“What brought this on?” Alva asked the day Little Dickie turned in his notice.
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I figure I can do better if I learn some real welding. You know, Heliarc, and some good pipe-joining technique.”
“I guess I can give you a raise, if it’ll change your mind.”
“It’s not all money,” Little Dickie said, snapping his gate key down on the shiny desk.
“What, then? I still can’t get used to Snyder not being here.”
Little Dickie looked around at the room and its fixtures. “I just figure I can do better than burning stuff apart. Time to put some stuff together for a change.”
In the next month Alva hired two new workers, mildly handicapped men provided by a federal program. His truck driver and crane operator stayed on, but they hardly ever came into the office. One or two times he saw them look briefly at the sewing machine, but he could tell they didn’t understand what it was and that they thought it was some shiny plastic thing he’d bought on vacation in Gatlinburg, Tennessee.
About once a week, right before leaving the office in the evening, he’d lift Donna’s sea-blue dustcover, which flowed and rippled like an expensive gown. He’d remove the cut-glass cover and turn the machine through a few cycles with its ivory handle. On one of these occasions, five months after he’d opened the safe, he bent down to examine the machine yet again and discovered that even the needle was engraved. The next day, he brought a magnifying glass from home and squinted at the script running along the lightning-silver shaft. It read, ART STITCHES ALL.
He sat back in his chair, feeling as though his skull had become transparent, letting in a warm illumination he didn’t comprehend any more than an animal standing in a winter’s false dawn understands the physics of the sun. He turned and looked out the office window at a hill of steel beams cut into rust-red chunks, and he wondered for the first time about the mill where the pieces would be reborn into bars and plates and rolls. Closing his eyes he saw a long, running image of steel panels night-riding across the Great Plains toward a factory where they would be stamped into automobile frames, surgical instruments, brackets for church bells, braces for thick glass shelves holding diamonds and pearls, and he felt that he was now part of this flowing upward toward all the things that people make. He reached down to replace the dome, and the glass dolphin swam in his palm.
Welding with Children
Tuesday was about typical. My four daughters, not a one of them married, you understand, brought over their kids, one each, and explained to my wife how much fun she was going to have looking after them again. But Tuesday was her day to go to the casino, so guess who got to tend the four babies? My oldest daughter also brought over a bed rail that the end broke off of. She wanted me to weld it. Now what the hell you can do in a bed that’ll break a iron rail is beyond me, but she can’t afford another one on her burger-flipping salary, she said, so I got to fix it with four little kids hanging on my coveralls. Her kid is seven months, nicknamed Nu-Nu, a big-head baby with a bubbling tongue always hanging out his mouth. My second oldest, a flight attendant on some propeller airline out of Alexandria, has a little six-year-old girl named Moonbean, and that ain’t no nickname. My third youngest, who’s still dating, dropped off Tammynette, also six, and last to come was Freddie, my favorite because he looks like those old photographs of me when I was seven, a round head with copper bristle for hair, cut about as short as Velcro. He’s got that kind of papery skin like me, too, except splashed with a handful of freckles.
When everybody was on deck, I put the three oldest in front the TV and rocked Nu-Nu off and dropped him in the port-a-crib. Then I dragged the bed rail and the three awake kids out through the trees, back to my tin workshop. I tried to get something done, but Tammynette got the big grinder turned on and jammed a file against the stone just to laugh at the sparks. I got the thing unplugged and then started to work, but when I was setting the bed rail in the vise and clamping on the ground wire from the welding machine, I leaned against the iron and Moonbean picked the electric rod holder off the cracker box and struck a blue arc on the zipper of my coveralls, low. I jumped back like I was hit with religion and tore those coveralls off and shook the sparks out of my drawers. Moonbean opened her goat eyes wide and sang, “Whoo. Grendaddy can bust a move.” I decided I better hold off trying to weld with little kids around.
I herded them into the yard to play, but even though I got three acres there ain’t much for them to do at my place, so I sat down and watched Freddie climb on a Oldsmobile engine I got hanging from a willow oak on a long chain. Tammynette and Moonbean pushed him like he was on a swing, and I yelled at them to stop, but they wouldn’t listen. It was a sad sight, I guess. I shouldn’t have that old greasy engine hanging from that Kmart chain in my side yard. I know better. Even in this central Louisiana town of Gumwood, which is just like any other red-dirt place in the South, trash in the yard is trash in the yard. I make decent money as a now-and-then welder.
I think sometimes about how I even went to college once, a whole semester to LSU. Worked overtime at a sawmill for a year to afford the tuition and showed up in my work boots to get taught English 101 by a guy from Pakistan who couldn’t understand one word we said, much less us him. He didn’t teach me a damn thing and sat there on the desk with his legs crossed, telling us to write nonstop in what he called our portfolios, which he never read. For all I know, he sent our tablets back to Pakistan for his relatives to use as stove wood.
The algebra teacher talked to us with his eyes rolled up like his lecture was printed out on the ceiling. Most of the time he didn’t even know we were in the room, and for a month I thought the poor bastard was stone blind. I never once solved for X.
The chemistry professor was a fat drunk who heated Campbell’s soup on one of those little burners and ate it out the can while he talked. There was about a million of us in that classroom, and I couldn’t get the hang of what he wanted us to do with the numbers and names. I sat way in the back next to some fraternity boys who called me Uncle Jed. Time or two, when I could see the blackboard off on the horizon, I almost got the hang of something, and I was glad of that.
I kind of liked the history professor and learned to write down a lot of what he said, but he dropped dead one hot afternoon in the middle of the pyramids and was replaced by a little porch lizard that looked down his nose at me where I sat in the front row. He bit on me pretty good because I guess I didn’t look like nobody else in that class, with my short red hair and blue jeans that were really blue. I flunked out that semester, but I got my money’s worth learning about people that don’t have hearts no bigger than bird shot.
Tammynette and Moonbean gave the engine a long shove, got distracted by a yellow butterfly playing in a clump of pigweed, and that nine-hundred-pound V8 kind of ironed them out on the backswing. So I picked the squalling girls up and got everybody inside where I cleaned them good with GOJO.
“I want a ICEE,” Tammynette yelled while I was getting the motor oil from between her fingers. “I ain’t had a ICEE all day.”
“You don’t need one every day, little miss,” I told her.
“Don’t you got some money?” She pulled a hand away and flipped her hair with it like a model on TV.
“Those things cost most of a dollar. When I was a kid I used to get a nickel for candy, and that only twice a week.”
“ICEE,” she yelled in my face, Moonbean taking up the cry and calling out from the kitchen in her dull little voice. She wasn’t dull in the head; she just talked low, like a bad cowboy actor. Nu-Nu sat up in the port-a-crib and gargled something, so I gathered everyone up, put them in the Caprice, and drove them down to the Gumwood Pak-a-Sak. The baby was in my lap when I pulled up, Freddie tuning in some rock music that sounded like hail on a tin roof. Two guys I know, way older than me, watched us roll to the curb. When I turned the engine off, I could barely hear one of them say, “Here comes Bruton and his bastardmobile.” I grabbed the
steering wheel hard and looked down on the top of Nu-Nu’s head, feeling like somebody just told me my house burned down. I’m naturally tanned, so those boys couldn’t see the shame rising in my face, and I got out pretending I didn’t hear anything, Nu-Nu in the crook of my arm like a loaf of bread. I wanted to punch the older guy and break his upper plate, but I could see the article in the local paper and imagine the memories the kids would have of their grandfather whaling away at two snuff-dripping geezers. I looked them in the eye and smiled, surprising even myself. Bastardmobile. Man.
“Hey, Bruton,” the younger one said, a Mr. Fordlyson, maybe sixty-five. “All them kids yours? You start over?”
“Grandkids,” I said, holding Nu-Nu over his shoes so maybe he’d drool on them.
The older one wore a straw fedora and was nicked up in twenty places with skin cancer operations. He snorted. “Maybe you can do better with this batch,” he told me. I remembered then that he was also a Mr. Fordlyson, the other guy’s uncle. He used to run the hardwood sawmill north of town, was a deacon in the Baptist Church, and owned about one percent of the pissant bank down next to the gin. He thought he was king of Gumwood, but then every old man in town who had five dollars in his pocket and an opinion on the tip of his tongue thought the same.
I pushed past him and went into the Pak-a-Sak. The kids saw the candy rack and cried out for Mars bars and Zeros. Even Nu-Nu put out a slobbery hand toward the Gummy Worms, but I ignored their whining and drew them each a small Coke ICEE. Tammynette and Moonbean grabbed theirs and headed for the door. Freddie took his real careful when I held it out. Nu-Nu might be kind of wobble-headed and plain as a melon, but he sure knew what a ICEE was and how to go after a straw. And what a smile when that Coke syrup hit those bald gums of his.
Right then Freddie looked up at me with his green eyes in that speckled face and said, “What’s a bastardmobile?”
I guess my mouth dropped open. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I thought we was in a Chevrolet,” he said.
“We are.”
“Well, that man said we was in a—”
“Never mind what he said. You must have misheard him.” I nudged him toward the door and we went out. The older Mr. Fordlyson was watching us like we were a parade, and I was trying to look straight ahead. In my mind the newspaper showed the headlines, LOCAL MAN ARRESTED WITH GRANDCHILDREN FOR ASSAULT. I got into the car with the kids and looked back out at the Fordlysons where they sat on a bumper rail, sweating through their white shirts and staring at us all. Their kids owned sawmills, ran fast-food franchises, were on the school board. They were all married. I guess the young Fordlysons were smart, though looking at that pair you’d never know where they got their brains. I started my car and backed out onto the highway, trying not to think, but to me that word was spelled out in chrome script on my fenders: bastardmobile.
On the way home Tammynette stole a suck on Freddie’s straw, and he jerked it away and called her something I’d only heard the younger workers at the plywood mill say. The expression hit me in the back of the head like a brick, and I pulled off the road onto the gravel shoulder. “What’d you say, boy?”
“Nothing.” But he reddened. I saw he cared what I thought.
“Kids your age don’t use language like that.”
Tammynette flipped her hair and raised her chin. “How old you got to be?”
I gave her a look. “Don’t you care what he said to you?”
“It’s what they say on the comedy program,” Freddie said. “Everybody says that.”
“What comedy program?”
“It comes on after the nighttime news.”
“What you doing up late at night?”
He just stared at me, and I saw that he had no idea what late was. Glendine, his mamma, probably lets him fall asleep in front of the set every night. I pictured him crumpled up on that smelly shag rug his mamma keeps in front of the TV to catch the spills and crumbs.
When I got home I took them all on our covered side porch. The girls began to struggle with jacks, their little ball bouncing crooked on the slanted floor, Freddie played tunes on his ICEE straw, and Nu-Nu fell asleep in my lap. I stared at my car and wondered if its name had spread throughout the community, if everywhere I drove people would call out “Here comes the bastardmobile.” Gumwood’s one of those towns where everybody looks at everything that moves. I do it myself. If my neighbor Miss Hanchy pulls out of her lane I wonder, Now where’s the old bat off to? It’s two-thirty, so her soap opera must be over. I figure her route to the store and then somebody different will drive by and catch my attention, and I’ll think after them. This is not all bad. It makes you watch how you behave, and besides, what’s the alternative? Nobody giving a flip about whether you live or die? I’ve heard those stories from the big cities about how people will sit in an apartment window six stories up, watch somebody take ten minutes to kill you with a stick, and not even reach for the phone.
I started thinking about my four daughters. None of them has any religion to speak of. I thought they’d pick it up from their mamma, like I did from mine, but LaNelle always worked so much she just had time to cook, clean, transport, and fuss. The girls grew up watching cable and videos every night, and that’s where they got their view of the world, and that’s why four dirty blondes with weak chins from Rapides Parish thought they lived in a Hollywood soap opera. They also figured the married pulpwood truck drivers and garage mechanics they dated was movie stars. I guess a lot of what’s wrong with my girls is my fault, but I don’t know what I could’ve done different.
Moonbean raked in a gaggle of jacks, and a splinter from the porch floor ran up under her nail. “Shit dog,” she said, wagging her hand like it was on fire and coming to me on her knees.
“Don’t say that.”
“My finger hurts. Fix it, Paw-Paw.”
“I will if you stop talking like white trash.”
Tammynette picked up on fivesies. “Mamma’s boyfriend Melvin says shit dog.”
“Would you do everything your mamma’s boyfriend does?”
“Melvin can drive,” Tammynette said. “I’d sure like to drive.”
I got out my penknife and worked the splinter from under Moonbean’s nail while she jabbered to Tammynette about how her mamma’s Toyota cost more than Melvin’s teeny Dodge truck. I swear I don’t know how these kids got so complicated. When I was their age all I wanted to do was make mud pies or play in the creek. I didn’t want nothing but a twice-a-week nickel to bring to the store. These kids ain’t eight years old and already know enough to run a casino. When I finished, I looked down at Moonbean’s brown eyes, at Nu-Nu’s pulsing head. “Does your mammas ever talk to y’all about, you know, God?”
“My mamma says God when she’s cussing Melvin,” Tammynette said.
“That’s not what I mean. Do they read Bible stories to y’all at bedtime?”
Freddie’s face brightened. “She rented us Conan the Barbarian. That movie kicked ass.”
“That’s not a Bible movie,” I told him.
“It ain’t? It’s got swords and snakes in it.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
Tammynette came close and grabbed Nu-Nu’s hand and played the fingers like they were piano keys. “Ain’t the Bible full of swords and snakes?”
Nu-Nu woke up and peed on himself, so I had to go for a plastic diaper. On the way back from the bathroom I saw our little bookrack out the corner of my eye. I found my old Bible stories hardback and brought it out on the porch. It was time somebody taught them something about something.
They gathered round, sitting on the floor, and I got down among them. I started into Genesis and how God made the earth, and how He made us and gave us a soul that would live forever. Moonbean reached into the book and put her hand on God’s beard. “If He shaved, He’d look just like that old man down at the Pak-a-Sak,” she said.
My mouth dropped a bit. “You mean Mr.
Fordlyson? That man don’t look like God.”
Tammynette yawned. “You just said God made us to look like Him.”
“Never mind,” I told them, going on into Adam and Eve and the Garden. Soon as I turned the page they saw the snake and began to squeal.
“Look at the size of that sucker,” Freddie said.
Tammynette wiggled closer. “I knew they was a snake in this book.”
“He’s a bad one,” I told them. “He lied to Adam and Eve and said to not do what God told them to.”
Moonbean looked up at me slow. “This snake can talk?”
“Yes.”
“How about that. Just like on cartoons. I thought they was making that up.”
“Well a real snake can’t talk, nowadays,” I explained.
“Ain’t this garden snake a real snake?” Freddie asked.
“It’s the devil in disguise,” I told them.
Tammynette flipped her hair. “Aw, that’s just a old song. I heard it on the reddio.”
“That Elvis Presley tune’s got nothing to do with the devil making himself into a snake in the Garden of Eden.”
“Who’s Elvis Presley?” Moonbean sat back in the dust by the weatherboard wall and stared out at my overgrown lawn.
“He’s some old singer died a million years ago,” Tammynette told her.
“Was he in the Bible too?”
I beat the book on the floor. “No, he ain’t. Now pay attention. This is important.” I read the section about Adam and Eve disobeying God, turned the page, and all hell broke loose. An angel was holding a long sword over Adam and Eve’s down-turned heads as he ran them out of the Garden. Even Nu-Nu got excited and pointed a finger at the angel.
“What’s that guy doing?” Tammynette asked.
“Chasing them out of Paradise. Adam and Eve did a bad thing, and when you do bad, you get punished for it.” I looked down at their faces and it seemed that they were all thinking about something at the same time. It was scary, the little sparks I saw flying in their eyes. Whatever you tell them at this age stays forever. You got to be careful.
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