Aliens of Affection

by Padgett Powell

  A canoe in high water takes it or it goes down. End of chapter. He drank a beer and popped a handful of the pills for the nurse and knew that things were not going to change. This was it. It was foolish to believe in anything but a steady continuation of things exactly as they are at this moment. This moment was it. This was it. Shut the fuck up.

  He was dizzy. The trailer ticked in the sun and he felt it bending and he felt himself also ticking in some kind of heat and bending. He was dizzy, agreeably. It did not feel bad. The sinkhole that he envisioned was agreeable, too. He hoped that when the trailer went down it went smoothly, like a glycerine suppository. No protest, no screaming, twisting, scraping. The sinkhole was the kind of thing he realized that other people had when they had Jesus. He didn’t need Jesus. He had a hole, and it was a purer thing than a man.

  He was imagining life in the hole—how cool? how dark? how wet? Bats or blind catfish? The most positive speculation he could come up with was it was going to save on air conditioning, then maybe on clothes. Maybe you could walk around naked, and what about all the things that had gone down sinkholes over the years, houses and shit, at your disposal maybe—he heard a noise and thought it was the nurse and jumped in bed and tried to look asleep, but when the door opened and someone came in he knew it wasn’t the nurse and opened his eyes. It was his father.

  “Daddy,” he said.

  “Son.”

  “You came for Tomos?”

  “I’mone Tomos your butt.”

  “What for?” Rather than have to hear the answer, which was predictable even though he couldn’t guess what it would be, Scarliotti wished he had some of those sharp star things you throw in martial arts to pin his daddy to the trailer wall and get things even before this started happening. His father was looking in the refrigerator and slammed it. He had not found the beer. If you didn’t drink beer you were too stupid to know where people who do drink it keep it after a thirty-minute walk in Florida in July. Scarliotti marveled at this simple luck of his.

  He looked up and saw his daddy standing too close to him, still looking for something.

  “The doctor tells me you ain’t following directions.”

  “What directions?”

  “All directions.”

  Scarliotti wasn’t following any directions but didn’t know how anybody knew.

  “You got to be hungry to eat as many pills as they give me.”

  “You got to be sober to eat them pills, son.”

  “That, too.”

  The headboard above Scarliotti’s head rang with a loudness that made Scarliotti jerk and made his head hurt, and he thought he might have peed some more. His father had backhanded the headboard.

  “If we’d ever get the money,” Scarliotti said, “but that lawyer you picked I don’t think knows shit—”

  “He knows plenty of shit. It ain’t his fault.”

  “It ain’t my fault.”

  “No, not beyond getting hit by a truck.”

  “Oh. That’s my fault.”

  “About.”

  Scarliotti turned on the TV and saw Adam yelling something at Dixie. Maybe it was Adam’s crazy brother. This was the best way to get his father to leave. “Shhh,” he said. “This is my show.” Dixie had a strange accent. “Don’t fix it, then.”

  “Fix what?” his father said.

  “Tomos.”

  “Forget that damned thing.”

  “I can’t,” Scarliotti said to his father, looking straight at him. “I love her.”

  His father stood there a minute and then left. Scarliotti peeked through the curtains and saw that he was again not taking the bike to get it fixed for him.

  He got a beer and put the others in the refrigerator just in time. He wanted sometimes to have a beer joint and really sell the coldest beer in town, not just say it. He heard another noise outside and jumped back in bed with his beer. Someone knocked on the door. That wouldn’t be his father. He put the beer under the covers.

  “Come in.”

  It was the nurse.

  “Come in, Mama,” Scarliotti said when he saw her.

  “Afternoon, Rod.”

  He winced but let it go. They thought in the medical profession you had mental problems if you changed your name. They didn’t know shit about mental problems, but it was no use fighting them so he let them call him Rod.

  The nurse was standing beside the bed looking at the pill tray, going “Tch, tch, tch.”

  “I took a bunch of ’em,” Scarliotti said.

  The nurse was squinching her nose as if she smelled something.

  “I know you want to get well, Rod,” she said.

  “I am well,” he said.

  “Not by a long shot,” she said.

  “I ain’t going to the moon,” he said.

  The nurse looked curiously at him. “No,” she said, “you’re not.”

  Scarliotti thought he had put her in her place. He liked her but didn’t like her preaching crap at him. He was well enough to spend the $250,000, and that was as well as he needed to be. It was the Yankee Arab horse breeders were sick, not well enough to pay their debts when they go running over people because they’re retired and don’t have shit else to do. The nurse was putting the arm pump-up thing on his arm. She had slid some of the pills around with her weird little pill knife that looked like a sandwich spreader or something. He wanted to show her his Buck knife, but would reveal the beer and the pee if he got it out of his pocket.

  “It’s high, again. If you have another fit, you’re back in the hospital.”

  “I’m not having no nother fit.”

  Scarliotti looked at her chest. The uniform was white and ribbed, and made a starchy little tissuey noise when she moved, and excited him. He looked closely at the ribs in the material when she got near him.

  “Them lines on your shirt look like…crab lungs,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know, like crab lungs. You know what I mean?”

  “No, Rod, I don’t.” She rolled her eyes and he saw her. She shouldn’t do that. That was what he meant when he said, and he was right, that the medical profession did not know shit about mental problems.

  The nurse went over everything again, two this four that umpteen times ninety-eleven a day, which meant you’d be up at two and three and five in the morning taking pills if you bought the program, and left. He watched Barney Fife get his bullet taken back by Andy. He wanted to see Barney keep his bullet. Barney should be able to keep that bullet. But if Barney shot at his own foot like that, he could see it. Barney was a dumb fuck. Barney looked like he’d stayed up all night taking pills. There was another noise outside. Scarliotti had had it with people fucking with him. He listened. There was a timid knock at the door. He just lay there. Let them break in, he thought. Then, head wound or not, he would kill them.

  The door opened and someone called Hello. Then: “Anyone home?”

  Scarliotti waited and was not going to say anything and go ahead and lure them in and kill them, but it was a girl’s voice and familiar somehow, but not the nurse, so he said, “If you can call it that.”

  The girl from the Lil’ Champ stepped in.

  “I’m down here.”

  She looked down the hall and saw him and came down it with a package.

  “You paid for a case,” she said.

  “I could use a case,” Scarliotti said.

  “Pshew,” the girl said. Even so, she was, it seemed, being mighty friendly.

  “Well, let’s have us one,” Scarliotti said.

  The girl got two beers out of the package.

  “You like Andy Griffin?” he said.

  “Fith. He’s okay. Barney’s funny. Floyd is creepy.”

  “Floyd?”

  “Barber? In the chair?”

  “Oh.” Scarliotti had no idea what she was talking about. Goober and Gomer, he knew. The show was over anyway. He turned the set off, holding up the white remote rig to show the girl.

>   “They let you off to deliver that beer?”

  “I’m off.”

  “Oh.”

  “On my way.”

  “Oh.”

  Scarliotti decided to go for it. “I would dog to dog you.” He blushed, so he looked directly at her to cover for it, with his eyes widened.

  “That’s about the nastiest idea I ever heard,” the girl said.

  “My daddy come by here a while ago, took a swang at me,” Scarliotti said. “Then the nurse come by and give me a raft of shit. I nearly froze the beer. Been a rough day.”

  “You would like to make love to me. Is that what you’re saying?” Since she had touched him in the store and he had said what he said, the girl had undergone a radical change of heart about Scarliotti’s repulsiveness. She did not understand it, exactly.

  Scarliotti had never in his life heard anyone say, “You would like to make love to me,” nor had he said it to anyone, and did not think he could, even if it meant losing a piece of ass. He stuck by his guns.

  “I would dog to dog you.”

  “Okay.”

  The girl stood up and took her clothes off. Compared to magazines she was too white and puffy, but she was a girl and she was already getting in the bed. For a minute Scarliotti thought they were fighting and then it was all warm and solid and they weren’t. He said “Goddamn” several times. “Goddamn.” He looked at the headboard and saw what looked like a dent where his father had backhanded it and was wondering if he was wearing a ring done that or just hit it that fucking hard with his hand when the girl bit his neck. “Ow!” he said. “Goddamn.”

  “You fucker,” the girl said.

  “Okay,” Scarliotti said, trying to be agreeable.

  “Good,” she said.

  Then it was over and she no longer looked too white and soft. She was sweaty and red. Some of Scarliotti’s hair had fallen out on her from the good side of his head and he hoped nothing had fallen out of the bad side. The trailer had stopped moving from their exertions. There were ten beers sweating onto a hundred pills beside the bed. The nurse and his father would not be back before the trailer could start ticking in the heat and bending on its own, unless they bent it again themselves with exertions in the bed, but all in all Scarliotti thought it would be a good enough time to have some fun without being bothered by anyone before the trailer found its way down the hole.

  Scarliotti woke up and took the sweating beers in his arms and put them in the refrigerator and came back with two cold ones. “They look like a commercial sitting there but they don’t taste like a commercial,” he said, waking and mystifying the girl. “Women,” he said, feeling suddenly very good about things, “know what they want and how to get it. Men are big fucking babies.”

  “How do you come to know all that?” the girl asked.

  “I know.”

  “How many women you had?”

  “Counting you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Three.”

  “That explains how you know so much.”

  Scarliotti started laughing. “Heh, heh, heh…heah, heahh, heahhh—” and did not stop until he was coughing and slumped against the wall opposite the bed.

  “Quailhead,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You call me quailhead?”

  “No. You want to go down to the Green Room and eat free grits?”

  “Eat free grits,” she said flatly, with a note of suspicion.

  “Yeah.”

  “I thought you were going be a millionaire.”

  “I am. Pert near. That’s why I don’t pay for grits.”

  “Well, I still pay for grits. I ain’t eating no free grits.”

  “See? Heh, heh…it proves what I said. Women know what they want.”

  “And men are babies.”

  Scarliotti started the laugh again and crawled into bed with the girl.

  “Be still. Shhh!”

  “What?” the girl asked.

  “Listen to the trailer.”

  “I don’t hear anything—”

  “Listen! Hear that?”

  “No.”

  “It’s ticking. It’s moving. You ever thought of living in a sinkhole?”

  “No.”

  “You want to go down into a sinkhole with me?”

  “No.”

  “You want to go to the Hank show?”

  “Okay.”

  “I mean, us all, whole thing going. Trailer and all.”

  “To the Hank show?”

  “No, into the sinkhole.”

  Scarliotti started the uncontrollable heaving laugh again at this, and the girl reluctantly stroked the shaved side of his head to calm him. At first she barely touched it, but she began to like the moist bristly feel of Scarliotti’s wounded head.

  Scarliotti woke up and looked out the window and saw a dog and a turtle. The dog appeared to be licking the turtle.

  “Ballhoggey wollock dube city, man. Your dog,” he said to the girl, “is licking that turtle in its face. That turtle can bite, man. You better get your dog away from that turtle, man. That dog is, unnaturally friendly, man. I don’t want to even go into salmonella. That turtle can kill your dog from here to Sunday. It dudn’ have to bite him, man. I don’t want that turtle to bite your dog, man. On the tongue like that. I think I’d start, like, crying. I’d cry like a son of a bitch if we had to get that turtle off your dog’s tongue. Your dog’s tongue would look like a…shoe tongue. It would be blue and red. Your dog would be hollering and tears coming out of its eyes. That turtle would be squinting and biting down hard, man. I don’t want it. I don’t.

  “You better get your dog, man. We’d have to kill that turtle to get it off. If it didn’ cut your dog’s tongue off first, man. Shit. Take a bite out of it like cheese. This round scallop space, like. God. Get your dog, man. I have an appointment somewhere. What time is it? I think this damn Fruit of the Loom underwear is for shit. You see this guy walking around in his underwear with his kid, going to pee, and then popping out this fresh pair of miniature BVD’s for the kid just like his, and they walk down the hall real slow in the same stupid tight pants look like panties? Get your dog, man.

  “Shit. Fucking turtle. What’s it doing here, man? I mean, your dog’s not even supposed—What time is it? Get the bastard, will you? I can’t move my…legs. I don’t know when it happened. Last twenty minutes after I dogged you. I’d get him myself. That dog is…not trained or what? Did you train him? People shouldn’t let their dogs go anarchy, man. Dogs need government. Dogs are senators in their hearts when they’re trained. They have, like white hair and deep voices. And do right. Your dog is going to get bit, man. Get your dog. Please get your dog. This position I’m in, I don’t know how I got in it. It dudn’ make sense.

  “Do you ever think about J.E.B. Stuart? His name wasn’t Jeb, it’s initials of J. E. B. He had a orange feather in a white hat and was, like, good. Won. Fast, smart, all that, took no survivors; well, I don’t know about that. Kind of kind you want on your side, like that. Man. It’s hard to talk, say things right. If you don’t get your dog I’m going to shoot—you. No, myself. Claim your dog out there. The window is dirty as shit. I pay a lot of money for this trailer, you think they’d wash the goddamn window. No, you wouldn’t. You know they wouldn’t wash the goddamn window. I’d shoot the turtle, but the window, they wouldn’t fix it so they wouldn’t wash it, would they? I’d shoot your fucking dog before I’d shoot the turtle. That turtle idn’ doing shit but getting licked in the face and taking it.”

  The girl said, “I don’t have a dog.”

  “Well, somebody does,” Scarliotti said. “Somebody sure as hell does.”

  Wayne

  WAYNE THIS MORNING BEGINS unpacking a box of clay tiles for the HoJo roof in Scottsdale, Arizona, he’s supposed to repair. The first seven tiles are broken and that is enough. He is last seen leaving the convenience store across the street with a twelve-pack under his arm, ge
tting nimbly into his car. The carton of tiles is left open, its four top flaps at angles suggesting a funnel.

  Wayne’s car leaves a fine invisible trail of rust very near the color of the clay tiles. A bloodhound trained in Detroit could track the car, a 1968 Impala. A crime team could locate hairs matching Wayne’s along the trail of rust, blond and about seven inches long and not clean. Dental records, were Wayne found in demise, would be of little use identifying him owing to the extremely rapid rate of deterioration—equivalent to dentonic meltdown—of Wayne’s mouth. Wayne looks as if he has driven into a swarm of flies as he flies down the highway smiling and drinking and tossing his hair and tossing cans in the desert and forgetting roof tiles and roofs and HoJos, except for renting a room in one with a blonde, but he saw no blondes when he looked around after opening the carton of broken tiles to see if anyone was sympathetic and saw instead the convenience store and that was enough. Wayne is Wayne and Wayne is gone. Stone.

  Wayne, in a mirror of his motel room, the name of which he does not know (the motel), the room number of which he’d have to find the key to know, or open and look at the door, too bright a thing to do, Wayne looks at his teeth. He wishes they were like Legos. He could snap them out and snap in new ones, snugly into tight, clean holes, white and firm and solid. The holes in these he has are black with green or yellow edges and not clean, firm, tight holes like in Legos, which hold the Legos together snap-like. These teeth are rotten to hell. How they got this way is about how his liver got its way: a thing that mysteriously, suddenly, but not really, hurts. The teeth, the mirror, his right side, changing all the fun things he likes to do or he’ll die is a shame. “It’s a shame,” he almost says, looking at his teeth and drinking of a cold beer, but he doesn’t say “It’s a shame,” he laughs and looks in the cooler at the foot of the bed for that beer. And it’s there. He is, after all, the most lucky of men, at 10:30 in the morning in the Arizona desert. The bed, he notices, is not even disturbed; he slept on top of it, like a big cat. The maid will only have to plump it and tuck it a bit. He did not get his money’s worth here. But he has a cold Coors and the motel management isn’t Pakistani, so he’s not going to get under the covers now just to mess the bed up. He’s going to get in his car and get some cigarettes and chips and more beer and drive into the worthless future and enjoy the shit out of it.