Padgett Powell - Aliens of Affection - Stories

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.

“What I want to know,” the black guy said to Wayne, “is what would happen if Deion Sanders say to Mickey Mantle, Run it out, you piece of shit homeboy!”

From his distance, Harry announced, “Mickey Mantle had bad knees, he never run shit.”

“I know that,” the black guy said. “That ain’t my point.”

“I get you point,” Harry said. “All shit break loose is what happen.”

The black guy raised his hand and Harry high-fived it. Wayne looked on.

Wayne said, “I don’t understand Jesse Jackson or Mickey Mantle or Deion Sanders.”

“I believe that,” the black guy said, and looked to Harry for another high five, but Harry declined. Wayne bought the round and Harry served the beers and neatened everything up. Wayne didn’t know why he wanted to talk to the black guy in the first place, except he was sure the guy was a roofer and Wayne would be needing a job, but he didn’t need a job this soon, so he didn’t know why he started talking to the black guy, roofer or not, but now he had a buzz and didn’t mind talking to him.

“Hey!” he suddenly said. “You mean this thing where Carlton Fisk says to Deion Sanders, Run it out, you piece of shit or something?”

The black guy and Harry exchanged glances.

“Einstein,” the black guy said.

“Git it, git it, git it, guitar Sam!” Wayne shouted. “I get it now.”

“Get my man a beer,” the black guy said. “That is one trazee white man.”

“That is John Wayne,” Harry said.

“ Wayne, Stone,” Wayne said to the black guy.

“Robert Williams,” the black guy said to Wayne. “Don’t call me Bob.” Wayne and Robert Williams shook hands clumsily, Wayne attempting a black shake and Robert Williams a white shake. The fumbling resulted in Wayne chuckling and a white shake.

“So they hiring where you are?” Wayne asked.

“What day is this?”

“Friday.”

“Monday will be Monday, right?”

“Stoweno.”

“It’s roofing, right?”

“Water runs downhill and wet things don’t stick together.”

“They hiring.”

Wayne had a pair of the most bleached-out blue eyes Robert Williams had ever seen. It was hard to maintain, drunk or not, that those eyes could be connected to the devil. In fact, when Robert Williams shook Wayne’s hand, thinking it an act of racial duplicity, he was surprised to receive from Wayne a current of no malice whatsoever. Wayne was a new kind of blue-eyed devil: one who could not say nigger with sufficient heat or conviction to be anything but comical or innocently self-referential. What Robert Williams felt, despite himself, when he shook the fumbling, dirty hand of this Cloroxed pinkish devil was a small surge of pity.

On Monday morning at Ponderosa Roofing and Sheet Metal Robert Williams spoke highly of Wayne’s credentials as a roofer and Wayne was hired.

After securing his position at Ponderosa Roofing and Sheet Metal, which also manufactured, it turned out, serious roofing equipment, for which Wayne thought he could be a sales representative, particularly for the gas-powered gravel scarifier, as it was properly called, or power spudder, as it was known by those who used it, Wayne went on a date. There was a woman in the office named Pamela Forktine and Wayne could not resist asking her every morning for plastic spoons for the coffee-stirring operations, which were prodigious operations at Ponderosa or any other roofing company at six in the morning among troops as hungover and blear — their brogans flared open at the untied ankles and sticking to the floor, their flannel shirts not altogether tucked in, their hair wet-combed — as the troops at Ponderosa or any roofing company.

Wayne said, “Spoons, Ms. Forktine. Ms. Forktine, spoons.” Pamela Forktine was older than Wayne. She had put up with the advances of every description of loser testosterone hardcase it was conceivable to put up with, until Wayne. Wayne was to her mind so far gone on rancid testosterone he was sweet. That her fifteen or so years on him did not seem to bother him — a direct result, as she saw it, of the hormonal dementia these boys suffered — made her certain he was sweet.

The fifteen or so years she had on him did not bother Wayne, until they went out and Pamela Forktine took the bull by the horns and said, while they were going counter-clockwise in their cowboy boots and she was looking for Wayne’s chest hair between the pearl snaps of his shirt with her finger, “You want to do the bone dance?”

“Do what ?” Wayne said, stopping their counterclockwise drift among the stream and creating eddies of resentment on the floor around them. “I mean, sure ,” he said, and they got going again.

“It’s what kids say,” Pamela Forktine said. “Bone in, bone out.”

Wayne sort of bent over at the waist, blowing his nose at this. He turned a red far deeper than the yoke on his shirt. He had a piece of ass, it was a lock, but this kind of talk embarrassed him to a dangerous point. If Pamela Forktine wanted to do the bone dance, then Pamela Forktine had best not say anymore about it.

They went to her house. There she scared Wayne by looking in another room and announcing, “It’s okay. He’s out.”

“Who?”

“Rafe.”

“Rafe?”

“Oh. Raphael.”

“Who’s Raphael?”

“My son.”

“How old is he?”

“Nineteen.” Pamela Forktine had led Wayne into the living room and was making them a drink in the kitchen. Wayne pondered getting beat up by a nineteen-year-old kid named Raphael. His original concern had been that Pamela Forktine was married and that he might be shot by a Mr. Forktine. That was, now, preferable to this other. Raphael Forktine was either going to be a homosexual of some sort or some kind of terminator. Rafe Forktine sounded like death row.

When he looked back on it, picturing Pamela Forktine’s death-row-candidate son beating the ever-living shit out of him might have been the high point in the travail of his and Pamela Forktine’s eminent time together. But Rafe Forktine did not burst in and rescue Wayne from what was about to happen. No one did, including God.

Before God and everybody else, Pamela Forktine walked in the room with two drinks and her blouse open, no bra. This required of Wayne a careful, very casual double take. Her breasts were not altogether visible because they seemed to point down and away from each other, like a cartoon hound dog’s eyes. It was the end of subtlety on Pamela Forktine’s part. “Where’s that bone, Wayne?”

Wayne turned red and made a splitting noise.

“In here?” Pamela Forktine made one stroking pass, one unzipping pass, and scared Wayne with an immediate and vigorous program of what he would later term gobbling. It included a gobbling noise. Wayne would have laughed but was too frightened. The gobbling worked, though, and Pamela Forktine got up very cuddly in his neck, her knees facing him on the sofa, and said, “Oh, sweetie. I hope I’m okay.”