Welding with Children (18 page)

Ted lay down on the splotched mattress as though claiming it. This bed, it's mine, he thought. Turning onto his stomach, he willed himself to remember the musty smell. Yes, he thought. My name is Ted. I am where I am.

*   *   *

In the middle of the night, his bladder woke him, and on the way back to bed, he saw Andy seated in the boxlike living room watching a pornographic movie in which a hooded man was whipping a naked woman with a rope. He walked up behind him, watching not the television but Andy's head, the shape of it. A quart beer bottle lay sweating in his lap. The old man rolled his shoulders back. “Only white trash would watch that,” he said.

Andy turned around, slow and stiff, like an old man himself. “Hey, Dad. Pull up a chair and get off on this.” He looked back to the set.

Ted hit him from behind. It was a roundhouse open-palm swat on the ear that knocked him out of the chair and sent the spewing beer bottle pinwheeling across the floor. Andy hit the tile on his stomach, and it was some time before he could turn up on one elbow to give the big man a disbelieving, angry look. “You old shit. Just wait till I get up.”

“White trash,” the old man thundered. “No kid of mine is going to be like that.” He came closer. Andy rolled against the TV cart and held up a hand. The old man raised his right foot as though he would plant it on his neck.

“Hold on, Dad.”

“Turn the thing off,” he said.

“What?”

“Turn the thing off!” the old man shouted, and Andy pressed the power button with a knuckle just as a big calloused heel came down next to his head.

“Okay. Okay.” He blinked and pressed his back against the television, inching away from the old man, who seemed even larger in the small room.

And then a long, bony face fringed with white hair drifted down above his own, examining him closely, looking at his features, the shape of his nose. The old man put out a finger and traced Andy's right ear as if evaluating its quality. “Maybe you've got from me some sorry blood,” he said, and his voice shook from saying it, that such a soft and stinking man could come out of him. He pulled back and closed his eyes as though he couldn't stand sight itself. “Let the good blood come out, and it'll tell you what to do,” he said, his back bent with soreness, his hands turning to the rear. “You can't let your sorry blood run you.”

Andy struggled to his feet in a pool of beer and swayed against the television, watching the old man disappear into the hall. His face burned where he'd been hit, and his right ear rang like struck brass. He moved into the kitchen, where he watched a photograph taped to the refrigerator, an image of his wife standing next to a deer hanging in a tree, her right hand balled around a long knife. He sat down, perhaps forgetting Ted, the spilled beer, even his wife's hard fists, and he fell asleep on his arms at the kitchen table.

The next morning, the old man woke up and looked around the bare bedroom, remembering it from the day before, and almost recalling something else, maybe a person. He concentrated, but the image he saw was something far away, seen without his eyeglasses. He rubbed his thumbs over his fingertips, and the feel of someone was there.

In the kitchen, he found Andy and put on water for coffee, watching his son until the kettle whistled. He loaded a French drip pot and found bread, scraped the mold off and toasted four slices. He retrieved eggs and a lardy bacon from the refrigerator. When Andy picked up his shaggy head, a dark stink of armpit stirred alive, and the old man told him to go wash himself.

In a half hour, Andy came back into the kitchen, his face nicked and bleeding from a month-old blade, a different T-shirt forming a second skin. He sat and ate without a word, but drank no coffee. After a few bites, he rummaged in a refrigerator drawer, retrieving a can of beer. The old man looked at the early sun caught in the dew on the lawn and then glanced back at the beer. “Remind me of where you work,” he said.

Andy took a long pull on the can. “I'm too sick to work. You know that.” He melted into a slouch and looked through the screen door toward a broken lawn mower dismantled in his carport. “It's all I can do to keep up her place. Every damn thing's broke, and I got to do it all by hand.”

“Why can't I remember?” He sat down with his own breakfast and began eating, thinking, This is an egg. What am I?

Andy watched the old man's expression and perhaps felt a little neon trickle of alcohol brightening his bloodstream, kindling a single Btu of kindness, and he leaned over. “I seen it happen before. In a few days, your mind'll come back.” He drained the beer and let out a rattling belch. “Right now, get back on that ditch.”

The old man put a hand on a shoulder. “I'm stiff.” He left the hand there.

“Come on.” He fished three beer cans from the refrigerator. “You might be a little achy, but my back can't take the shovel business at all. You've got to finish that ditch today.” He looked into the old man's eyes as though he'd lost something in them. “Quick as you can.”

“I don't know.”

Andy scratched his ear and, finding it sore, gave the old man a dark look. “Get up and find that shovel, damn you.”

*   *   *

Andy drove to a crossroads store, and Ted wandered the yard, looking at the bug-infested trees. The other man returned to sit in the shade of a worm-nibbled pecan, where he opened a beer and began to read a paper he had bought. Ted picked up the shovel and cut the soft earth, turning up neat, sopping crescents. In the police reports column was a brief account of an Etienne LeBlanc, a retired farmer from St. Mary Parish who had been staying with his son in Pine Oil when he disappeared. The son stated that his father had moved in with him a year ago, had begun to have spells of forgetfulness, and that he wandered. These spells had started the previous year on the day the old man's wife had died while they were shopping at the discount center. Andy looked over at Ted and snickered. He went to the house for another beer and looked again at the photograph on the refrigerator. His wife's stomach reached out farther than her breasts, and her angry red hair shrouded a face tainted by tattooed luminescent-green eye shadow. Her lips were ignited with a permanent chemical pigment that left them bloodred even in the mornings, when he was sometimes startled to wake and find the dyed parts of her shining next to him. She was a dredge-boat cook and was on her regular two-week shift at the mouth of the Mississippi. She had told him that if a drainage ditch was not dug through the side yard by the time she got back, she would come after him with a piece of firewood.

He had tried. The afternoon she left, he had bought a shovel on the way back from the liquor store at the crossroads, but on the second spadeful, he had struck a root and despaired, his heart bumping up in rhythm, his breath drawing short. That night, he couldn't sleep; he left the shovel stuck upright in the side yard, like his headstone. Over the next ten days, the sleeplessness got worse and finally affected his kidneys, causing him to get up six times in one night to use the bathroom, until by dawn he was as dry as a cracker. He drove out to buy quarts of beer, winding up in the Wal-Mart parking lot, staring out the window of his old car, as if by concentration alone he could conjure someone to take on his burden. And then he had seen the old man pass by his hood, aimless as a string of smoke.

Two hours later, the heat rose up inside Ted, and he looked enviously at a cool can resting on Andy's catfish belly. He tried to remember what beer tasted like and could sense a buzzing tingle on the tip of his tongue, a blue-ice feel in the middle of his mouth. Ted looked hard at his son and again could not place him. Water was building in his little ditch and he put his foot once more on the shovel, pushing it in but not pulling back on the handle. “I need something to drink.”

Andy did not open his eyes. “Well, go in the house and get it. But I want you back out here in a minute.”

He went into the kitchen and stood by the sink, taking a glass tumblerful of tap water and drinking it down slowly. He rinsed the glass and opened the cabinet to replace it, when his eye caught sight of an inexpensive stack of dishes showing a blue willow design; a little white spark fired off in the darkness of his brain, almost lighting up a memory. Opening another cabinet, he looked for signs of the woman, for this was some woman's kitchen, and he felt he must know her, but everywhere he looked was cluttered and smelled of insecticide and seemed like no place a woman should have. The photograph on the refrigerator of a big female holding a knife meant nothing to him. He ran a thick finger along the shelf where the coffee was stored, looking for something that was not there. It was bare wood, and a splinter poked him lightly in a finger joint. He turned and walked to Andy's room, looking into a closet, touching jeans, coveralls, pullovers that could have been for a man or a woman, and then five dull dresses shoved against the closet wall. He tried to remember the cloth, until from outside came a slurred shout, and he turned for the bedroom door, running a thumb under an overalls strap that bit into his shoulders.

The sun rose high and the old man suffered, his borrowed khaki shirt growing dark on his straining flesh. Every time he completed ten feet of ditch, Andy would move his chair along beside him like a guard. They broke for lunch, and at one-thirty, when they went back into the yard, a thunderstorm fired up ten miles away, and the clouds and breeze saved them from the sun. Andy looked at pictures in magazines, drank, and drew hard on many cigarettes. At three o'clock, the old man looked behind him and saw he was thirty feet from the big parish ditch at the rear of the lot. The thought came to him that there might be another job after this one. The roof, he noticed, needed mending, and he imagined himself straddling a gable in the heat. He sat down on the grass, wondering what would happen to him when he finished. Sometimes he thought that he might not be able to finish, that he was digging his own grave.

The little splinter began to bother him and he looked down at the hurt, remembering the raspy edge of the wooden shelf. He blinked twice. Andy had fallen asleep, a colorful magazine fluttering in his lap. Paper, the old man thought. Shelf paper. His wife would have never put anything in a cabinet without first putting down fresh paper over the wood, and then something came back like images on an out-of-focus movie screen when the audience claps and whistles and roars and the projectionist wakes up and gives his machine a twist, and life, movement, and color unite in a razory picture, and at once he remembered his wife and his children and the venerable 1969 Oldsmobile he had driven to the discount store. Etienne LeBlanc gave a little cry, stood up, and looked around at the alien yard and the squat house with the curling roof shingles, remembering everything that ever happened to him in a shoveled-apart sequence, even the time he had come back to the world standing in a cornfield in Texas, or on a Ferris wheel in Baton Rouge, or in the cabin of a shrimp boat off Point au Fer in the Gulf.

He glanced at the sleeping man and was afraid. Remembering his blood pressure pills, he went into the house to find them in his familiar clothes. He looked around the mildew-haunted house, which was unlike the airy cypress home place he still owned down in St. Mary Parish, a big-windowed farmhouse hung with rafts of family photographs. He examined a barren hallway. This place was a closed-up closet of empty walls and wilted drapes, and he wondered what kind of people owned no images of their kin. Andy and his wife were like visitors from another planet, marooned, childless beings enduring their solitude. In the kitchen, he put his hand where the phone used to be, recalling his son's number. He looked out through the screen door to where a fat, bald man slouched asleep in a litter of shiny cans and curling magazines, a wreck of a man, who'd built neither mind nor body, nor soul. He saw the swampy yard, the broken lawn mower, the muddy, splintered rakes and tools scattered in the carport, more ruined than the hundred-year-old implements in his abandoned barn down in the cane fields. He saw ninety yards of shallow ditch. He pushed the screen door out. Something in his blood drew him into the yard.

His shadow fell over the sleeping man as he studied his yellow skin and pasty skull, the thin-haired, overflowing softness of him as he sat off to one side in the aluminum chair, a naked woman frowning in fear in his lap. Etienne LeBlanc held the shovel horizontally with both hands, thinking that he could hit him once in the head for punishment and leave him stunned on the grass and rolling in his rabid magazines while he walked somewhere to call the police, that Andy might learn something at last from a bang on the head. And who would blame an old man for doing such a thing? Here was a criminal, though not an able or very smart one, and such people generally took the heaviest blows of life. His spotted hands tightened on the hickory handle.

Then he again scanned the house and yard, which would never be worth looking at from the road, would never change for the better because the very earth under it all was totally worthless, a boot-sucking, iron-fouled claypan good only for ruining the play clothes of children. He thought of the black soil of his farm, his wife in the field, the wife who had died on his arm a year before as they were buying tomato plants. Looking toward the road, he thought how far away he was from anyone who knew him. Returning to the end of the little ditch, he sank the shovel deep, put up his hands, and pulled sharply, the blade answering with a loud suck of mud that raised one of Andy's eyelids.

“Get on it, Ted,” he said, stirring in the chair, unfocused and dizzy and sick. The old man had done two feet before Andy looked up at him and straightened his back at what he saw in his eyes. “What you looking at, you old shit?”

Etienne LeBlanc sank the blade behind a four-inch collar of mud. “Nothing, son. Not a thing.”

“You got to finish this evening. Sometimes she comes back early, maybe even tomorrow afternoon.” He sat up with the difficulty of an invalid in a nursing home, looking around the base of his chair for something to drink, a magazine falling off his lap into the seedy grass. “Speed up if you know what's good for you.”