“The boat,” he said, choking on the words, “it just doesn’t want any hard feelings.”
The woman’s eyes focused on his. “Well, my husband don’t have no feelings at all right now, so I guess the boat’s happy.” She grabbed his arm. “Let me innerduce you to Roy Junior.”
In the rear of the funeral home chapel, against a wall of slightly buckled paneling, a slim sunburned man who seemed about forty years old leaned back in a folding chair, its front legs hovering off the carpet. Wayne reached out, and the redheaded son put his cigarette in the corner of his mouth and offered a hand that felt like a tree root. The mother gave a rattling cough, then said, “This here’s the boy in the paper what tried to save him.” She turned and walked away, over toward the organist.
The son rolled up his bloodshot eyes for a look. He was wearing dark dress pants, patent leather shoes left over from a wedding in the seventies, and a white dress shirt with silver collar tips. The top three buttons were undone, showing a gold chain with a Phillips 66 emblem on the end. “You almost got kilt,” Roy Junior said.
Wayne sat next to him. He’d known dozens of men like him in the truck factory. “I tried to find him in the dark, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t do it.”
Roy Junior nodded. “Hey, you can back off on yourself half a turn.” He looked over at his mother, who was choosing hymns. “The old man just didn’t want to come on home to us. You know, he pawned my motorcycle to play them damn ten-dollar slots is what he done. The pawnshop come got it last night. I worked four years to save enough for that thing, and don’t look at me like it was some hippie motorbike without no muffler. This was a Gold Wing, like a banker might ride with his wife on the weekend.” Roy Junior put his Marlboro to his lips and drew deep and long, looking sideways at Wayne. “Daddy was okay all around, but he couldn’t leave them son-of-a-bitchin’ machines alone. My youngest brother had him a little college account started with money a uncle left him. Daddy lost that first off on video poker.” He glanced up through his bushy eyebrows. “Aw, hell, I don’t mean to bend your ear with all our goin’-ons.”
Wayne listened to the thready organ music and tried to imagine Roy Senior’s life but couldn’t. He closed his eyes for a long while, as though it hurt to look at the room. When he opened them, he said, “Why do you think he jumped?”
The son thought a moment, looking across the chapel at the coffin. “I reckon he got tired of taking from all us,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s a long, long story. Always chasing some jackpot.”
“What would he have done if he’d won the big one?”
Roy Junior bobbed his head. “Are you crazy, man? Nobody can’t win that thing. There’s billions-to-one odds against it.”
“But what if he did?”
He took in a drag on the nub of his cigarette, and Wayne thought the smoke must have been hot enough to weld his lips shut. “He’d try to give it back, what he took,” Roy Junior said. “But you can’t do that. Once something is took, even if you get it back, it’s still been took from you. It’s not the same thing you get back.” The son straightened in his folding chair and flicked ash on the carpet.
Wayne looked at Roy Junior’s fingers, which had been burned and nipped by hundreds of machines. “But he would have given you some of it.”
“I already had what I wanted,” Roy Junior said, talking out the smoke.
Wayne looked toward the tinny casket and could see that Roy Bradruff’s profile bore the same waxy complexion as a fourteen-year-old girl named Valerie. “I can’t believe it.”
“Believe what?” Roy Junior said.
Wayne put his hands together and rested his forearms on his knees. “That I couldn’t save him.”
The son took another hissing drag, the tobacco burning out against the filter, and he turned to Wayne with a mixture of derision and abiding sympathy on his face. He motioned toward the coffin with the dead cigarette and told him, “Listen to me now, fella, the only one could’ve saved anything is stretched out in that box.”
Resistance
Alvin Boudreaux had outlived his neighbors. His asbestos-siding house was part of a tiny subdivision built in the 1950s, when everybody had children, a single-lane driveway, a rotating TV antenna, and a picnic table out back. Nowadays he sat on his little porch and watched the next wave of families occupy the neighborhood, each taking over the old houses, driving up in their pairs of bug-shaped cars, one for each spouse to drive to work. Next door, Melvin Tillot had died, and his wife had sold the house to migrate up north with her daughter. Mr. Boudreaux used to watch her white puff of hair move through the yard as she snipped roses. Now she was gone, and there was no movement on his street that had consequence for him. Today he sat and watched the sky for sailing wedges of birds, or an army of ranked mackerel clouds, or the electric bruise of a thunderstorm rising from the molten heat of the Gulf. Sometimes he thought of his wife, dead now eight years. He was in that time of life when the past began coming around again, as if to reclaim him. Lately he thought about his father, the sugarcane farmer, who used to teach him about tractors and steam engines.
Two months before, Mr. Boudreaux had watched his new neighbors move in, a young blonde woman, overweight with thin hair and raw, nervous eyes. The husband was small and mean, and every weekend he sat in a lawn chair in the backyard as though he was at the beach and drank without stopping. They had one daughter, a plain, slow-moving ten-year-old.
Mr. Boudreaux could not bear to look at these people. They let the rosebushes die of thirst and left the empty garbage cans sit at the edge of the street until the grass under them forgot what the sun looked like and died. They never sat on their porch and had no pets that he could see. But after a while, he tried talking to the wife when she dragged out the garbage bag in the morning. Her voice was thin, like a little squeak. She worked somewhere for six hours each day, she told him, running an electric coffee-grinding machine.
One mild afternoon, Mr. Boudreaux was going to visit the graveyard, and he rattled open a kitchen window to air the room out while he was gone. Next door, he saw the daughter come into the yard and show her father a sheet of paper. The father curled up his lip, took a swallow from a tall tumbler, and looked away. Mr. Boudreaux felt sorry for the girl when she placed a hand on the father’s shoulder and he grabbed the sheet from her and balled it up. She put a forefinger to her glasses as if to bring the world into focus. The motion showed practice and patience. She was formless and looked overweight in her pleated skirt and baggy white blouse. Her carroty hair was gathered in a short tail above her neck, her lips were too big for her face, and her gray eyes hid behind glasses framed in pale blue plastic, the kind of glasses little girls wore thirty years before. She stepped next to her father’s chair again, getting in his space, as Mr. Boudreaux’s grandson would say. The father began to yell, something about a damned science project. He waved his arms, and his face grew red. Another child might have cried.
The next afternoon, Mr. Boudreaux was on his knees pulling grass by the backyard fence when he heard the school bus grind up LeBoeuf Street. He was still pulling when the father came home at four-thirty and sat in the lawn chair, next to the back steps. The girl appeared behind the screen door, like a shadow.
“It’s got to be turned in Monday,” she said. Even her voice was ordinary, a plain voice with little music in it.
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 yo
u 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 tipped over on its side. He turned 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 hollering match about money or relatives. But now there was only the aspirate 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 walked down his drive for the paper and saw the girl, Carmen, 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 started back toward the porch, telling himself, Don’t look. But at his front steps he felt a little electrical tug in 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 headlines.
“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,” she said, “but no one can help me.”
He banged the paper against his leg several times before he said anything more. He closed his eyes. “Is your momma 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. Carmen smelled dusty and hot and finished her drink in less than a minute. She placed the glass in the sink and then sat down at Mr. Boudreaux’s porcelain 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 nudge in the right direction.”
Carmen pushed her brown hair out of her eyes. “What did you do when you had a job?”
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.”
Carmen moved to the chair on his right and showed him her notebook. In it she’d drawn dozens of Os 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 figures were running through a bigger cylinder and even 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 fingers led his attention along the rows of exiting electrons, which had little smiles drawn on them as though they were now in 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.”
Carmen 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 Carmen got into his venerable Buick to go down to the electronics store at the mall. Walking the aisles, the girl hardly looked at her list, but instead spent her time browsing the tall pegboard sections hung with diodes and toggle switches, condensers and capacitors, where she toyed with little transistors through the thin plastic bags. Mr. Boudreaux tended to business, buying a pack of foot-square circuit boards, little red push switches, 18-gauge wire. Carmen had brought him a dog-eared book called Electricity for Children, and from it he’d 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 bright wire coming out of each end.
Their purchases stowed in a loopy plastic bag, they walked through the mall to the candy counter, where Mr. Boudreaux bought a quarter pound of lime slices. Carmen took a green wedge from him, saying nothing, and they walked on through the baby strollers, teenagers, and senior citizens limping along in running shoes. The children who were Carmen’s age looked stylish and energetic to him as they played video games or preened at their reflections in shop windows. Carmen was mechanical, earnest, and as communicative as a very old pet dog.
When they got back to Mr. Boudreaux’s house, Carmen’s father was standing unsteadily 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’ve 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.” Carmen came around the car and stood between them, staring down the street as if she could see all the way to Texas.
Mr. Boudreaux passed his tongue along his bottom lip. “The police. You called the police 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.
Mr. Boudreaux looked at the ground. He was embarrassed because he didn’t know what to think, other than that nobody used to imagine things like that. 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.”
Carmen’s father pointed a finger at him again. “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 Carmen. 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’s 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, helped her decide where to put headings and how to divide the information up. After supper, she came back over, and they planned the display. Carmen 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 22-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 22-ohm resistors soldered together in series, and the bulb will glow dimmer.” She went on to draw in the fourth circuit and said it 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. Carmen 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?”
Signals Page 30