Welding with Children

by Tim Gautreaux

  “Driver, get out,” he barked. Slowly, a graying, soft-looking man wearing a dark shirt buttoned at the top button slid out of the vehicle, his shaking hands raised high.

  “Can you please not yell?” The old man looked around at the drowsing houses.

  Vic stared at him, walked close, and looked at his eyes. He holstered his revolver. “Why’d you speed away like that, Father?”

  The priest was out of breath. “When you turned on those flashers, it frightened me and, well, I guess I pressed the accelerator too hard, and this thing took off like a rocket.”

  Vic looked at the car and back to the priest. “The tag is expired on your vehicle, and it doesn’t have an inspection sticker.” He went to his patrol car and reached in for his ticket book.

  “Could you please turn off those flashers?”

  “Have to leave ’em on. Rules, you know,” Vic said in a nasty voice. “You want to show me your proof of insurance, driver’s license, and pink slip?” He held out a mocking hand.

  “You know I don’t have any of those.”

  “Father, what are you doing in this wreck?”

  The priest put his hands in front of him, pleading. “I can’t say anything. It’s related to a confession.”

  “Oh, is this a good deed or somethin’?”

  The priest’s face brightened with hope, as though the patrolman understood what this was all about. “Yes, yes.”

  Vic leaned in and sniffed. “You think it’s a good deed to get drunk as a boiled owl and speed around town at night?” he hollered.

  “Oh, please, hush,” Father Ledet pleaded.

  Vic reached to his gun belt. “Turn around so I can cuff you.”

  “Have some mercy.”

  “Them that deserves it get mercy,” Vic told him.

  “God would give me mercy,” the priest said, turning around and offering his hands at his back.

  “Then he’s a better man than I am. Spread your legs.”

  “This won’t do anyone any good.”

  “It’ll do me some good.” Just then, a porch light came on, and a shirtless Nelson Lodrigue padded out to the walk in his bare feet, his moon-shaped belly hanging over the elastic of his pajamas.

  “Hey. What’s goin’ on?”

  Other porch lights began to fire up across the street and next door, people coming out to the edge of their driveways and looking.

  “It’s Father Ledet,” Vic called out. “He’s getting a ticket or two.”

  Nelson was standing next to the car before his eyes opened fully and his head swung from side to side at the dusty apparition. “What the hell? This here’s my old car that got stole.”

  Vic gave the priest a hard look. “Collections been a little slow, Father?”

  “Don’t be absurd. I was returning Nelson’s car.”

  “You know who stole my car?” Nelson lumbered around the hood. “You better tell me right now. I didn’t sleep for a year after this thing got taken. I always had a feeling it was somebody I knew.”

  “I can’t say anything.”

  “It came out in a confession,” Vic explained.

  Nelson ran his hand over the chalky paint of the roof. “Well, charge him with auto theft and I’ll bet he’ll tell us.”

  Two ladies in curlers and a tall middle-aged man wearing a robe and slippers approached from across the street. “What’s going on, Vic?” the man asked. “Hello, Father.”

  The priest nodded, hiding the handcuffs behind him. “Good evening, Mayor. This isn’t what it appears to be.”

  “I hope not,” one of the women said.

  Other neighbors began walking into the circle of crackling light cast by the police car’s flashers. Then the parish deputy pulled up, his own lights blazing. Vic looked on as the priest tried to explain to everyone that he was doing a good thing, that they couldn’t know all the details. The patrolman felt sorry for him, he really did, felt bad as he filled out the tickets, as he pushed the old head under the roofline of the patrol car, and, later, as he fingerprinted the soft hands and put the holy body into the cell, taking his belt, his shoelaces, and his rosary.

  * * *

  Father Ledet had to journey to Baton Rouge to endure the frowns and lecturing of the bishop. His parish was taken away for two months, and he was put into an AA program in his own community, where he sat many times in rusty folding chairs along with fundamentalist garage mechanics, striptease artists, and spoiled, depressed subdivision wives to listen to testimonials, admonitions, confessions without end. He rode in cabs to these meetings, and in the evenings no one invited him to the Ladies’ Altar Society dinners or to anyplace else. Mrs. Arceneaux never called to sympathize, and pretty Mrs. Barrilleaux would not look at him when he waved as she drove by the rectory in her new secondhand car. The first day he was again allowed to put on vestments was a Sunday, and he went in to say the eleven o’clock Mass. The church was full, and the sun was bleeding gold streamers of light down through the sacristy windows behind the altar. Alter the Gloria was sung by the birdlike voices of a visiting children’s choir, the priest stood in the pulpit and read the Gospel, drawing scant solace from the story of Jesus turning water into wine. The congregation then sat down in a rumble of settling pews and kicked-up kneelers. Father Ledet began to talk about Christ’s first miracle, an old sermon, one he’d given dozens of times. The elder parishioners in the front pews seemed to regard him as a stranger, the children were uninterested, and he felt disconnected and sad as he spoke, wondering if he would ever be punished enough for what he had done. He scanned the faces in the congregation as he preached, looking for forgiveness of any sort, and fifteen minutes into the sermon, he saw in the fifth pew, against the wall, something that was better than forgiveness, better than what he deserved, something that gave sudden light to his dull voice and turned bored heads up to the freshened preaching. It was Clyde Arceneaux, a plastic tube creeping down from his nose and taped to his puckered neck. He was asleep, pale, two steps from death, his head resting against the wall, but at least he had finally come inside.

  EASY PICKINGS

  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 si
milar 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.”r />
  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.”