Cries for Help, Various

by Padgett Powell

  On purchasing in the New World: as I have intimated previously, this is a curious operation. The credit cards my wife happily bounded over hill and dale with are useless, as is cash, had she any. Moreover, most strangely, outright bartering or trading also seems to be not done. I got the parrots, for example, by merely looking curiously at them through the slits in the box top, lining up their small bright eyes with mine, and eventually also lining up my eyes with those of the proprietor of the parrot business, the man sitting beside the box of parrots. He gently pushed the box toward me and gave a very slight backhand gesture near the box that clearly said, Take it away. Nothing was required of me but that I comply, and the sense was palpable that a large social error of some sort would have resided in my not complying. I take it that the parrot man can go look at something that attracts him or that he needs and it will similarly be made his, and that at some point I too will make this dismissive gesture regarding something I have that someone has lingered upon for a moment. It is a rather thrilling non-commercial commerce and I hope it works. Here’s a good saying: Do not be in too big a hurry to lick the red off your candy.

  At the track they told me my silks needed pressing and that a girl would be by my place to attend to it. The next day a young woman named Evita arrived and put the place in tip-top shape, bed made, floors spotless, the silks hung on a wire, a bowl of bright fruit, giant camellias floating in a dish. She showed me around with some pride as if it were a place new to me, which it was. I said, “Mighty tidy,” which phrase Evita repeated, apparently not comprehending but liking it. She got on the bed and patted it next to her. I lay down with her and she instituted unapologetic and hungry carnality. The bed was mussed and she got up and put it to rights and left. Here’s a good saying: Apply shingles from the bottom up.

  I am a member of the Country Club for Revolutionaries Only. The clubhouse is of unpainted cinder block and about twelve feet by twenty feet, a bar and a few tables. We drink but water. The members speak of scoring well or not scoring well, happily, but there is no golf course. Nor is there a tennis court or a pool or any property whatsoever outside, as near as I can tell. We toast to the revolution, we share the water, we speak of shooting well or not well, happily. There is another club in town sometimes spoken of: the Country Club for Those Who Mourn Lost Spouses. There is a latent note of derision when mention of this club is made, and an almost tacit tongue-clucking that says the sons of bitches over there (playing actual golf and drinking booze), as opposed to the sons of bitches over here (playing phantom golf and drinking water), do not know what they are doing. Here’s a good saying: What goes around comes around.

  My two parrots, the two who stayed with me—Polly, usually on the cornice, to whom I closely listen for another pronouncement upon wanting a cracker, and the other, mostly on my shoulder, who seems now to tease me by feinting at my earlobe—I have noticed are colored exactly as are my racing silks, green and black and pink. That this coincidence, or very opposite of coincidence, took me so long to notice is disturbing. It forces me to wonder if the parrots who escaped were colored differently and if the non-alignment, as it were, of their colors is what persuaded them to fly away. It forces me to ponder the question of coincidence, which I see in Darwinian terms, or not: is the likeness of my birds and my colors a kind of natural selection, or is it a sign that there is a designing instrument in our midst? When I am in my silks it appears that there are three birds in my bungalow, one of them larger and less bright. Here’s a good saying: Don’t hesitate to insulate your house, especially the floor.

  When I spot my wife at a distance gamboling freely over hill and dale there is a small throating of sadness. I wish I had been smarter at marriage. I was not altogether smart. It is, a divorce, not unlike bringing a meal along slowly and then through neglect burning this dish or that, and then perhaps another, and ultimately facing the situation, after long work, of an inedible repast, guests milling around unsatisfied and ready to head out for fast food. All that was needed was an ounce or two more of circumspection and caution and witness. The vision of the ruined meal will linger.

  Yesterday at the market I saw a bright and well-fed child with a parrot on her shoulder. I have not ventured out of doors with mine. I inquired of the child why her bird did not fly away. “Because his wings are clipped,” she said, in a crisp British accent.

  “And he knows that?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said, confident of this intelligence. “He sticks his head in my mouth,” she added, as if to bolster the case for the knowingness of her bird. She opened her mouth and turned to the bird, which did incline his head into her mouth.

  “He eats from there.”

  “You put seed on your tongue?”

  “No, food, when I’m chewing.” The bird looked at me as if to suggest I was not quite with it. The child was looking elsewhere, through with my not being with it.

  I was comfortable with not being with it. That is a function, I think, of the New World: not only is angst for being out of it gone, the matter is somewhat to be chuckled at that one ever fretted about being in the know, about anything. Here’s a good saying: It is quite all right to put all the eggs in one basket if you watch that basket.

  Today there was a roundup of the cute pink pigs. They were assembled into the town square and told to sit and they did, like dogs. They were examined by a person in a white coat whom I took to be a veterinarian but who I also suspected was merely a person in a white coat, perhaps a steward’s coat from a ship. At the terminus of each examination he whistled and a child came from the surrounding audience and gave the pig completing his examination a candy bar. This the pig deftly unwrapped with clever hooves that surprised me, and devoured swiftly—-“devoured swiftly” is archaic-sounding but perfectly apt. The pig then also spoke to the child: “Thank you, sir,” or “Thank you, madam.” Most of the children bowed or curtsied then to the pig. What was most startling in this perhaps hallucinatory vision was not the dexterity of the unwrapping or the pigs’ speaking in human tongue but their use of these terms “sir” and “madam” and the formal bowing and curtsying by the children. These were things I thought from the Old World and I did not know how or why they got in the New World, and why they would be regarded fondly, these old manners. The pigs, when all had been examined and fed, were dismissed, and I came to realize I had just witnessed some kind of mythological, or myth-making, amalgam of ritual: of, say, The Three Pigs (With No Wolf) and Halloween. There seemed an affinity between this affair without its wolf and its costumes and my country club without its golf and its liquor; in the New World we made a strength of absence. Everyone was much pleased with this afternoon of nice pigs and manners.

  I trot in pink and green flying silks, I cavort with Evita on crisp white sheets, I see pigs behave, I have not a trouble in the world, I despair. What is it about me? Is it the shadow of the gamboling ex-wife, the retardation that having a gamboling ex-wife suggests? As a human being, I realize, I am a nubbin. The pigs are ambassadors next to me. They take candy from children with grace. Could I yet perhaps learn, myself, how to behave?

  I lay down in front of the bungalow as it started to rain and observed, for hours, the square foot or so of dirt before my head. I saw a preponderance of animals so small I was not sure they were not grains of the soil, and indeed the matter of classifying animal/vegetable/mineral became a task beyond me as the earth was bombarded by the huge and fat explosions of rain pocking the ground. Once a centipede hove into view. Three segments of a worm bent into and out of sight. An ant was struck by a drop of rain and shook his head to clear it. The dirt itself moved, buoying the lighter components of itself up, the heavier down, and migrating onto my face. Evita came and picked me up. She put me in the shower and braced me against a wall of it with her forearm and washed me roughly with a rag, as if I were a dog. She put us to bed and lay with me gently and said, “I am Our Lady of Eternal Succor.” Polly was up on the cornice as if she were observing us and
I thought it a perfect time for her to say, a second time, if in fact she said it the first time, that she wanted a cracker, but Polly did not open her mouth.

  Evita is most tender and I continue to regard Polly, and Polly us, and I cop an epiphanic glow. I have a tincture of an inkling of a good saying, and suddenly see that a good approach, instead of waiting for a bird to say something again that it might not have already said, is to assume that a bird wants a cracker whether it can say so or not, and to get your ass up and give a bird a cracker and ask yourself, motivationally, just what the hell is wrong with you that you have not been providing all birds crackers with all you have. A good saying: in a New World behave in a new way as a new man. Unhorse the conquistador.

  Wagons, Ho!

  Wagon boss: Today there are fewer Indians than before. Clouds are swaying up there in the big sky like the bellies of belly dancers. Our teeth feel loose. We are not possessed of resolve. We wonder if the same doubt has seized the red man. We do not think of him as often subject to doubt. The idea of him in his teepee cowering from a want of self-confidence disturbs us as much or more than the idea of our own cowering. We are not afraid of him, mind you, but of something less tangible that we cannot name. It is precisely the murkiness of this fear that makes it disturbing. Alas, I suppose I am saying we fear fear itself far more than a thing to be feared. As cornball as that may sound, I am afraid it is true. We do not fear resolve, right or wrong, but we are made much uncomfortable by want of resolve. It is easy to understand in this light how General Custer appeared so delighted at the end. The music was about to stop playing for him and his band, but until it did his needle was in the groove.

  The only party not unhappy in this camp is Cook, who pounds away at something too hard to eat in its native state and all day has in his brain the notion delicious. Or maybe the notion is good enough that these bastards will not complain within earshot. Either way, he beats food with resolve. We sit here without.

  We will need move all these wagon wheels, broken or not, over here, and leave those skulls alone, and push these tiara sets into the woods. (We never contest the unfathomable on the Inventory; the labor required to fill out Form 0009.09, Derequisitioning Items on the Inventory for Which No Earthly Use Can Be Divined, dwarfs the labor to carry the unfathomable to California; we can possibly use the tiaras for a Little Miss Prairie Beauty Contest; possibly put them on the bulls for a rodeo.) We will be firm with our untoward and uncharitable desires, and forsake fresh meat, and be so incredibly generous with children that we burst into tears and spook the children, and fear the Indians but never show it, except as we run like hell, and just in general I think we are ready to accede that it is all pretty much too much for us, the ordnance questions, the panniers, the supply lines, the weather, the hearty meals or not and the hearty hopes or not, it’s all just . . . .

  Settler one: Your position, perhaps because it is so ill-defined, is certainly not for that less than eminently defensible. You have our sympathies entire.

  Settler two: I might take exception to one matter within our leader’s resolve manifesto. I would like one of those tiara sets before we push them into the woods. Or two. It might be nice to have a friend wear one with me. I question also the curious phrase “push them into the woods.” Do we severally do this with our feet, or do we fire up the dozer, why not hurl them into the woods, why into the woods, why, now that I am alert to it, get rid of the tiara sets at all? Are they a liability? Why can they not be merely left alone like the skulls? If we don’t want them (the tiaras, and I see no sense in not wanting them), we could even, say, put them on the skulls before we invest in the peculiar energy of by whatever means transporting them into the woods. In short, I think our leadership has gone daft. I want a tiara. I will herewith lead a revolt on behalf of any others who wish to have a tiara, or two, or who at least question the wisdom, for want of better term, of pushing them into the woods.

  Wagon boss: The Indians have not manifested themselves on the ridge lines of the surrounding hills in such prodigious number that we lose momentarily our breath and wonder if we are not in some kind of eclipse before finding ourselves indeed in some kind of eclipse, that of our very lives in one of those maddening tomahawk storms, those hurricanes of stone and hoof and yelling paint and buckskin and blood and everyone, including ourselves, hitting us with one thing or another while we generally find it more and more difficult to breathe, more and more difficult to see, more and more difficult to stand up, more and more difficult, alas, to keep on keepin’ on. The Indians have not shown us this unhappy formation and preparedness for, really, quite some time now. I wonder if it is not that collection of tiaras somehow protecting us. My order to dispose of them may be imprudent.

  I have never thought about the tiara much. I have thought much about the Indian. One of the most recurring thoughts I have in that venue is of the last hurricane they put us through, which so many of us, constituting so few of the original number of us, somehow survived. I was personally on my knees, having given up; I was dementedly lining up fallen tomahawks on the ground in front of me, in an interesting head-to-tail bric-a-brac pattern, when I noticed an Indian pony go closely by me and wink at me. This happened then several more times, perhaps five or six, interrupting me at the business of arranging the tomahawks attractively on the ground. The pony kept winking, as if telling me that it would be all right, that this was not the disaster that it was his job to help make it all look like, that I was not to worry overmuch. So I did not, and eventually quit my brocade of tomahawks and fondly watched the revolutions of the winking pony exclusively. And here I am today, and I think now that I too would like to have a tiara. I don’t think I need two. No, I don’t, I don’t want two. I just want the one.

  All of these pelts are good to go. Had we any idea where the fur traders are we would be sitting prettier. We will be eating beaver-tail sandwiches by the estimate of the quarterback, the quartermaster, for six weeks, no exceptions.

  Nearly every time we slake our thirst of the effects of the blistering sun by guzzling water from the clear cool mountain streams, face down like dogs, we discover about a hundred feet upstream something big and putrid and dead, or I should say big and dead and putrid to more accurately reflect the sequence of perception. What you first see, actually, is something big enough that you notice it at all, and then when it does not retreat at your approach you surmise it is dead, and by then you are sufficiently upon it to revel in its inevitable putridness. So we discover, every time we drink of lifesaving cool water, something big and dead and putrid in it. And we move on, to the music of steel and leather and oncoming gastrointestinal complaint.

  I was once struck by an arrow so sharp and so deftly put in me that, after the initial sting, which I ineffectively swatted at and decided had been a large carnivorous insect of so fearful a description that I was lucky not to have seen it, I went about my day, not discovering the arrow until I reclined upon it that evening. Perhaps as many as twenty-five of my pioneer brethren and sistern may have, must have, seen this wicked protuberance from my back and said nothing, operating, I suppose, under the general directive we obey out here not to dwell on the negative.

  One of the supreme difficulties of living on an advancing frontier such as ours is that we may not have dogs and cats. We try, but they, like, we guess, get lost, or decide that the nomad life is not for them and just wordlessly slip off to make more permanent homesteads along the way. We have many (unconfirmed) reports that the Indians do have dogs and cats. If so, this will be an area for investigation in the matter of final reparations and restitution in the grievance settlements.

  Here is what we wear on our shirt sleeves: mud, blood, snot, not feelings. Our feelings we wear somewhere inside our vests, close to our chests, like grubs in moist wood. This is best.

  The Cork

  I make a good firm precise cut with the razor blade into the cork, from one side of the cork to the longitudinal axis. The cork is a segment of a c
one, the diameter of one end approximately twice that of the other end, both ends flat. I am too stupid to know the name of this geometric figure and too stupid to know offhand, or even with industry, where to find out the name. “With industry” is some kind of vagueness by which I might mean crossing the room and getting the dictionary and then not knowing what to look up—cone? cork? I might mean a call to the reference desk at the library and then having to stammer, “Do you know how old-fashioned fishing corks were shaped, actually also the corks that were put into bottles as stoppers which were larger at one end than the other so that they stopped before going into the bottle?” And if I could get an affirmative, I would then say, “Well, what is the figure of this cork called? I need to know.”

  At this point the librarian would not say, “Why do you need to know?” as he, or indeed she, might want to but would be prevented from by a consideration of professionalism.

  So I would not be able to say, “Oh, you know, so if I were to try to write about cutting one of these corks for the purpose of inserting into it some fishing line, I would not have to waste a lot of words in an awkward and tedious and probably unserving description of the kind of cork I am talking about, I could just name it with the obscure geometer’s term that no one would know the meaning of and be done with it, and given that no one understood what kind of cork I was talking about anyway, in the absence of the long imprecise description at least he could get on with it. And there is a certain kind of person who might be bothered by not knowing the term for the cork and he might himself, if he was this kind of person, and if he was sufficiently bothered by it, go to the dictionary, but there is the other sort of person who would be unbothered by not knowing the term and just breeze on, gratified, perhaps even unconsciously, but gratified nonetheless, that he did not have to wade through the vague and tedious description of the cork which leaves him no better informed of it than the proper name which eludes him but which, the fumbling description, requires of him considerable time in the reading thereof.”