Welding with Children

by Tim Gautreaux

  The father put his glass against his forehead. “I don’t know anything about it,” he said. “Do you know how tired I am?”

  Her half-formed image shifted at the screen, then dispersed like smoke. In a moment, the mother came out and stepped carefully past her husband, not looking at him until she was safely on the grass. “I’d help her,” she said. “But I don’t know anything about that. Electricity. It’s something a man’ll have to do.”

  The husband drained his drink and flung the ice cubes at the fence. Mr. Boudreaux felt a drop hit the back of his spotted hand. “Why can’t she do something like a girl would do? Something you could help her with.”

  Mr. Boudreaux peered through the honeysuckle. The man was wearing jeans and a white button-down shirt with some sort of company emblem embroidered on the breast, a gay and meandering logo that suggested a bowling alley or gas station.

  The mother looked down and patted the grass in a semicircle with her left foot. “You’re her parent, too,” she said. It was a weak thing to say, Mr. Boudreaux thought.

  The father stood up, and the flimsy chair turned over on its side. He swung around and looked at it for a moment, then kicked it across the yard.

  * * *

  After dark, Mr. Boudreaux went out on his front porch with a glass of iced tea and listened, wondering whether the girl’s parents ever argued. He had never heard them, but then he remembered that since the coming of air-conditioning, he’d heard little from inside anyone’s house. When he first moved to the neighborhood, up and down LeBoeuf Street he could hear the tinny cheer of radios, the yelps of children chasing through the houses, a rare yelling match about money or relatives. But now he heard only the breathy hum of the heat pumps and the intermittent ahhh of an automobile’s tires on the subdivision’s ebony streets. He looked over at his fifteen-year-old Buick parked in the single drive. It embarrassed him to drive such a large old car through the neighborhood, where everyone stood out and washed the dust from their Japanese-lantern compacts. Maybe it was time to trade it off for something that would fit in. Next door, the father came out and walked stiffly to his candy apple car and drove away, dragging his tires at every shift of the gears, irk, irk.

  * * *

  The next morning, Mr. Boudreaux came out for the paper and saw Carmine sitting on her front steps waiting for the bus to appear out of the fog. Her eyes were red. He picked up the paper and began walking back toward the porch, telling himself, Don’t look. But at his front steps, he felt a little electrical tug at his neck muscles, a blank moment of indecision.

  He turned his head. “Good morning, little miss,” he called out, raising his paper.

  “Morning, Mr. Boudreaux.” Her low voice was small in the fog.

  “How you doing in school?” He unfolded the paper and pretended to read the headline.

  “Okay.”

  He bounced once on the balls of his feet. He could walk into the house and not look back. “It’s springtime,” he said. “My kids used to have to make their science projects this time of year.”

  She looked over at him, her eyebrows up in surprise. “You have kids?”

  Mr. Boudreaux realized how impossibly old he must seem. “Sure. A long time ago. They’re nurses and engineers and one’s a policeman way up in Virginia. They all had their science projects. What about you?”

  She looked down at a heavy brown shoe. “I want to do one, but no one can help me,” she said.

  He banged the paper against his leg several times before he said anything more. He closed his eyes. “Is your mamma home? Let me talk to her a minute.”

  * * *

  That’s how it got started. After school, she rang his doorbell, and he led her into the kitchen, where he fixed her a Coke float. Carmine smelled dusty and hot, and she finished her drink in less than a minute, placing the glass in the sink and sitting down again at Mr. Boudreaux’s table, spreading open a spiral-bound tablet. She gave him a blank look of evaluation, an expression she might use on a strange dog.

  Mr. Boudreaux sat down across from her. “Well, missy, what kind of project you interested in? Your momma said you needed a little push in the right direction.”

  “What did you do when you had a job?” she asked, pushing her hair out of her eyes.

  He blinked. “I started as a millwright at LeBlanc Sugar Mill, and when I retired, I was a foreman over all the maintenance people.”

  She frowned. “Does that mean you don’t know anything about electricity?”

  Leaning back, he rubbed a spot over his eye. “I worked on a lot of motors in my time.”

  Carmine scooted her chair closer and showed him her notebook. In it were hundreds of O’s drawn with legs, all running into a narrow cylinder and jumping one by one out of the other end of it. “These are electrons,” she said. Some of the electrons were running through a bigger cylinder and more of them seemed to be coming out the other side. “The tube shapes are resistors,” she instructed. “Some let electrons through fast, some slow.” Her short finger led his attention along the rows of exiting electrons, which had little smiles drawn on them, as though they had earned passage to a wonderful place. She told him how resistors control current and how without them no one could have ever made a television or computer.

  Mr. Boudreaux nodded. “So what you going to call this project?”

  “Resistance.” She said the word as though it had another meaning.

  “And we gotta figure out how to demonstrate it, right?” He closed his eyes and thought back to those late-night projects of his children. His son Sid, the state patrolman, had done friction. Friction, the old man thought. That was right up Sid’s alley. “We have to state a problem and show how it’s solved with resistors. Then we demonstrate how they work.”

  Carmine bobbed her head. “You have done this before.”

  * * *

  The next afternoon, they spent on the rug in the den, drawing and brainstorming. When Mr. Boudreaux let the girl out at suppertime, he saw her father standing on the front walk, glowering. The next morning was Saturday, and he and Carmine got into his venerable Buick and drove down to the electronics store at the mall. The girl hardly looked at her list. She spent her time browsing the tall Peg-Board sections hung with diodes and toggle switches, condensers and capacitors, fondling little transistors through the thin plastic bags. Mr. Boudreaux tended to business, buying a pack of foot-square circuit boards, little red push switches, eighteen-gauge wire. Earlier, Carmine had brought him a dog-eared book, Electricity for Children, and from it he had memorized the banding codes for resistors. With this knowledge, he selected an assortment of plastic cylinders that looked like tiny jelly beans decorated with red, black, and silver bands, an inch of silver wire coming out of each end.

  Their purchases stowed in a loopy plastic bag, they walked the mall to the candy counter, where Mr. Boudreaux bought a quarter pound of lime slices. Carmine took a green wedge from him, saying nothing, and they walked on through the strollers, teenagers, and senior citizens limping along in running shoes. Mr. Boudreaux looked at the children who were Carmine’s age. They seemed stylish and energetic as they played video games or preened in the reflections of shop windows. Carmine was mechanical, earnest, and as communicative as a very old pet dog.

  When they got back to Mr. Boudreaux’s house, Carmine’s father was standing in their way, wavering in the slim line of grass that ridged the middle of the driveway. The old man got out of the Buick and greeted him.

  The other man had been drinking again. He pointed a chewed fingernail at Mr. Boudreaux. “You should have asked me before you took that girl off somewhere.”

  “I asked your wife. You weren’t awake yet.”

  “Well, let me tell you, I was worried. I called up the police and checked you out.” Carmine came around the car and stood between them, staring down the street as though she could see all the way to Texas.

  Mr. Boudreaux passed his tongue along his bottom lip. “The police. You called the polic
e about me? Why’d you do that?”

  “You can’t tell nowadays. Old guys such as yourself and kids. You know?” The father stuck his pale hands into a pair of tight work pants.

  The old man looked at the ground. He was embarrassed because he didn’t know what to think, other than that nobody used to imagine such things. Not in a million years. “You think I’m gonna rob your kid or something?” he said at last. “Look.” He held out the plastic bag. “I helped her pay for her stuff.”

  Carmine’s father pointed a finger at Mr. Boudreaux. “She can pay for her own stuff. You keep your money in your pocket,” he said. “I don’t know why you think you got to do this.” He gave the girl a wounded glance and then turned toward his steps.

  Mr. Boudreaux looked at Carmine. She pushed her glasses up her nose and looked back at him. “Did you have a little girl back when you were a father?” she asked.

  He looked at his house and then back at the child. “Yes, I did. Her name is Charlene. And I have another named Monica.”

  For the first time that day, her expression changed and showed surprise. “What would anybody need with two girls?”

  * * *

  That afternoon, he watched her write her report; he helped her decide where to put headings and how to divide the information up. After supper, she came over, and they planned the display. Carmine drew out a design on lined paper with an oversized pencil. “I want those little button switches that work like doorbells here,” she said. “On the first circuit, I want a straight wire to a flashlight bulb in one of those sockets we bought. On the second line, I want a twenty-two-ohm resistor to the same-size bulb. That’ll make the bulb glow dimmer.” She stuck out her tongue and bit it as she drew carbon ribbons of circuits. “The third button will turn on a line with two twenty-two-ohm resistors soldered together in series, and the bulb will glow dimmer.” She went on to draw in the fourth circuit, which would be an ordinary pencil wired to show how current can pass through carbon, “which is what resistors are made of,” she told him. A fifth circuit would have a rotary switch controlling a bulb. Carmine drew in the electrical symbol for a variable resistor at this point and put down her pencil.

  “Now what?” Mr. Boudreaux asked, rubbing his eyes with his long forefingers. Since he’d reached his late seventies, he’d been going to bed around eight-thirty. At the moment, his knees were aching like great boils.

  “Now we have to solder this together on the perforated circuit board.”

  “Ow. I don’t know about that.”

  She didn’t look up. “Don’t you have a soldering iron?”

  “I haven’t seen it in years.” They got up and Carmine helped him down the back steps into the moonlit yard. Built onto the rear of the garage was a workshop. Mr. Boudreaux opened the door, and the glass in its top rattled. At one time he had spent long hours here fixing the house’s appliances or rebuilding bicycles and gas-powered airplanes. Now he came in once or twice a year to look for a screwdriver or to store a box. Carmine found the light switch.

  “A workbench,” she sang, going over to a vise and turning its handle around.

  Mr. Boudreaux looked for the soldering gun while she dusted the maple counter with a rag and spread out the components. “Here it is,” he said. But when he plugged the instrument in and pulled the trigger, a burst of sparks shot from the vents and a smell of melting Bakelite filled the shop. Holding it by its cord, he unplugged it and then threw it into the yard. The girl looked after the soldering iron sorrowfully.

  “Do you have another one?”

  “No, honey. And it’s too late to go to the store. We’ll have to finish tomorrow.” He watched her look to the counter and purse her lips. “What you thinking?”

  “Sundays are not good days,” she told him.

  He shook his head at the comment. “You’ll be over here.”

  She stared at her blocky leather shoes. “Mom and I have got to be there, and we’ve got to stay quiet.” She looked up at him and her face showed that she was smarter than he ever was. “We’ve always got to be in the corner of his eye.”

  “What’s that?” He bent a furry ear toward her.

  “He wants us around, but kind of on the side. Never the main thing he looks at.”

  The old man searched above his head and on a rusty sixteenpenny nail found his Turner gasoline blowtorch. “If this thing’ll work, we’ll try to get our soldering done the old-fashioned way.”

  She clapped her hands together once. “What is it?” She put a forefinger on the brass tank.

  “Well, you open it up here,” he told her, unscrewing a plug in the bottom and shaking out a few spoonfuls of stale, sweet-smelling gas. “Then you put some fresh lawn-mower gasoline in, turn it over, and use this little thumb pump on the side.”

  “To make pressure?”

  “Yeah. Then you light the end of this horizontal tube and adjust the flame with these old knobs.” He dug around in a deep drawer under the counter, coming up with an arrow-shaped tool with a wooden handle on one end and an iron rod running out of that into a pointed bar of copper. “You got to set this heavy point in the flame, and when it gets hot enough, you touch it to the solder, which melts onto the wires. That’s what holds the wires together.”

  The girl grabbed the wooden handle and waved the tool like a weapon, stabbing the air.

  * * *

  In a few minutes, the blowtorch was sputtering and surging, humming out a feathery yellow flame. It had been over thirty years since Mr. Boudreaux had used such a torch for soldering, and it took several tries before the first wires were trapped in melted silver. He and the girl strung wire and turned screws into a circuit board, and for a minute, he was a younger man, looking down on the head of one of his own daughters. He felt expert as he guided Carmine’s short fingers and held the circuit board for her to thread the red wire through to the switch terminals. He felt back at work, almost as though he were getting things done at the mill.

  The girl avoided his eyes, but she did give him one glance before asking a question. “Why’re you helping me with this?”

  He watched her fingers pull a wire under the board. “It just needed doing.”

  “Did you really help your children with their projects?”

  “I don’t remember. Maybe their momma did.”

  She was quiet as she turned in a stubby screw. “Did you ever have to do a science project?”

  He looked out the workshop window and closed one eye. “I don’t think science had been invented yet.” He checked her face, but she wasn’t smiling. Then he remembered something. “When I was in fifth grade, I had to read a novel called Great Expectations. The teacher said we had to build something that was in the book, like an old house, or Miss Haversham’s wedding cake, or some such foolishness. I forgot all about it until the night before, and knew I was really going to catch it the next day if I showed up without it.”

  Carmine took the hot copper away from the torch and soldered a joint herself. “What did you do?”

  He rubbed his chin. “I think I cried, I was so scared. My mother would whack me with a belt if I ever failed a course, and I wasn’t doing so good in English. Anyway, my daddy saw my long face and made me tell him what was wrong. He asked me what was in the book.” Mr. Boudreaux laughed. “I thought that was strange, because he couldn’t read hardly two words in a row. But I told him about Pip, and Pip’s father, and the prison ship. That caught his ear, and he asked me about that ship, so I told him. Then he went outside. That night, I went to bed and couldn’t sleep hardly a wink. I remember that because I’ve always been a good sleeper. I go out like a light about nine, ten o’clock, you know?” The girl nodded, then placed a bulb in a socket. “When I got up for school, Daddy had left for work at the mill, and on the kitchen table was a foot-long sailing boat, painted black, three masts, all the rigging strung with black sewing thread, deck hatches, gun ports, and a bowsprit. It was all done with a pocketknife, and it was warm to the touch, because my momma said
he had put it in the oven to dry the paint so it would be ready for school.”

  The girl seemed not to hear him. “I want the battery tied in with wire,” she said.

  “The old man was like that,” Mr. Boudreaux told her. “He never asked me if I liked the boat, and I never said anything to him about it, even when I brought home a good grade for the project.”

  When they were finished, all the lightbulbs lit up, as she had predicted. He built a hinged wooden frame for the two posters that held her report and drawings. They set everything up on the workbench and stepped back. Mr. Boudreaux pretended to be a judge and clamped his fingers thoughtfully around his chin. “That’s a prizewinner,” he said in a mock-serious voice. Then he looked down at Carmine. Her lips were in a straight line, her eyes dark and round.

  * * *

  The next day was Sunday, and Mr. Boudreaux went to eleven o’clock Mass, visiting afterward with the men his age who were still able to come out. They sat on the rim of St. Anthony’s fountain under the shade of a palm tree and told well-worn jokes in Cajun French, then tales of who was sick, who was dead. Mr. Landry, who had worked under Mr. Boudreaux at the sugar mill, asked him what he had been doing with his granddaughter at the mall.

  “That was a neighbor child,” Mr. Boudreaux told him. “My grandchildren live away.”

  “What was she doing? Asking you about the dinosaurs?” He laughed and hit the shoulder of the man next to him.

  “She’s doing a school thing, and I’m helping her with it.”

  Mr. Landry’s face settled into a question. “She lives on the north side of you?”

  “Yes.”

  Mr. Landry shook his head. “My son works with her daddy. She needs all the help she can get.”

  “He’s a piece of work all right.”

  The men broke up and moved away from one another, waving. Mr. Boudreaux drove the long way home, passing by the school, along the park, behind the ball field. He felt that by helping with the science project, he had completed something important and that he and the girl had learned something. His old Buick hesitated in an intersection, and he looked at its faded upholstery, its dusty buttons and levers, thinking that he should buy a new car. He could cash in his insurance policy and finally use a little of his savings.