Welding with Children (3 page)

“Don't eat that green pecan—it'll make you sick. Which church you go to?”

“Bonner Straight Gospel.”

He flew back as though he'd just fired a twelve-gauge at the dog sleeping under the station platform across the street. “Bruton, your wild-man preacher is one step away from taking up serpents. I've heard he lets the kids come to the main service and yells at them about frying in hell like chicken parts. You got to keep them away from that man. Why don't you come to First Baptist?”

I looked at the ground. “I don't know.”

The old man bobbed his head once. “I know damned well why not. You won't tithe.”

That hurt deep. “Hey, I don't have a lot of extra money. I know the Baptists got good Sunday-school programs, but…”

Fordlyson waved a finger in the air like a little sword. “Well, join the Methodists. The Presbyterians.” He pointed up the street. “Join those Catholics. Some of them don't put more than a dollar a week in the plate, but there's so many of them, and the church has so many services a weekend, the priests can run the place on volume like Wal-Mart.”

I knew several good mechanics who were Methodists. “How's the Methodists' children's programs?”

The old man spoke out of the side of his mouth. “Better'n you got now.”

“I'll think about it,” I told him.

“Yeah, bullshit. You'll go home and weld together a log truck, and tomorrow you'll go fishing, and you'll never do nothing for them kids, and they'll all wind up serving time in Angola or on their backs in New Orleans.”

It got me hot the way he thought he had all the answers, and I turned on him quick. “Okay, wise man. I came to the Tree of Knowledge. Tell me what to do.”

He pulled down one finger on his right hand with the forefinger of the left. “Go join the Methodists.” Another finger went down and he told me, “Every Sunday, bring them children to church.” A third finger, and he said, “And keep 'em with you as much as you can.”

I shook my head. “I already raised my kids.”

Fordlyson looked at me hard and didn't have to say what he was thinking. He glanced down at the ground between his smooth-toe lace-ups. “And clean up your yard.”

“What's that got to do with anything?”

“It's got everything to do with everything.”

“Why?”

“If you don't know, I can't tell you.” Here he stood up, and I saw his daughter at the curb in her Lincoln. One leg wouldn't straighten all the way out, and I could see the pain in his face. I grabbed his arm, and he smiled a mean little smile and leaned in to me for a second and said, “Bruton, everything worth doing hurts like hell.” He toddled off and left me with his sour breath on my face and a thought forming in my head like a rain cloud.

*   *   *

After a session with the Methodist preacher, I went home and stared at the yard, then stared at the telephone until I got up the strength to call Famous Amos Salvage. The next morning, a wrecker and a gondola came down my road, and before noon, Amos loaded up four derelict cars, six engines, four washing machines, ten broken lawn mowers, and two and one-quarter tons of scrap iron. I begged and borrowed Miss Hanchy's Super-A and bush-hogged the three acres I own and then some. I cut the grass and picked up around the workshop. With the money I got from the scrap, I bought some aluminum paint for the shop and some first-class stuff for the outside of the house. The next morning, I was up at seven replacing screens on the little porch, and on the big porch on the side, I began putting down a heavy coat of glossy green deck enamel. At lunch, my wife stuck her head through the porch door to watch me work. “The kids are coming over again. How you gonna keep 'em off of all this wet paint?”

My knees were killing me, and I couldn't figure how to keep Nu-Nu from crawling where he shouldn't. “I don't know.”

She looked around at the wet glare. “What's got into you, changing our religion and all?”

“Time for a change, I guess.” I loaded up my brush.

She thought about this a moment, then pointed. “Careful you don't paint yourself in a corner.”

“I'm doing the best I can.”

“It's about time,” she said under her breath, walking away.

I backed off the porch and down the steps, then stood in the pine straw next to the house, painting the ends of the porch boards. I heard a car come down the road and watched my oldest daughter drive up and get out with Nu-Nu over her shoulder. When she came close, I looked at her dyed hair, which was the color and texture of fiberglass insulation, the dark mascara, and the olive skin under her eyes. She smelled of cigarette smoke, stale smoke, like she hadn't had a bath in three days. Her tan blouse was tight and tied in a knot above her navel, which was a lardy hole. She passed Nu-Nu to me like he was a ham. “Can he stay the night?” she asked. “I want to go hear some music.”

“Why not?”

She looked around slowly. “Looks like a bomb hit this place and blew everything away.” The door to her dusty compact creaked open, and a freckled hand came out. “I forgot to mention that I picked up Freddie on the way in. Hope you don't mind.” She didn't look at him as she mumbled this, hands on her cocked hips. Freddie, who had been sleeping, I guess, sat on the edge of the car seat and rubbed his eyes like a drunk.

“He'll be all right here,” I said.

She took in a deep, slow breath, so deathly bored that I felt sorry for her. “Well, guess I better be heading on down the road.” She turned, then whipped around on me. “Hey, guess what?”

“What?”

“Nu-Nu finally said his first word yesterday.” She was biting the inside of her cheek. I could tell.

I looked at the baby, who was going after my shirt buttons. “What'd he say?”

“Da-da.” And her eyes started to get red, so she broke and ran for her car.

“Wait,” I called, but it was too late. In a flash, she was gone in a cloud of gravel dust, racing toward the most cigarette smoke, music, and beer she could find in one place.

I took Freddie and the baby around to the back steps by the little screen porch and sat down. We tickled and goo-gooed at Nu-Nu until finally he let out a “Da-da”—real loud, like a call.

Freddie looked back toward the woods, at all the nice trees in the yard, which looked like what they were now that the trash had been carried off. “What happened to all the stuff?”

“Gone,” I said. “We gonna put a tire swing on that tall willow oak there, first off.”

“All right. Can you cut a drain hole in the bottom so the rainwater won't stay in it?” He came close and put a hand on top of the baby's head.

“Yep.”

“A big steel-belt tire?”

“Sounds like a plan.” Nu-Nu looked at me and yelled, “Da-da,” and I thought how he'll be saying that in one way or another for the rest of his life and never be able to face the fact that Da-da had skipped town, whoever Da-da was. The baby brought me in focus, somebody's blue eyes looking at me hard. He blew spit over his tongue and cried out, “Da-da,” and I put him on my knee, facing away toward the cool green branches of my biggest willow oak.

“Even Nu-Nu can ride the tire,” Freddie said.

“He can fit the circle in the middle,” I told him.

M
ISUSE OF
L
IGHT

The store's electric bell rang, and Mel DeSoto saw the young woman come in out of the heat with something under her arm. She looked shyly at the tripods ranked along a shelf, at the racks holding the latest cameras lined up like gleaming robotic eyes, and then she spotted his counter, the one that held the classics.

“Hello,” she said. “Someone told me you buy old cameras.”

He realized that though she was tall and blond, and wearing a very serious and knowing expression, she was only about eighteen, at least twenty years younger than he was and a whole lifetime away. “What do you have?”

She raised a cracked leather case to the counter. “My grandfather died and my parents are getting rid of his things.” Her eyes slid across his face and bounded off to the back of the store. He suddenly felt big and soft and old.

Mel opened the case and began to examine a fifties-era Rolleiflex, checking the slower shutter speeds, opening the back and looking for fungus on the lenses. It was a clean camera, the mechanics crisp, almost perfect. He set it on the counter between them and listened to the timer buzz like a wasp until the shutter fired with a snap. He opened it again and pulled out an exposed roll of 120 film. “You want this?” he asked.

She made a face. “No.”

He looked at her and wondered about her sense of family history. “Well, this is in pretty good shape. I can let you have two hundred dollars for it.”

She moved her hips from side to side, a girl's motion. “I didn't know if you'd even want it.”

“This was a fine camera in its day.” He pulled out a form and asked her to sign it. “Some dealers would try to steal it from you. Your parents will be proud you got a fair price.”

“Nobody cares what I do,” she told him. He paid her from the register, and then she was gone out into the steamy New Orleans afternoon. Mr. Weinstein walked over and handled the camera.

“Dust it, and it'll be good as new. This one'll sell.” Mr. Weinstein owned the store. He was a bald man with lardy skin and a dark brush of hair above his ears. His eyes flicked toward the door. “She seemed kind of sad.”

Mel shrugged. “This was her grandfather's.” He sat at his little workbench and began to work with Lilliputian brushes and screwdrivers. He knew old cameras and how to deal with their shiny arms and eyes, their little spring-fed brains. As a young man, he had tried his hand at art photography and took courses at Tulane, but his work was not promising, and his professor would write on his projects, sometimes on the photographs themselves, “Misuse of light.”

At lunchtime, he walked down the street for a hamburger, and when he reached into his pants pocket for change, he found the old roll of film the girl had left with him. It was wound on a metal spool, and the backing paper dated to the fifties. He decided to try to develop it at home. Mel enjoyed the bad photography of amateurs and always tried to develop the exposed film left in old cameras he'd purchased. Sometimes the film had faded out to nothing; sometimes the emulsion would be cracked and corroded, showing only a dried lake of skin, a quarter-moon of birthday cake. But then there would be the roll that had sat in some dark closet, locked in a Kodak Tourist, or an old Zeiss folder, kept dry by air-conditioning in an upper-middle-class house, and he could develop whatever was there: backyard picnic, lakeside fish fry, the trip to the fat aunt's house. Now and then, he'd find something artful or otherwise interesting, and he'd put it in a scrapbook he kept for the purpose. He'd try to figure out what was in the minds of the people in the photographs, but he never could. Sometimes he'd try to imagine himself in one of the pictures, and when he would do this and look at the person standing next to him, he'd find only another stranger, like anyone he'd bump into on the street.

One of his prizes seemed to have been taken in the fifties. It was a color shot of a vacation to the Grand Canyon, three weeping little girls in razory focus lined up against the pipe barrier at the edge of a cliff, the canyon itself a Mercurochrome smudge in the background. Another of his favorite images came out of an ancient Leica and was a fairly close shot of a German battleship sitting in an inner-city canal, firing its huge deck guns straight down a boulevard, oil drums on the bank jumping fifty feet in all directions from the concussion, and one woman in a dark coat in the shadow of the cannon barrels, leaping from a dock, taking flight over the water like a crow. The entire image somehow rippled with the shock of the guns, as though the negative had picked up sound as well as light.

He showed the photo of the little girls to his wife. She told him that she saw merely tired children at the end of a long ride in a car without air-conditioning. His daughter thought the little girls were spoiled and had just been denied an ice-cream cone. Mel suspected an apoplectic father unaware of the irony of driving two thousand miles to record the misery of his offspring against a gorgeous but ignored background. He thought the man was either missing the point of photography or was a very bad person, uncaring about his children's misery and mocking them with a record of it. The photo had meaning, but it was closed. The figures in the paper would not talk.

One evening after his wife and daughter had gone to bed, Mel went into his home darkroom, mixed up some Microdol-X in a deep bath, and plugged in a green safelight. He dropped an ice cube into the developer and watched the thermometer in the solution fall to 68°F. In total darkness, he unwound the strip of negatives he'd gotten out of the girl's Rolleiflex and put it down into the bath, shaking it free of bubbles, then picking the long ribbon of film up by its ends and rocking it through the developer. This was a terrible way to develop film, but with forty-plus-year-old exposures, he needed to see what the images were doing. After a few minutes, he reached up in the dark and hit the button for the green light, and he saw that the film was just beginning to show images, so he rocked the wet strand through the chemical again until the emulsion began to crowd with persons and railings and what looked like deck chairs.

The next day, he sold three expensive press cameras, and right before lunch a woman came in carrying an old Brownie in its original box. He was going to turn it down, but when he pulled the cartridge from the bottom, he saw an exposed roll of 127. The woman took his offer of five dollars, did not want a receipt, and left without a word. On his way to lunch, he decided to drop the color film off around the corner at a drugstore that had one-hour service. After his meal, he picked up the photographs and went outside to lean against the building in the sun and look at what he had. The images were blue-toned and dull, barely focused: There were eleven shots of a man sitting in various pointless attitudes on a dirty cloth sofa, drinking bottled beer. He was wearing a sleeveless undershirt and had very hairy shoulders. The wall and a curtain behind the sofa were sooty, and Mel guessed the man was poor and lived in the North, in a house heated with a coal stove. The last photo was of a smiling little girl wearing a Communion dress, her hands folded in front. Her nose resembled that of the man on the sofa. Mel considered the images separately and as a suite and found nothing interesting about them either way, so he tossed them into a trash can on his way back to the shop.