Padgett Powell - Aliens of Affection - Stories

The beauty of mountain living continues unapace. I do nothing and nothing does not strike back. I tidy the house of an odd morning, though with the dirt floor the operation is one of judgment. You want the broom marks either all in one direction or describing a pleasant and regular pattern; the two cups together here, the two plates there, or a cup on a plate and a cup on a plate, as you prefer. The crow in the window is not to be teased with a shiny object. A gecko on the hearth is to be steered around: he will eat his translucent weight in flies. Then a coffee and a pill of choice about mid-morning, about the time you’d sit down and watch a rerun of Lucy in the States. I continue to fret the non-abandonment of Mrs. M.

The people here are friendly, whether dead or alive, mortal or god. The switchblade boys appear to have been an aberration, mostly. I do sometimes long for the odd breakfast cereal, but this passes with a good eye-to-eye with the crow.

I more and more display a contemplative nature, except that little in me inclines to elevated matters. Of occasion I take exquisite pleasure in a good tooth brushing and face scrubbing with a marvelous soap that they make themselves somehow from hogs and that smells of oranges. Grooming seems important when you walk about on your twenty-thousand-mile sandals. I am going to go soon in search of the fifty-pound Chihuahua, and I want to look good. If I am to be laughed at, I prefer an impeccable countenance. There is comfort in being deemed a neat lunatic. And less vainly there is the matter of being thought well of by the fifty-pound Chihuahua should one be found. One does not ordinarily credit dogs with discriminating in the matter of the master’s dress, but this will not be an ordinary dog.

One day I washed my face well and got on the bus to go and find him. I felt very secure in myself. I did not care what happened. That is how everyone should feel every day, but in my case I need the artifice of looking for something that should not exist and, should it, that will make people laugh at or run from to feel “normal.” As I grasp the nuances and vagaries of psychological disorders from my early brushes with the science, there is not much wrong with me.

In Chihuahua I found plenty plenary kennel. I found dogs the size of country rats with eyes the size of shooter marbles, with tiny, heavy-nailed feet that clicked on tile. I smiled at all these dogs and asked the breeders, “Más grande?” I have no idea if this locution was correct. It seemed that it was taken to mean something more like “More greater numbers?”—i.e., more dogs? — because I was invariably shown more (small) dogs.

It was my first day away from the house in some time, and my feet hurt, and I couldn’t tell if I was being regarded unfavorably because I wasn’t buying any of the hundreds of dogs I was shown or for less obvious reasons; these people in Chihuahua seemed alive and maybe I was back in the realm of common human indecencies, the dogs made me nervous in ways I was certain a big one would not; it got dark and I got tireder and lost, black-cave-nightmare lost on a trail on a hill that may not have been a trail and may have been not a hill but a fullblown mountain. Things got black and steep and I missed my María and the cool sheets and warm cinnamon and good cheer of a woman congratulating you for doing nothing beyond being there. I began most naturally howling like a wolf. By “most naturally” I mean it — these noises issued from me without a lot of thought. I did not say, Okay, we are in extremis, estranged from our friendly dead village, thing to do here is act like wolf — I just started rather groaning about my feet and María and the dark and then I began kind of singing the moaning and then I thought I was sounding like a wolf but don’t really know what they sound like, but even that idea — maybe I sounded like a bad idea of a wolf — did not occur and I kept at it, it felt right and meet so to do, amen. And out of the darkness walked unto me, looking terribly uncomfortable yet happy to see me, as might be said of any dog under circumstances like these, a forty-seven-pound Chihuahua, though its weight I did not determine then, I simply knew it was close enough. It was my dog. I had not believed in my lunatic quest until I saw its object before me in hesitant devotion.

Already it was surrendered to me, leader of our two-dog pack, and my self-esteem, which comes and goes, came. A fifty-pound Chihuahua, a mythical dog, surely a holy dog that I sensed was as old as the Aztec-Mayan mess I knew nothing about, was addressing me as Master on a lost mountain in Mexico. I shut up and said, “Home, boy,” and wanted to name him but only odd names arose — Algernon, Cremator, Dungeonballs, Turk (not bad — he looked Ottoman), Oldsmobile, Tampax, Terwilliger, Tweezer, Toulouse, I got stuck in the Ts until I hit Trotsky, perfect, and remembered I’d decided to name him that, and Trotsky led us home.

There we were put to bed like a couple of boys. María wagged a finger at me and said “Muy grande!” to either me or the dog and put him on a pallet in the kitchen, where he stayed, and we went to bed as usual, fond and hot. She smelled great and was firm and heavy, I should say solid, “heavy” misreads but should be taken favorably. María is the forty-seven-pound Chihuahua of women. I was to have been the hundred-and-forty-seven-pound eunuch of Taco Charley’s. My dog is the forty-seven-pound Chihuahua of Chihuahua. My head is a blunt instrument, a blunt instrument, and I don’t care. María is a good person.

A good person is a can of worms. A can of worms is a ball of wax. Sexually speaking. No. I do not mean that. I do not mean anything. If that were possible. I submit it is not. One may not mean nothing, never. One may amount to nothing, “be” nothing, and nothing may exist in a philosophical sense, but one may never mean nothing. This is, I think, obvious: What do you mean? Nothing. Oh?

So I mean something. A good person is a can of worms. That is what I mean. I am not good, probably. But the measure, the measuring, is…well, a can of worms, I believe is the expression. The expression seems almost universally applicable. Even a can of worms is a can of worms. Everything, however, is not a fly in the ointment or a wrench in the works. Shoe polish is not either of these, but shoe polish is a can of worms, clearly. Shoes themselves, wearing them, not, securing the proper size, the proper support, tying them — just what about shoes is not a can of worms? Nothing is not a can of worms. QED.

I took to taking the long, regular walk with my short, irregular dog. We went everywhere and nowhere together.

Perhaps a word about my past is in order. I have one. As they go, it is not astounding, probably, or outstanding, certainly, I would think. But as soon as I make such a claim, or claims, I wonder what I mean. You know about the episode involving Mrs. M. and Tod’s trike and my halfway-house time I have rather avoided. My presentation of these facts has not been altogether linear, I admit. I have said Mrs. M. is in indiscreet pursuit of me, and that that pursuit I have rebuffed. Something of the opposite might be the case. Or let us put it this way: I confess I was winder-peekin’ before I rode away from the window on Tod’s trike. That much I allow. Winder-peekin’ is as old a crime and harmless as they come, and in my book if you have the urge to winder-peek you’d best go ahead and winder-peek. The suppression of this impulse can bottle up into a nuclear mushroom of desire if you do not just go ahead and do it.

But my entire life, this is what I want to say, has not consisted of winder-peekin’. It has consisted in other enterprise. I have had jobs, good and bad, mostly the latter, mostly indoors, mostly involving paper more than people, and I have pension funds in place, etc. Much like anyone else, except those folk in lesser-developed countries where trades are still well thought of and you can be, for example, a fisherman for a living without having to join the Ku Klux Klan. I have observed Christmas at the appropriate time. I have browsed racks of greeting cards and been unable to bring myself to select one idiocy over the others. In many ways, I am approximately exactly like everyone else in the human predicament. But lately I am not: not everyone is walking the hills of Mexico unchallenged with a giant Chihuahua at his side for protection and a giant-hearted woman in his (her) bed at night for balm. I have seen my dog eat cacti, how tough he is — flowers skins needles and that ornery fiber-glassy down that really hurts, much more than the needles outright. He gives, I suppose, a cactus-eating aura and nobody messes with a cactus-eating aura, off a forty-seven-pound Chihuahua or off a mouse. I bask in this aura, drinking the occasional Yoo-Hoo, making the occasional sketch of hillside, whistling the occasional tune, inspecting the shoes I occasionally notice on my feet, the twenty-thousand-mile sandals, wearing well in the unpaved desert. My life, you might say, lacks definition. I had definition looking in Mrs. M.’s window, riding Tod’s trike, drinking that chocolate milk.