Padgett Powell - Aliens of Affection - Stories

Wayne rebaits. Takes one pretty-good-looking chicken heart off his hook and tosses it to the gravel, where ants will find it in about ten minutes, though there is not an ant on the beach, and puts a better-looking chicken heart on, a fresh purple-red cone with a band of yellow fat on it, and casts it out, far like he can, as he puts it in his Mexican English. To cast out as far like he can is farther than he should, because the fish, if there are any, are in closer. But Wayne is the kind to speak perennially of “the channel,” of the necessity of casting into this channel, which is never marked — you have to know —but is always, wherever you fish, far out there, at precisely the distance Wayne can cast if he casts far like he can.

Floyd, Wayne’s brother, still lives with his and Wayne’s mother. Floyd is a large, soft fellow who somehow is not regarded as fat, or quite grown, which is why, probably, at thirty-seven, people do not kill him. He is found in the wee hours wearing plaid sports coats too large even for him, the pockets loaded with science-fiction paperbacks, verbally assaulting police officers. He is arrested, to be bailed out by his mother. He returns home, red-eyed, with his science-fiction books stacked neatly on his folded coat on his high knees during the front-seat ride home in his mother’s car. She is not mad at him, or really worried. He’s Floyd and he’s home.

Wayne is putting his car in a ditch, putting Antabuse under his tongue, putting his kids in a motel to hide them from his wife, putting dollar bills in a jukebox at eleven in the morning, putting a chaise lounge beside a lake to call for an imaginary broad to give him a knobber. Wayne has thrown away everything except a folding plastic-and-aluminum chair, an Igloo Playmate cooler, and his cigarettes.

Floyd has thrown away nothing — not his childhood room, his toys in it, or his mother.

Mr. Stark, father and husband, threw them all away, one presumes.

Floyd is Mrs. Stark’s boy.

Wayne is on his own.

Wayne inherited the throwing-away. Wayne even threw away the United States Navy. Once, an Ingersoll-Rand compressor, admittedly someone else’s, but still.

Floyd? Asleep. Mrs. Stark is watching a late-morning soap. These people are afraid of nothing.

Floyd is talking, on a roof: “It was thirteen inches long and nine inches around—”

“On the soft?” Wayne asks.

“On the soft,” Floyd says, with a giggle. “I think.”

Wayne pulls out his tape measure and starts measuring roof jacks. As these things happen, the fourth or fifth jack — a lead jacket for open ventilation pipes protruding through roofs — is exactly thirteen inches high and nine inches around.

“If that son of a bitch has a dick that big,” Wayne says, “you tell that son of a bitch I’ll suck it.”

Floyd giggles some more. “I don’t know where he is.”

“I thought he was your friend,” Wayne says.

“My friend’s friend.”

“I don’t care who the son of a bitch is. I’ll suck it.” Wayne measures another jack.

Wayne is serious in the one way Wayne can be serious: trivial outrage. He is being lied to, albeit thirdhand, about a ludicrous matter, but insofar as Wayne has a member that he cannot tell anyone is thirteen inches long by nine inches around— on the soft —he is outraged. The gentleman of mythic dimension has breached a protocol of manners, even for roofers, and Wayne will see him in a duel, if he can. Wayne proposes not to duel evenly, member-to-member; Wayne proposes false submission: he will contest this liar on his knees. The true beauty of this is that if the man did appear, up the ladder and over the horizon of the roof edge, carrying with him this great, leaden soil pipe between his legs, Wayne would not suck it. Wayne would turn profoundly red, giggling now himself — Floyd would stop giggling, at this point embarrassed and a little outraged to have delivered the goods, only to have his brother welsh — and begin complimenting the bearer of the cannon.

Wayne would say, “That’s a goddamned weenie ! That is a goddamned weenie !”

The man of course is never to be produced, and the day of measuring roof jacks and threatening the man declines from its prospects of gargantua, Wayne retiring to Coors, Floyd to science fiction. For weeks, even months, Wayne and Floyd measure roof jacks. A surprising number can be found that measure thirteen inches in height by nine inches in girth, exactly.

Wayne and Floyd measure roof jacks finally automatically, compulsively, learning to gauge them on sight with great precision—“Ten-seven, skip it”—and finding the eerily common thirteen-nine in a twilight zone of ambivalent sexuality. After work they clean themselves with creamy go-jo and coarse rags and cold beer.

Finally they stop measuring roof jacks. Wayne may shake his head occasionally, passing a thirteen-nine. Floyd ignores or has forgotten roof jacks as anything other than obstacles not to trip over.

Days, once they abjure gargantua, even absurd gargantua, and descend into their ordinary smallnesses, have a way of remaining small. The lives that inhabit the days also assume postures of ordinary smallness. One day an apex of sorts, laughable though it be, of men together measuring roof jacks with twenty-five-foot Stanley Powerlocks, gives way to the men scattered, disconnected, down from the roof, doing less than measuring roof jacks and laughing. Threatening nothing. Threatening, finally, not even themselves.

And Wayne today? Wayne today is as elusive as Wayne yesterday. But Wayne isn’t afraid of anything because he knows he is afraid of it. I, by contrast, think myself fearless, and when something scares me it scares the shit out of me and forces me to undergo a little private analysis the likes of which never trouble Wayne. If you are afraid of everything, you are finally not afraid of anything. It is when you presume to be not afraid of a few things that the terror creeps in. The terror resides in correctly identifying what you are afraid of and what you are not afraid of. The absolutely fearful person is in an absolute and comfortable position: against the ropes, ready for it all. The presumer, the poseur of courage, is looking left, right, behind himself, trembling.

And what of Ugly, Wayne’s estranged wife, with two kids and already, no doubt, Wayne’s bad teeth in their malnourished heads? What of poor Felicia and the rug rats? Plastic shoes, polyester shorts, impetigo legs, happily playing, and at nothing demonstrably inventive or clever or advanced or Montessori. The debilitating issue of debilitated parents. Who will grow up to be, the boys, broadcast magnates or serial killers and, were there girls, Union 76 cashiers or actresses of first-tier Hollywood sexuality. Life all over the road. These people are afraid of nothing.

Of Felicia I know nothing. On the one occasion when Wayne called her Ugly in my presence, I noticed at that moment her nice ass, in short, tight shorts of a color like magenta, set off by her very white legs and of a stretchy knit material, the combination of which — these dimestore pants and unhealthily white legs — was exciting, and if she had asked me if she was ugly, I would have said she was not, but she did not (why would she? how could she?), and I did not volunteer a correction (very easy to do: “Wayne, for God’s sake”). And why did I not correct him? None of my business? Too smarmy? Would it have been open flirtation to compliment her even by the left-handedness of scolding my friend her husband? I think I suspected I would worsen the situation if I said, Not ugly to me. And this seems true still. But how I might have worsened it was obscure then and still is. Felicia would have given me a look, then or an hour later, delivered me a colder beer than that she delivered Wayne, or she would have been disgusted with me. That, I think, is the better probability. Not ugly, big boy? And what are you going to do about it? Shit. And she continues to diaper a rug rat, fetch us beer, hide.