Padgett Powell - Aliens of Affection - Stories

She was not praying. She was thinking. She was thinking that in this bog of impropriety she was preparing to take Jimmy Teeth and herself into there was only one truly immoral mire, and that was to act older than he was. She could be older, she could be more experienced, she could take him in ten minutes where he’d take ten years to get on the streets of sex, and that would be that, but if she pulled rank, if she mothered him or protected him or even counseled him, she would be as wrong as the book on this sort of thing said she was. Jimmy Teeth’s presumed maturity, the young manliness that dared him into her life with his speaking pumpkin head on a fence and his trembling string-sized legs pushing stolen internal combustion all over her expensively landscaped, highly mortgaged family estate, would be the terra firma for their slouching into a swamp as potentially messy as this one.

“Jimmy,” she said, looking him in the eye and despite herself feeling a tenderness for another human being she had not felt in a long time, “Jimmy, I’m going to show you something.”

“Yes!” Jimmy Teeth said, making them both laugh.

“Jimmy, first, if I raise you from five dollars to, say, eight, for the lawn, you won’t tell Mr. Hollingsworth, will you?”

“That would be a private matter between you and me,” Jimmy Teeth said.

“And, Jimmy?”

“Yes’m?”

“Do you go trick or treating?”

“No’m, I quit that.”

That was the right answer. Mrs. Hollingsworth made herself another drink. Jimmy was free to pour himself another lemonade if he wanted one. From there on, Jimmy Teeth was on his own. Mrs. Hollingsworth was not on her own, but to the extent she became Janice Halsey again, which was a journey that partook of Orpheus’ ascent from the underworld with instructions to not look back, with some comical but not ungratifying sex mixed in, she was on her own, too.

IN THE PIC N’ SAVE Green Room, grits were free. Scarliotti, as he liked to call himself, though his real name was Rod, Scarliotti ate free grits in the Green Room. To Rod, grits were virtually sacramental; to Scarliotti they were a joke, and if he could not eat them for free in a crummy joint so down in the world it had to use free grits as a promotional gimmick, he wouldn’t eat them. Scarliotti had learned that when he was Rod, treating grits as good food, he had been a joke, so he became Scarliotti. He wanted his other new name, his new given name, to come from the province of martial arts. Numchuks Scarliotti was strong but a little obvious. He was looking for something more refined, a name that would not start a fight but would prevent one from starting. He also thought a name from the emergency room might do: Triage Scarliotti, maybe. But he had to be careful there. Not many people knew what terms in the emergency room meant. Suture Scarliotti, maybe. Edema Scarliotti. Lavage Scarliotti. No, he liked the martial-arts idea better. With his new name he would be a new man, one who would never eat grits with a straight face again.

There were many things he never intended to do with a straight face again. One of them was ride Tomos, a Yugoslavian moped that would go about twenty miles per hour flat out, and get clipped in the head by a mirror on a truck pulling a horse trailer and wake up with a head wound with horseshit in it in the hospital. Another was to be grateful that at least Tomos had not been hurt. Now, his collection of a quarter million dollars in damages imminent, he didn’t give a shit about a motorized bicycle. He wasn’t riding that and he wasn’t seriously eating grits anymore. He was going to take a cab the rest of his life and eat grits only if they were free. He would never again be on the side of the road and never pay for grits, and it might just be Mister Scarliotti. Deal with that.

The horse Yankees who clipped him were in a world of hurt and he wanted them to be. They were the kind of yahoos who leave Ohio and find a tract of land that was orange groves until 1985 and now is plowed out and called a horse farm and buy it and fence it and call themselves horse breeders. And somehow they breed Arabian horses, and somehow it is Arabs behind it all. Somehow Minute Maid, which is really Coca-Cola, leaves, and Kuwait and Ohio are here. And the Yankees are joking and laughing about grits at first, and then they wise up and try to fit in and start eating them every morning after learning how to cook them, which it takes them about a year to do it. And driving all over the state in diesel doolies with mirrors coming off them about as long as airplane wings, and knocking people who live here in the ditch.

Scarliotti is in his motorized bed in his trailer in Hague, Florida. It is only ten o’clock but the trailer is already ticking in the heat. Scarliotti swears it — the trailer — moves, kind of bends, on its own, when he is lying still in the bed, and not even moving the bed, which has an up for your head and an up for your feet and both together kind of make a sandwich out of you; hard to see the TV that way, which is on an arm just like at the hospital and controlled by a remote just like at the hospital, a remote on a thick white cord, which he doesn’t understand why it isn’t like a remote everybody else has at their house. When the trailer moves, Scarliotti thinks that a sinkhole might be opening up. Before his accident that would have been fine. But not now. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars would be left topside if he went down a sinkhole today, and even if he lived down there, which he thought was possible, he knew he couldn’t spend that kind of money down there. He thought about maybe asking Higgins, whom he worked for before the accident, if they could put outriggers or something on the trailer to keep it from going down. They could cable it to the big oak, but the big oak might go itself. He didn’t know. He didn’t know if outriggers would work or not. A trailer wasn’t a canoe, and the dirt was not water.

There were about a hundred pills on a tray next to him he was supposed to take but he hadn’t been, and now they were piled up and he had started throwing them out the back window and he hoped they didn’t grow or something and give him away. You could get busted for anything these days. It was not like the old days.

Tomos was beside the trailer, and Scarliotti had asked his daddy to get it running, and if his daddy had, he could get to the Lil’ Champ for some beer before the nurse came by. The bandages and the bald side of his head scared the clerk at the Lil’ Champ, and once she undercharged him, she was so scared. He let that go, but he didn’t like having done it because he liked her and she’d have to pay for it. But right now he couldn’t afford to correct an error in his favor. Any day now, he’d be able to afford to correct all the errors in his favor in the world. He was going to walk in the Lil’ Champ and buy the entire glass beer cooler, so he might as well buy the whole store and the girl with it. See how scared she got then.

He accidentally hit both buttons on the bed thing and squeezed himself into a sandwich and it made him pee in his pants before he could get it down, but he did not care. It didn’t matter now if you peed in your pants in your bed. It did not matter now.

He tried to start Tomos by push-starting it, and by the time he gave up he was several hundred yards from the trailer. It was too far to walk it back and he couldn’t leave it where it was so he pushed Tomos with him to the Lil’ Champ. He had done this before. The girl watched him push the dead moped up and lean it against the front of the store near the paper racks and the doors so he could keep a eye on it.