Welding with Children (19 page)

For the next two hours, the old man paced himself, throwing the dirt into a straight, watery mound on the right side of the hole, looking behind him to gauge the time. Andy got another six-pack from the house and once more drank himself to sleep. Around suppertime, the old man walked over and nudged the folding chair.

“Wake up.” He put his hand on a pasty arm.

“What?” The eyes opened like a sick hound's.

“I'm fixing to make the last cut.” Etienne motioned toward the ditch. “Thought you might want to see that.” They walked to the rear of the lot, where the old man inserted the shovel sideways to the channel and pulled up a big wedge, the water cutting through and widening out the last foot of ditch, dumping down two feet into the bigger run.

Andy looked back to the middle of his yard. “Maybe this will help the damned bug problem,” he said, putting his face close to the old man's. “Mosquitoes drive her nuts.”

Etienne LeBlanc saw the strange nose, which had been broken before birth, and looked away with a jerk of the head.

*   *   *

The next morning, it was not yet first light when the old man woke to a noise in his room. Someone kicked the mattress lightly. “Come on,” a voice said. “We're going for a ride.”

He did not like the sound of the statement, but he got up and put on the clothes he had worn at the discount store and followed out to the driveway. He could barely hear the ditch tickle the dark and was afraid. Andy stood close and asked him what he could remember.

“What?”

“You heard me. I've got to know what you remember.” The old man made his mind work carefully. “I remember the ditch,” he said.

“And what else?”

The old man averted his eyes. “I remember my name.”

Andy whistled a single note. “And what is it?”

“Ted Williams.” There was a little bit of gray light out on the lawn, and the old man watched Andy try to think.

“Okay,” he said at last. “Get in the car. You lay down in the backseat.” The old man did as he was told and felt the car start and turn for the road, then turn again, and he hoped that all the turning in his head would not lead him back to a world of meaningless faces and things, hoped that he would not forget to recall, for he knew that the only thing he was was memory.

They had not driven a hundred feet down the lane when a set of bright lights came toward them and Andy began crying out an elaborate string of curses. The old man looked over the seat and saw a pickup truck in the middle of the road. “It's her,” Andy said, his voice trembling and high. “Don't talk to her. Let me handle it.” It was not quite light enough to see his face, so the old man read his voice and found it vibrating with dread.

The pickup stopped, and in the illumination from the headlights, Etienne saw a woman get out, a big woman whose tight coveralls fit her the way a tarpaulin binds a machine. Her hair was red like armature wire and braided in coppery ropes that fell down over her heavy breasts. Coming to the driver's window, she bent down. She had a big mouth and wide lips. “What's going on, you slimy worm?” Her voice was a cracked cymbal.

Andy tried a smile. “Honey. Hey there. I just decided to get an early—”

She reached in and put a big thumb on his Adam's apple. “You never get up before ten.”

“Honest,” he whined, the words squirting past his pinched vocal chords.

Her neck stiffened when she saw the old man. “Shut up. Who's this?”

Andy opened his mouth and closed it, opened it again and said with a yodel, “Just an old drinking buddy. I was bringing him home.”

She squinted at the old man. “Why you in the backseat?”

Etienne looked into the fat slits of her eyes and remembered a sow that had almost torn off his foot a half century before. “He told me to sit back here.”

She straightened up and backed away from the car. “All right, get out. Some kind of bullshit is going on here.” The old man did as she asked, and in the gray light she looked him over, sniffing derisively. “Who the hell are you?”

He tried to think of something to say, wondering what would cause the least damage. He thought down into his veins for an answer, but his mind began to capsize like an overburdened skiff. “I'm his father,” he said at last. “I live with him.”

Her big head rolled sideways like a dog's. “Who told you that?”

“I'm his father,” he said again.

She put a paw on his shoulder and drew him in. He could smell beer on her sour breath. “Let me guess. Your memory ain't so hot, right? He found you a couple blocks from a nursing home, hey? You know, he tried this stuff before.” The glance she threw her husband was horrible to see. “Here, let me look at you.” She pulled him into the glare of the headlights and noticed his pants. “How'd you get this mud on you, pops?” She showed her big square teeth when she asked the question.

“I was digging a ditch,” he said. Her broad face tightened, the meat on her skull turning to veiny marble. At once, she walked back to her truck and pulled from the bed a short-handled square-point shovel. When Andy saw what she had, he struggled from behind the steering wheel, got out, and tried to run, but she was on him in a second. The old man winced as he heard the dull ring of the shovel blade and saw Andy go down in a skitter of gravel at the rear of the car. She hit him again with a halfhearted swing. Andy cried out, “Ahhhhh don't, don't,” but his wife screamed back and gave him the corner of the shovel right on a rib.

“You gummy little turd with eyes,” she said, giving him another dig with the shovel. “I asked you to do one thing for me on your own, one numbskull job,” she said, emphasizing the word
job
with a slap of the shovel back on his belly, “and you kidnap some old bastard who doesn't know who he is and get him to do it for you.”

“Please,” Andy cried, raising up a hand on which one finger angled off crazily.

“Look at him, you moron,” she shrieked. “He's a hundred son-of-a-bitching years old. If he had died, we'd a gone to jail for good.” She dropped the shovel and picked him up by the armpits, slamming him down on the car's trunk, giving him open-handed slaps like a gangster in a cheap movie.

The old man looked down the gravel road to where it brightened in the distance. He tried not to hear the ugly noises behind him. He tried to think of town and his family, but when Andy's cries began to fracture like an animal's caught in a steel-jawed trap, he walked around the back of the car and pulled hard on the woman's wrist. “You're going to kill him,” he scolded, shaking her arm. “What's wrong with you?”

She straightened up slowly and put both hands on his shirt. “Nothing is wrong with me,” she raged, pushing him away. She seemed ready to come after him, but when she reached out again, a blade of metal gonged down on her head, her eye sockets flashed white, and she collapsed in a spray of gravel. Andy lowered the shovel and leaned on the handle. Then he spat blood and fell down on one knee.

“Aw, God,” he wheezed.

The old man backed away from the two figures panting in the dust, the sound of the iron ringing against the woman's head already forming a white scar in his brain. He looked down the lane and saw her idling pickup. In a minute, he was in the truck, backing away in a cloud of rock dust to a wide spot in the road, where he swung around for town, glancing in the rearview mirror at a limping figure waving wide a garden tool. He drove fast out of the sorry countryside, gained the blacktop, and sped up. At a paintless crossroads store, he stopped, and his mind floated over points of the compass. His hands moved left before his brain told them to, and memory turned the truck. In fifteen minutes, he saw, at the edge of town, the cinder-block plinth of the discount center. Soon, the gray side of the building loomed above him, and he slid out of the woman's truck, walking around to the front of the store without knowing why, just that it was proper to complete some type of circle. The bottom of the sun cleared the horizon-making parking lot, and he saw two cars, his old wine-colored Oldsmobile and, next to it, like an embryonic version of the same vehicle, an anonymous modern sedan. Etienne LeBlanc shuffled across the asphalt lake, breathing hard, and there he saw a young man asleep behind the steering wheel in the smaller car. He leaned over him and studied his face, saw the LeBlanc nose, reached in at last and traced the round-topped ears of his wife. He knew him, and his mind closed like a fist on this grandson and everything else, even his wife fading in his arms, even the stunned scowl of the copper-haired woman as she was hammered into the gravel. As if memory could be a decision, he accepted it all, knowing now that the only thing worse than reliving nightmares until the day he died was enduring a life full of strangers. He closed his eyes and called on the old farm in his head to stay where it was, remembered its cypress house, its flat and misty lake of sugarcane keeping the impressions of a morning wind.

S
UNSET IN
H
EAVEN

After Chad Felder had turned forty, he'd begun reading articles about health in the New Orleans newspaper. He knew he shouldn't be doing this. He usually imagined he had or would soon develop whatever malady was described in the medical columns, and Louisiana was a land of such exotic ailments: cholera, pollution-induced carcinomas like coronary and nasal cancer. He enjoyed his job at the accounting firm, but he feared that if he carried too many numbers on his back, his resistance to disease would go down, so he'd asked his employer for Fridays off. His boss did not object; Chad had been a fine CPA for twenty-three years and some of the young guys could carry the load, he was told. He'd planned to exercise and eat healthily on Fridays, but what he mainly did was drink coffee, read the newspaper, and stare at the wrinkles on the backs of his hands.

One Friday morning, he was sitting in his windowed breakfast nook, which overlooked a half-acre backyard and a wall of brush beyond. His two-story brick house was in the rear of a new subdivision that had sprung up north of Lake Pontchartrain, and beyond his lot was a two-mile-thick band of sapling woods that had been cut over by a lumber company five years before, leaving a dense welter of loblolly, pin oak, and stickers. He was reading a column on prostate disease when his ears picked up the whopping sound of what he thought was a helicopter. Glancing out toward the garage, he saw only an empty sky above his gray Volvo. Then, from the corner of his eye, he saw movement in the woods directly behind the house and turned to see the grille and vertical muffler of a rusty tractor poke out of a bank of blackberry bushes.

The doddering tractor pulled straight into his yard dragging a bush hog that was cutting a clean trail behind. It was a tall, bulky tractor, its green paint blistered and eroded, and Chad stood up as it approached his house with a ground-shaking rumble, because it seemed ready to push through the wall and into his breakfast room. In the machine's iron seat was a dried-up husk of a man wearing a khaki baseball cap, a green wing-collar shirt, and gray work pants. He pulled back a lever, and the tractor, a shuddering John Deere that must have been fifty years old, stopped short of the flower bed and rolled back a quarter turn of its muddy tires. The old man killed the engine and stared at the house, shifting sideways to look through a window at Chad, who was holding on to the back of a chair. Then he climbed down slowly, taking pains not to slip, and came to the back door.

Chad liked old people because they were living proof that he could steer around all the horrible diseases in life and last a good while. Young people, especially his own teenaged children, worried him like storm clouds because they were always tempted to drive fast, experiment with chemicals, smoke, drink, and get mashed on dangerous summer jobs. When his daughter would introduce a new girlfriend she'd brought from school, Chad would hold her hand a second longer than was comfortable, worrying about how she would get home safely.

The old man was pounding on the door, so Chad opened it wide and said, “Hi, what can I do for you?” He thought that the farmer's eyes were like cinnamon balls a child spat out because they were too hot. He must have been ninety.

The old man opened his mouth, failed to say anything, then looked down at his work shoes as if to take time to make something up. Finally, he said, “I was cutting out my field and was gonna turna back at the fence.” Chad understood that most of the old local farmers were Italian, and he adjusted his ear to the accent. “But I never found the damned fence. I just kept going and come out in your yard.” He pointed to the John Deere, which sat back on its underinflated tires and hissed. “I never knew about all these fancy houses,” he said, looking behind him.

“Would you like to come in and sit down? It's already getting pretty hot out.” Here was a chance to study a survivor.

“Yeah, okay.” He walked in and stood by the stove but did not look at Chad in his monogrammed shirt and wing-tip shoes.

The breakfast table was buried under the morning paper and dishes, so they wound up in the living room, where Chad offered the farmer a seat in the lounger in front of the television. The farmer's skin was a well-worn, oiled leather, and his ears were sun-bitten and droopy. Chad offered him something to drink.

“That'sa nice,” he said. “Water's nice.” He looked around like a man waking up in a hospital emergency room.

After a moment, Chad handed him a glass, and he took the water down slowly, as though it were a particularly fine drink of wine. He looked at his host for the first time. “I'm Joe Santangelo.”

Chad shook hands, told him his name, and sat down. “I didn't know there was a farm close by.”

“North Cherry Road,” he said, looking at the television deadpan.

Chad's eyebrows went up. “That's two and a half miles.”

The old man pulled a handkerchief and wiped his arched nose. “I been there a long time makin' peppers and strawberries.” He jerked his head up. “You ever farm?”