Padgett Powell - Aliens of Affection - Stories

Yes, so I have, as any modern burgher citizen denizen fool census-mark does, annuities and a litter of wives and lesser mistakes in my wake. But something distinguishes me from those doing their time, workaday halfway-house cons who do not take inspiration from a black cabdrivers insolence and flee country of origin. Let’s just not go into it. I have made some phone calls and effected a cleaner getaway than it might have looked. There are realtors in red jackets showing my house. My modest man fired from Merrill Lynch for not pushing company stock on me is now holding my holdings at Smith Barney and observing my “conservative” investor-profile status, all interest and dividends on auto-rollover mode until such time as I need cash down here, which does not seem to be imminent. María does not know of course that I could buy us anything at all, and I find it agreeable not dwelling on it myself. I sometimes do wish I had Tod’s Harley down here, but that would elicit more notice than is healthy. Halcyon as it is, there are still the switchblade boys in the hill and dale. My dog and I have done some naughty spelunking — unobservant of safety precaution, I suppose I mean — in old silver mines. These have a greasy groped feel to the walls that tells you the last thing you will ever locate within is silver, and this seems to excite us as to the possibilities of finding truer treasure. We don’t know what, my bug-eyed hyper pal and I, but we look. Deep in a mine, too dark to see rock before you nose it, I can hear my dog pee from excitement in the soft guano. We squish on. This is life, perfectly put: go not you know where, except down, for reward already removed by those cleverer than you, sliding agreeably in ammoniac excrement, and “give up” and turn around with a sigh of resigned cheer with your boon companion, who does not complain. In Cincinnati, drink beer with grumbling colleagues until you all get DUIs going home to abuse the family. In untamed Mexico, drink a Yoo-Hoo with your dog and walk home and have a pill and a nurse. Altogether better way of life. Another thing: an egg down here is either in a nest, and usually not a formal one but one of convenience, such as a drawer, or it is in a pan acookin’, or it is in someone’s hand going to the pan. It is not in a box on a shelf in a store or on a truck going to the store or on a belt going to a box to go in a truck to go to the store to go on a shelf to go on a belt to go in a bag to go in a car to go in a house to go in a refrigerator to go from the box to go in a pan. I rest my case. Let your mind swell with the implications of the horseshit attending an egg in the United States and see how far you get. Gedouttahere is where you get.

I was allowed to work — the term is inaccurate: to get in the way — at the local panadería, and so was my dog. I hung out and flopped flour around, and punched it, and heaved it, and cut it, and kneaded and rolled and just generally had a sexy time of it. My dog was called Dusty. I contemplated his nature as he apparently contemplated me having relations with dough. He was allowed on the premises because it was believed he was the world’s greatest ratter, but I do not think he is. At any rate, I have never seen him look for a rat or act like he wants to locate one. It seems rather more correct to regard this dog as a gentleman, albeit a tense one who does manifest a nervous eye toward my welfare. If I cough in a cloud of flour, he edges up, prancing a little, to my side, until the fit is over and he retires to a cool pool of flour on the floor. If I slip in guano as we mine lost silver, and whimper from the slick ammoniac turf, he licks my face. He is a kind of bodyguard, but through no wit or will of his own — people are generally terrified of a forty-seven-pound Chihuahua.

I get off from the panadería —where, by the way, no one fears Dusty because, as I get it, they are already dead, and where I am accepted because once covered in flour I am indistinguishable from the dead — I get off and go home and make María breakfast against her day abus. I feature the fried egg and the cigarette tortilla, buttered and salted and rolled tightly. They’ve allowed me a bag of sopaipilla from the panadería and these I adulterate with things and put in a plastic bag for her. She goes off brown and fresh and fed and coming home to me. Wow. Legs! Kisses! No crap! Me and the dog and my TV-free day! Silver mining with my dog. I am a puny Tarzan with an apple-dome Cheetah and a robust Jane. Jane is always robust, that is why she is Jane. Jane does not say, “What did you do today, honey — nothing again?” Jane says, “Estoy berry tire” and gets you in a headlock and wrestles you to bed and buries her head in your unmanly chest.

Then the Revolution came by. That is all I know to call it. It was a parade of men in Mercedeses, shouting a formulaic something that contained the three or so Mexican names known to me before this my naturalization. It sounded like ZapatBoliTrotsGuevaraWhathe-fuckwrongwiyou!? I looked timid for a minute and looked to María for support and protection, a very bad move on the game board of machismo. But I noticed there was some kind of gentler current running through things; the apparent leader got out of the T-top through which he had been throwing the crowd epithets and candy and spoke conspiratorially with María, as near as I can tell about me. At any rate, they looked at me during this consultation, he at my head and she at my feet. I had the wit to go get my dog and two sugar scoops of the pills. I could not tell whether they wanted me for a ritual sacrifice or for some nobler symbolic purpose — a red-faced white man visible in the cause.

When I got back outside, things looked better and worse. El Revolucionario looked like he wanted to kiss María rather than execute or conscript me. The gang was impatiently revving the Mercedes Revolution motorcade. The entire scene had elements of a rabid young labor union, a Klan rally, a Hells Angels mobilization, a football weekend, a fraternity rush party, a fistfight on a dance floor, fishing on a big party boat, and on the fringes a drug deal. That’s where I stepped in: without any more ado I poured the pills from the sugar scoops into the cupped palms of all the revolutionaries. This raised my stock visibly and considerably. At the precise zenith of this coup of public relations my forty-seven-pound Chihuahua peed on a Mercedes tire. I felt we had together made a perfect declination to join the cause, either as casualty or as troop. And indeed the wet tire was noted with some chuckling and some pills were thrown back amid headshaking and the Parade of the People was off in half-circle blasts of dust and diesel and death to the oppressors. María and my dog and I stood there arm-in-arm, looking happily into the sunset. Is the cup half empty or full? I aim to get into my grave squarely and neatly and meet my private batch of worms without one more moment of horseshit intervening. Leave me alone — I shall dig my own hole. I do not recall being as centered, as easy on the feet of my being, since as a boy I took solid solace in keying out a snake or tree and playing a little ball. After that, things got pointless fast. And it seemed the job of everyone to accelerate the pointlessness and deepen one’s commitment to it. This is where, if I am not mistaken, “failure” began to accrue: those who for whatever reasons did not or could not vigorously conspire in the proliferation of pointlessness began to “fail.” The specifics of what I mean by “pointlessness”—oh, supply your own. Who cares. I’ve got a unique dog and a room full of no appliances broken or working and a woman not broken and no country that claims me and its revolutionaries will not kill me. Could I have more? I am allowed to muss myself in the bakery of the dead. I am allowed to prospect in old and lost mines. I am allowed to fall down therein in prodigious bat slime. I am allowed.