Cries for Help, Various

by Padgett Powell

  The librarian I am not going to call might, yes, be a woman, and may I say here that perhaps the most beautiful woman I have ever seen is a reference librarian? A woman so beautiful that men decline the opportunity to speak to her at all, and indeed one whom I am not at complete liberty to speak to in all the ways I might wish to speak to her, by which I mean only of course all the ways, or some of the ways, chiefly the intimate ways, that a man might be expected to want to speak to a woman he regards as the most beautiful he has ever seen.

  Into the cork I press the monofilament fishing line, by holding a length of it tightly as one holds dental floss and pressing it into the razored slit that describes a plane to the longitudinal center of the cork, there we’ve been through that quite enough I think. Now we have something to behold. We have this cork, handsome in its lines whatever they may be actually called: a nice set of circles (two) and diagonals (two in transection or 180 of them if you elected to conceive of one line per degree) connecting them, the larger end of the cork fluting down to the other, or the smaller flaring up to the larger, as you choose. The cork’s surface has its agreeable mottle, its imperfections adding up to the sense of a perfect imperfectness, a phenomenon in nature (viz marble, for example) that we find very pleasing—you know, rose-mole all stipple on a trout and glory be to God for dappled things, old Hopkins was all over it. Alas, we have the humble, brindled cork, only a piece of tree bark actually, but a piece of bark machined into the demi-cone with its precision, even if our vocabulary lacks the precision to name it, and through the cork now penetrating the center of one end and emerging from the center of the other end a fine plastic line, whether greenish or bluish always suggestive of water in its color, this string from the laboratory running precisely through this thing which floats taken from the side of a tree.

  Why am I on about this cork and its new alien, plastic axis? Well, for one thing, as you can tell, I find something aesthetically pleasing about its construction, its antinomies, its little ironies, even its indictment of my intellectual fundament, or perhaps I mean my epistemological grasp, by which I might mean my sense that that summer-school course in geometry following the tenth grade, which might serve as a symbol for my education entire, was not adequate. For another, this cork sits here in its pleasing contrasts telling me I might even go fishing. There, fishing, with cork upright and approximately one-half submerged, in the slim event—it is the modern world—a fish takes it down, it will displace water to a greater degree as it sinks and then upon actual submersion the water will close over the larger plane of its top with considerable force and effect a very agreeable little snap or pop, and this sound—coupled with the undiluted boyhood thrill of game on and the enduring surprise of seeing the cork disappear—will startle me in a finite and uncomplicated and most pleasing way. Something more involved and more mundane may ensue—a fish one does not want, a fish injured one does not wish to injure, one’s bait robbed, etc.—but the moment of the cork in the water, at the ready, is pure. I have no need, however, of taking it fishing: I have the cork with the line through it, and that is enough. It is itself, a thing I have made. It is there. It does not bode complications. It is not a telephone, say, that is going to ring. It does not contain an assault upon me of the world and my dim access unto it.

  I could now freely call the most beautiful reference librarian in the world and not ask the name of the figure of the cork. I could say, “I have a thing I do not need trouble you with the naming of. I remember you from a party. I saw you and was struck by you. You could be making a living with your looks, professionally, I mean, and I trust you do not think I am being vulgar, though I suppose I am. Let it be: I am vulgar. You could be comfortable and famous by contriving to let men, and women, look at you, as opposed to not being comfortable or famous and having men call you up and ask you the name of the figure of the cork they might be wasting their little lives playing with. I saw you and was struck by you to such a degree that the obviousness of carnality went right by us as I stepped up and talked to you, openly and cleanly, except for the fact that I correctly noticed that no other men were stepping up to talk to you because they were stuck in the carnality of their imaginings of you. You bring that on in a mortal, you effing librarian. It is just that I am a little past mortal, or not yet there. I have no doubt been there—there was a time I would have run from the room as other men, or stepped up and proposed intercourse in some properly masked fashion, but now I have reached the cork stage. I have this cork here, it is not a phone that is going to ring—and even when I say that I see a comparatively agreeable Bakelite phone of the forties with a rotary dial and five-digit numbers and a live operator you might know the first name of, not the instrument of complex tumor-bearing mind-scattering hell that a phone represents today—I have this cork, I don’t have you, I want this cork, I might want you.”

  That would be okay, saying that, not unlike seeing the cork go down, before the ensuing mundane complications of the catch or the repudiation, the tangle of lives, the impure disentangling that is always necessary and never final.

  Not Much Is Known

  There are people one wants to know, and people one does not want to know, and of course people one would want to know and people one would not want to know if one met them. A few people know a lot of people, many people know a few people, and some people know just some people. It comes down to the impulse to know everyone or to know no one. It’s a distillation column. At the top are the gregarious everyone-knowers, at the bottom the hermits. At the top the saints, at the bottom the killers. Some killers just want to kill one person, some want to kill hundreds or thousands. At the very bottom is a man who knows no one but himself, not well, and wants to kill himself.

  He has one pair of shoes and once had a dog. The dog liked to eat ice cream from a bowl, and its impeccable house habits and grooming habits deteriorated after it was struck by a car. After that it was accidentally closed in a car in the sun and died of heat prostration and the man found the dog with its collar improbably caught in the seat springs under the car seat. He, the man, was about twelve. The dog was not, as the expression goes, still warm; the dog was very hot. The man, or boy, pulled the dog out by the collar once he got him free of the undercarriage of the seat and laid him on a patch of green grass to cool down. He went inside and reported to his mother and father that Mac was dead.

  Mac was a wire-haired terrier and looked handsome there cooling in the grass. His life had been hard after the accident with the car: a pin in his hip, the shitting on the patio, the no longer having a festive taste for ice cream from a bowl. The father freshened a hole in the backyard that had been begun by the boy for an underground fort and buried Mac in it. When later he could not find his reading glasses it was theorized that they had slipped from his pocket into Mac’s grave, and the mother asked the boy to dig Mac up and look for the glasses. What? the boy asked, and the mother then suggested it was not after all a good idea and desisted in the request that the boy dig the dog back up before the boy asked, as he later felt he would have, why he and not his father—who had alone conducted the burial and alone selected the depression left by the boy’s abandoned fort— why he and not the father was to dig the dog up, looking for the father’s, not his, glasses. The dog died trapped in a salmon-colored Renault. It was not known who closed him in it.

  Not much else is known. It is not known why we become more frightened or saddened by things as we age rather than less.

  Matter of Time

  He would regard the objects around him and remark on them. He would regard the objects around him and not remark on them. He would not regard the objects around him and remark on them. He would not regard the objects around him and not remark on them.

  These dispositions came and went, overlapping each other, mingling equally or one dominating for a time, then the others, in any order. But over time he came to see that he had observed them more or less in the given order, and that they had, while enjoying over
laps and recessions, succeeded each other like phases of the moon. He was now not regarding things and not remarking on them. It was agreeable but left him little to do. The difficulty, among others, with observing and remarking on things was that it was too much to do, as was observing and not remarking, as was not observing and remarking anyway. So he felt that if he felt there was too little to do in not observing things and not remarking on them, that this was a trivial sensation that would pass and give way to the great unbusy and wise calm he was after.

  Traveling from point to point was next: it was clearly, literally, pointless in the long run. In the short term it was just dailiness and the dull business of surviving the days. In surviving the days people were trying to lengthen their time on earth in order to reduce mind and body as much as possible to a skeleton before stepping into the grave. It seemed to him that that could be accomplished more elegantly and with less waste by just sitting in a good chair. “Let’s get this show on the road,” he said one day, the last thing he ever said, and picked his chair and sat.

  For a moment he fretted the position of the chair as to whether it was in the sun or not, or in too much sun if it were in the sun, before realizing that that fretting was bootless because the sun would lower and leave him no matter where he sat, and he was not going to follow it. If he were going to follow the sun, he might as well take city buses to and fro all over the city and observe the world and issue copious remarks upon it. He might as well live a long chattering gay life before hopping into his hole all bones. He almost thought that people must be attempting, in their festive pointless frenetic living, to be gathering momentum which would carry their bones into the next world still animate. Perhaps in the next world there would be no forces to oppose the energies of a skeleton and it would, with an ounce of momentum, go on forever. That could possibly explain why people insisted on running their marathon daily lives as they did, going from point to point, eating, observing, making their points, delivering their opinions, then excuse-me resting up for tomorrow’s round. They were trying to deliver their frames unto eternity with a running start. There they planned to go on chattering forever and forever gay, as clicking and clacking bones, no longer pestered by, or pestered in a different way by, weight problems. They were quite clearly trying to remain in the sun all day and all night if they could. The sun was a very symbol of what he had come to quit in quitting the regarding and the remarking and the going. He had also quit the sun.

  He sat in the odd corner of the patio, then, having quit. Matter of time, he thought, matter of time. That meant more than he wanted it to mean, so rather than ponder it—a species of observing, remarking, going—he reissued it: Matter of time now, matter of time.

  Matter of time.

  He was perhaps not the happiest man alive, but he was, he was sure, not the unhappiest, and he thought he had a good chance of being the happiest man not alive. That was tenable, and a matter of time would tell.

  Not regarding the world and not remarking on it from his chair in the sun or not in the sun was going to prove an unworkable position from which to execute his duties as a judge of circuit court, so Mr. Hollingsworth made preparations to retire. The day he did retire he came home to find one of his daughters telling him that his wife had lost her mind. His orientation and attitude in his chair required for that a momentary adjustment.

  His daughter, who had never been fond of him, was now fondly showing him a drawerful of loose longhand pages that she claimed was the surest sign her mother had finally gone over the edge. He admitted to himself that that much writing under any voluntary circumstances did look suspicious, but these pages looked even odder than they might have in their condition and context. They were as beat-up as hard-used currency, and stained like cookbook pages, and had among them snapshots and birthday candles and a screwdriver. Even a glance suggested they were somehow about Nathan Bedford Forrest, a confederate general whom he, Mr. Hollingsworth, knew something about but whom he didn’t know she, Mrs. Hollingsworth, knew anything about. A second glance, which he made sitting at the kitchen table attempting to dislocate his daughter from his ear, suggested that what Mrs. Hollingsworh knew about General Forrest appeared to be entirely fanciful. He could not give his attention to the document because the daughter was now silently but desperately gesturing for him to come look through the keyhole of the bathroom door at, presumably, his wife. “She’s taking a bath!” the daughter stage whispered, as if it were the height of outrage. He found the idea of peeping at his wife agreeable, if the daughter were not there. The entire situation here suggested that somehow his wife had also managed to take a seat in the chair of disregard that did not follow the sun. It appeared, moreover, that they had sat down simultaneously and independently in the same chair, in one another’s laps as it were. They had been remote from each other for some time. This was a surprising and agreeable new intimacy, if that’s what it was. For the sake of simplicity and hope in a better world, Mr. Hollingsworth decided to assume that that’s what it was. He and his wife were, somehow, magically and newly intimate.

  He said aloud, “Hot damn Vietnam,” part sign of his cheer and part signal to his daughter that if she thought her mother insane she could afford to batten down for more high water. She could come away from that keyhole and sit at the dining-room table and hear some truly odd music from him.

  A Local Boy

  The Milledgeville Mole bears down upon himself with ruby-red precision. He takes coffee in his tea. His underwear is stained. There are global coordinates in his brain. The activation quotient for the bank robbery is below the level at which he would need find a gun and commence. The doughnuts are more important, from Ryall’s, where the heavy girl in the weird old-fashioned light-green uniform dress is smart and nice to him. Her teeth are okay, and his are not.

  His camp on the riverbank across from where Sherman camped is a dismal mess. Coons came and redid the feng shui the last three nights running. He feels there is mildew and coon spit on all his effects, even on the Grundig console radio that weighs a hundred pounds that he cannot move or listen to because there is no power but which looks very good there, like he is somebody. With all the coon spit and the mildew he would most like a flood and then a fire, or a fire and then a flood, to clean away the soot, or maybe it would be better to move altogether. Where did Sherman camp next, he wonders. Go with the flow, historically thinking. Why did Sherman not become President? Why Grant? Why is he, the Milledgeville Mole, an unemployed lout and not a fine bank president with a Rotary Club meeting this morning—a breakfast with a steam table!—or the owner say of the big Ford dealership out 441? He would live in a big house out on the lake and his pets would be dogs, big expensive dogs you take to the vet in their own SUV. He would not be predated upon by coons. The coons took every generic fig newton he had. A coon, he has noticed, does not leave something for later and a coon does not overlook anything, ever. They are like smell itself, if that makes sense. They should be used in airport security.

  He flew to Las Vegas for the purposes of playing in the World Series of Poker and to play guitar with the group Van Halen but neither of these ventures worked out. He fell back on—he was a little tired of the expression to fall back on, but it was handy, and his mother had used it a lot in instructing him on how to live—he fell back on house painting for two weeks after that. The Las Vegas thing did not work out at the Milledgeville airport, where he had no identification to get on the plane with. A plane is not a Greyhound bus, he is fond of saying, or was, he no longer is. God his shoes are thin and rank and shitty-looking. If he could steal a pair of stout shiny shoes it would be a way of feeling better about things. He wonders where he is in the water column of history. He feels he is sideways to a lamb and talking to the worms. A school girl kicked him with a pair of these shoes they wear that have contrasting stitching like big dental floss, and he would like a pair of those, very effective weird-looking shoes. “Excuse me,” he periodically says to himself, “I have t
o go kill someone now.”

  Mao

  When we see the baby, it is swaddled in a tight charcoal wool coat that suggests Chairman Mao. It is held gently in place beneath the seat of a buckboard by the hobnailed boots of the coachman. From the baby’s vantage the seat above it is a maneuver of wood and steel, and the boots of the coachman are towers of oiled leather. The heel of each boot holds a fold of the Mao coat to the buckboard floor. The jarring and jolting of the buckboard produces a finally pleasant aggregation of shocks that affect the child with the sopor of morphine. It is a not unhappy baby.

  When the baby is older, and all of these impressions that can be are assimilated—when all of the available archival film is properly on sprocket and in register—the arrangement of the seat over the baby will come to suggest the underside of a flowerbox of the window variety. The springs on which the seat is supported will suggest in his memory ice tongs. This conceit is enriched and a bit confusing for there are actual ice tongs in the buckboard proper, and the baby will soon enough see them. There is ice in the buckboard. The coachman is the ice man, or would be, but that he is the ice woman. The baby’s perspective up the towers of oiled leather does not at first permit it to know that it is the ice woman.