Typical

by Padgett Powell

  This one dude, older dude, they called Mr. C, was walking around asking everybody if this stick of wood he was carrying belonged to them. He had this giant blue and orange thing coming off his nose, about like an orange, which it is why they called him Mr. C, I guess. A kid who was very pretty, built well—could of made a fortune in Montrose—ran to him with a bigger log and took him by the arm all the way back to his spot, some hanging builder’s plastic and a chair, and set a fire for him. It’s corny as hell, but I started liking the place. It was like a pilgrim place for pieces of shit, pieces of crud.

  Then a couple gets me, tells me their life story if I’ll drink instant coffee with them. The guy rescued the girl from some kind of mess in Arkansas that makes Tent City look like Paradise. He’s about six-eight with mostly black teeth and sideburns growing into his mouth, and she’s about four foot flat with a nice ass and all I can think of is how can they fuck and why would she let him. For some reason I asked him if he played basketball, and the girl pipes up, “I played basketball.”

  “Where?”

  “In high school.”

  “Then what did you do?” I meant by this, how is it Yardog here has you and I don’t.

  “Nothing,” she says.

  “What do you mean, nothing?”

  “I ain’t done nuttin.” That’s the way she said it, too.

  It was okay by me, but if she had fucked somebody other than the buzzard, it would have been something.

  I was just kind of cruising there at this point, about like leg-up in Alvin, ready to buy them all a case of beer and talk about hard luck the way they wanted to, when something happened. This gleaming, purring, fully restored, immaculate as Brillo Tucker would say, ’57 Chevy two-door pulls in and eases around Tent City and up to us, and out from behind the mirrored windshield, wearing sunglasses to match it, steps this nigger who was a kind of shiny, shoe-polish brown, and exact color and finish of the car. The next thing you saw was that his hair was black and oily and so were the black sidewalls of his car. Everything had dressing on it.

  The nigger comes up all smiles and takes cards out of a special little pocket in his same brown suit as the car and himself. The card says something about community development.

  “I am prepared to offer all of you, if we have enough, a seminar in job-skills acquisition and full-employment methodology.” This comes out of the gleaming nigger beside his purring ’57 Chevy.

  The girl with the nice butt who’s done nothing but fuck a turkey vulture says, “Do what?”

  Then the nigger starts on a roll about the seminar, about the only thing which in it people can catch is it will take six hours. That is longer than most of these people want to hold a job, including me at this point. I want to steal his car.

  “Six hours?” the girl repeats. “For what?”

  “Well, there are a lot of tricks to getting a job.”

  I say, “Like what?”

  “Well, like shaking hands.”

  “Shaking hands.” I remember Earl Campbell not buying my stinky shoes. That was okay. This is too far.

  “Do you know how to shake hands?” the gleaming nigger asks. Out of the corner of my eye I see the turkey buzzard looking at his girl with a look that is like they’re in high school and in love.

  “Let’s find out,” I say. I grab him and crush him one, he winces.

  “You know how to shake hands.”

  “I thought I did.”

  Who the fuck taught him how? Maybe Lyndon Johnson.

  He purrs off to find a hall for the seminar, and the group at Tent City proposes putting a gas cylinder in the river and shooting it with a .22.

  I’ve got my own brother to contend with, but we got over it a long time ago. He was long gone when ARMCO troubles let everybody else’s brother loose on them. He, my brother, goes off to college, which I don’t, which it pissed me off at the time, but not so much now. Anyway, he goes off and comes back with half-ass long hair talking Russian. Saying, Goveryou po rooskie in my face. It’s about the time Earl Campbell has told me he won’t wear my cleats because they stink, so I take all my brother’s college crap laying down.

  Then he says, “I study Russian with an old woman who escaped the Revolution with nothing. There’s only one person in the class, so we meet at her house. Actually, we meet in her back yard, in a hole.”

  “You what?”

  “We sit in a hole she dug and study Russian. All I lack being Dostoevsky’s underground man is more time.” He laughed.

  “All I lack being a gigolo,” I said, “is having a twelve-inch dick.” And hit him, which is why he doesn’t talk to me today, and I don’t care. If he found out I was in the shower with my shotgun he’d pass in a box of shells. Underground man. What a piece of shit.

  That’s about it. Thinking of my brother, now, I don’t feel so hot about running at the mouth. I’m not feeling so hot about living, so what? What call is it to drill people in their ear? I’m typical.

  Letter from a Dogfighter’s Aunt, Deceased

  HUMPY, THE STUCK-UP LIBRARIAN, ruined little Brody. There is a certain truth down in there allowing them a purchase, at least, upon what happened. For I must say that if I had not read so many books, I could only have seen Brody as a runaway and so would probably not have helped him. This is not to say, of course, that a more legitimate member of the family might not have come along, spotted him making his break, and helped him out of another motive: to teach him a lesson, let us say. His father would have done that, moral waste dump that he is.

  Humpy’d turn over in her grave. They say that when a family member uses incorrect grammar—grammar so out of form, that is, that they, its chief torturers on earth, can recognize something awry. Don’t say ain’t, your Aunt Humpy she’d turn over in her grave if she couldn’t hardly hear you. The remonstrated child, if he has some spirit, will sneak outside and put his mouth to the ground and yell ain’t into the dirt, blowing ants and debris away from his dirty face. They have one of these, Brody’s wife’s sister’s child, for whom I am performing unbid the services of guardian angel, endeared more and more to the little delinquent with each lip-to-ground utterance he calls me with.

  What does happen in heaven—heaven or hell, it is purely a matter of choice, and I have ever preferred, no matter the situation, the happier name for it—what does happen when one is alleged to turn in a grave is generally that one does spin, but in a kind of spiritual pirouette. Ain’t, yestiddy, spose to, and all precocious profanity comes shouted into the dirt and I do my tickled dance and love that child the more for daring to torture the dead.

  You needn’t believe me, but that—a high quotient of daring—is what heaven (again, call it hell if you will) is all about, if I may speak in earthly parlance. Here we are the children we were born as, without the myriad prejudices and passions and myopias that made us the human beings we mortally became. And when you can see, from the vantage of correct vision restored, a young child yet unoccupied by teachings human, it will make you dance. All guardian angels are secured in the first six days of human life.

  This is a bit specious-looking for you. You do not want to buy it. You wonder, I hope you do, how I inform you of Brody’s thoughts on picking damp bolls, the cruelty of having to pick damp cotton, the day he decided to run away. I tell you. Humpy, the dead egghead spinster librarian, tells you all they think and know on earth.

  One night my special child, Lonnie, was involved in some ghost-story telling in a tent in the back yard. He went outside and squatted close and yelled haint. No one had corrected him against the word (or will); it was to him clearly guilty of association with ain’t. Inches from his straining face a startled copperhead drew back. I possessed that snake to simply smile.

  While it occurs to me, Brody did not become a dogfighter, any more than I was a queer librarian, despite his acknowledged associations with real dogfighters and despite my developed habit of looking over reading glasses at ill-bred men.

  Here’s Brody: I was
going to be a big dogfighter. It’s something. The defenses. The dogs is still good. But… it’s not for me. It’s the people. The trash. It’s just not for me.

  His old man, the preacher: My boy, I don’t know what he is, come specifically to it. I know he’s not a preacher. I know he’s got a hundred monsters on chains in a piece of swamp he bought. You tell me. I don’t know what he is. What does a man do with monsters on chains in a swamp, comes by in a new Buick or new panel truck all the time? To talk about nothing. Any old kid can just trying things out run away once, even leave his own mother picking cotton alone—me, I was at the Bible convention. But to turn out a common man, that tries me, that almost tries my faith.

  A dogfighter: Ho! Dogfight’ll take ten years off your life. God, the yelling and swearing and … niggers! Nigger don’t know how to act no matter where you put him. And they ain’t all of it. I just go to cockfights now. Gentlemen still run a cockfight.

  And dear Lonnie: My Aunt Humpy she is not buried very deep. She can hear talk. I think they don’t even know where she is buried, because if you say certain things, anywhere, like even in Darlington under the canopy for a race, they say she can hear it even though you can’t hear it yourself what your own self says. I want to be sure she hears it if she can get to turn over when she does.

  My dear sister Cecelia: it’s hard to say your own sister was a queer, but I have to admit it. That’s the worst thing. Rescuing Brody from the brier patch with his tied-up suitcase was a drop in the bucket next to the main crimes, though that was about the first of the big ones. She was an intellectual. They say the library over at Pembert is still ahead of its time, even though they stopped spending money on it when she died. She had nothing to do with Brody staying gone four years, coming home married to a Mormon girl, of all things. They rolled up in a newish pickup, all sheepish looks at the ground, one sofa and about five of them dogs tied in the back, the dogs sitting on the sofa smiling at everything, like what a joke it all was.

  Brody on the dogs: These dogs you read about eating babies don’t have a thing to do with it. I’ve sold three thousand dogs in ten years and not one of them has bit a child or I’d know. I’d know about it quick, buddyro. I sell these dogs to people who pay $300, and when they pay $300 they don’t expect something to eat their children. I don’t think most of my dogs would bite a man without proper training, to tell the truth. They don’t have to.

  Ceece even says it: my picking up Brody and setting him on the road to ruin is minuscule. Queer. Ha. Or, Ho!

  It is funny how folk can extrapolate aberrations ultimately all to the sexual: to say, the first child in a family of heathen to receive an education—to refine himself in virtually any way—will be sooner or later alleged homosexual. And naturally my relatives, my living relatives, were no different. Let me essay to classify us our clan directly, lest anyone waste energy on the very simplest of human taxonomy by my failure to state the obvious. We are white North Carolina Baptist—not the absolute worst run of trash on earth only because of a strange rubbing off of the otherwise bogus FIRST IN FREEDOM presumptions wafting out of the Research Triangle.

  I am grateful to be able now to take the long view, as we say here. We see the earth many ways, time in its various dimensions—one of my favorites is the micrometer slice of a living life. It is possible to see Brody that day as if he is on a thin transparency cut from the waxen log that his whole life, and all lives around him, have come to be. The nice light of one pure moment shines easily through him as he stands, nervous, courage-screwed, hugging his suitcase, in the wet briers. He looks rather like an overgrown, beaten child. We can place a slice of a later Brody over this same setting: today, for example, he stands there waiting for me (not for me, for anyone) in blue polyester pants the color of the sky and an olive duck shirt he cannot keep tucked in, his crew cut a little shaggy, looking diffidently off to the ground near one of his hard shoes, still looking a little beat-up. That quality remains: though he did not become a dog-fighter, he did come close enough to share the common mark of the fraternity—the beaten-up. Dogfighters look, to a man (not to mention the ladies), beaten-up, despite brave cosmetics against it: buntline pistols, leather sport jackets, fancy boots, contractors’ jewelry, full bellies and pomaded hair, and many, many Mickey Gilley smiles. This is partly why they take the pleasure they do in watching a thoroughbred dog, conditioned to a point suggesting piano wires and marble, reduced by another sculpted cat to a soft red lump resembling bloody terry cloth.

  There is Brody, his nose suggesting a broken nose, his slightly wet eyes, looking mystified by nothing in particular, looking up the road at someone (me) coming, taking a deep breath to step out into view to discover if it is someone who will help or hinder him run away, to discover it is me and that he will need to compound the crime of escaping with that of lying. Yes’m, he says, almost before I ask, Ceece knows I’m going. Of course she knows.

  Well, I guess she would, I say, smiling, touching his knee, which he has pressed hard into his suitcase, as though he would if he could compress the thing into nothing so that no more suspicion might be raised. This was the moment I first knew I was going to die. I do not mean to sound so melodramatic—I was to live yet for years.

  I mean to say that when I saw Brody running, and when I saw myself aiding and abetting, I saw myself fully defined as the black sheep I was, and for once I was legitimate (I had company—with Brody there we were a conspiracy of two black-wool fools), and in a complex surge of emotion I loved little Brody, loved him much more than any queer aunt could confess, and I saw at the same time, as one truly does very few times in a normal life, that I was actually going to die someday, go to a funeral as the lead, and I considered seducing Brody and dismissed seducing Brody. He would hoot to hear that today, but that day he would not have chuckled, and I could have had my way with him, if a queer forty-year-old librarian popping out of a girdle did not scare the priapic wits out of him, which I presumed at the time not unlikely. And so I put Brody out on a corner in Lumberton, helped him become in his attempted escape the only other member of this clan to attend college (one of several accidents that befell him), and stand accused of—not merely accused, am held responsible for—his low living today, the very thing his escape was to have been from, and I the only one who helped him go.

  Brody has come to ignore the church, crime one, and make money without holding a job, crime two. At this minute he is talking to a man he cannot understand in Taiwan who wants ten grown bulldogs. The Oriental cannot understand Brody either, because the English he knows is not the English Brody practices. And Brody is not altogether fluent in some Charlie Chan English that seems to parody the r/l problem.

  Brody says: Imone sin you tin young dawgs.

  Mr. Ho says: They rast rong time, we purchase rots burrdog to you, Mista Blode.

  Brody: No sir, iss not the wrong time. I just caint keep puppies till they grown dawgs.

  Ho: Rots.

  Brody: Rots?

  Ho: Yes!

  Brody: What do you mean?

  Ho: Satisfactly.

  Brody: What is?

  Ho: You, Mista Blode.

  Brody: Send me a check for five thousand dollars.

  Ho: Thank you.

  How did Brody’s escape fail? Or did it fail? Perhaps it did not. He came back with full intention of becoming a dogfighter. He fell, or stopped, short. He decided to make the dogs but not make them fight. Which is an inaccurately cute way of putting it: one doesn’t need to make these dogs fight. They volunteer.

  I couldn, you know, stand to knock so many dawgs in the head. That’s what you have to do. He is talking about culling, culling the cowards and the inept from the brave and the strong, which in practice means shooting beautiful year-old dogs because they do not measure up. It is a point of pride with a dogfighter to allow a dog to live on his yard. This blood courage in dogs (parlance; I mean in dogfighting, but one commonly says in dogs) is an outrigger courage, a pontoon of vicarious guts runni
ng beside your own tipsy, slender, sinkable soul, your soul which accepts bad teeth, bad jobs, bad diet, which purports to refuse all injustice done you since and because of the Civil War, purports to accept no slight or slander and yet must take all and every, and so locates one accidental day, or night, a dog, two dogs with jaw muscles like golf balls addressing each other like men—not taking no for an answer. Your trod-down my-daddy’s-daddy’s-daddy-was-whipped-and-lost-his-cotton soul, now eating Cheetos instead of smothered quail and oysters hauled up from Charleston, standing there in blue jeans with a pistol in your armpit, sees an answer to all the daily failures of a failing late-trailer-payment life, and a dogfighter is born.

  The real item: I tookeem home and tiedeem up in a inner tube and hungeem and beateem with a hammer. I coottn killeem acause he was swingin and bouncin like iss, springy—the rubber, you know, leteem git away. But I gotteem, the quittin bastard, quit on me like that, I never been so embairsed in my life.

  —If a dog fight for me an hour good as that—

  —And you a fool, too.

  —Well, tell you what, Jackie. Meet me ahine my house with your tube and your hammer, and I get me a rig, and we get up in a tree and go at it. I want to see you go an hour.

  —You don’t have the least notion what a good dog is.

  —Yes I do. You had one.

  —That’s fuckin right. I had one. And I git rid of the next one I git like it the damned straight same way.

  Alive, I never went to a dogfight, but I have been since. I did also go one night looking for Brody in his kennel, the first time I went there, and found myself suddenly ringed by what seemed large big cats axled to the ground on chains begging me with body wags to pet them.