visiting afterward with the men his age who were still able to come out. They sat on the rim of St. Anthony's fountain under the shade of a palm tree and told well-worn jokes in Cajun French, then tales of who was sick, who was dead. Mr. Landry, who had worked under Mr. Boudreaux at the sugar mill, asked him what he had been doing with his granddaughter at the mall.

“That was a neighbor child,” Mr. Boudreaux told him. “My grandchildren live away.”

“What was she doing? Asking you about the dinosaurs?” He laughed and hit the shoulder of the man next to him.

“She's doing a school thing, and I'm helping her with it.”

Mr. Landry's face settled into a question. “She lives on the north side of you?”

“Yes.”

Mr. Landry shook his head. “My son works with her daddy. She needs all the help she can get.”

“He's a piece of work all right.”

The men broke up and moved away from one another, waving. Mr. Boudreaux drove the long way home, passing by the school, along the park, behind the ball field. He felt that by helping with the science project, he had completed something important and that he and the girl had learned something. His old Buick hesitated in an intersection, and he looked at its faded upholstery, its dusty buttons and levers, thinking that he should buy a new car. He could cash in his insurance policy and finally use a little of his savings.

When he got home, even though he felt light-headed, he began to clean out the glove compartment, search under the seats, empty the trunk of boots and old tools. He rested in the sun on his front steps, then decided to change into shorts, get the galvanized pail, and wash the car. He was standing in a pool of water from the hose, looking down at his white legs, when he heard the shouting begin next door. The mother's keening yell was washed away by the drunken father's roaring. The girl ran out as though she were escaping a fire and stood on the withering lawn, looking back into the house. Mr. Boudreaux saw a wink of something white at the front door, and then the science project posters flew out onto the walkway, followed by the circuit-board display and the little platform they had made for it. The father lurched down the steps, his unbuttoned white shirt pulled from his pants, his eyes narrowed and sick. He kicked the poster frame apart, and Carmine ran to avoid a flying hinge. She turned in time to see the circuit board crackle under a black shoe.

“Hey,” Mr. Boudreaux yelled. “Stop that.”

The father looked around for the voice and spotted the old man. “You go to hell.”

Mr. Boudreaux's back straightened. “Just because you can't handle your liquor don't give you the right to treat your little girl like that.”

The father staggered toward him. “You old bastard, you tried to make me look bad.”

Mr. Boudreaux's heart misfired once. The walk was so slippery, he couldn't even run away from the father, who was coming around the car in a wobbly, stalking motion. He looked down at the father's doubled fists. “You stay in your yard. If you give me trouble, I'll call the cops.” The father gave him a shove and Mr. Boudreaux went down hard in a grassy puddle.

“Ow. You drunk worm. I'm seventy-eight years old.”

“Leave us alone,” the father yelled. He raised a shoe, and for a moment the old man thought that he was going to kick him. Then the mother was at the man's side, pulling at his arms.

“Come back in the yard, Chet. Please,” she begged. She was not a small woman, and she had two hands on his arm.

Mr. Boudreaux squeezed the lever on the hose nozzle and sprayed the father in the stomach and he stumbled backward against the mother, cursing. He sprayed him in the forehead. “You rummy. You a big man with old guys and little kids.”

“Screw you, you old bastard.” The father shook water from his hair and tried to pull out of his wife's hands.

“Aw, you real scary,” Mr. Boudreaux shouted, trying to stand up. When he finally was able to see over the roof of his Buick, the mother was pulling her husband up the steps, and Carmine was standing under a wilting magnolia tree, looking over at the fragments of her science project scattered along the walk.

*   *   *

Mr. Boudreaux's lower back was sore. By eight o'clock, he couldn't move without considerable pain. He looked angrily through his living room window at the house next door. He went out on his porch and watched the light in Carmine's bedroom window. Then he went in and watched television, adjusting the rabbit ears on his set and rolling the dial from station to station, not really paying attention to the images on his scuffed Zenith. He turned the machine off and stared at it a long time, felt the cabinet, and tapped it with his fingers. Then he got a screwdriver, unscrewed the back, and peered in. Mr. Boudreaux pulled off all the knobs on the front, slid the works out of the case, and carried it over to his dining room table, placing it under the bright drop fixture. When he turned the works over, he smiled into a nest of resistors. He read the band values, and with a pair of pointed wire snips, he removed several that bore two red bands and one black. Behind the selector were light sockets, and he cut these out, noting with a grimace that the bulbs in them drew too much power.

In the living room was his wife's cabinet-model Magnavox hi-fi. He slowly ran a finger along its walnut top. Then he pulled the knobs off and opened it up with a screwdriver, removing several feet of red and black wire, as well as three light sockets that contained little bulbs of the correct voltage. The volume knob was a variable resistor, he now understood, and he removed that also. He went out to his workshop and took the little steel-tongued toggle switches off his old saber saw, his chain saw, his Moto-Tool. He needed one more and found that in the attic on a rusty set of barber's clippers that had been his brother's. Also in the attic he found his first daughter's Royal manual typewriter. Mr. Boudreaux could type. He'd learned in the army, so he brought that down, too. He emptied the new batteries out of a penlight he kept on his bedside table. They had bought extra sheets of poster board in case Carmine made a mistake while drawing the big resistors, but she had been careful. He dug the handwritten first draft of her report out of his trash can and penciled in the revisions he could remember. Then, on paper that was only slightly yellowed, he typed her report neatly, with proper headings.

Next, he drew the images on the posters, big color-coded resistors traversed by round electrons with faces drawn on. His lettering was like a child's, and this worried him, but he kept on, finishing up with instructions for operating the display. He drew in the last letter at two o'clock, then went out into the workshop to saw up a spruce two-by-four to make the poster frame again. He needed hinges, so he had to go to the cedar chest in his bedroom and remove the ones on the wooden box that held his family insurance policies. He mounted the posters with thumbtacks pulled from an old corkboard that hung in the kitchen. The tacks heads were rusty, so he painted them over with gummy white correction fluid he'd found in the box with the typewriter.

At four o'clock, he had to stop to take three aspirin for his back, and from the kitchen window, he looked across through the blue moonlight to the dark house next door, thinking maybe of all the dark houses in town where children endured the lack of light, fidgeting toward dawn.