Welding with Children (22 page)

“Easy,” the murderer repeated, with no inflection. Jimmy saw the man's black hair gleam, every strand in place in soft oiled lines like the hair on holy statues, and then the bull whirled and jumped for them, its haunches digging in, its sea of angry muscles directed at something it sought without knowing why, choosing the table and the men as a target with the logic a thunderbolt uses to select a tree or a house or a man walking along with a rake hoisted on his shoulder.

The animal could choose, if they sat still enough, to go for the table, to come in beside one of them and put a horn on the underneath, or even its whole head, and give it a murderous heave out of their hands. If they all kept their palms down, they would do better than Rex Ted's team. Or the Brahma could choose to lay his skull against the table's edge, and then it would go hard for the man on the other side. Or he might lay the barrel of a horn against a man and push them all down like bowling pins. None of the men thought any of this; they were not there, as far as Jimmy could tell. They had drained themselves of feeling and were white and empty.

What the bull did do was lower his head and hit Nookey from the rear, the animal's flat skull battering the chair and the man's backbone together, shoving his chest against the table, which shocked into Jimmy's ribs, the plywood top breaking in two and heaving up in the middle. Little Claude raised his hands right before a horn tip went through his cheek and into his mouth. Jimmy's long arms cracked like a whip over his head when the table hit him, and then he was in the dust, watching a hoof come down next to his face. Two rodeo clowns fell off the fence and distracted the animal as Little Claude dragged Jimmy clear into an opened gate, and a trusty hustled a white-faced Nookey over the fence, where he was put down in fresh manure, his legs kicking as a man with a cross on his shirtsleeve knelt down to blow breath into his flattened lungs. The clowns got to the pen where Jimmy lay, jumping in ahead of the bull, and then Jimmy looked under the bottom board to see the murderer, whom everyone had seemed to forget, sitting untouched in front of nothing, his hands still out flat, palms down, in the center of the ring, his hair flawless, his eyes open. Jimmy wanted to yell, but there was no air in him. The rodeo announcer said something incomprehensible and awful, a squawk of speech, and before the clowns could get back over the fence, the bull ran into the murderer like a train, hitting him so hard that rivets flew out of the folding chair.

Jimmy lay back and robbed his share of the atmosphere in little sips until he could breathe again. He saw arms come under a board and drag out the murderer's body. After a minute or two, a guard holding a shock stick climbed into the pen with Jimmy and told him that Red Tex's group had won the competition.

“That right?” Jimmy rasped.

“They gonna get their pictures in the paper,” the guard told him. He looked at Jimmy as though he almost felt sorry about something. “We can only have one winner.”

“Well,” Jimmy said, looking under the bottom board to where the bull was trying to kill a clown trapped in a barrel, “maybe so.”

D
ANCING WITH THE
O
NE
-A
RMED
G
AL

On Saturday, Iry Boudreaux's girlfriend fired him. The young man had just come on shift at the icehouse and was seated in a wooden chair under the big wall-mounted ammonia gauge, reading a cowboy novel. The room was full of whirring, hot machinery, antique compressors run by long, flat belts, black-enameled electric motors that turned for months at a time without stopping. His book was a good one and he was lost in a series of fast-moving chapters involving long-distance rifle duels, cattle massacres, and an elaborate saloon fight that lasted thirty pages. At the edge of his attention, Iry heard something like a bird squawk, but he continued to read. He turned a page, trying to ignore an intermittent iron-on-iron binding noise rising above the usual lubricated whir of the engine room. Suddenly, the old number-two ammonia compressor began to shriek and bang. Before Iry could get to the power box to shut off the motor, a piston rod broke, and the compressor knocked its brains out. In a few seconds, Babette, Iry's girlfriend, ran into the engine room from the direction of the office. White smoke was leaking from a compressor's crankshaft compartment, and Iry bent down to open the little cast-iron inspection door.

Babette pointed a red fingernail to the sight glass of the brass lubricator. “You let it run out of oil,” she said, putting the heel of her other hand on her forehead. “I can't believe it.”

Iry's face flushed as he looked in and saw the chewed crankshaft glowing dully in the dark base of the engine. “Son of a bitch,” he said, shaking his head.

She bent over his shoulder, and he could smell the mango perfume that he had given her for Christmas. Her dark hair touched his left earlobe for an instant, and then she straightened up. He knew that she was doing the math already, and numbers were her strength: cubic feet of crushed ice, tons of block ice. “Iry, the damned piston rod seized on the crankshaft,” she said, her voice rising. “The foundry'll have to cast new parts, and we're looking at six or seven thousand dollars, plus the downtime.” Now she was yelling.

He had let both Babette and the machine down. He looked up to say something and saw that she was staring at the cowboy novel he'd left open and facedown on his folding chair.

“I don't know, Iry. The owner's gonna have a hard time with this.” She folded her arms. “He's gonna want to know what you were doing, and I'm gonna tell him.” She gestured toward the book.

“Look, I checked the damned oil level when I came on shift. It wasn't my fault.”

She looked at him hard. “Iry, the machine didn't commit suicide.” She licked a finger and touched it to the hot iron. “Mr. Lanier has been after me to cut staff, and now this.” She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them and shook her head. “You need to get away from this place.”

He pulled a shop rag from the back pocket of his jeans and wiped his hands, feeling something important coming. “What's that mean?”

She looked at him the way a boss looks at an employee. “I'm going to lay you off.”

“You're firing me?”

“Last time we had a compressor rebuild, we were down for a long time. Come back, maybe next month, and we'll see.”

“Aw, come on. Let's go out tonight and talk about this over a couple cold ones.” He pushed back his baseball cap and gave her a grin, showing his big teeth.

She shook her head. “You need a vacation is what you need. You ought to go somewhere. Get out of town, you know?”

“A vacation.”

“Yeah. Get your head out of those books. Go look at some real stuff.”

“Who's gonna watch the compressor that's still working?”

Babette took his shop rag from him and wiped a spot of oil from a glossy red fingernail. “The new man who watches during your lunch break. Mauvais.”

“Mauvais can't operate a roll of toilet paper.”

“We'll just be making party ice after this.” She looked at him. “At least he's never let the oil get low.”

He glanced at her dark hair, trying to remember the last time he'd touched it.

*   *   *

The next morning, Iry got up and drove to early Mass through the rain. The church was full of retirees, people who had stayed on the same job all their lives. The priest talked about the dignity of work, and Iry stared at the floor. He felt that his relationship with Babette, such as it was, might be over. He remembered how she had looked at him the last time, trying to figure why a good engineer would let the oil run out. Maybe he wasn't a good engineer—or a good anything. After Mass he stood in the drizzle on the stone steps of the church, watching people get into their cars, waved at a few, and suddenly felt inauthentic, as though he no longer owned a real position in his little town of Grand Crapaud. He drove to his rent house, and called his mother with instructions to come over and water his tomato patch once a day. Then he packed up his old red Jeep Cherokee and headed west toward Texas.

After a few miles, the two-lane highway broke out of a littered swamp and began to cut through sugarcane fields. The rain clouds burned off, and the new-growth cane flowed to the horizons in deep apple-green lawns. Iry's spirits rose as he watched herons and cranes slow-stepping through irrigation ditches. He realized that what Babette had said about a vacation was true.

He avoided the main highway and drove the flat land past gray cypress houses and their manicured vegetable gardens. Through sleepy live oak–covered settlements, the old Jeep bobbed along with a steady grinding noise that made Iry feel primitive and adventurous.

On the outskirts of New Iberia, he saw something unusual: A one-armed woman wearing a short-sleeve navy dress was hitchhiking. She was standing next to a big tan suitcase a hundred yards west of a rusty Grenada parked in the weeds with its hood raised. Iry seldom picked up anyone from the side of the road, but this woman's right arm was missing below the elbow, and she was thumbing with her left hand, which looked awkward as she held it across her breast. He realized that she would only look normal thumbing a ride on the left side of a highway, where no one would stop for her.

When he pulled off, she didn't come to the car at first, but bent down to look through the back window at him. He opened the passenger door and she came to it and ducked her head in, studying him a moment. Iry looked down at his little paunch and resettled his baseball cap.

“You need a ride?”

“Yes.” She was pale, late thirties or so, with tawny skin and dark wiry hair spiked straight up in a tall, scary crew cut. He thought she looked like a woman he'd once seen on TV who was beating a policeman with a sign on a stick. She seemed very nervous. “But I was hoping for a ride from a woman,” she said.

“I can't afford no sex-change operation,” he told her. “That your car?”

She looked back down the road. “Yes. At least it was. A man just pulled off who made all kinds of mystifying mechanical statements about it, saying it'd take three thousand dollars' worth of work to make it worth four hundred. I guess I'll just leave it.” She sniffed the air inside the Jeep. “It's awfully hot, and I hate to pass up a ride.”

He turned and looked at a large dark spray of oil under the engine. “That man say it threw a rod cap through the oil pan?”

She gave him an annoyed look. “All you men speak this same private language.”

He nodded, agreeing. “You don't have to be afraid of me, but if you want to wait for a woman, I'll just get going.”

“Well, I don't really relate well to most men.” She looked at him carefully for a moment and then announced, “I'm a lesbian.”

Iry pretended to look at something in his rearview mirror, wondering what kind of person would say that to a stranger. He figured she must be an intellectual, educated in the North. “That mean you like women?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He pursed his lips and saw the day's heat burning her cheeks. “Well, I guess we got something in common.”

She frowned at this but wrestled her suitcase into the back-seat anyway, got in and pulled the door shut, adjusting the air-conditioning vents to blow on her face. “My name is Claudine Glover.”

“Iry Boudreaux.” He turned back onto the highway and said nothing, sensing that she'd begin to speak at any moment, and after a mile or so, she did, breathlessly, talking with her hand.

“I've never hitchhiked before. I was on my way from New Orleans, where I just lost my job, of all things. My car was a little old, maybe too old, I think, and it started to smoke and bang around Franklin. I just need a ride to the next decent-sized town so I can get to an airport and fly home to El Paso, where my mother…” She went on and on. Every hitchhiker he'd ever picked up had told him their life stories. Some of them had started with their birth. One man, named Cathell, began with a relative who had made armor in the Middle Ages and then summarized his family tree all the way to his own son, who made wrist braces for video-game addicts with carpal tunnel syndrome. Iry guessed people thought they owed you an explanation when you helped them out.

“We got something else in common,” he told her.

“What?”

“I just got fired myself.” He then told her what he did for a living. She listened but seemed unimpressed.

“Well, I'm sorry for you all right. But you can probably go anywhere and find another icehouse or whatever to operate, can't you?”

He admitted that this was so.

“I am a professor of women's studies,” she said, her voice nipping at the syllables like a Chihuahua's. “It took me a long time to get that position, and now after four years of teaching, I lost it.” She raised her hand and covered her face with it.

He rolled the term
women's studies
around in his head for a moment, wondering if she was some kind of nurse. “Aw, you'll find some more gals to teach,” he said at last. He was afraid she was going to cry. It was forty minutes to Lafayette and its little airport, and he didn't want to experience the woman's emotional meltdown all the way there.

She blinked and sniffed. “You don't know how it is in academics. My Ph.D. is not from the best institution. You've got to find your little niche and hold on, because if you don't get tenure, you're pretty much done for. Oh, I can't believe I'm saying this to a stranger.” She gave him a lightning glance. “Does this airport have jets?”

“I don't think so. Those eggbeater planes take off for Baton Rouge and New Orleans.”

She did begin to cry then. “I hate propeller aircraft,” she sobbed.

He looked to the south across a vast field of rice and noticed a thunderstorm trying to climb out of the Gulf. If he didn't have to stop in Lafayette, he might be able to outrun it. “Hey, c'mon. I'm going all the way through Houston. I can drop you by Hobby. They got planes big as ocean liners.”