Welding with Children (24 page)

“You think it's all right to mix booze with your pills?” he asked.

She made a sweeping motion at him with her fingers. “Let's not worry about that.” Her voice was tight.

“You think you got a shot at this teaching job?”

“Oh, they'll need somebody like me,” she told him.

“You going to say to them that you're a good teacher? You know, show them those records you were telling me about? Those forms?”

“I'm a crippled black woman and a gay feminist.” She put her elbows on the table. “I'm a lock for the job.”

He shook his head. “They won't hire you for those things.”

“They'll at least need me to teach freshman English.” She took a long drink. He wondered if she'd taken another pill in her room.

“Why don't you just tell them you're good with the students?”

“You have to be a certain kind of good,” she said, her voice hardening.

“How's that?”

“You can't understand. They don't have people like me in icehouses.”

A man in a wheelchair rolled through the front door. He wore a white cowboy hat, and his belt was cinched with a big buckle sporting a golden music note in the center. He coasted into the corner of the room behind a little dance floor and flipped switches on an amplifier. A computerized box came alive with blinking lights. Iry saw the man pick up a microphone and press a button on the box. The little café/lounge filled with guitars and a bass beat, and the shriveled man in the wheelchair began to sing in a tough, accurate voice that was much bigger than he was. Two couples got up and danced. After the song, the food came, and Claudine ordered another margarita.

By the time the meal was over, she was sailing a bit. He could tell. Her eyelids seemed to be sticky, and she was blinking too much. He began to get sleepy and bored, and he was wondering what was on the cigarette-branded television in his room when she leaned over to him.

“Ivy,” she began, “it's noisy in here.”

“Iry,” he said.

“What?”

“My name's Iry.”

“Yes. Well. I'm going to get a fresh drink and walk back to my room.” She looked at him for a second or two. “If you want to talk, come with me.”

“No, I believe I'll check out what's on the tube,” he told her.

“You'd rather watch TV than have a conversation with someone?” Her face twisted slightly, and he looked away.

“No, I mean, it might not look right, me going in your room.” He felt silly as soon as he'd said it. Who, in Alpine, Texas, would give a damn what tourists from a thousand miles away did with their free time?

Claudine's face fell, and she sat back in her chair, staring toward the door. The music machine began playing “When a Tear Becomes a Rose,” the beat a little faster than usual. When the old man sang, he closed his eyes as though the music hurt. Iry stood up and cupped a hand under Claudine's right elbow, right where things stopped.

“What are you doing?” She looked up at him, her eyelids popping.

“Asking you to dance,” he said, taking off his cap and putting it on the table.

She looked around quickly. “Don't be absurd.”

“Come on, I bet you used to do the Texas two-step in high school.”

“That was another life,” she said, rising out of the chair as if overcoming a greater force of gravity than most people have to deal with.

For a few seconds, she bobbled the step and they bumped shoe tips and looked down as though their feet were separate animals from themselves, but on a turn at the end of the floor, she found the rhythm and moved into the dance. “Hey,” he said.

“Gosh.” She settled the end of her arm into his palm as though the rest of her were there, a phantom limb extending up onto his shoulder. The little man did a good job with the song, stretching it out for the six or seven couples on the floor. Claudine wore a sad smile on her face, and halfway into the song, her eyes became wet.

Iry leaned close to her ear. “You all right?”

“Sure,” she said, biting her lip. “It's just that right now I'm not being a very good lesbian.” She tried to laugh and reached up to touch her crew cut.

“You ain't one right now.”

“How can you tell?”

“You dance backward too good.”

“That's stupid.”

He turned her, and she came around like his shadow. “Maybe it is, and maybe it ain't.” About a minute later, toward the end of the song, he told her, “I've danced with lots of black girls, and you don't move like they do.”

“You're making generalities that won't stand up,” she said. Then the tone of her voice grew defensive. “Besides, I'm only one-sixteenth African-American.”

“On whose side?”

“My mother's.”

He walked her to their table, his hand riding in the small of her back. He noticed how well she let it fit there, his fingertips in the hollow of her backbone. He pursed his lips and sat down, pointing to her old navy purse. “You got any pictures of your family?”

She gave him a look. “Why?”

“Just curious. Come on, I'll show you Babette and my mama. They're in my wallet.” He pulled out his billfold and showed her the images in the glow of the candle. “Now you.”

She reached down and retrieved her wallet, pulling from it a faded, professionally done portrait of her parents. The father was blond and sun-wrinkled, and the mother lovely and tawny-skinned, with a noble nose and curly hair.

“Nice-looking people,” he said. “Your mama, she's Italian.”

Her lips parted a little. “How would you know?”

“Hey, Grand Crapaud has more Italians than Palermo. I went to Catholic school with a hundred of them. This lady looks like a Cefalu.”

“She's part African-American.”

“When I bring you home tomorrow, can I ask her?”

She leaned close and hissed, “Don't you dare.”

“Aha.” He said this very loudly. Several people in the little room turned and looked in his direction, so he lowered his voice to say, “Now I know why you really got your butt fired.”

“What?”

“You lied to those people at the college. And they knew it. I mean, if I can figure you out in a couple days, don't you think they could after a few years?”

She stood up and swept the photos into her purse. He tossed some money on the table and followed her outside, where the air was still hot and alien, too dry, like furnace heat. “Hey,” he called. He watched her go to her room and disappear inside. He was alone in the asphalt lot, and he stuck his hands into his jeans and looked up at the sky, which was graveled with stars. He looked a long time, as though the sky were a painting he had paid money to see, and then he went in to his own room and called her.

“What do you want?”

“I didn't want to make you mad.”

“The word is
angry.
You didn't want to make me angry.”

“I was trying to help.”

There was a sigh on the line. “You don't understand the academic world. Decent jobs are so scarce. I have to do whatever it takes.”

“Well, you know what I think.”

“Yes, I know what you think,” she told him.

“You're a straight white woman who's a good teacher because she loves what she's doing.”

“You're racist.”

“How many black people have
you
danced with?”

She began to cry into the phone, “I'm a gay African-American who was crippled by a horse.”

Iry shook his head and told her, as respectfully as he could, “You're crippled all right, but the horse didn't have nothin' to do with it.” He hung up and stared at the phone. After a minute, he put his hand on the receiver, and then he took it away again.

*   *   *

The next morning, he didn't see her in the motel café, but when he put his little suitcase in the back of the Jeep, she walked up, wearing a limp green sundress, and got into the passenger seat. Five hours later, he had gone through El Paso and was on US 180, heading for Carlsbad, when she pointed through the windshield at a ranch gate rolling up through the heat. “Home” was what she said, looking at him ruefully. It was the only unnecessary word she'd spoken since they'd left Alpine. “First time in five years.”

He pulled off to the right and drove down a dusty lane that ran between scrub oaks for a half a mile. At the end was a lawn of sorts and a stone ranch-style house, a real ranch house, the pattern for subdivision ranch houses all over America. Out back rose the rusty peak of a horse barn. Iry parked near a low porch, and as soon as he stepped out, Claudine's round mother came through the front door and headed for her daughter, arms wide, voice sailing. Claudine briefly introduced him and explained why he was there. The mother shook his hand and asked if they'd eaten yet. Claudine nodded, but Iry shook his head vigorously and said, “Your daughter told me you make some great pasta sauce.” He glanced at Claudine, who gave him a savage scowl.

The mother's face became serious, and she patted his hand. “I have a container in the fridge that I can have hot in ten minutes, and the spaghetti won't take any time to boil.”

Iry grinned at Claudine and said,
“Prepariamo la tavola.”

“Ah,
sì,
” the mother said, turning to go into the house.

Claudine followed, but she said over her shoulder, “You are what is wrong with this country.”

“Scusi?”

“Will you shut up?”

*   *   *

After the lunch and salad, he asked to see the barn. The mother had leased the range, but she maintained three horses for Claudine's brother and his children, who lived in Albuquerque. Two of the animals were in the pasture, but one, a big reddish horse, came into a gated stall as they entered. Iry inspected the barn's dirt floor, sniffed the air, and walked up to the horse. “Hey,” he said. “You think we could go for a little ride?”

She came up behind him, looking around her carefully, a bad memory in her eyes. “I'm not exactly into horse riding anymore.” Her voice was thin and dry, like the air.

“Aw, come on.”

“Look, I'm thankful that you brought me here, and I don't want to seem rude, but don't you want to get back on the road so you can see cowboys and Indians or whatever it is you came out here for?”

He pushed his cap back an inch and mimicked her. “If you don't want to seem rude, then why are you that way? I mean, this ain't the horse that hurt you, is it?”

She looked back through the door. At the edge of the yard was the gate to the open range. “No. I just don't trust horses anymore.” She turned to face him, and her eyes were frightening in the barn's dark. “I don't think I ever liked them.”

“Well, here,” he said, opening the wooden gate wide and stepping next to the horse, putting his hand on its shoulder. “Come tell this big fella you don't like him because of something his millionth cousin did. Tell him how you're an animal racist.” The bay took two steps out into the open area of the barn, toward where she was standing, but before he took the third step, she made a small sound, something, Iry thought, a field mouse would make the moment it saw a hawk spread its talons. Claudine shook like a very old woman; she looked down, her eyes blind with fright, and she crossed what was left of her arms before her. Iry stepped in and pushed the horse easily back through the gate. The animal swung around and looked at them, shook its head like a dog shedding water, and stamped once. Claudine put her hand over her eyes. Iry slid his arm around her shoulder and walked her out of the barn.

“Hey, I'm sorry I let him out.”

“You think I don't know who I am,” she said. “You think the world's a happy cowboy movie.” She stopped walking, turned against him, and Iry felt her tears soak through his shirt. He tried and tried to think of what to do, but he could only turn her loose to her mother at the door and then stand out in the heat and listen to the weeping noises inside.

Two days later, he was at a stucco gas station in the desert, standing out in the sun at a baked and sandblasted pay telephone. On the other end of the line, Claudine picked up, and he said hello.

“What do you want?”

“You get that job?” He winced as a semi roared by on the two-lane.

“No,” she said flatly.

“Did you do what I asked you to?”

“No. I explained all the reasons why his English Department needed me.” There was an awkward pause, in which he felt as if he were falling through a big crack in the earth. Finally, she said, “He didn't hire me because there weren't any vacancies at the moment.”

“Well, okay.” And then there was another silence, and he knew that there were not only states between them but also planets, and gulfs of time, over which their thoughts would never connect, like rays of light cast in opposite directions. A full half minute passed, and then, as if she were throwing her breath away, she said, “Thanks for the dance at least,” and hung up.

He looked out across the highway at a hundred square miles of dusty red rock sculpted by the wind into ruined steeples, crumpled hats, and half-eaten birthday cakes. Then he dialed the icehouse's number back in Grand Crapaud and asked for Babette.

“Hello?”

“Hey. It's me.”

“Where in God's name are you?”

“Out with the Indians in Utah, I think.”

“Well, I've got some news for you. The compressor, it wasn't your fault. Mauvais had put mineral spirits in the lubricator instead of oil.”

“Did the shop pick up the parts for machining?”

“No. The owner is buying all new equipment. Can you believe it?”

“Well.”

“When are you coming home?”

“You want me to come back?”

“I guess you'd better. I fired Mauvais.”

He looked west across the road. “I think I want to see a little more of this country first. I can't figure it out yet.”