Welding with Children (20 page)

“No.” Chad thought of farm chemicals and made a face.

Joe Santangelo suddenly leaned out of the chair and pointed a crooked finger at the television. “Without people like me, you can eat your big TV sets and shiny cars for lunch, but you not gonna have no son-of-a-bitchin' snap beans.”

Chad faked a smile and took the empty glass. “That's a fact” was all he could think of to say.

“My daughter couldn't grow a four o'clock in a flowerpot. She says, ‘Why you work so damn hard? You don't have to. You can watch the television.'” He made another derisive gesture at Chad's thirty-one-inch screen. “All that's bullshit. I don't understand nothing on it.” He seemed to reconsider a moment. “Friday nights they got the fights.”

“Would you like to use the phone? Maybe call home?” It gave Chad a sinking feeling to think that the old man had lived through life's accidents and diseases, only to wind up with Alzheimer's. He looked out through French doors to the steaming machine and beyond it to the path cut through the woods. Had he gotten himself lost, so that he had to mow around the brush for hours, finally blundering into the subdivision? What would those several hundred acres look like from an airplane? In Chad's mind, a long, ribbony trail wandered in loopy repetitions, like a life story.

“My daughter said, ‘What the hell you want to grow vegetables for? You can get snap beans in a can.'” He said
vegetables
as four syllables, stressing only the third. “In a
can.
You believe that? I told her, ‘Try to get in a store yellow grits that taste like the fresh corn. Try to get fresh, tangy ribbon-cane syrup in a big-ass supermarket.'” He put his silver head back and closed his eyes.

“Your daughter, does she live with you?”

Joe didn't move, and his voice softened. “Sometime that little girl's a bitch, let me tell you. I come in from the garden and she yell about the seed I bought. ‘How the hell you gonna grow something without seed?' I tell her. All she thinks about is the money.”

Chad sat forward and pinched his lip. He wondered what the old man was imagining, maybe a farm scene—a hundred acres of strawberries—tomatoes to the horizon. “There you go,” Joe said in a drowsy voice, “talkin' about the money.”

Chad went into the kitchen and checked the phone book for Santangelos but found none. In the living room, he found the old man sound asleep, his mouth open as if saying, Awwww. North Cherry Road was a string of tiny truck farms interspersed with patches of piney woods. It was only five minutes away, and he could drive along and read mailboxes on the east side of the blacktop, find the old man's house, and probably his unappreciative daughter as well. It would take an hour to get a deputy out to the subdivision on such a call. It would be simpler just to find his daughter and have her come get him. He left a note taped to the inside of the door and left, pushing the smoky Volvo out of the subdivision, then over the three miles to North Cherry Road. He drove slowly past the clapboard and asbestos-sided farmhouses, noting names like Dimaggio, Macalusa, Cefalu, Amato, but no Santangelo. Soon he found himself in the little town of Pine Oil, turning around in the lot of the turpentine plant. The smell made his nose itch, and he rode back out of town with a handkerchief held to his face.

Halfway back down North Cherry, he decided that surely all these farmers knew one another, so he would stop and ask. An old woman wearing a kerchief was digging in her roadside mailbox, so he pulled up next to her.

“Hi,” he said. “I'm looking for the Santangelo place.”

“The which?” She leaned into the passenger's side window.

“Santangelo. You know where they live?” He raised his voice, noting her hearing aids.

“Santangelo? Why you lookin' for that?”

He studied the face powder trapped in the many wrinkles of her upper lip. “Mr. Joe Santangelo is at my house in Belle Acres right now, and I'm trying to find his relatives.”

The old woman laughed. “Joe Santangelo's not in your house, mister.”

“What do you mean?” He checked his rearview and watched a log truck swing past him.

“Look, you go talk to Mack Muscarella. Fifth driveway on the right. He'll set you straight.” She stood up and began walking down her drive toward a small brick house as square as a child's block. Chad drove on to a poorer section of the road where the land was low and willow oaks and tallow trees crowded out the pines. The fifth driveway led back two hundred yards to a wooden house set up on brick piers and topped with a rusty tin roof. In the middle of the yard, a gas meter rose up on its silver pipes. Tied to it was a black goat stretching the rope, eating a thistle. An old man wearing overalls sat on the porch swing and waved when Chad pulled into the yard, motioning for him to come up the steps.

“I'm looking for the Santangelo place,” he told him.

“That's it,” he said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. Chad looked but saw nothing but woods to the east.

“I don't see anything.”

“What you looking for?” He ran a comb through his gray hair, which was wavy and white as wood smoke.

Chad gave him a look. “The Santangelo place.”

Again, the thumb went over the shoulder. Chad strained his eyes and made out a peeling roof ridge rising above a mob of gum saplings. He jumped down from the porch and walked off toward the brush. The house he found was swaybacked, the beams probably eaten out by termites. The windows sagged at crazy angles, their glasses opaque with a film of dirt, their screens in rags. The place had not been lived in for years. In the rear, he found a cypress barn, a pump house, its door hanging by one hinge, and a tractor shed, the door flung wide. He walked inside and imagined that the cool, damp shade was like a freshly opened tomb. He turned around and followed tractor marks in the soft earth to a bare spot where the rusting bush hog had rested. Beyond that, a five-foot-wide path sliced through the weeds.

He walked back to the old man's porch. “You saw him, didn't you?”

The white head nodded. “He come over to borrow two cans of gas, talkin' to me like it was thirty years ago.”

Chad looked back, again unable to see the house. “How did he start that old tractor?”

A shrug. “Cleaned the points with a pocketknife and turned the flywheel by hand. It's got a magneto. Don't need no battery. It's simple, like he is.” Mr. Muscarella looked over toward the dead house and sniffed. “Joe raised four children in that place, payin' for everything with bell pepper and strawberry, raisin' the corn and bean. He was okay, you know? Kept his grass down, drained his septic tank to the back, a good neighbor.” Again he put the thumb over his shoulder. “Every year, he'd make that strawberry wine, and on Saturday him and the wife would ask some of us on Cherry Road to come around and dance in the kitchen. They got a big kitchen in that house.”

Chad brushed privet leaves off his pants. “He had a record player in the kitchen?”

“Nah. Joe had him a pearl-button concertina, and he'd play that till the wine jug got dry and his wife went to bed, wore out from dancing with us and the kids.”

Chad looked over at his Volvo, which was parked in a sunny spot, heating up. “You know where I can call one of his children?”

Mr. Muscarella folded his hands on his belly and shook his head. “They all gone from Louisiana. Couldn't find no work, except little Pearl.” He stretched out his bare feet, which were cased in calluses. “I'm pretty sure he's been livin' with her over in Gumwood.”

“Lord, that's fifty miles. How'd he get back here?”

The old man crossed his legs at the ankles. “I never thought to ask him.”

“Didn't you worry when he took off on the tractor like that?” He tried to keep accusation out of his voice, and he looked at the goat, who was sniffing the gas meter.

The old man smiled at something complex and private. “Mister, he got that olds-timer's disease.” He made a twirling motion at his temple with a forefinger. “That wasn't Joe Santangelo what come by here. That was just his old body.” He pursed his lips a moment. “Kind of like a movin' picture, but not the real thing.”

Chad pulled at his collar. “He thinks he's who he is. He told me his name.” He undid one button on his shirt, which was starting to stick to his chest.

“He's doin' things the second time in his head. He told me he was gonna clear two acres for some peppers. Like he did long time ago.” The old man opened a thick hand and looked at the palm. “Mister, you can't do nothing the second time. It's the first time what count.”

Mack Muscarella gave him permission to use the phone and did not follow him in. The house smelled of furniture oil and cooking and bug spray, and he sat on an old vinyl couch to use the rotary phone to call the sheriff. Then he drove home quickly, to be there before the deputy arrived. He hurried to the living room, but it was empty. In the kitchen, the note was where he'd left it, and his head snapped up to look through the breakfast room window. The tractor was gone.

In the backyard, he closed his eyes to listen, and far off he imagined he heard the whopping exhaust of a big two-cylinder John Deere working under a load. When the breeze shifted, the noise faded away; after a while, it came back like the smell of supper cooking. He wondered what the old man thought he was doing, and he remembered Mr. Muscarella's words: “It's the first time what count.”

Chad stood in the driveway waiting for the policeman, watching his tall, bald image move in the window of his car. He bent toward the reflection and checked his earlobe for a deep crease, a sure sign of heart disease. The crunch of gravel signaled the approach of the deputy, so he walked down his long drive to meet him.

Everything about the officer was big, his shoulders, his pistol, his salt-and-pepper mustache, his mitten hands. His name tag read
DRULEY WATTS.
He asked why he'd been called, and Chad told him the story.

“Well,” the policeman drawled, “would you like to help me walk after him through the brush? Maybe we can find him without too much trouble, and I won't have to pull another deputy in on this.”

“Let me change my shoes.”

The policeman looked down at the shiny wing tips. “Good idea. By the way, do you have any idea how he got to his old place?”

“Old man Muscarella said he just walked in off North Cherry Road.”

“Just a minute.” He held a finger up in the air and turned for his cruiser. After speaking to someone on the radio, he walked with Chad up to the house. “My dispatcher says a 1969 Chevrolet was found out of gas in the middle of the highway north of Pine Oil. Had 1981 tags on it. That's probably how he got to town.”

In his walk-in closet, he searched for a pair of Bean's woods shoes, finding them under his tennis bag. As he laced them up, he thought of Joe Santangelo's cracked brogans.

A hundred yards into the thicket, they came to a
Y
and had to decide which leg to take. Already the parish officer was sweating through his uniform. He pulled off his hat and looked to the south. “I hunted this tract years ago, and as I recall, it gets pretty rough up ahead. The trees are some bigger and too close together to let a wide tractor through. If he gets an axle hung against an oak sapling and that old machine doesn't stall out, it'll go round like a Tilt-A-Whirl at the fair and fling him over a tire.” He started down the south path. “How old would you say this guy is?”

Chad followed along in the deputy's steps, watching for snakes. “He's so old, I can't even guess.” He pulled a tendril of dewberry from his shirtsleeve. The peppery smell of the fresh-cut weeds made his nose burn and run.

“Let's pick it up, then. These old ones don't do so good in the sun.” He hopped over a small log.

“You talk as though you've faced this before.”

“Mister,” the deputy said over his shoulder, “the world's full of people who don't know what year it is. When they stray off, who you think gets called out to find them? One time I found old lady Cotton, who owns the big sawmill, living with a family of Mexicans in the next town. She'd just wandered in and plopped down on their sofa, and they didn't know what to do with her. All she did was watch television and eat, so they let her stay a couple days. When I found her, she thought I was her son and wouldn't leave until after her program was over. What the hell? I ate chili till
The Young and the Restless
went off, then brought her to her daughter at Waxhaw Estates.” Druley Watts shook his head. “Richest woman in town and all she could appreciate was cheap food and soap operas.”

Chad tripped on the stump of a blackjack sapling. He bent down to lace his shoe, which had been pulled off, and the deputy waited for him, listening. “I don't hear a thing. Maybe he's run out of gas.”

They walked for fifteen minutes, crossing shallow ditches left over from when the ground had been farmland a hundred years before. The trail twisted back on itself, went around big trees, headed south, then west, then southeast. Beyond a patch of pigweed was an area of washouts near a bayou. The deputy whistled. “I'm glad he didn't roll off in that direction.” They pushed on into a grove of live oaks, black arms searching wide for sun. Here the undergrowth was sparse and low, the canopy thick. It was a cool, damp room. “There.” The deputy pointed. “Oh, damn, damn, damn.”

Chad broke into a run, because he had seen it, too. Fifty yards ahead, the tractor was stalled against a tree and behind it something like a bundle of laundry lay in the cutover poison ivy and swamp iris. It was Joe Santangelo, or a rag doll likeness of him, his head lying over on one shoulder, a blue joint in his neck. Above him was an oak limb as big as a stovepipe. The deputy felt for a pulse and touched the broken neck with a little finger.

“What happened?” Chad was breathing hard, his mouth open. He looked around as if to remind himself where he was and why.