Welding with Children (8 page)

E
ASY
P
ICKINGS

He drove into Louisiana from Texas in the stolen sedan, taking the minor roads, the cracked and grass-lined blacktop where houses showed up one to the mile. The land was overrun with low crops he did not recognize and was absolutely flat, which he liked because he could see a police car from a long way off. He was a short man, small of frame, tattooed on the neck and arms with crabs and scorpions, which fit his grabbing occupation of thief. In the hollow of his throat was a small blue lobster, one of its claws holding a hand-rolled cigarette. He thought of the woman in Houston he'd terrorized the day before, going into her kitchen and pulling his scary knife, a discount bowie he'd bought at the KKK table at a local gun show, and putting it to her throat. She'd wept and trembled, giving him her rings, leading him to her husband's little stash of poker money. The day before that, he'd spotted an old woman in Victoria returning alone from the grocery, and he'd followed her into the house, taking her jewelry, showing the knife when she balked, and getting the cash from her wallet. He'd robbed only these two women, but it seemed that he'd been doing it all his life, like walking and breathing, even though he'd just gotten out of jail the week before after doing two years for stealing welfare checks. He looked through the windshield at the poor, watery country. Anyone who would live out here would be simple, he thought, real stupid and easy pickings.

His name was Marvin, but he called himself Big Blade because the name made him feel other than what he was: small, petty, and dull.

He noticed a white frame house ahead on the right side of the road, sitting at the edge of a flooded field, clothes on the line out back. Big Blade had been raised in a trashy Houston subdivision and had never seen clothes dried out in the open. At first he thought the laundry was part of some type of yard sale, but after he stopped on the shoulder and studied the limp dresses and aprons, he figured it out. Across the road and two hundred yards away was a similar house, an asbestos-sided rectangle with a tin roof, and after that, nothing but blacktop. Big Blade noticed that there were no men's clothes on the line, and he moved the car toward the driveway.

*   *   *

Mrs. Landreneaux was eighty-five years old and spoke Acadian French to her chickens because nearly everyone else who could speak it was dead. She came out into the yard with a plastic bowl of feed and was met at the back steps by Marvin, who pulled out his big knife, his eyes gleaming. Mrs. Landreneaux's vision was not sharp enough to see the evil eyes, but she saw the tattoos and she saw the knife.

“Baby, who wrote all over you? And what you want, you, wit' that big cane cutter you got? If you hungry, all I got is them chicken
labas,
and if you cut off a head, throw it in the bushes at the back of my lot, and pluck them feather over there, because the wind is blowin' west today and—”

“Shut up, and get inside,” Big Blade growled, giving the old woman a push toward her screen door. “I want your money.”

Mrs. Landreneaux narrowed her eyes at the man and then hobbled up the back steps into her kitchen. “Well, I be damn. Ain't you got nobody better to rob than a ol' lady whose husband died twenty-nine years ago of a heart attack in a bourrée game holding ace, king, queen of trumps? The priest told me—”

Big Blade began to seethe, his voice hoarse and low. “I will kill you if you don't give me your jewelry and money. I'll gut you like one of your chickens.” The old lady stopped speaking for just a second to bring him into focus.

“You with the crawfish drew on you throat, you trying to scare me wit' a knife? Like I ain't use to death? I break a chicken neck three time a week and my brother, he got shot dead next to me at the St. Landry Parish fair in 1936 and all my husband's brother got killed in that German war and that Lodrigue boy died with his head in my apron the day the tractor run over him, course he was putting on the plow with the damn thing in gear and even the priest said it wasn't too bright to get plowed under by your own plow and—”

“They call me Big Blade,” Marvin thundered.

“My name's Doris Landreneaux. I used to be a Boudreaux before—”

Marvin slapped the old woman, and her upper plate landed on the Formica dinette table. With no hesitation, she picked up her teeth and walked to the sink to rinse them off. Grabbing the incisors, she slid her dentures back in place. “Hurt?” she yelled. “You want to hurt a old lady what had seven children, one come out arm-first? Look, I had eight major surgeries and a appendix that blowed up inside me when I was first marry, made me so sick, I was throwing up pieces of gut and the priest gave me Extreme Unction nine time.”

“Shut up,” Marvin yelled, raising his hand over her fluff of hair.

“Oh, you kin hit me again, yeah, and then I'm gonna drop on the floor, and what you gonna do with me then?”

“I can kill you,” Marvin hollered.

“But you can't eat me,” Mrs. Landreneaux shrilled back, wagging a knobby finger in Big Blade's befuddled face.

*   *   *

In the other house on that stretch of road, old Mrs. Breaux realized with a gasp that she was not going to take a trick in a bourrée game and would have to match an eighteen-dollar pot. The third trick had been raked off the table when Mrs. Breaux turned up her hearing aid with a twist of her forefinger and began begging, “Oh please, somebody, don't drop you biggest trump so I can save myself.”

“I can't hold back,
chère,
” Sadie Lalonde told her. “I got to play to win. That's the rules.” Mrs. Lalonde's upper arms jiggled as she snapped down a trump ace.

Mrs. Breaux's eyes got as small as a bat's, and her mouth turned into a raisin. “You done killed my jack,” she yelled, following suit with her card. “I'm bourréed.”

Mr. Alvin crossed his legs and sniffed. “You bourréed yourself, girl. You should know better to come in a game with the jack dry.” Mr. Alvin shook a poof of white hair out of his florid face and carefully led off with a four trump, followed by Sadie's ten and a stray diamond by Mrs. Breaux, whose little cigarette-stained mustache began to quiver as she watched the money get raked off the table.

“You done it,” Mrs. Breaux hollered. She shrank back in her wooden chair and searched over her ninety years of evil-tempered earthly existence for the vilest curse words she'd ever heard, and none of them packed the power she wanted. Finally, she said, “I hope you get diabetes of the blowhole!”

The other three widows and one never-married man laughed out loud at Mrs. Breaux and fidgeted with the coins in their little money piles, digging for the next ante. Mrs. Guidroz pulled her aluminum cane off the back of her chair to get up for a glass of tap water.

“There's ice water in the fridge,” Sadie offered.

Mrs. Guidroz shook her tight blue curls. “I wasn't raised to drink cold water. That stuff hurts my mout'.” As she drew a glassful from the singing tap, she looked out of the window and down the road. “Hey. Doris, she got herself some company.”

“If it's a red truck, it must be her son Nelson,” Sadie said. “Today's Tuesday, when he comes around.”

“
Non,
this is a li'l white car.”

“Maybe it's the power company,” Alvin suggested.

“
Non,
this is too little for a 'lectric company car. Where would they put their pliers and wire in that thing?”

Sadie Lalonde hoisted herself off the two chairs she was sitting on and wobbled to the window, putting her face next to Mrs. Guidroz's. “That's either a Dodge or a Plimmit.”

“What's the difference?”

“I think they the same car, but they label the ones with ugly paint Plimmits.” Sadie looked over her glasses. “Doris don't know nobody drives a car like that.”

Alvin came to the window and wedged into the women. “You sure it ain't a Ty-ota? One of her two dozen granddaughters drives one like that.”

“Nanette. I think she sold that, though.”

Alvin shook his head. “Oh, no, she wouldn't. You know, them little yellow fingers make them Ty-otas and they don't never wear out.” He looked through the window. “But that's one of them little Freons.”

“Is that a Chevrolet?”

“No, it's a cheap Dodge with a rubber-band motor. Only a Jehovah Witness would drive something like that.”

“Aw, no.” Mrs. Guidroz stamped her cane on the linoleum. “You think we ought to call over there and see if she needs help runnin' them off? Them Jehovah Witness like cockleburs on corduroy.”

From the card table behind the group at the sink rose Beverly Perriloux's voice. She had lit up a Camel and was talking out the smoke. “Y'all come back and play some cards before Mrs. Breaux catches herself a little stroke.” She took another intense drag, all the tiny warts on her face moving in toward the center.

“Damn right,” Mrs. Breaux complained. “I got to win my eighteen dollar back.”

Alvin dusted off his chair and sat down, and Mrs. Guidroz gulped two swallows of water while Sadie reached for her wall phone.

*   *   *

Big Blade looked around Mrs. Landreneaux's kitchen at the plywood cabinets, the swirling linoleum, which popped when he stepped on it, at a plastic toaster that was a clock and out of which a piece of plastic toast slowly arose every ten seconds. It occurred to him that he was trying to rob the wrong woman.

“I want your wedding rings,” he announced.

She held her hand out toward him. “I stopped wearin' one when Arthur told me to.”

Big Blade wiggled his knife. “Arthur?”

“Yah. Arthur-ritis.”

“Where is it?”

“It wasn't but a little silver circle and I gave it to a grandbaby to wear on her necklace. Oh, I had a diamond up on some prongs, too, but it used to get plugged up with grandbaby shit when I'd change diapers, so I gave that away, too.”

The phone rang and Big Blade stepped toward it. “Answer and act normal. One false word and I'll cut you open.”

Mrs. Landreneaux gathered her arms vertically in front of her, her fists under her chin, feigning fright, and tiptoed to the wall phone.

“Hallo,” she yelled. Then turning to Big Blade, she said, “It's Sadie Lalonde from down the road.” Speaking back into the receiver, she said, “No, it ain't no Holy Roily; it's some boy with a sword trying to rob me like the government.”

Big Blade reached out and cut the phone cord with a swipe. “I ought to kill you where you stand,” he said.

Mrs. Landreneaux grabbed the swinging cord and gave him a savage look. “And then what would you have?”

He blinked. “Whoever called better not cause no trouble.”

Mrs. Landreneaux put a thumb over her shoulder. “Sadie and that gang playing bourrée. You couldn't blow 'em out that house with dynamite.”

The man looked around as if he was considering gathering up the worn-out contents of her kitchen and packing them into the stolen car he'd left idling out front in the grass. “You got to have some money around here somewhere. Go get it.”

She raised a hand above her head and toddled off toward the hall. “If that's all it takes to get you out my hair, you kin have it, yeah.” Abruptly, she turned around and walked toward the stove. “I almos' forgot my chicken stew heatin' on the burner.”

“Never mind that,” he growled.

Mrs. Landreneaux rolled up an eye toward him. “You hungry, you?” She lifted a lid, and a nimbus laden with smells of onion, garlic, bell pepper, and a medium nut-brown roux rose like a spirit out of the cast-iron pot.

“What's that?” Big Blade sniffed toward the stove, his knife drifting.

“Chicken stew. You eat that over some rice and with potato salad and hot sweet peas.” She looked at the boy's eyes and stirred the rich gravy seductively. “You burglars take time to eat or what?”

*   *   *

“Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Mrs. Lalonde sang, holding the dead receiver to her ear and looking out of her little kitchen window with the four other cardplayers. “I don't know what to think.”

“She's probably being nasty to us,” Mrs. Guidroz said, tapping her cane against Alvin's big soft leg. “She wants us to worry.”

“That woman says some crazy things,” Beverly agreed. “She spends so much time cooking, I think she's got natural gas on the brain.”

Mrs. Breaux lit up a Picayune with her creaky Zippo. “Hot damn, let's play cards. Ain't nobody can put nothin' over on Doris Landreneaux.”

“Somebody's over there intrudin',” Sadie protested.

Mrs. Breaux sniffed. “She'll talk the intrudin' parts off their body, that's for true.”

“Well, her phone won't answer back. Somebody ought to go over and see who's there with her.”

The old women turned toward Mr. Alvin, a tall, jiggly old man with pale, fine-textured skin who was built like an eggplant. His pleated gray trousers hung on him like a skirt on a fat convent-school girl. “Why me?”

“You a man!” Mrs. Guidroz exclaimed.

Mr. Alvin's eyes expanded as though the information were a surprise. “
Mais,
what you want me to do?”

Sadie turned him toward the screen door. “Just go look in her kitchen window and see if everything is all right.”

“I shouldn't knock on the door?”

Mrs. Guidroz shook her tiny head. “If there's a bad man in there, you gonna tip him off.”

Alvin hung back. “I don't know.”

“Dammit, Alvin,” Mrs. Guidroz said, “I'd go myself, but it's been raining, and last time I walked to Doris's from here, my stick went down in her lawn a foot deep, yeah, and I couldn't get it unstuck, and Doris wasn't there, so I had to limp all the way back and call my son to come pull it out.”