Welding with Children

by Tim Gautreaux

  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.”

  “Go on, Alvin,” Sadie said, putting a shoulder to his back and nudging him out the door.

  * * *

  Alvin looked down the road to Mrs. Landreneaux’s house as he walked the clamshell shoulder trying to seem inconspicuous. An old pickup truck passed, driven by what seemed to be a twelve-year-old boy, and Alvin did not return the child’s wave. He walked the grassy edge of Mrs. Landreneaux’s driveway and took to the spongy lawn, circling around to her kitchen window. He stooped and walked under it, the way he had seen detectives do in the movies. When he raised his eyes slowly past the window ledge, he saw a strange man at Mrs. Landreneaux’s table waving a murderous-looking knife at the old woman while chewing a big mouthful of something.

  “You don’t watch out, I’m gonna put you in that stew pot,” the man said, and Mr. Alvin lowered himself slow as a clock’s hand and began to slog through the deep grass toward the highway, where he heard something like a steam engine puffing as he walked along, realizing that it was his own breath. He thought about running and tried to remember how to do it, but his heart was pounding so hard that all he could do was swing his arms faster and paddle the air back to Sadie’s house.

  * * *

  The women were at the window, watching him hurry back. “O mon Dieu,” Mrs. Guidroz sang, “look how fast Alvin’s moving. What’s it mean?”

  Mrs. Breaux cackled. “It’s probably just his Ex-Lax working.”

  They opened the door and pulled him into the room by his flabby arms.

  “There’s someone there holding a knife on Doris,” Alvin gasped.

  “Ai yai-yai!” Sadie shouted.

  “Call Deputy Sid,” Beverly announced from the card table, where she was refilling her butane lighter from a miniature canister of gas.

  Sadie shook her head. “It’ll take him a half hour to get out here.” She straightened up and looked around. “Maybe one of us ought to go over there with a gun.”

  Alvin put up his big hands. “Oh no, I went already.” He walked over to the phone and dialed the sheriff’s office.

  Mrs. Breaux threw down a pack of cards in disgust. “What kind of gun you got?”

  Sadie reached into the next room to a little space between an armoire and the wall, retrieving a double-barrel shotgun with exposed hammers. “This was Lester’s daddy’s gun.”

  Mrs. Breaux walked over and figured out how to open the action. “They ain’t no bullets in this thing.”

  Sadie walked over to her dresser, her perfume and lotion bottles clinking against each other on the vanity, and pulled out the top drawer. “Does this fit?” She handed Mrs. Breaux a tarnished .38-caliber cartridge. She dropped it into the gun, but it rattled down the barrel and tumbled out onto the linoleum.

  “It’s not the right size,” Mrs. Breaux complained, peering into Sadie’s outstretched hand and plucking two high-brass cardboard shells labeled with double O’s.

  “Here you go.” She plunked in the shells and snapped the action shut.

  * * *

  The parish had only one settlement to the south, Grand Crapaud, and south of that a few miles, the highway came to an end. The center line of the road led up to the steps of a twelve-by-twelve-foot asbestos-sided building on piers, the office of the South End deputy.

  Deputy Sid was a tall black man wearing a cowboy hat with a gold badge on the crown and an immaculate, freshly ironed uniform. He sat at his little desk filling out a report about Minos Blanchard letting his Dodge Dart roll overboard at the boat ramp next door. The phone rang, and it was the dispatcher from the parish seat.

  “Sid, you there?”

  “I’m here all right.”

  “Mrs. Lalonde out by Prairie Amer called in that Doris Landreneaux has an intruder in her house right now.”

  “That’s those peoples always playin’ cards?”

  “And the one that’s always cookin’.”

  “How does Mrs. Lalonde know they’s somebody in there?”

  “There’s a strange car in the yard.”

  “Did she say what kind it was?”

  “She said it was a Freon.”

  “They ain’t no such thing.”

  “I know that. Mr. Alvin looked in the window and saw the intruder.”

  Deputy Sid pushed back his hat. “What’s Mr. Alvin doing looking in a woman’s window?”

  “Can you get out there?”

  “Sho.” He hung up and in one step was at the door.

  * * *

  Mrs. Landreneaux watched Big Blade finish one overflowing plate of chicken stew, and then she fixed him another, providing him all the while with French-dripped coffee laced with brandy. “You better think where you put your money,” Big Blade said through a mouthful of potato salad.

  “You ain’t had some dessert yet,” Mrs. Landreneaux cooed. “Look, I foun’ some bread pudding with whiskey sauce in the fridge.”

  Big Blade took a tentative taste of the dessert, then a spoonful, eating slowly and with one eye closed. By the time he’d finished everything on the table, he was stunned with food, drowsy, dim-witted with food. He had been eating for a half hour. When he saw movement at the back screen door, he ignored it for a moment, but when the form of a uniformed black man imprinted itself on his consciousness, he ju
mped up, holding his knife in one hand and the old lady’s bony arm in the other.

  Deputy Sid stepped in smiling, moving easily, as though he’d lived in the kitchen all his life and was walking through his own house. “How you doin’, Mrs. Landreneaux?”

  “Hey, yourself, Deputy Sid. They’s fresh coffee on the stove.”

  “Freeze,” Blade barked.

  Deputy Sid stopped the motion of his hand above the range. “I can’t have no coffee?”

  The little plastic slice of toast peeked out of the clock and Blade jumped. “Ahhh.”

  “What?” Deputy Sid looked to the windowsill.

  “It’s that damn clock,” Mrs. Landreneaux said. “That crazy thing scares the hell out of me, too, but my sister give it to me, and what can you do? I come in here at night sometime and that little toast rises up like a rat sticking its head out a cracker can and—”

  “Never mind.” Big Blade was looking at the deputy’s staghorn-gripped, nickel-plated revolver. It was angled toward him on the policeman’s narrow hip. “Give me your gun or I’ll cut the old lady’s throat.”

  Deputy Sid considered this for a moment. “Okay, man. But hold on to Misres Doris, ’cause she fixin’ to take off.” The deputy popped his safety strap, lifted his revolver with two fingers, and placed it on the table. Blade held on to the old lady with one hand, reached to the table, still holding the big knife, and realized that he would have to put it down to retrieve the gun. The second he put his finger into the trigger guard of the pistol, Deputy Sid moved his hand over and picked up the knife.

  “Hey,” Blade told him, pointing the shiny weapon at his head.

  “You don’t need this no more.” Deputy Sid dropped the knife behind the refrigerator.

  “I want my knife.”

  “You better get on out of here while you got the upper hand.”

  Big Blade glanced through the screen door. “Yeah. I bet you got buddies outside just waiting.”

  Deputy Sid shook his head. “No, man. It’s just me. But let me give you some advice. You on a dead-end parish highway. The open end got a roadblock right now. South here is marsh and alligators.”

  “And then what?”

  Deputy Sid screwed up an eye to think. “Cuba, I guess.”

  “Shit. What about north?”

  “Rice fields for five miles.”

  “That little car I got will get me through the roadblock.”

  “I don’t know. You left the motor running and it idled out of gas. You can get in it, but it won’t go nowhere.”

  Big Blade’s eyeballs bounced back and forth for a few seconds. He waved the gun. “Handcuff yourself to that oven door and give me the keys.”

  Mrs. Landreneaux pointed. “Careful you don’t scratch nothin’. The last thing my husband did before he died is buy me that stove, and it got to last me a long time. He told me—”

  “I’m taking her with me. So if you got partners outside, you better call to them.”

  “I’m the onliest one back here.”

  “Is your cruiser idling?” Big Blade asked with a wicked smile.

  The deputy nodded slowly.

  “Hah, you people are dumb as dirt,” he said, backing out of the kitchen with the old lady in tow.

  Deputy Sid watched them walk out of his line of vision. He looked at the stove, reached and felt the side of the coffeepot, and then stretched to the cabinet to get himself a cup.

  * * *

  The cruiser was eight years old and Big Blade had to clean out clipboards, digital adding machines, dog-eared manuals on report writing, apples, candy bars, chewing gum, magazines, and empty cans of Mace before Mrs. Landreneaux would fit into the front seat. She buckled her safety harness, and he climbed in on the driver’s side. The old white Dodge’s transmission slipped so badly that it would hardly back out onto the road, but soon they were spinning along the highway, going west. After five miles, he could see one police car in the distance parked across the flat road, and he knew he could make the escape work. All he had to do was hold the pistol to her head and let the officers see this. They would let him roll through like a tourist. Just then, Mrs. Landreneaux crossed her hands over her breastbone and announced in a strangled voice, “I’m having me another heart attack.” Big Blade stopped the car as the old woman’s face got red for five seconds, and then she coughed once, her arms falling limp at her side and her upper plate tumbling from her mouth and bouncing once on the floor mat. He looked ahead to what he could now see were two police cars waiting with their flashers swatting the flat light rolling off the rice fields. Feeling with great dread the flesh of the woman’s neck, he could find no pulse, and suddenly everything changed. He imagined himself strapped to a gurney in a Louisiana prison, waiting for the fatal charge to come along the tube into his arm. He looked into his rearview and then turned the car around, the old woman’s head rolling right. Maybe there would be a boat at the end of the road and he could escape in that.

  The Dodge stuttered and groaned up to thirty, forty, forty-five as he headed in the other direction. Soon Doris Landreneaux’s house was rolling up on the right, and on the left he watched the only other house in the area, with a mailbox out front and a bushy cedar growing next to it. As soon as he passed that mailbox, his peripheral vision snapped a picture of five old people crouching in a line, hiding behind the cedar. At once, he heard a huge detonation and the car began a drunken spin, metal grinding on the blacktop, the tires howling until the cruiser stopped sideways in the road. Big Blade shook his head and fell out of the front seat, holding Deputy Sid’s revolver. He saw a skinny old woman in a print dress walking up and holding a shotgun toward his midsection. One hammer on the gun was down, and the other was up like a fang ready to drop. He stood and raised the nickel-plated revolver and pulled the trigger, aiming at her legs, but all the weapon did was go tik-tik-tik-tik-tik-tik.

  “Get on the damn ground,” Mrs. Breaux hollered in her creaky voice, “or I’ll let the air out of you like I did that tire, yeah.”

  Big Blade lay down in the road, and then he heard a cackle from the front seat of the cruiser as Mrs. Landreneaux unbuckled herself and climbed out with her upper plate in her hand. “Ha-haaa, I foolt him good. He tought I was dead and he ran from them other cops.”

  Along the shoulder of the road came Deputy Sid, a sea-green oven door under his arm. He bent down, retrieved his revolver, and loaded it with six shells dug out of his pocket. “I got him now, ladies, Mr. Al.”

  Mrs. Landreneaux sidled up to him. “You got some more police coming?”

  “Yeah. I called ’em from your bedroom phone. Then I called your neighbors here.”

  Mrs. Breaux lowered the hammer on the shotgun. “Hot damn. Now we can get back to the game. Doris, you want to play?”

  She waved her hand above her white hair as if chasing a fly. “Nah, me, I got to go clean up my kitchen.”

  “What about you, Deputy Sid?”

  He looked at his blasted front tire and the pellet holes in the fender. He let the bottom of the oven door rest on the ground. “It gon’ take me a week to write all this up. Maybe next time ya’ll play, you can give me a call.”

  Sadie lumbered up out of the grass, followed by Alvin. “Don’t bring that gun into the house loaded,” she said.

  Mrs. Breaux opened the action and plucked out the good shell, chucking the empty into a roadside ditch. She handed the weapon to Alvin, who took it from her with his fingertips, as though it might be red-hot. Mrs. Breaux grabbed a handful of Alvin’s shirt and let him tow her off the road and across the soft lawn. Suddenly, she wheeled around. “Hey, you,” she called to Big Blade, who was squirming under the barrel of Deputy Sid’s revolver.

  “What?” He had to look through the window of the oven door to see her.

  “If you ever get out of jail, I want you to come play cards with us.” She threw back her head and laughed.

  “Why’s that?” he asked. “What’s she mean?”

  “Just bring l
ots of money, boy,” she said as she looked down the road toward an approaching parade of flashers and the warbling laugh of a siren sailing high over the simple rice fields.

  THE PIANO TUNER

  The phone rang Monday morning while the piano tuner was shaving, and he nicked himself. The strange lady was on the line, the one who hardly ever came out of her big house stuck back in the cane fields south of town. The piano tuner told her he’d come out, and then he wiped the receiver free of shaving cream and blood. Back at the lavatory, he went after his white whiskers, remembering that she was a fairly good-looking woman, quite a bit younger than he was, in her mid-thirties. She also had a little money, and the piano tuner, whose name was Claude, wondered why she didn’t try to lose some of it at the Indian casino or at least spend a bit cheering herself up with a bowl of gumbo at Babineaux’s Café. He knew that all she did was sit in a 150-year-old house and practice pop tunes on a moth-eaten George Steck upright.

  Claude gathered his tuning kit, drank coffee with his wife, then headed out into the country in his little white van. He made a dozen turns and got on the clamshell road that ran by Michelle Placervent’s unpainted house, a squared-off antique thing set high up on crumbling brick pillars. Behind the house were gray-wood outbuildings, and behind those the sugarcane grew taller than a man and spread for miles, level as a giant’s lawn.

  As he pulled his tool kit out of the van, Claude recalled that Michelle was the end of the line for the Placervents, Creole planters who always had just enough money and influence to make themselves disliked in a poor community. Her mother had died ten years before, after Michelle had graduated with a music degree and come home to take care of her. He looked up on the gallery, stopping a moment to remember her father, a pale, overweight man with oiled hair, who would sit in a rocker and yell after cars speeding in the dusty road, as though he could control the world with a mean word.

  The piano tuner remembered that Mr. Placervent had begun to step up his drinking after his wife died, and Michelle had to tend him like a baby until he dropped dead in the yard yelling at a postman about receiving too many advertisements from Kmart. From that point on, it was just her, the black housekeeper, the home place, and a thousand acres the bank managed for her. Then the housekeeper died.