Welding with Children

by Tim Gautreaux

  The lounge was a long room, glass walls on one side and a long bar with a smiling lady bartender on the other. He introduced Michelle to Sid, a bright-looking man, savvy, dressed in an expensive suit. Sid smiled at her and pointed out the piano, and the next thing Claude knew, Michelle was seated behind a rebuilt satin-black Steinway playing “Put On a Happy Face,” her high-heeled foot holding down the soft pedal. After a while, the room began to fill with local oil men and their glitzy women, plus the usual salesmen sprawling at the tables, and even a couple of cowboys who lit like dragonflies at the bar. A slim, tipsy woman in tight white jeans and spike heels approached the piano and made a request, putting a bill into a glass on the lid. Michelle stared at the money for a moment and started “Yesterday,” playing for six minutes.

  Claude sat at a tiny table next to the window overlooking the swimming pool and ordered a German beer. He’d never done anything like this and felt out of place. When he did frequent a bar, it was the kind of place with Cajun music on the jukebox and a gallon jar of pigs’ feet on the counter. Michelle finished the tune and looked over at him, and he gave her the okay sign. She smiled and sailed into another, then tickled off a half dozen more over the next forty-five minutes. At one point, she walked to Claude’s table and asked how she was doing. He could see, even in the dim light, that her eyes were too intense, the way a person’s eyes get when she’s having too much fun.

  The piano tuner wanted to say, Lighten up on the arpeggios. Slow your tempo. But she was floating before him as fragile as a soap bubble, so he gave her the thumbs-up. “Perfect. Sid says you can have a hundred dollars for four hours, plus tips.”

  “Money,” she squealed, bouncing back to the piano and starting “The Pennsylvania Polka,” playing with a lot of sustain pedal. A brace of oil men looked over briefly, but most people just leaned closer to talk, or patted their feet. Claude signaled her to quiet it down a bit.

  For an hour and a half, he watched as Michelle played and grinned at people coming to her tip glass. She sang one song through the microphone over her keyboard and drew a moderate wave of applause. She was a good-looking woman, but she had never learned how to move around people, and Claude got the feeling that folks who studied her close up thought she was a little silly. He sat there wishing there was a regulating button on the back of her head that he could give just a quarter turn.

  Eventually, the piano tuner became drowsy and hungry in the dim light of the lounge, so he walked across the lobby to the restaurant and treated himself to a deluxe burger basket and another cold bottle of beer. He sat there next to the plant box full of plastic flowers and worried about Michelle and whether he’d done the right thing by turning a Creole queen into a motel-lounge pianist.

  As soon as he left the restaurant, he could tell something was not exactly right. A young couple walked out of the lounge with quick steps, and then he heard the music: Hungarian Rhapsody no. 2. Sid appeared at the lounge entrance and waved him over. “Michelle’s really smoking our Steinway,” he said, putting his mouth to the piano tuner’s ear. “You know, this crowd thinks classical music is something like Floyd Cramer’s Greatest Hits.” Claude looked into the room, where customers seemed to bend under the shower of notes like cows hiding from a thunderstorm. Some of the loud salesmen had stopped selling mud pumps and chemicals to listen, and the drunk cowboys, who had picked up two women, were trying to jitterbug.

  Sid put a hand on Claude’s shoulder. “What’s going on? She’s got to know that’s not the right music for this place.”

  “I’ll talk to her.”

  He glanced over his shoulder. “She’s smiling a lot. Is she on something?” Sid knew musicians.

  “Depression medicine.”

  He sniffed. “Well, I guess that music’ll drive you off the deep end.”

  After the big rumbling finale, the cowboys let out a rebel yell, but no one applauded, and Claude walked over and put his hand on her back, bending down. “That was good, Michelle.” What else could he say to her?

  She looked up at him and her eyes were wet, her skin flushed and sweating. “You don’t fool me. I know what you’re thinking. But I couldn’t help it. I just got this surge of anger and had to let it out.”

  “What are you mad at?” He saw that her shoulders were trembling.

  She didn’t say anything at first, and then she looked up at him. “I’ve been sitting here thinking that I would have to play piano five nights a week for twenty-three years to pay for the renovation of my house.” She straightened up and looked over the long piano at the bartender, who had both hands on the bar, watching her. “What am I doing here?” She ran a palm down her soft throat. “I’m a Placervent.”

  Claude pushed her microphone aside. “Your medications are maybe a little out of adjustment,” he said in a low voice, wishing he were anyplace on earth other than where he was. He looked over at Sid. “You ought to finish this set.”

  “Why? I can survive without the money. I mean, I appreciate you getting me this job, but I think I’m ready to go home.” She seemed angry and out of control, but she didn’t move.

  He was sure his face showed that he was getting upset himself. She stared down at the keys until finally one of the cowboys, really just a French farm boy from down in Cameron Parish, wearing a loud shirt and a Wal-Mart hat, came up and put a five in her tip glass. “Hey, lady, can you play any Patsy Cline?”

  An injured little smile came to her lips. She straightened her back and started to say something to him, but instead she looked at Claude, at his embarrassed and hopeful face. Her mouth closed in a line, and her right hand went down and began picking out an intro. Then, to his amazement, she started to sing, and people looked up as though Patsy Cline had come back, but without her country accent, and the whole room got quiet to listen. “Crazy,” Michelle sang, soft as midnight fog outside a bedroom window, “crazy for feeling so lonely.”

  * * *

  He didn’t see her for a long time. At Sid’s, someone spilled a highball into the Steinway, and when Claude was over there to straighten it out, the manager told him she was still playing on weekends, and off and on at the Sheraton, and a little at the country club for the oil-company parties. He said that she had gotten her dosage pretty regulated and she played well, except toward the end of the night, when she would start singing blues numbers and laughing out loud between the verses as though she were telling jokes in her head. Laughing very loudly. The piano tuner wondered if she would ever get on an even keel. People like Michelle, he thought, sometimes their talent helped them fix themselves. Sometimes not. Nobody could predict.

  In the middle of December, she called him to come tune a new console she’d bought. She’d finally gotten a carpenter to put knee braces under the front steps so Lagneau’s Music could bring a piano into the house. They’d told her they didn’t want George as a trade-in, though, and that they wouldn’t take the big vertigrand down into the yard for a million dollars. It was built like a wooden warship with seven five-by-five back braces, and it weighed nearly eight hundred pounds. When Claude got there, the entry was open, the dark giant of a piano at the head of the long hall that led to the back porch. As he stepped in, he saw the new piano in the parlor, a cheap, ugly blond-wood model. He couldn’t believe she’d chosen it. Michelle appeared at the far end of the hall, looking wild-eyed, her hair falling in loose, dangly ringlets. She was wearing rust-smudged tan slacks under a yellow rain slicker and was lugging the end of a half inch cable in her cotton gardening gloves.

  “Claude,” she said, shaking her head. “You wouldn’t believe the trouble I’ve had this morning. I had Lagneau’s crew push the old piano into the hall, but the rollers on the bottom locked up. Just look what they did to the floor.” She swept a hand low. The floors were so covered with two-hundred-year-old divots brimming with cloudy wax that he couldn’t spot much new damage. “They managed to get it up on this old braided rug, and I figured I could tow it off the back porch and let it fall into the yard
.”

  He looked in her eyes to see what was going on. “You gonna skid this thing down the hardwood on this rug? We can’t just push it ourselves?”

  “Give it a try.”

  He leaned on it, but he was a small man, and the piano didn’t budge. “I see what you mean.” He looked down the hall to the open rear door. “You think it’ll slide onto the porch and fall through the back steps?”

  “They have to be replaced anyway. Mr. Arcement said he would cart away the mess next week.” She ran the cable under the keyboard and around the back through the handholds, completing a loop and setting the hook. When she passed by the piano tuner, he smelled gasoline on her clothes, and he walked to the back door to see what she’d hooked the cable to. Idling away in the yard was a John Deere 720, a big two-cylinder tractor running on propane.

  “God Almighty, Michelle, that tractor’s the size of a locomotive.”

  “It’s the only one out in the barn that would start,” she said, dropping the cable’s slack into the yard.

  He looked out at the rust-roofed outbuildings, their gray cypress darkening in the drizzle. She began picking her way down the porous steps, which didn’t look like they’d support his weight, so he went out the front door and walked around to the back. He found Michelle standing on the right axle housing of the tractor, facing backward, looking into the hall at the piano. The machine’s exhaust was thudding like a bass drum. He remembered that older John Deeres have a long clutch lever instead of a foot pedal, and she was easing this out to take up slack in the cable. A tire rolled up on the septic tank’s lid, and the front end veered sharply. Claude didn’t know exactly what she was trying to do, but he offered to help.

  “I’ve planned this through. You just stay on the ground and watch.” She sat in the seat, found reverse gear, backed the tractor closer to the house, snugged the steering wheel with a rubber tie-down so it wouldn’t wander again, then eased forward in the lowest gear until the cable was taut. With the slack out of the line, she put the lever all the way forward and the machine began to crawl. Claude walked way out in the yard, stood on tiptoe, and saw George skidding down the hall, wandering from side to side but looking as though it would indeed bump out of the house and onto the back porch. About three feet from the door, the piano rolled off the rug and started to turn broadside to the entryway. Michelle stopped the tractor and yelled something. He couldn’t understand it over the engine noise, but she might have been asking him to go inside and straighten the piano. She stepped out onto the axle again, leaned forward to jump to the ground, and the piano tuner held his breath because there was something wrong with the way she was getting off. Her rain slicker caught on the long lever and he heard the clutch pop as it engaged. Michelle fell on her stomach, the big tractor moving above her. Claude ran over, and when she came out from under the drawbar, he grabbed her arm to get her up. Meanwhile, the tractor had pulled the piano’s soundboard flat against the entryway to the house, where it jammed for about half a second. The tractor gasped as its governor opened up and dumped gas in its engine, and, chak-chak, the exhaust exploded, the big tires squatted and bit into the lawn, and the piano came out with the back wall of the entire house, three rows of brick piers collapsing like stacks of dominoes, the kitchen, rear bedroom, and back porch disintegrating in a tornado of plaster dust and cracking, wailing boards. A musical waterfall of slate shingles rattled down from the roof, the whole house trembled, nearly every windowpane tinkled out, and just when Claude and Michelle thought things had stopped collapsing, the hall fell in all the way to the front door, which swung closed with a bang.

  The tractor kept puttering away toward the north at around four miles an hour, and the piano tuner wondered if he should run after it. Michelle began to make a whining noise deep down in her throat. She hung on to him and started to swing as if she’d pass out. He couldn’t think of a word to say, and they stared at the wreck of a house as though considering putting it back together with airplane glue, when a big yellow jet of gas flamed up about where the stove would be in all the rubble.

  “A fire,” she said breathlessly, tears welling up in her eyes.

  “Where’s the closest neighbor?” he asked, feeling at least now he could do something.

  “The Arcements’. About a mile off.” Her voice was tiny and broken as she pointed a thin white arm to the east, so he gathered her up and walked her to the front, putting her in his van and tearing out down the blacktop toward the nearest working telephone.

  * * *

  By the time the Grand Crapaud Volunteer Fire Department got out to Michelle Placervent’s place, the house was one big orange star, burning so hot that it made little smoke. The firemen ran up to the fence but lost heart right there. They began spraying the camellias at roadside and the live oaks farther in. Claude had rescued Michelle’s Lincoln before the paint blistered off, and she sat in it on the side of the road, looking like a World War II refugee he had seen on the History Channel. Minos LeBlanc, the fire chief, talked to her for a while and asked if she had insurance.

  She nodded. “The only good thing the house had was insurance.” She put her face in her hands then, and Claude and Minos looked away, expecting the crying to come. But it didn’t. She asked for a cup of water, and the piano tuner watched her wash down a pill. After a while, she locked her Lincoln and asked him to take her into town. “I have an acquaintance I can stay with, but she won’t come home from work until five-thirty.” She ran her eyes up a bare chimney rising out of the great fire. “All these years and only one person who’ll put me up.”

  “Come on home and eat supper with us,” he said.

  “No.” She looked down at her dirty slacks. “I wouldn’t want your wife to see me like this.” She seemed almost frightened and looked around him at the firemen.

  “Don’t worry about that. She’d be glad to loan you some clothes to get you through the night.” He placed himself between her and the fire.

  She ran her white fingers through her curls and nodded. “All right,” but she watched him out of the corner of her eye all the way into town, as though she didn’t trust him to take her to the right place. About a block before Claude turned down his street, she let out a giggle, and he figured her chemicals were starting to take effect. Evette showed her the phone and she called several people, then came into the living room, where Claude was watching TV. “I can go to my friend Miriam’s after six-thirty,” she said, settling slowly into the sofa, her head toward the television.

  “I’ll take you over right after we eat.” He shook his head and looked at the rust and mud on her knees. “Gosh, I’m sorry for you.”

  She kept watching the screen. “Look at me. I’m homeless.” But she was not frowning.

  When the six o’clock local news came on Channel 10, the fifth story was about a large green tractor that had just come out of a cane field at the edge of Billeaudville, dragging the muddy hulk of a piano on a long cable. The announcer explained how the tractor plowed through a woman’s yard and proceeded up Lamonica Street toward downtown, where it climbed a curb and began to struggle up the steps of St. Martin’s Catholic Church, until Rosalie Landry, a member of the Ladies’ Altar Society, who was sweeping out the vestibule, stopped the machine by knocking off the tractor’s spark-plug wires with the handle of her broom. As of five-thirty, Vermilion Parish sheriff’s deputies did not know where the tractor had come from or who owned it and the battered piano.

  Claude stood straight up. “I can’t believe it didn’t stall out somewhere. Billeaudville’s four miles from your house.”

  Michelle began laughing, quietly at first, her shoulders jiggling as she tried to hold it in. Then she opened her mouth and let out a big, sailing laugh, and kept it going, soaring up into shrieks and gales, some kind of tears rolling on her face. Evette came to the door holding a big spoon, looked at her husband, and shook her head. He reached over and grabbed Michelle’s arm.

  “Are you all right?”

  She tri
ed to talk between seizures of laughter. “Can’t you see?” she keened. “It escaped.” On the television, a priest was shaking his head at the steaming tractor. She started laughing again, and this time Claude could see halfway down her throat.

  * * *

  A year later, he was called out for four tunings in Lafayette on one day. September was like that for him, with the start of school and piano lessons. On top of it all, Sid called him to fish a bottle of bar nuts out of the lounge piano. He got there late, and Sid bought him supper in the restaurant before he started work.

  The manager wore his usual dark gray silk suit, and his black hair was combed straight back. “Your friend,” he said, as if the word friend held a particularly rich meaning for them, “is still working here, you know.”

  “Yeah, I was over at her apartment last month tuning a new console for her.” Claude shoveled up pieces of hamburger steak.

  “You know, there’s even some strange folks that come in as regulars just to hear her.”

  Claude looked up at him. “She’s a good musician, a nice woman,” he said between chews.

  Sid took another slow drink, setting the glass down carefully. “She looks nice,” he said, emphasizing the word looks. The piano tuner recognized that this is how Sid talked, not explaining, just using his voice to hint at things. The manager leaned in to him. “But sometimes she starts speaking right in the middle of a song. Strange things.” He looked at his watch. “She’s starting early tonight, for a convention crowd, a bunch of four-eyed English teachers.”