Cries for Help, Various

by Padgett Powell

  Admit the woman and her daughter to your house so that they can go to the ecology conference without staying at the Zen hostel. Have it explained that this is the eco conference, this month, not the solar-panel workshop, next month, for which you initially agreed to let them stay in your house, because a friend of yours asked if this was feasible and you said it was, not paying attention to dates, so when the woman called you naturally assumed she was on about the solar-panel workshop, but she was not, and now you have accepted the mother-daughter eco team twice into your house. Have it explained that the program of intense stretching and lymph-liberating mojo that she purports to trade for the room will take at least two and a half hours and that Sally, the daughter, was born here, and the only reason she was born at all is because Sheila Harr, a famous crazy landlord in the area, sixteen years ago during the Danny Rolling reign of terror, when she, the woman, demanded iron bars on the ground-floor windows because someone’s boyfriend had merely crawled through a window to get to an upper room to get his shit back from the girl who’d kicked him out, and if an ordinary boyfriend just getting his shit could get in that easily what did it say about how easily Danny Rolling could cut all their heads off—on day fifteen Sheila Harr showed up with the iron bars, but she, the woman, was like, No I am already OUT of here, and went downtown to a large house with four men in it and took up with one of them, “And the rest is, well,” she says, smiling and indicating Sally with a motion of her arm not unlike Vanna White’s indicating a letter on the board, “history.” Regard ever so slyly Sally standing there, who says, “That’s great, Mom,” and heads for the bedroom you have lent them. As soon as the mother goes to the car to get the $1800 infrared pad they will sleep on because the room is freezing and they have the $1800 infrared pad, try to repair the girl, feebly, but try.

  “Are you in school?”

  “Eleventh grade.”

  Figure out a way to compliment her intelligence, which may not be vast but which looks vast insofar as the girl is still with this mother and therefore has the patience of Job and you think that her intelligence must somehow be as large as or nearly as large as her suffering.

  “You’re in the IB program?”

  “The whole school is sort of an IB program, it’s a magnet school.”

  Ah. And so how to rescue her? Lock the door on the mother in the yard? No: just stand there, thinking of Woody Allen and Roman P. Keep your eye on this girl for the next two days and see if you can do anything for her. You are an ass and this girl has had enough of assness but maybe you can slide something her way that will not be more assness. You will have your hands full with the mother, but still. Even tonight you will be up until midnight hearing about the spiritual healers in Sarasota Florida the mother is referring you to, while the daughter sleeps in the cold room. Listen to the ecologically ferocious mother’s twenty-minute shower from the safety of your own bed. You have told her about your own adventure with Jesus a few years ago and you may need Him again. You have withheld from her how He wears a dirty Pink Panther costume and gives bj to French husbands on family holiday. It will be interesting to see yourself try to tell her this; it will require your knowing that Jesus himself is witnessing your telling her this and chuckling at you as you do it. You must tip your hat to Jesus: when they say He is The Man, they are not kidding.

  It’s a new day: act like it. Put the behind behind. Appreciate the lunacy of that, of all advice. Just have a look at appreciate itself. If you inspect the weirdness of all advice, of the imploration that it be followed, you might have a look at the advisability, the integrity, the tenability of the imperative mood itself. Now that we have, just bag it.

  Cross the stream. Build a small perfectly shaped teepee-style Boy Scout campfire and watch it burn and put it out when you are done according to standard overkill practices so that if the woods burn down tomorrow you will be blameless, even in your own head. Recall how you have felt the times you have inadvertently burnt the woods down and appreciate that this feeling clear of guilt for having redundantly shoveled a fire apart even after you have drowned it twice will be a stronger good feeling, the freedom from the guilt, than the strong dumb feeling you have had doing all that nonsense to the fire. While having the strong dumb feeling knocking apart and drowning the tiny gratuitous fire that was not even that much fun to have sat beside and watched, look around the woods for the absent wildlife. Strain your ears; hear the flutter of a sparrow or a finch, and know that you can’t, but some people can, identify that bird by that flutter alone. Marvel at how some people became smart and some who once fancied themselves smart, that would be you, never were smart and never became smart, coasting along all that time without need to become smart because of the presumption that they (you) already were. You may even want to confess that you identified presumers of this sort with your best scorn until you joined the club. The appropriate expression for this surmise is “Shit.” You may go ahead now and say it, by the little late fire in the wee noise of the lone fluttering bird, aloud in the woods.

  The Indicative Mood

  I have read that half the bees are missing. There is a woman on French TV with glossy pink cream on her lips. Oh, surely that is not called cream. Right you are, it is called gloss. So say it again. No. You have slipped into the imperative mood. All right. You have seen a woman with not cream but gloss on her lips. Yes, I have seen a woman on French TV who has glossy pink gloss on her lips. How stupid I sound. The gloss is stupid—relax. You have slipped again. Stay in the indicative. You too. I will.

  What about the bees? I will not respond to that. Okay: Tell me about the bees. I will not respond to that. Okay: that half the bees are missing is interesting and possibly alarming but perhaps some details could help us along. The bees have just not come home. Your bee farmers are opening up hives and they are empty. Give me some wine. No. I would like some wine. Okay.

  An early car such as a Model-T Ford or a Model-A Ford was a simple thing and it had enough room around the engine that you could stand inside the hood and fix it. And the engine was simple enough that you could fix it. Now the bees are gone. We have come a long way in the wrong direction, or in a wrong direction, I think it fair to say. There is not space inside a car hood now for a bee to work, and half the bees are MIA. I love the category MIA. It means dead but we are too pusillanimous to say so. Goddamn that is a cute girl out there on the street.

  There is butter in parts of the world that has crystals of salt suspended in it. There is butter in parts of the world that has no salt in it.

  This deal wherein the women have to be covered up—I am not down with it. I have patience for perversity but for a person to have to walk around under a blanket just does not position itself well in my I-can-see-that scope. My I-can-see-that scope in fact does not have in its field of view people covered up unless it is dark at night and cold in the room and they want the covers on them. I am sorry. I have refocused my scope and I just can’t get that to come into view.

  I love a well engineered car even if a bee cannot get under the hood. You have got to admit they run better than they did in 1930. I concede you that ground but I maintain still that we have won the battle and lost the war. I will not contest you on that. The wine is good. We want more of it. We do. We are wine wanters. We are wanters. We want shit. We do. This is good. A boy is always praised for a good appetite. No one is praised for a poor appetite. A good appetite gets one in trouble later in life, and a poor appetite would have one be lean and healthy, trim as a garter snake on a log over a creek 200 yards from a family picnic. I went once to a social put on by a club called something like the Toasters. Someone’s backyard was devoted to passing out ice cream to the entire neighborhood. There were vats of ice cream of all stripe in commercial coolers in the yard. It was a riot of bloating and running and headfreeze and a weird happy panic among us who thought surely we were crashing this thing, before we knew that term, but surely we were uninvited and were going to be stopped from eating t
his ice cream, which we ate all the more indiscriminately for this fear of impending probation. I like the way you ended that with probation. Yes, it is not the precise word I wanted but I was in a rush insofar as that sentence looked capable of going on forever to end it, and possibly probation serves well precisely because it is not the right word but evokes a fuzzy neighborhood of possibility for the right word into which the audience can insert the right word. The audience are good people. I love good people. Me too.

  If I knew anything about weaving, and had me a setup, I would weave me a good rug today. I just feel like having a good rug under construction, and later like walking on something solidly built and durable and good under the feet and good to look at as you cross it and good to look at still after you have crossed it and sat down in a good leather chair with maybe your whiskey under a pleasant yellow cone of lamplight and a not smelly dog right nearby. I can even see crossing back over this rug and signaling the dog to come on and putting on boots and getting your shotgun and going out into the field and walking with the shotgun breached over your arm and flushing two quail and glancing at the dog, who looks from the quail to you, with a small raise of his brow at your not having fired at the quail, and you say to him, or her, Those birds flew away, didn’t they?, and the dog just resumes the walk. I can see all this. I wish I had a loom. The other stuff—the whiskey, the lamp, the estate with quail on it—would all fall into place. Yes it would. Like dominoes. Like world-class high-living self-important-but-not-so-important-that-we-do-not-know-how-to-be-a-modest-gentleman dominoes.

  I don’t think a compound modifier of that absurd a dimension is actually legitimate in the indicative mood. I don’t care. Well if we are to bend rules we might as well break rules. Oh, no, that is not true. That is not the case. I would say, “Don’t go jumping to seclusions,” except it is imperative and not that funny. That look that the dog gives the gentleman in denial who modifies his dominoes queerly—that look contains an essence we are after and cannot state. Look—a well clad family on the street! I will not respond to that. Point taken.

  The dog sees the birds flush an instant or more after he has smelled them sitting there in the bush like roasting hens. The birds blow up just off the ground in this agreeable burst of flavor and noise, and then get some air inside their feathers making the entire place smell like bird hay, and sit there generating the sufficient energy and correct air pressure for an actual flight that will carry them out of reach of his mouth, and the click of metal and the explosion that usually immediately signals birds being in this dog’s mouth does not happen. The dog follows the flight of the birds and his gaze comes to rest on the man in a smooth unbroken arc, not unlike the way one moves his fingers through his hair after someone has declined to shake one’s hand.

  You mean the dog does not follow the birds one way until they are out of sight and then snap his head back at the man as if to say What the fuck you sumbitch did you do that for? I will not respond to that. Point taken, I will reform it: the dog looks smoothly from the disappearing birds to the man in one motion, almost like an eyeroll. Yes. Like the time we saw that girl go into the seizure who we thought was just rolling her eyes. Somewhat like that. My point is she appeared to be doing one thing with her eyes and then it proved she was really doing something else. And in just this way the dog appears to be following the quail and then he is looking at the man, with one eyebrow raised. The eyebrow raised says, What did you not shoot for? Oh, yes, and it says more than that. It says, Why are you not a man? It says, You are not a gentleman with an estate with quail on it with a whiskey back at the house that will need be refreshed near where I lie not on the stupid rug which feels much better than the wood floor, you do not even have the house or the whiskey or the lamp or the rug, you are just a boob who thinks he wants to weave a rug. He says, Who do you think you are, a Senator from Mississippi?

  Dogs never roll their eyes. That is their chief appeal to man. If you could get a dog that would do an eyeroll, and you were convinced it was always at the expense of others and not at your own expense—man! The eyeroll dog would set a new pace in dogs, would it not? Not accepted. The eyeroll dog would set a new pace in dogs. You could make a million dollars with a dog that would roll its eyes. It’s a niche wide open.

  Losing the Wax

  How did I go from being full of bluster and cheer to being empty and afraid? Usually a man has to be incarcerated, or see his fellows slaughtered, or lose a child, or . . . doesn’t he? Normally, in a normal person, yes, I think a blow of some sort would be required to install the fearful void where there had been the hale stand-and-deliver. But a coward may just lose his sheen, as it were, and precipitate into his true state, overnight, or over a few nights, or over some modest period of time, without any sudden cause. The sheen after all was false, a gloss, like the thin wax sprayed on an apple.

  The wax wears off. Spots appear, the flesh softens, consumers (friends, lovers) back off, and one is taken from the top shelf, even if just in his mind, and is headed for a bag to be sent to the sauce factory. One defense is a commensurate loss of mind, which will allow the sodden apple to be giddy about the soddening. The commensurate loss of mind can be voluntary, as a tactic of camouflage or diversion, or it may too come naturally as a contingent wearing off of essentially the same wax. At any rate the empty, afraid, ex-hale, post-stand-and-deliver fool will not accept at first that his wax is gone and that he is in decline. And then he will.

  Marbles

  I am sitting here without my marbles together, envying other people sitting where they are sitting with their marbles together. I have in mind a certain poet in New York, seventy-five or so, in his apartment knowing all that he knows, arranging some lines on paper that advance evidence he knows yet a little more than the prodigious sum we already knew he knew.

  Bebek

  Bebek up the way is so green that I start weeping. Why on earth would a spectrally green village on the Bosphorus, in a country not mine, make me weep? Do I really mean weep? Or was I not just blubbering, or chortling sad, chuckleheadedly morose, and perhaps not over Bebek or its green but over something else—like my lost loves, all the girls gone, the women who’ve woken up and left? Perhaps I was snotting up for those numberless waves, triggered by the improbably fresh green of trees along blue water. They’ve taken their underwear and gone, Captain. Let us make eggs, then.

  It is not that Bebek is green but that the green is containing so much yellow, suggesting perhaps that the trees are artificial, possibly high-quality synthetic trees, that makes me burst into tears. But I burst into tears less than I . . . crumble into tears. I see these bright trees, who knows but that they are not Robert Penn Warren’s infamous arsenical green, off-color in a way that suggests they are fake, or under klieg lights, which suggests deep down that Bebek is Miami, which is a globalization crime of the first order, and I begin to blubber. Blubber, and wander toward the phony trees or the trees that are so well lit and real that they look unreal, and blather. The uncertainty as to whether the trees are spectrally real or spectrally unreal is enough to make a sane man cry, and I am not a sane man. The last moment I was arguably sane was in the sixth grade. I could spell, I could impress the teacher, I thought I was the smartest boy in the room—already, alas, the seed of lunacy was present. I was never sane. Are infants sane? If they are, when, at what moment, does the bending begin? Is it a pang of hunger not satisfied immediately, a pang of hunger satisfied too soon? Is it a soiling of the body? Is it the assault of phenomena impossible to comprehend—like plastic-looking trees?

  Yesterday I was sitting in my golf cart not golfing but reading when I saw peripherally an orange thing moving that I expected would prove a tabby cat, odd out in the field where I had parked the cart in the sun to read. It was not a cat but a fox, trotting at a good smooth clip, a bright yellowy fox on his way past with business on his mind. His big puffy tail followed him straight out. His pencil legs were a scissoring little blur. His head did not bounce
but glided a foot above the ground on a perfect level line. He was indeed tabby-cat-orange, or -yellow. I gave him a little kissing noise which made him speed up to relative cover and distance, where he stopped and regarded me, and then resumed his course, perceptibly a little more quickly than before. This fox was entirely sane.

  Hoping Weakly

  I have spent some time this morning cleaning the gradu from the thumb notches on my Randall Number 23 knife. That occupied most of my mind for the duration of the cleaning. A small portion of my brain was left over with which to speculate simultaneously that I will be non-productive if I take a sabbatical next year, that I am in fact non-productive now. Which is why the bulk of my brain is engineering how to run a fingernail back and forth in the thumb-notch grooves cleaning out the gradu. The gradu itself is most likely actually metal polish with which I have idly polished the knife itself when similarly occupied by nothing better to do than shine up an already shiny knife.

  Now that I have declared myself idle I have time and inclination to look out the window and appreciate the weather. The sky contains heavy low blue flat clouds slowly sliding to the north and looking like rain. I have heard some thunder. The humidity is high enough to have wilted the banded water snake skin I have that I dumbly left draped over a table edge the last time the humidity was high enough to wilt the skin. When that humidity evaporated, if you may speak of evaporation with respect to humidity, the skin of course crisped out and preserved the angle of drapage. I have been waiting for a bout of new high humidity to allow the skin to relax and flatten out and today I have it, and the skin is limp and restored, and it was touching the Randall Number 23 when I found it, and I took up the knife expecting to see salt contamination where the skin had touched it. I saw no salt damage but I did see the gradu of old polish in the thumb notches so I have applied my energies and resources, nearly all of them, to its removal.