Padgett Powell - Aliens of Affection - Stories

That want seemed a huge oversight on the part of the stewards of modern civilized life who had turned life into injury and redress, loss and litigation. The final moment in it all would be every citizen suing himself or herself for damages resulting from his or her own excesses and negligences with respect to himself or herself and his or her personal aggrandizement or lack thereof. The vista of the denizens of the modern world suing themselves into bankruptcy gave hope where there had not been any. This was a beautiful prospect to Mr. Albemarle, patrolling all along the watchtower — a kind of global legal self-immolation that would leave a few survivors who bore no one else and themselves no ill will. He suddenly felt, in possession of this vision, that he might be a prophet of some sort: the elect, here all along the watchtower not to guard a moat of the brokenhearted but to witness a Trojan War of Tortes. He was going to observe World War III, which was going to be a global litigious meltdown, from a safe purchase on his lawless wall.

Mr. Albemarle left the letter on top of the writing desk with instructions for its copying and mailing to one thousand appropriate parties, TBA. He had no idea whom the instructions were for, but if someone came along and assumed the duty it would be better than if someone didn’t. Leaving the desk he noticed a phone booth he had never seen before and stepped in it and dialed a number.

“Hello?”

“Hello. Good, it’s you.”

“Who is this?”

“Troy Albemarle.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. I just wanted to tell you that I’m lonely.”

“You have the wrong number.”

“No, I don’t.”

“You don’t? You don’t know me and I don’t know you.”

“You’re a woman ,” Mr. Albemarle said, with more force than he intended, “and I just wanted to tell you that I’m lonely.”

“Look, mister. That’s what you tell your own woman, not a stranger.”

“Look, yourself. If I tell my own woman I’m lonely, she’ll think me silly.”

“Maybe you are.”

“Maybe I am. I don’t dispute it. But to admit that one is silly is not to deny that one is lonely.”

“It probably accounts for it.”

“It probably does !” Mr. Albemarle all but shouted, slamming the phone into its chrome, spring-loaded cradle, fully satisfied.

When he saw Dale Mae approaching with a shotgun, he thought to test the wisdom of the conversation with the strange woman, with whom he was in love.

“Dale Mae, I’m lonely.”

“Don’t be silly,” Dale Mae said.

“Yes!”

“What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing.”

“Do you want to shoot some skeet?”

“Of course I want to shoot some skeet.”

“Well, come on. There’s a skeet range down the way.”

“I never saw a skeet range all along the watchtower,” Mr. Albemarle said. “A lot of things, actually, are—”

“Come on, lonely heart. My daddy taught me one thing and I’m going to show you what it is.”

“Do, do, do,” Mr. Albemarle said, taking a look around for the presence of witnesses to this exchange. There were none that he could see, which, he knew, meant not much. Nothing apparent meant more, in these days, than something obvious. He was getting used to that. It took some doing, but he was doing it.

The skeet range was of the nothing-apparent type. Dale Mae stopped walking, put two shells in her gun, and crisply closed it, looking dreamy-eyed at Mr. Albemarle and patting the gun and saying of it “Parker” in the lowest, sexiest voice he’d ever heard, and then her eyes cleared and she turned to face the void beyond the wall, said “Pull,” and blew to infinitely small pieces a thing which seemed to fly from the front face of the wall. It looked like a 45 rpm record before she hit it; Mr. Albemarle concluded it had been a clay skeet after she hit it. She kept saying “Pull” and blasting that which flew, left right high low, to bits, and she took a long, lusty snort of the thick cordite smell in the air and scuffed some of the wadding from her shells off the wall and said, “Mone get me some iced tea and fried chicken when I get through shooting, and then kiss you to death,” and resumed firing, shooting backwards and between her legs and one-handed from the hip, like a gunslinger with a three-foot-long pistol, missing nothing, and Mr. Albemarle started talking, uncontrollably, agreeably:

“In the first grade had a teach name Mrs. Campbell that was the end of sweetness for me in the, ah, official realm. Next year ozone, I mean second grade in orange groves, etc. Mother had water break and taxi to hospital, golf-course father, had swimming lessons chlorine nose. A siege of masturbation ensued. Declined professional life — had choice, too. Somehow at juncture early in life where you elect to watch birds or not I deigned not. Fuck birds. This is sad. I am holy in my disregard of the holy. Sitting upright in a Studebaker or some other classically lined failure is the attitude in which I see myself for a final portrait in the yearbook of life. Depth charges look like 55-gallon drums, but I suspect they are really not that innocent-looking up close. Reservations at hotels and restaurants and airlines are for—” He stopped and snorted lustily the cordite himself and realized he had been aping Dale Mae’s shooting in mime. He looked like a fool. She kept shooting. She was a one-person fire-fight. She would fill the moat with clay shards and wads.

“I want the certainty of uncertainty. I declare nothing to customs, ever. Transgressions of a social and moral sort interest me: philosophically, I mean. They assume — I mean those who assume to know a transgression — that points A and B for the gression to trans are known. I’ve had trouble, since the ozone of second grade and the chlorine and my mother holding herself, having peed in her pants and cursing my father, and since the large beautiful hognose snake I was too scared of to pick up in the orange grove so went home to get a jar to invite him to crawl into, which took about a half hour, and well, the snake didn’t wait around, I’ve had trouble knowing point A and point B in order to correctly perceive, or conceive, transgression.”

“Let’s go get some chicken,” Dale Mae said.

“That sounds delicious. That sounds good. That sounds not urbane but divine anyway—”

“Shut up, baby. I can’t kiss you, you go off your rocker.”

“You shoot that gun I shoot my mouth, is all. I—” There was, not improbably, tea and fried chicken in a handsome woven basket, and a red-checkered tablecloth for them to have the picnic on, all along the watchtower.

Selling hot, melted ice cream from a rolling cart, like soup, or to put on pastries, or something, he supposed, Mr. Albemarle pushed an umbrellaed cart all along the watchtower. It had four rather small wheels instead of the more conventional two large wheels used by food vendors, and they flibbered and squalled, drawing his attention away from trying to figure whose idea it was to try to sell hot ice cream to pondering how much of life, finally, was pushing things around on wheels. The sick were flibbering and squalling down halls of disinfectant, the healthy down freeways of octane, dessert in a good restaurant flibbered and squalled up to you in a cart much like his — if the human race had gone as mad for fire as it had for the wheel, the earth would be a black cinder. Instead, it was a scarred, run-over thing, tracks all over it, resembling in the long view one of the world’s largest balls of twine, in this case one as large as the world.

Dale Mae was down the way and Mr. Albemarle moved along the way. Who was going to buy hot ice cream? Who, all along the watchtower, was going to buy anything? There was no one all along the watchtower, so far, except the sodiers, the aliens of affection, and now Dale Mae. Mr. Albemarle looked around to see if perchance anyone was watching and pushed the cart of bubbling ice cream — it smelled cloyingly sweet — over the edge of the watchtower into the moat, brushing his hands together briskly as if he’d handily completed a nasty task. He whistled a happy tune, one that appeared to be random notes, and sauntered all along the watch-tower.