Also by Padgett Powell
Edisto
A Woman Named Drown
Typical
Edisto Revisited
Aliens of Affection
Mrs. Hollingsworth’s Men (reissued as Hologram)
The Interrogative Mood
You & Me
Published by Catapult
catapult.co
Copyright © 2015 by Padgett Powell
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-1-936787-31-9
Some of these stories, some in different form, were previously published in The Cincinnati Review, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Cutbank, Epoch, FENCE, Gulf Coast, The Hopkins Review, The Idaho Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Land-Grant College Review, Little Star, McSweeney’s, NarrativeMagazine.com, New England Review, Okey-Panky, Oxford American, The Paris Review, St. Petersburg Review, Subtropics, Unsaid, and The Washington Post Magazine.
“The Imperative Mood” was first published as an ebook by Profile Books in the United Kingdom. “Working for Brother Catcard” and “Utopia” were published in an ebook by Ecco Press.
“Joplin and Dickens” contains quotations from Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist and Bleak House.
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For Uncle Don and Spode, my teachers
Contents
Horses
Love
Joplin and Dickens
Mrs. Fiberung
Gift
Sisters
Perhaps South America
Confidence
Change of Life
Cries For Help, Various
Longing
Dizzy
Dusk
Letter from France
Wearing a Meat Shirt and Killing a Snake
Spy
Thang Phong and the Son of the Chief of Police
Breakdown
Mrs. Stamp
Bedtime
The Flood Parade
Getting You Some Cocktail
Solitude
The Imperative Mood
The Indicative Mood
Losing the Wax
Marbles
Bebek
Hoping Weakly
Gluing Wood
The Retarded Hermit
The New World
Wagons, Ho!
The Cork
Not Much Is Known
Matter of Time
A Local Boy
Mao
Yeltsin Dancing
Yeltsin Spotted Abroad in a Bar
Yeltsin and Canaries
Working for Brother Catcard
Utopia
No Empress Eyes
Horses
The other horse traders are over there in the 7-Eleven. These horses are jittery and I don’t know how long I can hold them. That piebald one there—or is that a paint? It’s a Holstein for all I know, and that is one of the galling things about this enterprise, people saying the roan this and the buckskin and the paint and the quarter and the Indian pony and that and this and you have no idea which goddamn horse they are talking about, they are talking about one of fifty things we have here which can get us hung if we are caught, can kill you if you get near one in the wrong way, and can run off and get you beat to shit by the hombres who affect to know how not to have them run away, I have just about had it with this shit, what with most of the crew over there in the 7-Eleven and the Sheriff cruising around out here, around me and the herd and the hot dog wrappers, and the horses are nervous in the wind and the swinging stoplights, and all the fellows with the handlebar mustaches are inside getting coffee, and I’m out here looking like a plebe in a fraternity with fifty stolen monsters I can’t tell apart, and there’s the Sheriff, and we are beyond the day when he can be shot and we go on our way.
Do not ask me how I am involved in rustling horses in the 21st century over asphalt with the law in big Ford Crown Victorias. I do not know. They are in there in goddamn period chaps and I am out here in Army Navy discount camo fatigues I got for five dollars. I look like a dope dealer. I’d feel better if I were a dope dealer. You will not believe what we are up to. No one will credit what we are up to. I do not myself. If the Sheriff interrogated me right now about these fifty horses by the highway with their drovers in the 7-Eleven getting coffee, and I told him the whole story, he would not believe what we are up to. The silhouette of a man—rather like the Tin Man, they said, improbable large straight lines and a hollow sound from it—stood in the doorway during what must have been a big cowboy drunk, or a big cowboy-poetry drunk, because I am convinced also that some of these drovers are cowboy poets, given their proclivity to be on the phone and their attention to their costumes and their pallid postures and the way they seem to want to hear themselves talk and what can start a fistfight (one said another used too many feminine endings and the second asked just what was that supposed to mean and hit him) . . . where was I? I have a headache, it is snowing lightly, the 7-Eleven still holds twenty poet horse rustlers, I am telling you what you cannot believe: that a Tin Man came to these men in their revelries preceding the current larcenous overland march and told them, in a thundery but soft voice, to take horses into the Big Horn and to be ambushed by an equal or larger band of Indians and surrender them, the horses, to the Indians, and by so doing initiate a reversal of history that would at the other end of its drift restore thirty million buffalo to the Plains and his integrity and livelihood and independent character to the red man. “Reverse history?” one of the cowboys is reputed to have said. “We gave them the horse in the first place. To reverse history we’d have to take the horses away, it seems to—”
“Sewerage,” the Tin Man said, or some aural approximation thereto, for the sound from the thing was soft and not trippingly tongued, which lent a force to its supernatural-seeming authority. A foul odor, identical to sewerage, then filled the barracks, as they like to call their quarters, and some of the more excitable ones maintain that a soup of actual septic-tank flotsam then filled the room to a level of two feet before receding cleanly away, but other witnesses, the more formal of the poets, in my estimate, ascribe this vision to the overactive imaginations of their lesser trained and less reliable brothers. Nonetheless they all obeyed the call of the vision, stole fifty horses, and now drink patriotically large quantities of gourmet-blend coffee from convenience stores en route to reversing history and righting the colossal imperialist genocide of the West, while I hold the horses. The horses are the starter culture, as I see it, if this history we are to reverse could be viewed as yogurt, and I don’t see that that is an inapt conceit. That is my exact plan if I find myself interviewed alone by the Sheriff, in fact: I will tell him the horses are starter culture, and that is all I will say other than asking they appoint me a lawyer, and a psychiatrist if that comes with the deal now. Hanging out with men wearing Polo clothes and affecting to punch each other over the matter of feminine endings should alone establish a sound insanity plea. I will walk away from the horse-stealing charge.
“Boy, what you doin’ with all that horseflesh?” the Sheriff finally asks, purring loudly beside me and the herd in his big throaty Ford.
“I have succumbed to deer pressure,” I tell him. At this he smiles.
“Y’all need a permit drive livestock loose up a road like iss.”
“Sir, what is that?” I indicate a jar of dark-colored liquid on the seat besid
e him.
“That? Blackstrap molasses. Boy give it to me dudn’ want me lookin in t’is business.”
“Could I have a taste?”
“You can have the whole thang, son. I’mone bust that boy for whatever it is he doin’ pretty soon.”
I have had a fascination with sorghum and molasses for some time because I do not know what they are. I finger up a taste of the stuff and pour a quantity of it into the ankle collars of each of my boots and step about a bit to get the molasses into the socks and crackling good. The Sheriff smiles at this too. This will keep me out of the Big Horn culture-reversing ambush.
“Sheriff, I need to go to the hospital.”
“I see that, boy.”
“Could you take me?”
“I can call you a amblance but I can’t take you myself, it’s regulations—”
“Aw forget it, Sheriff. I’ll walk.” I affect to start for the hospital, abandoning the horses. I wonder if the poets will appreciate my forestalling and deflecting the Arm of the Law from their date with the Indians. The Sheriff lurches the big car up to me and pops it in park before it has stopped and chirps to a passionate little stop beside me in the huge idling machine. Now he is not smiling.
“I feel the same way. About all this”—he feels at something on his face and looks at himself in his side mirror—“regulations shit. Get in the car. You need help.”
I get in, rider-side front. The Sheriff says, “What did you do that for?” as I with some difficulty gum and crackle my feet into the car.
“Do what?”
“Nothin’.”
We ride, and we ride well, and I never see the horses or the poets again. I do not read of a reversal of history that begins at the Big Horn. They did not admit me to the hospital but told me to get my nasty shoes back outside.
An orderly seeing me taffy out, by this time hobbling as if I am in ankle chains, ripping blisters and wincing, caught up to me outside the ER and provided me with a small handle to a spigot and I washed my boots in cold water from the side of the hospital and then returned the spigot handle to him.
“Old guy in here last night?” he said.
“Yeah?”
“Come in here moaning and shit, like food poison?”
“Yeah?”
“He get all booked in? They put him in a room? The doctor gerng come?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, that dude esploded!”
“What?”
“Shit all over the room. Had to get his ass brand-new room. I been cleaning it since five this mornin’. That why I have this handle.”
We look at my wet boots and socks on the grass, exhausted. As mornings go, or days, this one has been, for me, singularly good. I feel ennobled to have distracted the Sheriff, abandoned my role in reversing history, and now to be a boon companion to a man who has mopped shit in a room since five a.m. We are the ungainfully employed, unjailed, unlettered, unprotected fair boys left in the world. I feel a little high with my numb feet on the green grass beside my sodden socks and boots, my new friend smiling at them and not asking one question about them, or me, or the Sheriff, whom he saw deposit me in the ER drive-thru. These are lousy details of the quotidian and they do not merit the attention of men thinking about larger things, like cleaning whole rooms fouled by unfortunate exploding men.
“He had six hundred dollar in his wallet, in his pants, hook on the wall, all spray with shit. I took ten dollar. Only. I put his clothes in the laundry. Special service. Ten-dollar tip, moreso.”
“I dig where you comin’ from.”
“Dude esploded.”
The way this fellow shakes his head, incredulously admiring the misfortune of the exploding patient, and the way we snicker together on the lawn, is pleasing, very pleasing, in the long array of not final things during our time on Earth. The way the day has gone has made me think things like “the not final things during our time on Earth.” I am happy, happy not to be a horse-rustling poet, a culture starter, on a lawn with cold blue feet in the sun, my bowels not urgent, a friend to chat with.
Love
I walk around picking up raw bits of meat in the soles of my shoes. The old Converse high-tops pick up the meat and apparently mold it into these rather blunted pyramid-shaped nougats, or pills, what would you call compacted meat in roughly the shape of pyramids such as what fall out, a little dusty, from your shoes? I have these Docksiders with a wavy razor-cut tread that picks the meat up into the thin voids of the tread and presses it into ribbons that suggest tapeworms, or would suggest tapeworms were you to get the meat out of the tread in a piece. Meat pressed into shapes like that is disturbing to me somehow, so I am not unhappy that it can’t be got out in that configuration, the tapeworm or audio-mylar configuration, but I am not altogether happy that it, the meat, remains up in the razory tread of my shoes either. I wash the shoes but am not convinced you can really clean up in spaces that tight. I question the design, the intellect that decided to cut rubber into waved micrometer slices to shoe men who want to be sailors at heart, or even pretend sailors on sidewalks in their chinos hailing their girls, etc. The waffle-iron idea of the Converse engineers seems by comparison a much more wholesome approach. I am going with the flow mostly here. I am mostly going with the flow here, I mean. Trying to, with meat on my shoes. I know a poet named Rachel.
September is my yellow month. I can be down in the mouth but not blue in my yellow month. Rachel is pink. I am not going to mention her again, at the request of one of my friends.
Joplin and Dickens
Janis Joplin at her desk regards Charlie Dickens at his, and wonders. That boy could be the answer, or one of the answers, to the long question that will trouble her. Will I be the loneliest girl on Earth? The dog of loneliness is already at age nine nuzzling her. Because it is, after all, a dog, and nuzzling, and she nine, the dog of loneliness nuzzling little Janis Joplin at this point is merely cute. It will not be so cute later when she has bad skin and has wrecked her voice and swings that bottle of Southern Comfort at it as it tries to lick her face all sweaty on stages . . . oh my this is poetic. Let’s abjure poetry because the conceit of this—Janis Joplin and Mr. Dickens a century out of his time—is already inane. We will stick to the facts and try not to be pretty.
She has heard Charlie Dickens use pretty big words early in the third grade. Unlike other children she has not been inclined to roll her eyes at him when he deploys a doozy. Even the teacher has rolled her eyes, or done that thing where she takes a deep breath and lets it out and says, “Okay, Charlie, can you state that in other words?”
To this Charlie has said, “In other words?” seeming to be honestly perplexed. It is clear to Janis at least that he is not dissembling, to use a big word that cannot properly be in her brain either. What she means to think is that Charlie is not pretending not to understand the teacher when she wants other words instead of the perfect ones he has apparently just used. Janis assumes them perfect anyway, because she doesn’t herself know their meaning and she will give the benefit of the doubt to a boy in pleated short pants with his hair wet-combed and speaking clearly without giggling or mumbling. She’d like to mount Charlie Dickens, in the cloak closet if she has to, but in the bushes right outside the windows on the side of the school facing the orphanage where he lives would be better. It is not usual for a nine-year-old girl to have visions of mounting people but Janis is not a usual girl.
Charlie for his part is unusual too. He has about given up talking in class, participating in the teacher’s notions of good-pupil citizenry, because it is clear she does not really like good-pupil citizenry or she would not be inhaling and sighing like that and asking for other words. Last week he said, “Crazy wooden galleries common to the backs of half a dozen houses, with holes from which to look upon the slime beneath; windows, broken and patched, with poles thrust out, on which to dry the linen that is never there; rooms so small, so filthy, so confined, that the air would seem
too tainted even for the dirt and squalor which they shelter; wooden chambers thrusting themselves out above the mud, and threatening to fall into it—as some have done; dirt-besmeared walls and decaying foundations; every repulsive lineament of poverty, every loathsome indication of filth, rot, and garbage; all these ornament the banks of the ditch behind the orphanage in which I am not alone confined.”
He thought he had got it about right until the teacher then said, “Can you, Charlie—” sigh—“say that in other words?”
“I’ll try,” he said, “but later,” and sat down, because he was winded and he did not think he knew other words and he saw Janis looking at him in that way he had no words for yet.
He tried later that night to formulate words not other than those he had used to describe his mean privation but to describe the kind of looking at him Janis Joplin did. It was shy, spittlely, askance when not directly at him; diffident, not shy, he thought; perhaps sidelong rather than the awkward askance when not direct; spittlely was terse but not elegant, better to string it out with a little gobbet of spit in the corner of her mouth as if she were hungry. Janis did look hungry, but not in the way his peers at the orphanage looked hungry. They looked like they wanted to eat Twinkies and Janis did not look like she wanted Twinkies. Janis had this odd way of looking like an old woman sometimes, an old woman in a bed like Miss Havisham, a woman he could see in his mind, the vision of whom mystified him: he did not know who it was or why he had a name for her and could recall no one remotely like her in his life at the orphanage outside Austin, Texas.
On television Janis has seen an interview with Ray Charles that has made her interested in Ray Charles and indeed in music itself in a way that she was not interested in either Ray Charles or music before she saw the interview. Mr. Charles had on magnificent, gleaming sunglasses and rocked his head around in the air like a bird dog looking for a scent, which she knew he did because he was blind, or was supposed to be blind. Too many singers claimed to be blind for them all to be blind, she thought, but she thought Ray Charles was probably not lying, about that. If anything made her suspicious of his blindness it was simply how good his sunglasses looked. They had gone to some trouble getting those magnificent glasses, movie-star glasses that could have been on an Italian actress if they were not there waving around like solar antennae on Mr. Charles’s face. Anyway, right out of those glasses came this white sizzly blinding light into her own eyes as Mr. Charles said, “You can only make love to one woman at a time.” That remark transfixed Janis. She did not know why he said it or what he had been saying or what the question was. In fact she did not know, really, what “make love to a woman” meant, let alone one at a time, but it was an idea that held a great appeal to her, clearly up there on the tree of adult knowledge. And when he said it she knew he was not lying about being blind, or about being a good singer, or about being a good singer being a good thing to be, though she did think he might be lying when he said you could only make love to one woman at a time. It sounded like he was denying something rather than just stating a fact, whatever the fact was, or whatever the denial. She could eat two apples at one time. It was dumb because they both turned a little brown as you did it but you could do it. She wondered what in fact there was you could do one of that you could not do two of at one time. She could sing two songs at one time, or five, and she did this in the bathtub and she mostly did it when she forgot lines to one song but remembered those to another but sometimes she did it for fun. Ray Charles was not on the level about that woman thing, but he was guarding his being on the level about the music thing. She thought: What if I be Ray Charles on the music thing and myself on the woman thing? I’ll say you can make love to more than one woman at a time. She already sang very well, in the bathtub, and no one ever told her to pipe down, one reason she thought she was pretty good. José Feliciano, Stevie Wonder, Ronnie Milsap, and Ray Charles? It was too much. At Blind Lemon Jefferson she gave up.
Cries for Help, Various Page 1
