Cries for Help, Various

by Padgett Powell

  Another day, still here. Another fat boy has manifested. He tapped on a window on the side of the house and I steered him to the front door. He had a laminated card identifying himself, avec photo, currently dated, as a collector for the handicapped. He was very relaxed, made a joke about someone going down the street. I explained that I do not speak well, and his apparent answer was, Well, it’s for the handicapped, what need is there for speech or further comprehension? I gave him a small handful of change, he manifested momentary disappointment, then quickly assented that it was good, C’est bon. Probably legitimate. It has upset the day of the coward. Giving a small amount of change to a probably legitimate undertaking, or to a possibly illegitimate undertaking, is perfect cowardice. Deciding the venture was real or fraudulent either way and giving nothing, slamming the door, or deciding it was maybe real or even fraudulent and giving a goodly sum, flank the act of cowardice and have about them vapors of courage. You will not find me on those flanks. I am in the very center of fear and being small. A fat boy on the streets of France knows it.

  And what would you say, Sir, to the chance we might mount a draft horse in chain mail and swarp down the enemy in rows like wheat?

  Aye, bonnie good that, let’s do, and then let’s try not to dissect the swarping of our fellows and find less in it than heroism. Will we be able to manage that?

  I am only thy valet, Sire. I can put thee on the mount, I cannot determine how thou ridest.

  Cry for Help from Home

  My grandfather kept bees. I never saw him at this enterprise and do not know precisely how I know that he pursued it. I have had the urge to have bees myself but so far have not procured a single bee. My father was a gambler. I think that was his essence. In high school he hustled pool halls, in WWII he joined the Marines before being drafted, in life he struck out in entrepreneurial ventures and real-estate developments. In his last hours he escaped the house and walked to the 7-Eleven and bought a lottery card, got lost and tired on the way home, and was brought to the door by two women who wanted to know if they could keep him. They had found him sitting on their low garden wall, they found him charming, and they brought him home. I have never gambled on a thing in my life.

  Cry For Help from the Theater of Love

  Jogging along lightly, nude, I encounter some Vermont-hiker-looking folk before I can cut off the road so say, “Finally tried out some really light backpacking ha!” and cut for the house, crossing the porch on which I had not noticed the preponderance of trash before, but I had only crossed the porch the one time before, ten minutes ago, and inside told the woman that I’d unfortunately run into the neighbors and she said, “And you would have to come in here.” She was immediately busy with two children on an articulation table of some sort, I thought at first an abdominal-exercise machine, and I suppose by one argument it was but it was finally more technical than that. And the older child on one end of the table that I took to have Down syndrome got up and crawled onto the smaller child at the other end of the table and affected to smother it with a lawn chair, to everyone’s delight, and I noticed through a window back toward the porch two girls exercising in wheelchairs, pulling themselves therapeutically up and down the room, one of these girls apparently disfigured or mutilated and covered up and the other absolutely striking but paralyzed in the legs, and ho, this was a bit of a rough scene here all of a sudden, where ten minutes ago this woman had just offered herself without all these complications, just these perfect rouge silver-dollar areolae in an open shirt, which is why I had gone down to the pond and washed up and jogged back, and found all this. Man. Locating succor is getting hard.

  Longing

  The kind of exhaustion I am talking about is, simply, or not simply, the broken heart. It makes you long to hold hands with someone you have not hurt who has not hurt you. This longing would be immediately and hotly extant if a dark girl offered you a cup of flan.

  Dizzy

  The aerie feather-brained quality is upon me today, I am slightly dizzy and nauseated. Got to ride over to the foundry and smelt some ore. My eyeglasses are featuring that snot-smeared effect. I hate that. My buddy was chased by a pack of dogs that scared him so bad he shat a little in his pants, and he hates that. I knew several distinguished older men who have died who had a better grip on things than I do. I wonder if they can see me floundering. I know that one of them in particular, with a scotch and pretty women about him in heaven, would enjoy sending annoying telegrams of advice like “Buck up” if he could. Most of them, though, I suppose would elect not to send a telegram even if they could. This is why they were regarded as distinguished on earth. They had the astute capacity not to deign, presume, meddle. They hunkered down within the castle walls of their particular potency, whatever it was, and did not send loose emissary of themselves about the uncharted ground of their purlieu.

  It seems to me that if you do not deign, presume, and meddle, though, that the forces of the world at large, sometimes in the form of a kind of anonymous aggregate power, will pile up on you in an ambient deigning and presuming and meddling that will render you helpless. It is this way today: I am helpless here, dizzy and looking through badly fouled glasses at the bright, challenging world. Of course a non-anonymous, specific, particular force can deign, presume, and meddle with you also, like the phone company, or Ms. Trujillo at the phone company, who might withal be said to be but an accidental agent of aggregate force. But if, say—oh, you get the picture, you must, you are in the picture yourself. If you don’t get the picture and fancy yourself not in it, I would say you are deigning to presume and are meddling with me, tacitly accusing me of being off rocker a bit. You are part of the problem. But I do not think that you are part of the problem. I think you are with me. I think you and I could dance across this floor of doubt in a cuddly promenade if we could know what our feet are up to. If I knew what my feet were up to, I would be distinguished, alive or dead. It is easier to be distinguished dead than alive.

  I have lost the capacity to make a fist with my head, is what I mean. It is a matter of mental muscle tone, and I’ve gone as slack as pudding. I need to drink me some brain Jell-O, get some pearls growing in that oyster. At the very least I’ve got to wash my glasses and shut up.

  Dusk

  At dusk, the girls visit. We ride out to meet them on our horses, with our guitars. Our guitars are made of boxwood.

  The girls are of flesh and they are agreeable to our every suggestion profane and genteel. They come at dusk. By dawn they are gone wherever they go. We live in a valley of cattle and history. Conditions are dry but there is water in the wells. All in all it is Spanishey.

  The boxwood is a small hedge in my experience, and that my guitar is made of boxwood troubles me. The girls are taken with the tunes from our guitars, withal.

  In history there has been force and badness and an eking along of goodness. There are broken guitars, but also new guitars. The girls are broken, but whole and trying. We too. We meet them when they come at dusk, at the gates of the ranch, a good place to meet. The cattle, the air, the past, etc. is there to enrich the moment. We are there with our boxwood guitars. The girls smile every night. They smile just the same way.

  We will not be able to hold this moment forever, though we will try rabidly. A rogue boxwood plant on the impossibly long drive to the gate to meet the girls holds us in thin regard.

  In history, before this moment and after this moment, some powerful men will drive this impossibly long drive with Mercedeses and it will be possible, the drive. The girls they meet will not be coming to them on foot, however, and will not be smiling. In a Mercedes, in fact, the drive will look practical. There will be no guitars, not of boxwood or anything else, then. Their girls will not be wearing colorful handmade skirts as ours do. The skirts are so folksy and authentic you couldn’t take it if they were not on genuine girls who have come to see you. The men of Mercedes history, before this and after this, will have to drive far to procure their women,
and the women will wear basic black and be expensive. That kind of woman is not for us, indubitably not for us.

  Our names are so common we have forgotten to use them for some time. It has not mattered. We probably have not actually forgotten what they are, our names, but it might be close. We would abjure a test. We remember our girls at dusk and our guitars. I remember the boxwood holding me in its shrinking regard. How is there enough wood in the plant of a boxwood, or in many of them, to make a guitar? Does my guitar speak to the plant? Does the plant weep, or mourn, to see us pass with our guitars of itself? If you think this way, you are compelled to drive the impossible drive on a horse, not in a Mercedes. The horse has some non-Mercedes thoughts of its own. The girls are not about to be seen getting into Mercedeses either. We have all gone the other way. We are not powerful, except in our disregard for power, which is a weak form of powerfulness, we are not under delusions here. We are clear-headed, clear-voiced, clear-intended to our girls, who come at dusk.

  Their skirts are a sunset under their smiles, and a sunset is behind their smiles, the same every night. Our guitars speak to the girls, to history, to the boxwood who disapproves of us. We inhale the history in the air, the past, present, and future. Too much of that will give you a headache so we do not do too much of that. Too much of that will accelerate your forgetting your name also. One girl is named Angelique. One is browner than the others and looks chewier, if to say that would not give offense. We deem, now that we have said it, that it would, so we retract it. Shall we say that the browner girl appears sturdier than the lighter girls, that her smile in the dusk appears brighter because her white teeth flash in greater contrast to her face than the teeth of the lighter girls flash, etc., and so the possibly very fraudulent conclusion may be drawn that the browner girl is happier and therefore readier for the rough handling that men with boxwood guitars and no car are going to mete out? And that these men who regard men in Mercedeses as caciques in history, even if they are but heavily mortgaged realtors, are the kind who would formulate that a girl looks chewier not with an eye to offending but merely with an eye to avoiding blather? Yes. She looks chewier then. Very chewy and she gives us a good feeling just being around her, as do equally the other girls, the less chewy-looking ones in the dusk. They are every bit as chewy-looking in the full day and in the full night. The browner girl has this advantage only for a few minutes per day. That does not seem unfair.

  The guitar is easy to tune, the Mercedes not. As men of the weak powerful sort, who abjure the test of name recall, our own, we abjure also the notion of fairness, we know better, but it creeps into our thoughts sometimes, like bilge water. It obtains, pitch all you want. No craft does not leak. The thin boxwood holding us in thin regard was eaten by a bull. Or an antelope for all we know. We do know we had to run, guitars and girls bouncing a lovely discordant concerto across the present frame of history, from a shorthorn bull as wide as three Mercedeses and half as fast, but not for an impossibly long distance. The girls were happier and chewier all after that, our guitars sounded more splendid than usual, and all of us but me had failed to notice the missing boxwood.

  Letter from France

  I have, I think, two apartments in France and so seldom use one of them that I somewhat forget I have it or where it is when I do recall, alarmed, that I have it. In this respect it is like the course exam you are scheduled to take in dreams for a course you have not attended and do not comprehend your enrollment in. My second apartment, or first if you will, is somewhat more on the map of consciousness—to say, I have a clearer idea of what it looks like and where it is (it is airy and on the front of a building; the other is dark and in the high dank rear of a building)—and I believe I have spent time in it, but not much. This must leave me actually living yet somewhere else. I am in general very nervous in France.

  My brain and my heart are as small as a songbird’s. I tweet a little, flit, do not overthink. My emotions are a green and purple sorbet.

  I wear a corset and a codpiece under my clothes. Whenever I am tempted to act, rare, I step back and secretly tighten the undergarments to further restrict motion, and thereby the temptation to act. A life of action is a wasted life.

  Julie-New Sanchez-Manchez-Holt-Durgen is coming over for some covert sex that I may not appear to be very interested in lest it put her off that I am a typical male. The fact is that I am not up for appearing uninterested in sex, whether that is typical male or not, and I am not up for the sex with Julie-New Sanchez-Manchez-Holt-Durgen itself, whether that is typical male or not. I am not altogether up for a visit by Julie-New Sanchez-Manchez-Holt-Durgen except insofar as she can give me some inadvertent clues about my apartments. Sometimes I think I am living in her apartment and she is coming not to visit me but to discover me in her place, at which point she might legitimately expect to govern how I act with respect to sex or anything else. I wish I could get some claritude on some of these issues. The weather outside has shifted from a pleasant balm to some kind of typhoon-acting thing that has the walls heaving in and out visibly, audibly straining. I have wedged a towel into the front-door sill to stop the seepage of water. I have activated a small electric teakettle and I plan to drink tea if I find some. I will hold a warm crockery cup in my hands and take comfort in the warmth. The tea would soothe my nerves were my nerves unsoothed. My nerves are soothed in direct proportion to the force of wind around them. I feel as calm and serene as a dead man.

  I read that Ted Turner has lost all his money and that there is some talk, commingled with the historical end of his father, of Ted Turner’s killing himself. I pray that this is not the direction Turner rides his sunset pony toward, and in fact now that the little teakettle is starting to whistle I say, and I say it out loud, in the apartment I think in France that I myself rent or do not, Ted, do not ride your sunset pony that dark way. Steer the mean little bastard into the light, Ted, and don’t let it bite you. You have a million dollars in your pocket and Kofi will just have to wait on the billion, so you keep on keepin’ on, Ted. If I can, you can.

  Wearing a Meat Shirt and Killing a Snake

  Taupist cold-cut shirt. We were wearing that. Them. A shirt of cold-cut discs, like shingles or chain-mail medallions. They were fragrant, the discs, the shirt. We were nervous, not knowing if large animals would attack us. We hoped that olive loaf would appeal even less to them than it did us. The Taupists make these shirts, we presume. We further presume they are some kind of monks, meat-shirt-making monks. The Taupist label in the shirt said Do Not Remove Under Penalty of Flogging, or We Will Make You Wear This Shirt a Long Time in the Sun. We could see ourselves in the sun in the meat shirt drying up like fish scales and being pink and rancid and then green and rancid and we were afraid to tamper with the Taupist label or to take the shirt off.

  I broke into an apartment seeking information on snake hunting in the area and discovered three loose rattlesnakes in the apartment. One of them crawled near my brother whom I told to be still, but he was agitated and the snake bit him in the shoulder blade and hung on. I ripped it loose and slammed it on the floor, uncharacteristically. I was having trouble with 911 when the girl whose apartment it was let herself in, and I told her who I was and apologized for killing one of her snakes and said I was having trouble with 911. My brother was by this time in the bathtub to his jawline in hot water, giggling. Outside the bathroom the girl had taken off her shirt and bra and was on the floor in her skirt looking attractive (very brown and firm); she waved me away when I veered toward her. In the other room I found her brothers in karate gis. They attacked me with a lot of Oriental postures. I could not persuade them not to try to defend the honor of their sister, or of their sister’s apartment, or snake, or whatever it was they were defending. I could not control them, or their sister, or 911, or my brother. All I could control was the snakes, and I had stupidly killed one of them. Had I thought about it I’d have said it was not a good day overall.

  And when we finally worked up the c
ourage to take off the meat shirt and drop it in the desert, where it sent a spiral of delicious toxicity up into the nostrils of buzzards, and we were certain that Taupists, whoever or whatever they were, were not in pursuit of us, we felt like having ice cream. You would, in the desert, having shed your meat shirt, understandably want some ice cream, born of cream and sugar and ice and salt, and of course you can walk, or ride, a long way in the desert, whether in a meat shirt or not, afraid of Taupists or not, with a belief that such a thing as a Taupist who would manufacture a meat shirt and require you to wear it under penalty of flogging exists or not, before you find ice cream.