Welding with Children (21 page)

“You okay?” Druley Watts looked at him.

“I'm dizzy,” he said. “I'll be all right in a minute.” But when he stared down at the body, he felt threatened and sick. With his cap knocked off and his face relaxed, Joe Santangelo seemed younger, and Chad bent close to make sure it was the right man.

The deputy looked up at the tree. “He must have looked back a minute and the limb raked him off. He probably came down on the mower deck headfirst.” Reaching low with his big hand, he pulled down the eyelids. Chad made a noise in the back of his throat, but the deputy didn't look up. He knelt slowly in the wild grass to examine the body.

Giddy, Chad went down close to him. “I'm always thinking something like this might happen to me.”

The deputy picked up one wing of Joe Santangelo's collar with a big finger and let it drop. “Why would you think that?”

*   *   *

The next morning, Saturday, Chad sat at the breakfast table and stared into the woods until his wife shooed him out of the house. He walked to the head of the trail the old man had cut and stared to where it turned in the undergrowth.

Returning to his yard, he set about cutting the grass with the riding mower, then edging the walks and driveway. After lunch, he ate a salt tablet and carried a quart of water out with him as he raked pine straw, trimmed dead branches, poisoned fire-ant mounds. Movement did not allow him to think much, so even after supper, as long as the light lasted, he cleaned the rain gutters and shoveled up a single ten-foot-long row in which to plant late-season tomatoes. That night, his body did not let him think or dream, and even his spirit sank down into bone-tired sleep. But the next day, Sunday, his back hurt, and he worried about it all through church.

That afternoon, he got into his sedan and drove to Gum-wood, a gravel-shouldered hamlet of bald red-dirt yards. He had gotten the address from the sheriff's department, and when he pulled into her lot, he saw she lived in a trailer, a clean one, surrounded by low boxwoods and flanked on one side by a neat hand-turned garden. He got out and knocked, looking up into a thunderstorm-haunted sky.

She was about fifty or so, loaded with the padding of middle age. Her face showed too much work, too little money, and so her expression berated him. “What you need?” she asked.

“My name's Chad Felder. I'm the one who found your father in the woods behind my house.”

“Oh,” she said, nodding in a way that said, Too bad, but at the same time, So what? At that moment, the thunderstorm broke open like a melon, and she told him to come in. The trailer was not as small as he had imagined. Looking around, it occurred to him that he had never been in a trailer. Three very young and somber children trooped past him toward the back; she sniffed loudly and told him to sit down at a little table next to a steaming coffeemaker. “Them's my grandkids,” she said. “Cream and sugar?” she asked, as if it would never occur to him to turn down free coffee.

“Yes. I just wanted to come by and see if you had any questions.” He looked at her back as she stretched up to get cups out of a tiny cabinet. He had surprised himself by coming up with a reason for his visit.

She put down the cups noisily, old melamine things that jittered on the Formica table. “The cops said he hit a tree and broke his fool neck,” she said. He opened his mouth but then closed it again. “Course,” she continued, “it's a wonder he didn't run off the road and kill himself before he got back to the old place. That ratty Chevy of his didn't have no brakes to speak of.” She sloshed coffee into his cup, sweetened hers, added powdered creamer from a quart jar, then shoved the sugar bowl at him. “So you found him, huh?”

Chad took a sip. It was good coffee. “Yes. A policeman was with me, but I still got pretty upset.” He told her the story, keeping his voice well modulated and respectful. He did not mention that her father had called her a bitch. “I understand the funeral was yesterday afternoon.”

She nodded, lighting a filterless cigarette. “Good thing he had a policy. That box cost like hell.”

He watched her eyes. “Well, I know you'll miss him around here.”

She did not hesitate. “No, I won't.”

He straightened his back. “What?” The rain was pelting the trailer like gravel.

“Mister, that old man was my daddy, and he did good for me most times, but he had to be tended like a child. Got to be more of a child every day.” She pulled the cigarette from her mouth and quickly drew a backhanded circle in the air. “He got to be contrary and mixed up a couple years ago, and half the time he didn't feel good enough to go outside, so I had to live inside and listen to his crap about sugarcane and how they ain't milled good grits in this country since hybrid corn come in style. Mister, day in and day out, that talk is more tiring than a case of the flu.”

Chad looked away at a fake knot in the fake paneling. He was slightly outraged and didn't know why exactly. “You didn't love him?” he asked.

The woman took a lung-scorching drag. “I didn't say that.” She looked at him hard and blew the smoke out the side of her mouth, away from the table. “Now answer me. Did I say that?”

“No.”

“Joe Santangelo was eighty-nine years old. You don't live forever, mister.” She dropped an ash on her cotton print blouse and brushed it off with her hand, pulling the bottom down over her stretch jeans. “What, you want him to be ninety-five and all stove up with hurting in every joint, not knowing his own children from Adam's house cat?”

He looked down at the table. “No.” She was right, and he hated it. The three young children came up from the rear of the trailer, opened the door, and tumbled back at a flash of lightning, running down the hall supple as puppies. “Did he enjoy those kids?”

“Most of the time, except when they got in his little spoon-fed garden. Then he give 'em hell. Standing out in that dirt like a crazy man, yelling at those little bitties like they know what they done.” She got up and slammed the door. “You want some more coffee?”

“I don't think so. I just wanted to tell you that, uh…” His mouth hung open. He didn't really want to tell her anything. He had come to hear a life story but was getting just a bitter summation. Chad thought that Joe Santangelo might have left something behind for him. Some clue, maybe, of why he rode the planet for eighty-nine years and then wound up in his backyard. Maybe there were no clues; or the clue was this snorting daughter.

“I appreciate you coming by,” she was saying, “but the sheriff's men told me everything Friday night.” She sat sideways in her chair and looked out the diamond-shaped window set in the door. “I'm sorry you had to find him and get all bent out of shape like you are. But you can't let that stuff bother you. He taught me that. Hell, if Joe Santangelo would've found me dead in front the TV, he would've put me in a Hefty bag and set me out on the curb. I'd show up in heaven covered in coffee grounds and cigarette butts.”

Chad made a face and shook his head. “I wish I could joke about it like you can.”

The daughter regarded him closely, blinking when a lightning bolt came down in the next block. She poured them both another cup. “Mister, you think the old man's in heaven?”

The question made him move in the chair. “Why, I'd guess so.”

“What you reckon he's doing there?”

“Doing?”

“Yeah. What?”

He took a swallow of coffee. “Farming. That's what he liked most, wasn't it?” He imagined Joe Santangelo riding a big John Deere, pulling a set of silver plows in a straight line forever, behind him lines of crumbly black dirt that looked as though they'd been drawn with a pencil and ruler.

“And what'll you do up there?”

“I don't know.”

She tilted her head to one side. “Would you fish? Hunt?”

A flash popped at the window, a gust of wind rocked the trailer, and the lights blinked, once. “I guess I'd keep records for the place.”

She raised one eyebrow. “That's what you'd like to do?”

He turned up a palm to her. “I'm an accountant. I like to make numbers balance out.”

She straightened up. “That's it, then.”

“That's what?” He poured himself more coffee and spooned sugar into the tan plastic cup.

“That's what people want to do when they go to heaven. Their jobs. They want to get 'em right.” She lit another cigarette and squinted through the smoke, watching him.

Chad sat back and listened to hail banging down on the roof. He thought about what it would be like to complete an important balance sheet without his usual fear of causing a fiscal disaster. The daughter excused herself to go and check on her grandchildren, and Chad closed his eyes for a moment, imagining a mountain-sized computer monitor gradually lighting up at sunset, its screen covered with rows of amber numerals winking like stars. He walked along the bottom of his columns, which ran as high as night itself, knowing he'd never make a mistake, never be out of balance.

The woman returned to the little kitchen and began gathering up cups and spoons, banging them into the sink and turning on the hot water full blast. “Hey, mister, that junky tractor of his is still in the woods in back of your place. I'll sell it to you cheap. You can go to raising snap beans.” She looked over her shoulder at him, her tongue making a lump in her cheek.

He thought about this for a moment. “I like my snap beans from a can,” he told her.

She laughed above the sink's steamy spray. “Amen to that,” she said.

R
ODEO
P
AROLE

Four inmates walked out into the hot, powdery dirt of the corral to sit in folding chairs at a neon-orange card table. Where they dragged their boots, the soil smoked. Jimmy, the burglar, was the youngest, a tall, bent rail of a man with scrambled-egg hair and a barbecued, narrow face. He didn't want to sit at the table under the blowtorch sun with his palms down on the flimsy surface, waiting for the pain, but the others had told him that if he stayed with them longest, if they all could just sit there with their hands on the table while it happened, they could win, and the reporters would put their pictures in the statewide paper, where the parole board would see what good Joes they were, brave competitors, winners. Two members of last year's winning team were free already.

Minutes before, Jimmy had leaned over the rough-cut fence and watched what had happened to the other teams. The first foursome to compete had tried not to look. They were veterans. He had watched Rex Ted and Black Diamond and Mollyfish and Ray-Ray sit like statues in a tornado, as though no kind of movement could save them. He'd looked and willed to be like them, draining himself of feeling as he heard the knock of the wood latch, the explosion of breath from the animal, and the ground-trembling plants of the hooves as the bull came on, but he'd turned his head from the arena at the first yell, which was followed by a sympathetic
“Awwww”
from the crowd. Three men had scattered, Rex Ted was rolling on the ground, gored, and the card table had not come down yet. Two trusties came out with a stretcher and carried Rex Ted away, passing by the fence where Jimmy stood looking into the bloody man's face, which bore an expression saying, It finally happened and I'm not surprised one damned bit.

Now Jimmy was in the arena, waiting for the bull to arrive like a decision come out of thin air. Nookey, a hairless older man, who was in for dynamiting a toxic-waste dump, sat across the table. “Okay,” he said. “Look at it like this. It's like a judge saying something and you can't stop it or change it.”

Little Claude, an accordionist who had burned down his wife's lover's house, nodded agreement. “Don't look at that judge; don't look at that bull,” he said, spreading his palms out on the plywood. The fourth was a new man, a murderer who would never get out, not even after death, for no family would claim him, and someday he would be buried in the prison graveyard by the swamp. He was big, with a head of thick black hair combed back and eyes wild as a bear's, a man whom any stupid woman would notice and love at once.

Jimmy spat, and his spit sat on top of the dust like quick-silver. “Rex Ted's group has the best time. Ray-Ray picked up his hands right before the bull hooked.”

“Let's don't talk about it,” Little Claude said. “If you talk about it, you gonna try to get out the way. You gonna pick up your hands.”

Nookey closed his eyes just for a moment. “We got to be still and hope he goes for the table.”

“This is something,” the murderer said, and the other men looked at his eyes, which were open too wide for the strobe-hot sun, as though they were unaffected by light. He had the worst position. His back was to the gate, and behind him a prison guard gave a Brahma repeated shocks with a cattle prod, the animal shrieking and trying to climb the boards.

Jimmy turned to the murderer. “Why you doing this? We can get out.”

“I can get out,” said the murderer.

“You doing over three hundred years, man,” Nookey said, tilting the white dome of his head so sweat could roll off sideways, missing his eyes. “They welded the door on you.”

“I can get out,” he said again, looking at nobody.

A little cloud passed over, and the table turned dark. The men looked at their hands on the dusty surface. Jimmy heard the gate latch knock open, and then the cloud uncovered the sun. The wood under his hands glowed with fire.

The bull spun out of the pen like a tornado of angry meat, a gray animal with shadowed black eyes, a lurching hump on his back and, under him, his tortured, swinging bag loaded with electricity from the shock sticks of the howling guards. His hooves kicked up the floury dust, and it seemed for a moment that he had camouflaged the men and their bright table, that the onion eyeballs would not turn on them and the animal would not bolt into their quiet pocket of territory. Jimmy felt the dirt under his boot soles jump each time the animal planted a hoof, but he looked at nothing and willed his mind empty, waiting for whatever fact was about to be proved on him. He saw Nookey's face go blank, Little Claude's lids close. The murderer's eyes got even wider, and he looked over at the bull. “Easy,” Jimmy said in his direction.