Padgett Powell - Aliens of Affection - Stories

Got me a set of sandals made from tires, arc of tread and some rubber-coated cable, look good for about another twenty thousand miles. Got these from a man in Matamoros walked on his knees on the same sandals; I know these are good sandals. I have sold my wardrobe by haggling with a boy over the price of a carved bird and a yo-yo while another boy selling his sister ran off with my valise — one calls it a valise if of European extraction and relieved of it in non-Europe. This I know, even if the odd American on the run from Taco Charley’s hardly qualifies. I got a red-striped shirt, or undershirt, that invokes a comic character in low Italian opera. I have never seen an opera. Does that matter? I am on the lam and it feels good. I dyed my hair red. Actually, I put a bottle of peroxide on it and before I got on the bus good it was red and seems to have arrested there. I look not unjustly like Mrs. M.’s husband, had she one. She has sent her deprived need warping after me. She’s in for a certain disappointment, for this husband looks distinctly homosexual. And I already have wondrous searing hallucinatory dysentery, a truly fevered poop. I feel like Zebulon Pike, of whom I know not one fact, and that I say I feel like him has as much to do with me and his ghost as with any nitpicking biographers who want to challenge us. Those who choose to are free to challenge a dead man with his name on a mountain if they want to. There is not going to be a lot of challenging me from here on in. I am bound for Chihuahua with a icee on my knee. Don’t you cry for me, I am bound for Chi-hoo-wa-wa with my Dog World on my knee.

There are more important matters than Chihuahuas, fifty pounds or otherwise. I like the open window and a breeze. Inclemency is important. Dolls and their effects on children, not to mention adults. Fiscal policies, particularly those that oppress the indigent, are “more important” than the fifty-pound Chihuahua. Violations of human dignity in general and in all forms are “more important” than a dog, however spectacular it may be with its apple-dome cranium and wide-set bugged eyes and tiny feet and nervous happy prancing mince, looking, at fifty pounds, like a Doberman on nicotine and steroids. Yet for me no human concern is worth a damn next to the matter of a fifty-pound Chihuahua. Only my wanting one is on scale, in terms of human gravity, with the fifty-pound Chihuahua itself.

The bus I ride with my rubricated hair is all colors, I noticed getting on. It appears to have been perpetually painted, like a ship, but unlike a ship the bus is painted with whatever is at hand. It looks industrial hippie, naturally a tad garish but not deliberately so, in the interest of preservation rather than political statement. It is a scrambled color chart shambling and rusting withal down the dusty trail, which here is a dusty, mighty dusty trail, yessirreebob. Even the chickens in the good seats are hunkered down in their necks looking to be having difficulty breathing. The five men who entertained me by indiscreetly passing a switchblade back and forth among them are now not disapprovingly passing among themselves, taking swigs after studying the label, my bottle of peroxide, which I offered by way of greeting. Calloused feet abound, and the bloodshot eye, and the patient mostly overweight Madonna, and the knotty, fly-on-sore, rather-more-mucusy-than-not Child. And the squinting Chicken. And the open-eyed Me. Yes, Me, a virtual sunflower of perceptive acquisitiveness bouncing in full mental jacket on the bus with everybody else destitute enough to be in northeast Mexico without any prospects of visiting the beauty parlor or clocking in or calling the travel agent or writing the proposal or calling the agent or going to the doctor or the theater very soon. No, we are riding the bus; for now we are riding the bus. The Switchblades will find a 99-bottles-of-beer-on-the-wall pulque bar, the Chickens aroost in the dark where they will keep one eye open, the Madonnas a place to bed the sluggish Children and conceive some more. And I want a Dog.

There was a time when I was not this way. But: was there not such a time for us all? Do we not all claim a moment before which we were not the ruint sons of bitches we have become? Do you want or need to hear of my unfallen state when you have your own? I think not. Let us get on with it. I like a rigorous schedule of mental and physical exercise which cannot be adhered to, and good cotton socks and good leather boots. That is all I need, and the dog. Mysticism is a sport that any good failed scientist of the West can be a good amateur in by simply breathing his normal empirical air and not worrying too much about his (inevitable) failure (at science). I have found a candy bar in my seat on the bus and am looking around to see what might be the consequences of eating it. I feel like I’ve found a case of cigarettes in a penitentiary. The bus is cool and the candy firm. I do not recognize the brand. It is probably Nestle in disguise. Or Coke. Nothing is simple. Capitalist raptors fly at seat level through the people’s bus. I fall on my candy bar like a hero falling on a grenade. It’s not bad, nutty with a bouquet of gasoline and lint.

We had a bus break and I got two chocolate-drink soda things, like the Yoo-Hoo in the States, but these look less, well, homogenous, more cacciatore. When I got back on the bus, one of the switchblade fellows was across my seat, with his feet in the aisle and his eyes slitted open to watch me react. I made a hand gesture that meant nothing, but amused his peers, and sat with a woman I know now to be a nurse. I offered her one of the coagulate Yoo-Hoos and to my surprise she accepted it, and to my further surprise she palmed me a pill, and to my further surprise I downed it, and to my further surprise it made me high in a solid quality oxycodone way. I was sorry to see the last of my runny Yoo-Hoo go. The bus was now winding precariously up into hills, and the livestock was restless, some of it running under the seats, and the tired civility of the folk was degrading into a workaday funk lending less charm to their colorful polyester clothes than you might have perceived had you been, say, a housewife from Oshkosh watching them get on the bus back in Matamoros and not getting on yourself but crossing back over the border in your rental car and sleeping the happy sleep of the well traveled in the TraveLodge with the sleepy-bear logo outside in calming neon and trademark-registered, waking once in the night when your husband suddenly was not beside you but relaxing immediately when he emerged from the bathroom, knowing it was his one nightly relief and that one at his age indicates no prostate alarum unless you are talking to the Cancer Society people, who tend to go overboard, but understandably, you suppose, and the nurse leaned to me as if falling asleep, and in fact had her head on my shoulder for a moment before she said, “Joo can come home me but do not see me your thing.” I nodded vigorously at this suggestion, oddly cheered by her directness, and very suddenly rather depressed by the paucity of my knowledge of Mexico and the paucity of my business being in it. What I knew: the name Zapata, which I was not sure was Mexican; the name Bolivar, ditto; Santa Ana, definite, but a large loser; Cortes wrecked somebody (Peru?) (Where does Pizarro fit in?); Aztec-Mayan mess, some Egyptian-like outfits without mathematics and not sure where they were; one word: perro, dog, but I also thought it might mean but (and I dearly hoped not, because finding a fifty-pound but was going to be at once easier and more complicated than finding a fifty-pound dog); and that Trotsky had been assassinated in Mexico City, which I got, with an ice ax, which I did not get. That was the sum of Mexico as I sat going home with a nurse in my quest for a large Chihuahua. All in all, it was a fair fix. If I kneecapped the first switchblade boy off the bus with my Yoo-Hoo bottle it might command the respect of the others. Then I could make a dignified retreat to the pill-filled lair of my wanton health-care professional and have a very nice evening at home. I could relish her want of material overcomforts, her spare rooms free of the blued noise of TV, her hard mattress, one sheet, two cups, two plates. Her red table and matching yellow chairs. Her one strand of beads, her butt.