Welding with Children by Tim Gautreaux

Author:Tim Gautreaux
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Picador

RESISTANCE

Alvin Boudreaux had outlived his neighbors. His asbestos-sided 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 blond woman, overweight, with thin hair and raw, nervous eyes. The husband was small and mean, sat in a lawn chair in the backyard as though he was at the beach, and drank without stopping, every weekend. They had one ten-year-old, a plain, slow-moving daughter.

Mr. Boudreaux could not bear to look at these people. They let the rosebushes die of thirst and left the empty garbage cans sitting 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 they had no pets that he could see. But after a while, he tried to talk to the wife when she dragged out the garbage bag in the morning. Her voice was thin, like a little squeak against the thumb. 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 and took a swallow from a tall tumbler, looking away. Mr. Boudreaux felt sorry for the girl when she placed a hand on the father’s shoulder and the man 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

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