Cries for Help, Various

by Padgett Powell

  Charlie Dickens raised his hand when the teacher asked someone to describe the weather. Most of the children had merely looked out the window and begun forming the notion that it was so obvious what the weather was that the teacher was either trying to trick them or was retarded. But Charlie was the kind of kid that would step into a trick with a smile and save them all from it. Despite his weirdness, they liked him. Many smart alecks you despised but Charlie was so far out there you could not despise him for being smart. He was some kind of twilight-zone smart and he would use it, as in the present weather trick, to protect them all. “The weather?” Charlie was saying. “Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, indistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers—”

  “Charlie—”

  “No, Ma’am, I can’t put it in other words.”

  “Very well. Good job. You may be seated.”

  The children had been on the verge of erupting in a kind of excitement she had not seen of them before. Perhaps it was the Megalosaurus. They had helped her resist the force of Charlie Dickens before this adventure, but now it seemed they might be swinging to him, and if they wholeheartedly began to support Charlie’s flights her classroom could go completely out of control. The only child who seemed self-possessed, actually, was little Janis Joplin, who had calmly studied Charlie during his weather broadcast without squirming or giggling or otherwise beginning to vibrate to his lunacy.

  Ms. Turner, as she was known to the children, was a private woman with an interest in biology that had gotten derailed. She had not gone to graduate school as she had hoped and now found herself inexplicably wrangling this small herd of mostly privileged children. She was fending off the unwanted advances of a coach from the middle school next door, a man who came round in polyester stretch pants and expensive-looking noisy athletic shoes trying to talk her into going out. This was an ordinary nuisance except that he, the coach, somehow reminded her of ordinary little Janis Joplin as she, Janis, sat there regarding the extraordinary Charlie Dickens. Ms. Turner had noticed this special regard Janis had for Charlie, and she knew what it was about, as phantasmagorical as that seemed for a child of Janis’s age: she was a sexual predator as surely as Coach Leech was. Richard Leech labored under the appellation Dick Leech, which did not make his life any happier. In a kind of blinding fatalism, Ms. Turner saw that her life was already fixed in this nothingness she was in and that she was not to escape it. This vision made things paradoxically a little easier to take: she might as well relax, and settle down. Thus she had come to let Charlie Dickens, for example, go on a bit more than she once had, short of his precipitating a riot among his peers with his performances, which struck them as tours de force of authority thwarting or nose thumbing. They could not, she didn’t think, distinguish between smart aleck and smart. As we have seen, she was wrong in this surmise. She could not know that the children sensed their own mundane trappedness there, as she sensed hers, and that they divined in Charlie Dickens’s excesses a chance that he would by them escape and go into an orbit they themselves would be denied. He was among them a kind of early astronaut, and they liked astronauts, of any kind. She was wrong too in her apprehensions of Dick Leech’s interests, because Dick Leech was as homosexual as balls were round, but Dick Leech is not within the scope of our concerns; forget him. Let’s forget Ms. Turner too. Things are happening.

  A girl quieter than even Janis Joplin, if that is possible, named Gail Crutchfield, who lives at the orphanage with Charlie Dickens, and who wears the most out-of-date clothes the orphanage has to hand down—today a long red plaid dress belted at the waist with a belt of the same material that makes her look like a Rockwell mother in 1940—this Gail Crutchfield, who has not opened her mouth heretofore in any enterprise in or out of class, is standing up in her desk chair and smoothing down her dress and wringing her hands nervously. She is breathing as if to prepare for something she has to say. She begins then not to talk but to sing. And to sing well. Powerfully well. At first Ms. Turner does not know the song—Hank Williams’s “Your Cheating Heart”—then she is amazed that she has heard it all her life and never heard it like this. Coming from the mouth of eleven-year-old Gail Crutchfield (Gail has been held back and is older than the other children), it is spectral, not at all the bumpkin tune Ms. Turner had assumed it before.

  Gail Crutchfield loses her nervousness entirely once she begins to sing. She concentrates on every note, and hits every note with authority, and uses a yodeling tremolo or vibrato where the song wants it, Ms. Turner does not know the musical term.

  When she is done, the children, who have been fidgeting and making small efforts to distract her (a couple of paper balls have flown by her head), start howling derisively and clapping and booing at once, and Gail sits down, primly folding her hands and erectly staring forward, with one red-faced glance at Ms. Turner as if to apologize for interrupting the class. Gail Crutchfield seems embarrassed to have interrupted the class but not to have sung the song. She says, to whom Ms. Turner cannot tell, “Well, you asked me to.” This is the first and only hint as to how this performance has come about in her classroom. Gail Crutchfield has not received any notice from Ms. Turner before this moment beyond that she lives with Charlie Dickens and a boy named Martin at the orphanage across the street. Ms. Turner is beginning to suspect that weird things are afoot in the room. She occasionally has this sensation: that she is on a bus and doesn’t know where it is going, and hasn’t even known that she is on a bus, that’s how out of it she is. The phenomenon of Gail Crutchfield this morning has put her strongly in the bozo-on-the-bus frame of mind.

  As he walks by the outside of the classroom after school, Charlie Dickens is whispered to loudly from the bushes under the windows the children stare out of all day. In the hedge is Janis Joplin, squatting down and hooking her finger at him. He goes in.

  “Hey,” Janis says, and he says, “Hi.”

  She kisses him wetly about his face. He is overwhelmed by her into a sitting position, legs straight out, Janis on all fours, going messily at him.

  “My girl,” he finally manages to say. “You have laved me as a dog so starved for affection might confuse flesh for its proper food.” He is smiling because the odd displeasure of his cold wet face in the bushes outside the classroom, which should put him, he thinks, in an ill humor, is not putting him in an ill humor. Janis for her part is certain he has called her a dog, a thing she could have predicted, but notices that Charlie Dickens is smiling.

  This she points out. “You are smiling, Charlie.”

  “Indubitably and inexplicably. The confluence of our salivas I’d not have predicted could be less than odious, but it is. This world is strange, Miss Joplin.”

  “You’re from the Baptist Home and you are the smartest boy in school, Charlie. That is strange to me.”

  “Martin is smart in his way, and we must consider the early talent of Miss Crutchfield. What did you think of her today?”

  Janis Joplin wonders how a boy who insists on wearing a trench coat and who clowns around all day, and who once ran and slid baseball style under a table when Ms. Turner was out of the room, and because under the table his feet touched a dead bird none of them had seen before that must have come in the window and died in the night stood up quickly announcing,“I killed a bird!”—Janis wonders how such a boy can be smart “in his way,” in any way; she wonders if Charlie Dickens is not being kind as adults seem to be and want children to be instead of picking on each other as they deserve, and all of this wondering she would prefer to do, there still on her hands and knees over Charlie Dickens
just like the dog he has called her, rather than think about what Gail Crutchfield did today in class, a thing that excited her and made her mad also because she has been working on something like that in the bathtub, not that song, which she knows is a Hank Williams song and not as she thinks Gail Crutchfield probably thinks a Patsy Cline song, this she can tell from the way Gail sang it, all kind of bossy instead of scared and shaky as Mr. Williams sang it. How to tell Charlie Dickens all this on her hands and knees in front of his face, the smartest boy in the world? “I have been singing in the bathtub a lot,” she says finally.

  Charlie Dickens regards her for a long time, just exactly as if he is thinking some large-word things up that cannot be put in other words. “You sing in the bathtub, Janis, if I may be familiar,” he says at last, “and I am afraid that I wallow in a slough of despond. I am not apparently coeval with my time.”

  “No, you are not,” Janis says, meaning by it nothing that Charlie can be certain of. He does not expect that she can understand him. He suspects she means that she does not deem him evil, and this is good enough and does not merit an explication of his inveterate, inscrutable, ineluctable way of speaking, since that impossible speech is primarily what he is talking about.

  “I don’t fit in today,” he says, “but you do, as shy as you seem, and as troubled. Your desperation is within reach of its targets, I mean, Miss Joplin. Mine is not. Mine is well lost. I feel, in other words”—they both giggle—“very old somehow, and you are very young. My desperations are behind me, as odd as that may sound, and yours are ahead of you, yet to be discovered.”

  This relaxes Janis. She can see herself kissing him again, and singing in the tub, and singing standing on her own desk chair, showing them the weak and shaky and real way to sing songs. “I want to have big boobs and blond hair,” she says.

  Charlie Dickens shakes his head ever so slightly, like a wise man. Like some grandfather in the cutest short pants who lives in the Baptist Home! Janis thinks.

  “You might want large breasts, Janis, but you do not want blond tresses that are fine and flaxen because, well, it is a hard matter to put delicately, but men do not want, in spite of all their proclamations to the contrary, to see Johnny Winter down there—excuse me, I mean Edgar. They do not wish to see Edgar Winter in the perturbations of their rut when they are weak with need and not ready to see Edgar Winter. Down there.”

  “Down where?”

  “In other words, in your pants.”

  “Charlie, you are too weird. Who is Edgar Winter?”

  “You will learn who he is. You will make a mark.”

  “You are so smart, you will be famous, Charlie.”

  “No, quick child. I think not. It is improper, or at least it would play verily at the edges of the field of impropriety, for me to burden you with my troubles. They are vast. As I have intimated, I am an old man, somehow, ill-befitting this age, and my age. This will precipitate in me a long degrade of faculties, what is called I believe a nervous breakdown. You will have one of these too, but your taper burns at the other end, as it were, the correct end. Mine burns from the base.”

  Janis giggled at this speech, and with it Charlie began to struggle to his feet and Janis let him get up. In two months’ time third grade would be over, she would have kissed Charlie Dickens two more times, and he would disappear over the summer and not be in school in Austin, Texas, for the fourth grade. She would discover the books written by Charles Dickens, hear Grace Slick tell Johnny Carson, “I would have blond hair and big boobs,” when he asked her, “If you could do it all over again, what would you do different?”, see both Johnny and Edgar Winter play their guitars in Port Arthur, sing herself well beyond the bathtub, and never properly be as much in love as she was the day Charlie Dickens told her all that he told her in the bushes outside the classroom, his cute boy knees and his difficult man mouth.

  Mrs. Fiberung

  The odds that Mrs. Fiberung were to retire that day after thirty years of service and set her car on fire inadvertently and narrowly preserve the Girl Scout cookies from its trunk and mosey on home eating them with great satisfaction and get there and find her son cavorting in the swimming pool with a girl, when she had theretofore thought him uninterested in girls, and a letter of foreclosure on the house, and two lizards either fighting or mating on the kitchen table, and a volleyball net inexplicably strung in the backyard, and a complete inability to recall her husband and the nastiness of the divorce, and a strange and harmless man slumped in a corner of her garage, whom she shooed away without calling the police, which was probably against principles of bourgeois suburban protocol, was incalculable. Were incalculable. The odds. Who wished to calculate anything these days anyway?

  Who broached the notion of odds and their calculability? Her car was on fire, her son was in the pool with a girl, lizards were going at it on the table, the cookies were good, she felt better about life in general than she had in years. This is a gift horse not to look in the mouth or the rear end either for that matter. Let it be lame. Accept it.

  She called her son in and his girlfriend and they stood there apprehensively dripping on the carpet, shivering a little, their shoulders narrowed under their towels, which were draped over them. “Cavorting in the pool like that with no one here to chaperone you will make the neighbors talk,” she said. “Go up to your room.” The girl looked from her to her son incredulously and then followed her son, who had already started up, to his room.

  Mrs. Fiberung hoped they took full advantage of this chaperoning. She was an expert militant chaperone and believed in the full exercise of the seditious power a chaperone was in position to wield. While she had thought her son homosexual she had of course maintained there was nothing really wrong in that, but she now discovered a very strong sense of relief in herself, almost a joy, a high that she sought to confirm and prolong and deepen by sending the two of them to a private room. They were nearly pickled by the chlorinated water anyway, she had noticed.

  She put on a trench coat her husband had left and modeled in it before a full-length mirror, looking like a spy. Some odd words and ideas came nearly to her mind that she could not completely grasp or assemble: furtivclature was one of them. She took that thought out to the pool and got in a chaise, still in the coat, with a drink, and found that furtivclature had shifted to numenboles or numenbolus. These entities in her head, whatever they were, suggested to her the idea that she wanted to become a radically different person from that she had been to this point in her life. Was that possible, or was it only an idea that everyone entertained once in a while and, like these oddball words, could not quite really possess or effect? Did the urge just not leave you, like these new words, incomplete and unformed and undefined? Was it not the case, for example, that in launching into a “new you” you typically got about as far as drinking by your pool in a spy coat in the middle of the afternoon and hoping your son was seizing the day upstairs in his bedroom? Was it not more likely that the two of them would be regarding her now through the slit blinds of that room and speculating as to what was wrong with her, and that soon she would abandon the poolside chaise and return the coat to its hanger and be back exactly to herself after the girl went home properly unmolested?

  I suggest we leave Mrs. Fiberung upon the horns of her little dilemma on the grounds that she is as capable as we are of solving what are, after all, her trivial problems. We have problems of our own we might be better advised to inspect. To the extent that they too are trivial, we might well advise our ownself to abjure them too. To hell with Mrs. Fiberung and her little problems, and to hell with us and our little problems, and let us get on with it.

  The odd volleyball net is before us beside the pool that Mrs. Fiberung has quit. Husbands do leave, boys do stray, girls do play, the Wide World of Sports will cover about anything. Buttocks. Buttocks in spandex. Before the buttocks develop that large-curd cottage-cheese dimpling, one of the saddest things on earth and one of God’s c
hief oversights. On the other hand, the buttocks before the curding is one of His proudest moments and indeed one of the signal arguments for His existence. To see Him working his way toward the human buttock, whether with the hand of the Darwinian selector or not, traveling from the hairy hind of quadrupeds to the fulgent, obscene turquoise and carmine noise of the baboon’s operatic ass to the smooth, domed, cleaved, in-the-beginning firm-as-Jell-O and perfect-for-spanking human buttocks is to see a great mind at work, and to place the buttocks in that relation to the shitty rump of an ox or to the cloaca of the slithering beast is not less than placing the sun in relation to a planet. Because of the butt, God exists. I have a butt, or had a butt, therefore I am the son of God.