“I haven’t seen it in years.” They got up and Carmen 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 its glass panel rattled. At one time he 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. Carmen 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 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 buy a new one. We’ll have to finish tomorrow.” He watched her look at the counter and purse her lips. “What you thinking?”
“Sundays aren’t 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,” she whispered.
“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 looked up to a rusty sixteen-penny nail jutting from a rafter and took down his Turner gasoline blowtorch. “Hey. If this thing’ll still work, we can 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 Carmen’s short fingers and held the circuit board for her to thread the red wire through to the switch terminals. He felt like he was back at work, almost as though he was getting things done at the mill.
The girl avoided his eyes but did give him a glance before asking, “Why’re you helping me with this?”
He guided her fingers as she threaded 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 toward the dark 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 Havisham’s wedding cake or some such foolishness. I forgot all about it until the night before, and knew I was going to really catch it the next day if I showed up without it.”
Carmen 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, gunports, and a bowsprit. It was all done with a pocket knife, and it was warm to the touch because 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 in the way that she 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 Carmen. 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, followed by an accounting of who was sick, who was dead. Mr. Landry, who’d worked under Mr. Boudreaux at the sugar mill, asked him what he was 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 bumped 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 both 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 life insurance policy and finally use a little of his savings.
When he got home, even though he felt light-headed, he began to clean out the glove compartment, search under the seats, empty the trunk of boots and old tools. He rested in the sun on his front steps, then decided to change into shorts, get the galvanized pail, and wash the car. He was standing in a pool of water from the hose and
looking down at his white legs when he heard Carmen’s parents arguing, their shouts pouring out the open front door, the mother’s keening yell washed away by the drunken father’s roaring. The girl ran out as though she were escaping a fire and stood on the withering lawn, looking back into the house. Mr. Boudreaux saw a wink of something white, and then the science project posters flew out onto the front walk, followed by the circuit board display and the little platform they had made for it. The father lurched down the steps, his unbuttoned white shirt pulled from his pants, his eyes narrowed and sick. He kicked the poster frame apart, and Carmen ran to avoid a flying hinge. She turned in time to see the circuit board crackle under a black shoe.
“Hey,” Mr. Boudreaux yelled. “Stop that.”
The father looked around for the voice and spotted him. “You go to hell.”
Mr. Boudreaux’s back straightened. “Just because you can’t handle your liquor don’t give you the right to treat your little girl like that.”
The father staggered toward him. “You old bastard, you tried to make me look bad.”
Mr. Boudreaux’s heart misfired once. The walk was so slippery he couldn’t even run away from the father, who was coming closer in a wobbly, stalking motion. He looked down at the man’s doubled fists. “You stay in your yard,” he told him. “If you give me any trouble, I’ll call the cops.” The father gave him a shove and Mr. Boudreaux went down hard in a grassy puddle. “Ow, you drunk worm. I’m seventy-eight years old.”
“Leave us alone,” the father yelled. He raised a shoe, and for a moment the old man thought he was going to kick him.
Then the mother was at his side, pulling at his arms. “Come back in the yard, Chet. Please,” she begged. She was not a small woman, and she had both hands on his arm.
Mr. Boudreaux squeezed the lever on the hose nozzle and sprayed the father in the stomach and he stumbled backward against the mother, cursing. He sprayed him in the forehead. “You rummy. You a big man with old guys and little kids.”
“Screw you, you old bastard.” The father shook water from his hair and tried to pull loose from his wife.
“Aw, you real scary,” Mr. Boudreaux shouted, trying to stand up. When he finally was able to see over the roof of his Buick, the mother was pulling her husband up the steps, and Carmen was standing under a wilting magnolia tree, her gaze frozen on the fragments of her science project scattered along the walk.
—
Mr. Boudreaux’s lower back was sore. By eight o’clock he couldn’t move without considerable pain. He looked angrily through his living room window at the house next door. He went out on his porch and saw the light in Carmen’s bedroom window. Then he went in and watched television, adjusting the rabbit ears on his set and rolling the dial from station to station, not really paying attention to the images on his scuffed Zenith. He turned the machine off and stared at it for a long time and tapped it with his fingers. Then he got a screwdriver, removed the back panel, and peered inside. Mr. Boudreaux pulled off all the knobs on the front, slid the works out of the case, and carried it over to his dining room table, placing it under the bright drop fixture. When he turned the works over, he smiled into a nest of resistors. He read the band values, and with a pair of pointed wire snips, removed several that bore two red bands and one black. Behind the selector were light sockets, and he cut these out, noting with a grimace that the bulbs in them drew too much power.
In the living room was his wife’s cabinet-model Magnavox hi-fi. He slowly ran a finger along its walnut top, then pulled the knobs off and opened it up with a screwdriver, removing several feet of red and black wire, and three light sockets containing little bulbs of the correct voltage. The volume knob was a variable resistor, he now understood, and he removed that as well. He went out to his workshop and took the little steel-tongued toggle switches off his old saber saw, his chain saw, and his Moto-Tool. He needed one more and found that in the attic on a rusty set of barber’s clippers that had been his brother’s. Also in the attic he found his first daughter’s Royal manual typewriter. Mr. Boudreaux could type. He’d learned in the army, so he brought that down too. He emptied the new batteries out of a penlight he kept on his bedside table. They had bought extra sheets of poster board in case Carmen made a mistake while drawing the big resistors, but she’d been careful. He dug the handwritten first draft of her report out of his trash can and penciled in the revisions he could remember. Then, on paper that was only slightly yellowed, he typed her report neatly, with proper headings.
Next he drew the images on the posters, big color-coded resistors traversed by round electrons with faces drawn on. His lettering was like a child’s, and this worried him, but he kept on, finishing up with instructions for operating the display. He drew in the last letter at two o’clock, then went out into the workshop to saw up a spruce two-by-four to make the poster frame again. He had no hinges, so he had to go to the cedar chest in his bedroom and remove the ones on the wooden box that held his family insurance policies. He mounted the posters with thumbtacks from an old cork board hanging in the kitchen. The tack heads were rusty, so he painted them over with gummy white correction fluid he’d found in the box with the typewriter.
At four o’clock, he had to stop to take three aspirin for his back, and from the kitchen he looked across through the blue moonlight to the dark house next door, thinking maybe of all the dark houses in town where children endured the lack of light, fidgeting toward dawn.
In the garage he found that there was no more gasoline for the old torch, which had whispered itself empty on the first project. On the front lawn, he cut a short length out of his new garden hose and siphoned fuel from his Buick, getting a charge of gas in his mouth that burned his gums under his dentures. Later, as the soldering tool heated in the raspy voice of the torch, he felt he could spit a tongue of flame.
He ran the wires as she had run them, set the switches, mounted the light sockets, soldered the resistors in little silvery tornadoes of smoke. He found the bulbs left over from the first project and turned them into the sockets, wired in the battery, checked everything, then stepped back. Though the workshop window showed a trace of dawn and Mr. Boudreaux’s legs felt as if someone had shot them full of arrows, he allowed himself a faint smile.
—
He made a pot of coffee and sat out in the dew on the front porch, hoping the girl’s father would leave before the school bus arrived. At seven-fifteen, he hadn’t appeared, so Mr. Boudreaux loaded the project into the backseat of his car, started the engine, and sat there, waiting. Carmen came out and stood next to the garbage cans, and when the bus came, its seats stippled with white poster boards, for everyone’s project was due the same day, she watched its door swing open, pushed her glasses up her nose, and climbed on. He followed the bus out of the neighborhood and down the long, oak-shaded avenue as the vehicle picked up kids in twos and threes, science projects at each stop. The farther he drove, the more fearful he became, thinking that maybe the girl wouldn’t understand, or maybe she would think he was doing this just to get back at her father, which in part, he admitted, he was. Several times he thought he’d better pass the bus, turn around, and head home. But then what would he do with the project? He wouldn’t throw it away, and it would haunt him forever if he kept it.
The bus pulled into the school lot, and he followed it in and parked. By the time he got to the covered walkway, children were pouring off, carrying jars of colored fluids, homemade generators, Styrofoam models of molecules. He had the bifold project in his arms, and when she came down the bus steps empty-handed, he spread it open for her. She stepped close, lifted a page of the tacked-on report, and checked the second and third pages as well.
“Where’s the display,” she asked, not looking at him.
“It’s in the car there,” he said, sidling off to retrieve it. When he got back, he saw she’d hitched her book bag onto her shoulder and had the posters folded up under her arm.
“Give it here,” she s
aid, holding out her free hand, her face showing nothing.
He handed it to her. “You want me to help bring it in?”
She shook her head. “No. How do the switches work?”
He clicked one for her. “Up is on, down is off.”
She nodded, then squinted up at him. “I’ll be late.”
“Go on, then.” He watched her waddle off among her classmates, bearing her load, then he turned for his car. She could have called after him, smiled, and said thank you, but she didn’t.
—
Because he was out so early, he decided to go shopping. He considered his options: the Buick lot, the appliance dealer’s, the hardware. After half an hour of driving slowly around town, he went into a department store and bought two small masonry pots filled with plastic flowers. They looked like the jonquils that used to come up in the spring alongside his mother’s cypress fence. He drove to the old city graveyard, and after walking among the brick vaults and carefully made marble angels, he placed a colorful pot on the sun-washed slab of his father’s grave. His back pained him as he laid down the flowers, and when he straightened up, the bone-white tombs hurt his eyes, but still he turned completely around to look at this place where no one would say the things that could have been said, and that was all right with him.
The Adventures of Sue Pistola
Sue suspected she was in trouble the day she stumbled into a Harley dealership and ordered a Little Thickburger. The salesman behind the counter was tall, and a cascade of dark hair fell to the middle of his back. He studied her eyes for a moment. “You drinkin’?” he asked, in the way locals posed that question, which really meant Why the hell are you acting this way?
She was a big girl herself, thirty years old, not thick, just tall and toned like a woman who’d grown up roping cattle. She stared at tattoos of flames rising up the salesman’s neck, beginning to understand that she wasn’t going to get her burger. “I don’t drink,” she told him, putting a hand on the counter for support.
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