Padgett Powell - Hologram - A Novel

— Ready aim fire gridley, then. Here we go. Forrest, Ride, Rear, Saber, Silent ought to do it. Hodhawmighty, Hod, lookit this.

— Ats bettern the durn demo. Look at that sombitch. Sword look like a razor blade. I want me one a them coats he got.

— And look at our boy, Hod. And you right, them others cant even see it.

— He look like he peein his pants.

— And he is stopped talkin bout beatin up people in funeral homes.

— What he sayin?

— He sayin he went one year to Nathan Bedford Forrest High School, which it is very near to here.

— Naw. Is it?

— How the hell I know, Hod? All I do know is they a man whose somebody done died back in there where he wont to beat somebody up about it, and now he talkin about goin to Forrest High School and peein in his pants.

— Close enough for me. What Turner say we spose to do now we found him?

— I dont know, Hod. Why do you keep asking me all these questions? I have run this machine and found our man first one I aimed it at, and you want me to do everthang.

— Read the orders.

— Shit.

— What?

— Where them cigars, Hod?

THERE WAS SOME DEBATE between Hod Bundy and Rape Oswald as to what to do in terms of bringing their man in now that they had located him. They watched him walk from the funeral parlor to the gravesite, stoop and pick up the Swisher Sweet cigars wrapped in the orders, regard them closely, absently pocket the orders, and momentarily, in a bizarre scene that it seemed only they noticed, they watched the man have the casket opened in the blistering air under the striped awning, talk to the deceased (he said, “Hey, bud,” which they knew because Rape Oswald was tracking his every move with the machine), lean into the ornate blue metal-flake box and appear to kiss the deceased, and then slip the cigars into the box with the deceased before signaling for the coffin to be resealed. He stepped back and looked around.

— He lookin to see did anybody see him kiss the corpse, Rape.

— He lookin to see, Hod, where Forrest is.

Then they saw Sally Palmer among the mourners. They said “Hodhawmighty damn” in perfect unison, so that it sounded a little bit like a small choir singing a brief tune.

— Son!

— Put that gun on her, Rape. See what she knows.

Rape Oswald was so thrown by the beauty of the woman that he could not operate the machine, and they did not determine whether she too could see Forrest. They were both in fact so dazed by her that they had difficulty even following their man from the funeral.

The man led them on an improbable three-state careering into a rented room in Holly Springs Mississippi. There, because they had lost the orders, which had been conceptually as opposed to technically procedural, and because the machine had possibly been damaged by beer in the course of their hauling it three states, they resumed operating the machine with some technical difficulties that had not presented themselves in the successful first run in Jacksonville.

They thought at times that the impossibly beautiful woman they now saw in the window of the rented room was the same one they had seen at the funeral; at other times they were convinced it was a second impossibly beautiful woman.

The competing theories in this domain fought in the minds of Rape Oswald and Hod Bundy like two good dogs. If that sumbitch could find one a them purty as at, Rape contended, he could find two. It was so impossible that even one woman so beautiful existed that the existence of two women so beautiful did not further strain credulity. The opposing theory was that she had been a waitress in the café below the room. If that the case, Hod Bundy wanted to know, how come she aint still the waitress? She quit, Oswald told him.

She quit, Bundy repeated.

— Ats right.

— She dint quit, because she warnt there in the first place.

— I saw him atalkin to this girl in there.

— Well, was she a girl what suck the breath out your yinyang she so purty?

— No. Not as I recall.

— And if it was a girl that good-looking, she would not be here in a café. Hollywood would of come and got her.

— Well, if it’s the same girl, how’d she get here? How’d he get her here? He dint even know her like, at the funeral.

— That was maybe his strength. That what got her interested in him. It always pays to forget em. Run that thang one more time, Rape. I am heavy bored.

But Rape Oswald could not operate the machine as he looked at the woman, again in the window. Instead he began speaking, in an oddly high voice: Were they a God, Hod, he would not allow the Tyranny of Pussy. He would not, not in no benevolent universe, give boys a dick so hard they make fools of theirself all their life for that right there.

— Give me the goddamn machine, Rape.

— You don’t know how to run it.

— You said yourownself they aint no operator’s manual.

— IMONE HAVE TO LOOK at that woman a long time, Hod.

— You already looked at her so hard she seen us. Why you wont to keep on?

— I got to see something wrong with her, get some relief. I could get aholt of her, it’d be like when they put Floyd dogs with Maurice bitches. Set a new pace in dogs they done that.

— Oswald, you is a dog. Take it or leave it, myself.

— What you got against dogs? Dogs is good. You worry me, Hod. First the queer friendlys, and now you don’t even want that —

— The queer friendlys, as you put it, is just reason. It stands to reason some boys might see pussy aint all it’s cracked up to be. You said that yourself.

— No, Hod. I said God whupped us with the Tyranny of Pussy, ats—

— Okay, Mr. Buckley. Some boys just said no, like Nancy Reagan said they was suppose to, except they said no to pussy. I don’t see why a man need to herniate hisself over that.

— Maybe acause they said yes to dick? Could that be it, Hod? The, like, Bible and all?

— Swaggert under his glass table, you mean, telling us what’s wrong with queers, paying a girl sit naked on a glass coffee table? You lost your goddamn mind, Oswald. And stop playin with yourself. Whole damn world see you got a rod on.

— I need her.

— Give me the machine.

— You don’t know how to run it.

— You jack off, I’ll take the General out for a walk, see if that girlfriend of yours wants him or not.

— I got to look at her a long time, Hod. Got to be something wrong somewhere. That the only way you can survive them not wanting you, find the flaw.

— What is Skate?

— Aint no Skate.

— Yeah there is. Saber, Scream, Scour, Skate. I want to see the General can skate.

— Give me that thing.

— No. Set there and play pocket pool and don’t mess with me.

— You messing with my hard, Hod.

— Boy, you all right?

THE MAN, TIRED ON the bed, recalls the blackened knife his grandmother slapped his father with famously. He did not ever witness that, of course. He witnessed her carving pickled tongue with it, though. She kept entire beef tongues on plates and sliced the tongue meat off and made you a sandwich of it with soft bread and bright, tart, yellow mustard. They were extraordinarily good sandwiches until one day he saw the tongue itself, thick and furry on the plate, and cold, massive. Until that moment he had thought they were eating some kind of composite lunch meat, like Spam, spelled Tung. There was in fact a local product called tung oil from a tree called a tung tree, and there was a semipro baseball team called the Tung Nuts that his father had played on, but of this the man as a boy was innocent when he balked at tongue upon his discovery it was not tung.