Aliens of Affection

by Padgett Powell

  The white thighs of his wife, who was not really ugly, white like Boy-ar-dee noodles, which he really got off on, occur to him and give him a little momentary woody. That’s what cigarettes and more beer are good against, errant and unfair woodies at 10:30 in the morning. Woodies out of the blue with no help in sight. He could wait for the maid…right. He could instead fire up the Impala, 357 loud cubic inches, and get the goddamn beer. That is the manly, sane thing to do. Felicia was ugly. So is the desert.

  It doesn’t have any trees. This cactus shit and mesquite shit is shit. Felicia was shit-for-brains and the desert is shit-for-trees. It does not look like rain—what else is new, in the desert. It doesn’t look like anything, in the desert. When things don’t look like anything, drive through them. And don’t try it alone: have help. Have Coors, Winstons, Doritos, cardboard coasters placed under your icy mug by a woman in tight polyester shorts at happy hour, a woman who will say “Sure, sugar” when you ask for jukebox change. Apropos of her shorts, you will say, looking now no lower than her forehead, “I’m from Texas.” “That right?” “I haven’t seen a tree in a month.” It’s not going well. What else is new. Play the jukebox and don’t play what you think she’d like. Play what you like, but you won’t know anything on it, so play whatever the hell you want to. You are a free man. Play what you don’t like, if you like. Go back to the bar and get her to fill your mug, or get her to give you a new icy mug, and say, “I played stuff I don’t know if I like it. They, you know, they have different songs as far as areas.” She takes your money, smiling. “What else is new in the desert,” you say to her butt, and she says “What?” stopping and looking at you from the register. “Nothing.”

  There was a girl he met in the Navy in the Philippines. She looked entirely American but swore, in perfect English, which made it harder to believe, that she was Amerasian, a soldier’s bastard. When they fucked she started shaking and kept shaking until he thought the cot would come apart. When they were done she put her face in his neck and held it there for a long time, which made him think she was crying and was entirely American. Wayne thinks of this now, looking at the woman behind the bar smoking, looking in virtually any direction but his, who calls him “sugar” when making change. The Navy was a desert but it wasn’t like this.

  “Have you ever heard of a song,” Wayne says to the woman behind the bar, “called ‘The Navy Is a Desert but Nothing Like This’?”

  “No,” she says.

  “Good song.”

  “I bet, sugar.”

  “No, you don’t,” Wayne says under his breath.

  “You ready?”

  “No,” he says, and walks out, anticipating the secure barreling unfraught ease of the heavy Impala on straight road. He hopes for a no-Pakistani motel tonight, but even on that he’s wearing down. “No Pakistani ever called me redneck,” he says to the rearview mirror, laughing. This gives him the cheering idea of registering in Pakistani motels as Muhammad Ali. That would establish everyone on even footing, somehow. “Mr. Ali will need a bar of soap,” he will tell them. “Mr. Ali will need sheets that are white.” “Mr. Ali will thank Allah for whiteness and soap.” He’s lost his mind and he doesn’t mind. He hates bathing. There’s not a Pakistani in the world dirtier than he is. Some guys in the Navy once had to gang-wash him. But still. White is white.

  Wayne goes home. California was out. There was, all in all, too much desert between his hangover leave-takings of Pakistani motels and his not altogether enticing visions of California. These were of Beverly Hillsesque inaccessibility and of Venice Beach, where everyone, including the women, had more muscles than Wayne did. All he could see was pink skates and purple spandex and no pussy at one end of things, and movie-star houses seen through a bus window on the other. So he turned around. There was nothing to go home to, but there was nothing to not go home to. He wondered if driving back over the same ground would have the effect of making the desert look different, possibly better (it couldn’t get worse). The phenomenon he had in mind was of how carpet sometimes looked different if you looked at it from the other side of the room. He wondered if the desert was like that. He bought five cases of Coors and did not plan to stop at any more motels, Pakistani or not. When he had packed the beer strategically in the trunk and got back in the Impala—he thought of the beer as ammo for a protracted military campaign—there was a bird in it with him. “Stone!” he said to the bird, fired up the car, and planned to have the bird cross the desert backwards with him. About a mile down the road the bird lit on his shoulder, shat on his shirtfront, and flew out the driver’s window in front of Wayne’s face. That was the desert for you. In the Philippines birds sat around on their own perches and talked to you. How a God-made, natural thing like the desert that was so Santa Fe and all that and Indian holy shit ground and Hopi boogie shit got to be worse off than a man-made piece of shit like the Navy and Subic Bay and two-dollar blow jobs from skinny guys’ little sisters was beyond Wayne.

  When Wayne got back from not going to California, the HoJo in Scottsdale still leaking, he hoped, but didn’t see how, since if it rained in the desert it wouldn’t be much, he drove over to his and Felicia’s house, which was now Felicia’s and the kids’, and walked in as if it were still his, too. Felicia was standing on what looked like a miniature walker for old folks. It had four chrome legs about a foot high and a pink vinyl pad on the top and was slanted backwards just like a walker. Only, Felicia was standing on it and looking at herself in the mirror over the sofa. Wayne reached under the cushions of the sofa and withdrew his Army WWI bayonet, which he had kept against intruders when he lived there.

  “What the hell you doing?” he asked Felicia.

  “This,” Felicia said, turning one way and another to look at her hips, which were in pink shorts the exact color of the vinyl pad she stood on, “is a Exerstep.”

  “A what?”

  “You step on it.”

  “I see that. Any beer?”

  “No.”

  Wayne looked at his bayonet: it was the narrow kind, very heavy, with the most prodigious blood groove he had ever seen on a knife of any kind. It was not imaginable to him that a bayonet like this one could kill someone better, or more efficiently or quickly, or let you get it out of the victim easier, or whatever the hell a blood groove actually did or was supposed to do. Blood groove. It sounded like a joke, or something to tell a recruit and laugh at him if he believed it. It was probably a way to save steel.

  Felicia stepped off the Exerstep and back up, and stepped back off and back on, and looked at her hips some more. Wayne pressed his crotch to her leg, at about her knee.

  “Hey, ugly.”

  “Don’t say that to me, Wayne.”

  “Okay. How about a knobber?”

  “Not now. Later.”

  “Sounds like a weenie.”

  Wayne struck an elaborate, stylized martial-arts pose and said, “I’m a burnin, burnin hunk of love,” and threw the bayonet at the back of the front door, which it struck not with the blade but with the short, heavy, fat machined handle, making a deep, dull contusion in the door and falling to the floor with a thick twang. Two boys ran into the room at the sound and saw immediately the bayonet and the fresh wound in the door and Wayne and said, in unison and looking at Felicia to gauge her approval, “Cool!” Felicia was expressionless, so the boys leaped on the bayonet and fought over it until Wayne took it from them and put it through his belt pirate-style.

  “Git.”

  The boys did.

  “There is some beer, I think, Wayne,” Felicia said.

  “Who brought it?”

  “Nobody.”

  “Nobody, shit.”

  “Nobody, Wayne.”

  “I didn’t leave it.”

  “Wayne, you left.”

  “Okay. Okay. Don’t give me the fifth amendment or third-degree burns or—” He stopped speaking, overcome by the sight of Felicia’s pale thigh going into the Exerstep-pink nylon so loosely a hand cou
ld easily glide up there, meeting no restriction.

  “Our Lady of Prompt Succor!” he declared, brandishing the bayonet and trying to kiss her.

  “Don’t. I’m sweaty.”

  “Okay.”

  Felicia went to shower and Wayne went to the kitchen, where he parted items in the refrigerator with the bayonet until he found the beer. These he would have stabbed to extract if it wouldn’t have wasted a beer. He felt good, suddenly very good. He almost took a beer into the back yard and punctured it with the bayonet to test out the blood groove, but did not. Yet. “Goddamn beer groove,” he said aloud, holding a beer in one hand and the bayonet in the other. He regarded the bayonet and its groove a moment, put it on top of the refrigerator, and walked back into the living room holding his crotch, with certain fingers extended and certain folded as he’d seen black rappers do. The fingering was the same as the Texas Longhorn Hook ’em Horns sign.

  What do they call it—fragrant dereliction?

  What?

  Romans. Somebody. Napoleons.

  Be quiet.

  I’m about to pop.

  Don’t.

  I could come back, do this to you all the time.

  No, you couldn’t!

  Come back, do it sometimes.

  Not come back. Sometimes, maybe.

  Whatever. Changkaichek!

  Oh, Wayne.

  Hey. That mudpuppy’ll be back hard in ten minutes.

  I don’t have ten minutes.

  What?

  Work.

  Sounds like a personal problem.

  Actually, it is, Wayne. I have to have two jobs now.

  Oh.

  And…

  And what?

  Don’t be here when I get back, if you want sometimes.

  Sheeyit.

  That’s right.

  Wayne left without showering, wondering where Felicia’s second job was, where she…how she took care of four kids. It was a vague, troubling haze of guilt that felt like a huge ball of tangled monofilament filling the back seat of the car. A ball of monofilament that size could not be dealt with with less than a flamethrower. It would ensnare birds, it would hook something, it would trip you, you’d see a piece of good tackle in it and never cut your way in, it would foul your next cast, it would williefy your entire life. If his life was a happy, larky fishing trip, he had a ball of monofilament half the size of the boat beside him. And it didn’t have anything to do with him anymore. Felicia had had it. She wouldn’t let him untangle it. Which he didn’t want to, couldn’t do anyway. How did marriage and kids look like such a hot idea before you had it and like such a clusterfuck after you got it? It was like praying for rain and getting struck by lightning.

  “I feel like going to Italy,” Wayne said aloud in the Impala. He pictured wearing rather pointy, thin-soled shoes and yelling at people without having to fight them and drinking things he’d never heard of (and liking them) and mountains, maybe, and fountains and marble and beautiful women who would talk to you whether you understood them or not and whether they understood you or not, a problem that sign language would solve anyway, and what it would be like sleeping with dark world-famous-loving women who did not wear pink shorts the same pink as a miniature geezer walker, stepping on it about once an hour. He was ready for a beer. He was not ready for the want ads, but it looked like time.

  Wayne drove down to a bar called Taco Flats run by an agreeable Mexican who would pretend he understood your bad Spanish. Blocking the lot to Taco Flats were cars lined up to do window banking at the bank next door. Wayne wished one of them would just rob the bank and dismiss the line of traffic. He wondered why he didn’t rob the bank. He had the bayonet, against the day Felicia cut him off and changed the locks and denied him his things, or moved in the night with them all, or whatever a woman going up and down on a geezer walker might come up with. He could rob the bank with his bad Spanish and a bayonet. “Cabrónes! Tú probablamente anticipare un hombre with pistole. Es un blood groove!” Blood groove shouted by a white-looking Mexican bandito would scare anyone in a bank in suburban San Antonio. The line of cars opened for him and he drove into the Taco Flats lot. It was lunatic to rob a bank without a gun. He had over a hundred dollars left from not going to California, anyway.

  The agreeable Mexican who ran Taco Flats, Harry, gave Wayne, whom he had once overlooked passed out at a corner booth and locked in Taco Flats for the night, a wink and said, “Qué pasa!”

  “Stone!” Wayne said. “Mongo firo bira, per favor.” He meant to say frió beer—cold, a word he knew—but never got it right. This was the sort of error Harry allowed by never correcting. He would in fact corroborate and advance these idiocies people came up with.

  “Aquí, a fiery beer, my friend John Wayne.”

  “Wayne,” Wayne said.

  “Sí. John Wayne, if you go to sleep and something today, let please a bandanna on the table for indication of surrender.”

  This was the height of Wayne and Harry’s communion: a manly, head-on reference to Wayne’s humiliating overnight stay and Harry’s jovial acceptance of it.

  “Chingasa!” Wayne said, squinting with mirth and a mouthful of extremely cold fiery beer.

  Harry would move on to other customers, forgetting Wayne except to ponder how someone as unlike John Wayne got to be called John Wayne. Wayne had no idea how he came to be called, by Harry, John Wayne, but it was in the fabric of not correcting anyone or anything to let it go. Besides, he had tried and it didn’t work. He drank like John Wayne, Wayne thought, if John Wayne drank. Did John Wayne drink? Did Dean Martin say, “Circle the wagons, the Injuns are comin’”? Were dress designers gay? These models you saw, runway, were so goddamned good-looking. He tried to picture Calvin Klein or Perry Ellis in the Navy. He couldn’t. He could see male models in Klein underwear in the Navy but not Calvin Klein himself. He did not have the balls to rob a bank. Bayonet, Biretta, shit, Uzi. Kalashnikov. He wouldn’t rob a bank with a bazooka. He wouldn’t hold up Fort Knox with an atom bomb. He couldn’t do shit.

  Well, why should he? What was wrong, exactly, with not having the balls to rob a bank? Someone tell him that. Someone tell him what was wrong with being afraid to rob a bank. He wished he had had it out with that woman in the desert who called him Sugar. It wouldn’t have worked. “You’ve never heard the song ‘The Navy Is a Desert but Nothing Like This’? Do you think it’s unmanly of me not to rob a bank? Do you?” She would have said no. And that would have been the end of it. It was hard to get anyone to actually talk to you, and harder, if they did, to get them to make sense.

  In this reverie Wayne suddenly smelled tar pitch. He looked around. People had come in. A black guy was saying to Harry, “Harry, is Cabriolet a goat and a Chevrolet or what?” Harry looked at him. “You know, man,” the black guy said, “cabrito.” The guy had on a T-shirt with a picture of the Last Supper or something on it over the words IT’S A BLACK THING, YOU WOULDN’T UNDERSTAND. Wayne thought the wearer of the shirt ought to understand what the fuck a Cabriolet was. It was a goddamned car.

  “It’s a car, Stone,” Wayne said loudly. He had the balls to do that. The black guy looked at him and Wayne realized the tar-pitch smell was coming from him. “You a hot man, Stone?”

  The black guy turned back to the bar and ignored him.

  Wayne went up to within two stools of him. He could see the left side of the table of black luminaries on the guy’s shirt. The figure closest to him looked like Jesse Jackson. That seemed right to Wayne: he’d never understood Jesse Jackson. You’d think anyone who spoke in rhymes to uneducated people in the ghetto would be understandable, but he was not, to Wayne. Wayne called Harry and bought the black guy a beer and had Harry give it to him, and when the black guy looked at him Wayne said, more embarrassed than he anticipated being, “I don’t understand Jesse Jackson,” and the black guy looked at him as if he was crazy.

  “Well,” Wayne said, apologizing by raising his palms off the bar in a shrug, “I don’t. I just
don’t. Cocaine is a pain in yo’ brain, I guess I get that. No, I don’t even get that. It feels pretty good to mine. You work hot roofing, right?”

  “Okay,” the black guy said.

  This threw Wayne a bit. Okay? Okay what?

  “Okay what?” Wayne said.

  “The beer.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  Wayne drank his own beer as a kind of confirmation that they were drinking together. That seemed to be the way the black guy took it, too. When they had finished the beers the black guy bought the round and Harry gave Wayne a beer without having to acknowledge where it came from. Wayne said “Stoweno” to Harry.

  To the black guy he said, “I work cold.”

  “Cold?”

  “Cold process.”

  “What that?”

  “No kettle. Shit in cans, barrels.”

  “Sticky shit.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Man. No.”

  “Better’n burning your ass.”

  “Stick your ass to everything.”

  “Más o meno.”

  “You don’t understand Jesse Jackson?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t understand Mickey Mantle.”

  “Sounds like a wiener.”

  “What?”

  “I dig it.”

  “You crazy.”

  “Stoweno.”

  Wayne was smiling at all this and the black guy was shaking his head, not altogether unamused. Wayne had no idea what the black guy was talking about or why he was smiling. He looked about 230, most of it in his shoulders. The black guy had had some pot after work and the two beers, and he was feeling frisky because Wayne looked about 90 pounds wet and the bartender was a largish Mexican, not a small one.