Cries for Help, Various

by Padgett Powell

  A bear skinned-out resembles a man, I have heard. This apparently disturbs hunters who have not been disturbed to that point in the adventure of killing a bear. But they get the willies once the hide sits there and the naked bear here.

  Mrs. Stamp

  A little dialogue played one morning in Mrs. Terrell Stamp’s head:

  Don’t sit on that knife.

  I can sit on these knives?

  Yes. Sit on those, but not on that one there.

  These here are okay?

  Yes. Sit right on them.

  Like this?

  Yes. You can squirm down on them, they won’t hurt you.

  Are they rubber?

  No, they are not rubber. God. They are just . . . well, sittable knives, and that one is not a sittable knife.

  Mrs. Terrell Stamp had many things on her mind, but foremost was marble cake in the morning. It was cold outside and she was happy to have her ingredients inside. She might go outside but if she did it would not be because she had to but because she wanted to. She liked to let good cold air come up her skirt for just a shot, then head back to the oven she could stand near while making the cake. She specialized in marble cake because she liked the wide tolerances involved in folding in the marbling fudge cake. There was not a right way or a wrong way to fold. If what was in one bowl got into what was in the other bowl, you had succeeded, more or less. You could do it without taking your eyes off a soap opera. There was precision cooking, and certainly other precision adventures in life, and Mrs. Terrell Stamp sought to avoid them. She liked loose, relaxed things, like popping out into the snow in a skirt for a minute, making a cake while looking at TV, leaning against the stove and thinking about nothing but how nice the stove was after the snow, how good the cake was beginning to smell, how crummy the soaps were but you kept watching largely because they were crummy. That was their point: loose art for the loose. You could have a marble cake that was not pretty, just as you could have, say, a dalmatian with heavy unattractive spots, but you liked the dog anyway, and you liked the cake too. That’s how she liked life—heavy or clumsy or inelegant or not smart, but good anyway.

  When the children got home from school in the afternoon she remembered who they were and how many they were and loved them. Raising children was the loosest, most imprecise art of the widest conceivable tolerances, to her mind, of any enterprise on earth, except perhaps drug addiction of the terminal sort. Half of daily television was now devoted to the premise that already loose parents should not attempt to raise children. She’d seen a sixty-year-old mother in a bikini try to mount a talk-show host in front of her own daughter. This had of course been an attempt to tighten up the daughter. The mother was screwed up, of course, but she was not incognizant of the underlying principles at work: appear tight, stay loose. The mother had hit on the errant proposition of appearing loose as well, an experiment that was failing. The daughter was aghast at the mother though, so it was debatable really whether the experiment would fail. It was unlikely, at any rate, that the daughter was going to try to mount the host after the mother had pawed him. And she would now in all likelihood hesitate before wearing an immodest bathing suit. Perhaps the crazed mother was genius. She was a bag of frenetic cellulite with badly dyed hair. Mrs. Stamp could not see her maintaining course too much longer.

  The show made her nervous, as they all did: an entire industry predicated on, and capitalizing on, the fact that Americans did not know how to properly have children or to eat. The soap operas tried to demonstrate the opposite fiction: that we were infinitely sexy and slim and in and out of love in mysterious and glamorous continuum. Television offered a dramatic commercialized equivalent to her little polar minuet between the cold snow and the warm stove.

  In a contemplative penseroso of this sort one morning in her kitchen, the roof of her entire house lifted off, almost noiselessly, and spun away, up up and away as if in a cartoon. It was non-threatening, this putative tragedy, so that Mrs. Stamp had occasion to be reminded of Dorothy’s house spinning as it left (or returned to?) Kansas, for her roof spun also, that slow, screwing spin that things approaching or leaving earth do, having something, she thought, to do with the earth’s spinning beneath them. Her roof sucked off the house like a tin of coffee being opened and spiraled off, dropping on her a small gentle rain of pink insulation tufts like mimosa blossoms. A sprinkling of roofing nails tinkled easily onto the kitchen floor. She could suddenly see how filthy her kitchen was, far more disturbing than the roof’s leaving. The weather outside was pleasant; what she could see of it, brushing insulation from her face, was what they meant when they said partly cloudy. There was no wind, no darkness to account for the roof’s spinning away to Oz or to outer space or to the nearest trailer park or strip mall. It would be a fine irony, and a sure sign of the hand of God, if the roof landed in a trailer park and did damage. Over the years He had hurled all the trailers he could and He was now ripping up parts of better built homes and throwing them at the trailers. Mrs. Stamp checked out her kitchen and it was all in working order. She still had water, gas, and the television was still on in the next room. What a pleasant day it was. The phone worked too. She should call someone and report the roof but did not know whom to call. She hated decisions and she most hated decisions involving telephones.

  There was no immediate problem with the roof beyond cleaning her kitchen and, she supposed, the entire house, now that it lay exposed to the light of day. Maybe she should call a cleaning service. That made some sense, but so did calling a lawyer and divorcing her husband, and so did calling a travel agent and booking a flight to Alaska, where as a young woman she had always wanted to go, but the importance of having a roof over her head had stopped that and other nomadic impulses. She had heard of families living in tents during the Depression and wondered if the tenability of that were soon to be demonstrated to her. Rather than walk outside, she climbed up on the kitchen counter and looked out of her house to see if other houses had suffered roof loss. They all appeared to be intact, and no one was out there gawking at hers. This was the first moment in which she wondered if her mental state might be not in order. Was her head really extending over the open wall of her kitchen peering at the unharmed houses up and down and across the street from hers, or was it somewhere else? Had it, her head, spun to Mars, leaving her house intact? Would a phone call prove the matter?

  She decided it would not. Even if she called a cleaning service and they sent a crew of alcoholics who hauled her carpets into the yard and steamed her entire house and blew it spic and span with an industrial compressor—she imagined this with real pleasure—and they chatted about the remarkable missing roof and what a boon to true cleaning it was, she and the sots about ready for her to break out the beer in reward for their Herculean ordeal, there would be no knowing that the entire affair was not delusional.

  What could she do? She had no idea, and usually having no idea what to do was a good inspiration for her doing nothing, but it felt different in this case. Sitting there in a roofless house did not speak of a sound mind. She’d look less suspicious somehow were she to bellydance from room to room in a roofless house, she thought. Yet it was also time to acknowledge that she was done calculating what was suspicious and how she would be perceived by others in what she did in life. This missing roof had put a foot down with respect to all that. She was clearly now on her own true, or false, path. She turned the TV off. Watching fat actual fornicators all day on the one hand and slender fake fornicators on the other had been fun, but it was over. The British call cookies “biscuits,” she thought, and we call cookies “cookies” and biscuits “biscuits.” She was going to be plain and correct from now on.

  Bedtime

  We did not know what to expect. The salamanders were cooking their own meals, having repudiated fast food with a viciousness that was surprising coming out of those soft-bodied gentle souls. They wore little chef hats and deftly used their tiny utensils and did not complain muc
h as they burned themselves, which, given the deliquescent quality of their moist skin and the heat of the stove, was nearly constantly. In fact it looked as if what they were cooking most was themselves. The happy suffering of the salamanders in the kitchen put us into a nervous and humble and vaguely guilty state. They had devised a way of cutting a standard Band-Aid into 128 pieces for dressing their wounds. The kitchen smelled of these fresh Band-Aids and earthworms and of the odd things they cooked.

  Well, by that I mean, since you ask, pancakes the size of Rockefeller dimes. Yes, you are right, not odd under the circumstances, given that they were pancakes for salamanders. Not odd at all. I have seen on a grown woman nipples the size of Rockefeller dimes, and that is odder than such a pancake fit for a salamander. To see those little dry pancakes going happily into those moist mouths was perhaps what I meant was odd. I have trouble meaning what I mean these days. I have trouble meaning anything at all. Am I not a grown man concerned with salamanders who cook, like cartoon characters? Can I actually mean this? To mean something you have to be capable of making a muscle with your brain, of bearing down mentally. I can no longer bear down. While this disturbs somewhat, it also does not disturb. If you can’t bear down, nothing much bears down on you. If you are preoccupied with salamanders in the kitchen, it is as agreeable as being preoccupied by anything else, or by nothing at all. We might as well forget the salamanders and their pancakes. We are free to move on to other concerns. I have none, but you perhaps have some. They would relate to the world, most probably—certainly they would relate to the world as opposed to the otherworld, a phrase that is attractive, as indeed we find the otherworld, whatever we mean by it, more attractive than the world. Why is this so, that we like a world that we can but feebly and variously only imagine exists over one in plain view before us? Is it not because the one before us is, in the parlance of the more eloquent of our children, messed up? We have so messed up the situation here that we prefer to think of an afterlife of beatitudes, or if we are not given to that sentimentality we select a finer one, a world not after but parallel and supernatural, usually peopled not by people but by weirdnesses made of goo and capable of thinking better than we do and fighting with more sophisticated weapons. Even the odd salamander who can cook will do. Why do we seek these other places full of alien forms? Is it because people are one big piece of shit? I verily submit that this is so. When you have reached this position, there is not a lot of what gets called wiggle room, and you don’t feel like playing outside, or inside, anymore.

  I have been traded back to my original team, which still does not want me. I play, and do not play, unwanted. It is not an enviable position, and I do not want to talk about it. I would rather talk about retardation, its onset and advance, considerable in my case, leading to my streamlighting into an ocean of ineptitude.

  My testosterone has dried up. I never had courage, and now have not even bluster. This would be humiliating had I still balls. As it is, even humiliation is neutral. Some of you out there can understand this. Together we constitute a large human club but we are of course clubless. We do not require private rooms for our elite lounges. We sit on a bench here, stand on a corner there. We hardly remember our mothers and do not care. Or we do and we do care. There is no difference in what we do or do not do.

  I am a goof guitar player, I believed in good shoes briefly but that belief too has succumbed to a risible and quaint erstwhile passionism, I will now go to bed. Lay me down to sleep, Jesus, you old bullyrag who first discovered these things I know.

  The Flood Parade

  I get back from the flood parade—a small flash flood is let through the streets to entertain the people—and discover my apartment filled with graduate students invited there by a colleague. They are watching television and he is testing a blowgun. I sit on a sofa next to a student. On the TV screen is a show featuring an actress I recognize as playing Miss Brooks from the show Our Miss Brooks; the actress appears to be the daughter of the woman who originally played Miss Brooks, Eve Arden. I inquire of the room if this is the daughter of Eve Arden and the students confirm it as if it is something everyone knows. They cannot possibly themselves know the show Our Miss Brooks or Eve Arden; their knowledge of popular culture is boundless if they know this to be Eve Arden’s daughter without knowing Eve Arden. The woman next to me lets her hand fall to my collar and does not remove it. I touch her hand there and we engage hands; she plays with my ear and I play with her fingers. She leans over me to adjust the TV and I see her breast, about the size and contour of a Hershey’s kiss. The party becomes very thick and this woman and I make a tour through it holding hands. We discover that we have flirted before and that I learned earlier that she is not available because she is involved with a young man some distance away who has threatened to kill himself if she leaves him. My position is that such an arrangement is unfortunate, and the woman agrees. A second woman at this point begins to vie for my affection in front of the first and I allow it to develop, watching the reaction of the first woman, whom I want badly. It is clear that she has taken her moral position with the welfare of suicides in mind. I drift around the party and discover I am in my underwear, not unlike the bulk of the partiers, but I nonetheless feel a little underdressed. I resolve to leave.

  Getting You Some Cocktail

  A cute girl with a nice pink backpack with a white cat in leaping silhouette on it has just gone by the window on a moped. I don’t need her.

  Last night a woman came and laid herself across both arms of the overstuffed chair I was in and asked if I did not want “some cocktail.” I said I did not know what “some cocktail” could mean but that I guess I wanted some. I touched her stomach. She was on one elbow across the arms of the chair and her stomach was firm. I’ll have cocktail if that’s the thing to have, I said. I admired the tension of her stomach that I had touched but did not so comment. She knew that I admired the tension of her stomach but did not so comment. I teared up a bit. She touched the side of my face, paying attention at the same time to people behind the chair who might witness this. This woman was vaguely redheaded but not in that arsenical juicy weird true-redheaded way. She was bleached out by troubles of her own, but holding it together. She was going to engineer to get me some cocktail and see that I had a decent time. I was most thankful to her.

  Solitude

  We were so loaded that these loose bricks outside Bobby’s place floated around in the house with us, directed by gentle commands like “Here, boy.” They wanted to float into the refrigerator when you looked for beer in there and you had to shoo them out. We did not want to asphyxiate a brick in the refrigerator.

  The meeting of the World Stone Club was called to order. Bobby started to read the agenda and the order broke down. Janey Farrington said all the girls were tired of taking off their shirts like it was the sixties and Julian said so what he was tired of his own name and wasn’t going to do that anymore either. This was funny, not going to “do” his name, like a drug, so Phyllis took her shirt off and showed herself to Julian and Julian said he wasn’t tired of that yet and he should not have been because in point of fact the shirts-off accord was best intended or designed or I should say, well I don’t know what I should say except that it was Phyllis above all the girls, maybe really by that point she was the only girl, who had any business taking her shirt off, aesthetically speaking. She has ski slopes and puffies and it gave you a buzz.

  I pushed a brick out of the way to see them clearly even though she had turned sort of privately to Julian, and the brick glided all the way out of the room into a lampshade in another room. Bobby’s mother had died last week and the house was starting to show it. Nobody mentioned her. I had liked her though I never said anything to her. She wore these pastel dresses with belts and had a permanent in her hair. I don’t know what she died of; she had not to my mind been sick and she was not old-looking either. It was in a small way like hearing June Cleaver or Harriet Nelson had died—you couldn’t believe
it but it probably happened. I was sitting there considering asking Bobby if he had buried his mother in the crawl space under the house like John Wayne Gacy when I looked over and Phyllis was on her knees against Julian on the sofa, grinding herself into his face, and Julian was crying and trying to suck on her, blubbering and slurping like the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a phrase I had never appreciated until that moment. He was a lonelyhearts and Phyllis had figured it out and she was giving him a tune to beat the band. It looked like a lot of fun. Her nipples were the color of the bricks, several of which were hovering near the action, like flies. Julian’s eyes were the same color red from his crying. It honest to God looked like he was crying those bogus tears of joy you hear about. I was ready to cry a little myself. Crying a little is a good thing if you can turn it off.

  This had never happened before, congress between members of the Stone Club during a meeting. The shirts-off thing had been political and we had been supposed to carry on like nudists. Now that the shirts-off thing had been repudiated, we were apparently free to act like reasonable people, so Phyllis mounted Julian and the rest of us watched and shooed bricks out of the way and wondered what Bobby had done to Mrs. Thames.

  I got up and called a state park in Georgia I had been thinking about and booked a cabin for a whole week for $264. Some outright solitude would do me good. With outright solitude you can do nothing, just lie there and not get up, or get up and lie back down, all day, or all night or any other stupid misuse of time because there is no one to look over your shoulder, if that is the right expression, and that is another thing about solitude, no need to worry about the right or wrong expression because you needn’t use any expressions at all.