Padgett Powell - Aliens of Affection - Stories

Scarliotti did not greet her but veered to the cooler and got a twelve-pack of Old Mil and presented it at the counter and began digging for his money. It had gotten in his left pocket again, which was a bitch because he had to get it out with his right hand because his left couldn’t since the accident. Crossing his body this way and pronating his arm to dig into his pocket threw him into a bent slumped contortion.

The girl chewed gum fast to keep from laughing at Scarliotti. She couldn’t help it. Then she got a repulsive idea, but she was bored so she went ahead with it.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

Scarliotti continued to wrestle with himself, looking like a horror-movie hunchback to her. His contorting put the wounded part of his head just above the countertop between them. It was all dirty hair and scar and Formica and his grunting. She came from behind the counter and put one hand on Scarliotti’s little back and pulled his twisted hand out of his pocket and slipped hers in. Scarliotti froze. She held her breath and looked at his poor forlorn moped leaning against the brick outside and hoped she could get the money without touching anything else.

Scarliotti braced his two arms on the counter and held still and then suddenly stuck his butt out into her and made a noise and she felt, as she hoped she wouldn’t, a hardening the size of one of those small purple bananas they don’t sell in the store but are very good, Mexicans and people eat them. She jerked her hand out with a ten-dollar bill in it.

Scarliotti put his head down on the counter and began taking deep breaths.

“Do you want to go on a date?” he asked her, his head still down as if he were weeping.

“No.” She rang up the beer.

“Any day now I will be pert a millionaire.”

“Good.”

“Good? Good? Shit. A mil lionaire.”

She started chewing rapidly again. “Go ahead and be one,” she said.

“You don’t believe me?”

“You going be Arnold Schwarzenegger, too?”

This stopped Scarliotti. It was a direction he didn’t understand. He made a guess. “ What? You don’t think I’m strong?” Before the girl could answer, he ran over to the copy machine and picked up a corner of it and would have turned it over but it started to roll and got away and hit the magazine rack. Suddenly, inexplicably, he was sad. He did not do sad. Sad was bullshit.

“Don’t think I came,” he said to the girl.

“What?”

“I didn’t come. That’s pee !” He left the store with dignity and pushed Tomos with the beer strapped to the little luggage rack over the rear wheel to the trailer and did not look back at approaching traffic. Hit him again, for all he cared.

In the trailer there wasn’t shit on the TV, people in costumes he couldn’t tell what they were, screaming Come on down! or something. He put the beer in the freezer. He sat against the refrigerator feeling the trailer tick and bend. Shit like that wouldn’t happen if his daddy would fix damn Tomos. His daddy was letting him down. He was — he had an idea something like he was letting himself down. This was preposterous. How did one do, or not do, that? Do you extend outriggers from yourself? Can a canoe in high water just grow its own outriggers? No, it can’t.

A canoe in high water takes it or it goes down. End of chapter. He drank a beer and popped a handful of the pills for the nurse and knew that things were not going to change. This was it. It was foolish to believe in anything but a steady continuation of things exactly as they are at this moment. This moment was it. This was it. Shut the fuck up .

He was dizzy. The trailer ticked in the sun and he felt it bending and he felt himself also ticking in some kind of heat and bending. He was dizzy, agreeably. It did not feel bad. The sinkhole that he envisioned was agreeable, too. He hoped that when the trailer went down it went smoothly, like a glycerine suppository. No protest, no screaming, twisting, scraping. The sinkhole was the kind of thing he realized that other people had when they had Jesus. He didn’t need Jesus. He had a hole, and it was a purer thing than a man.

He was imagining life in the hole — how cool? how dark? how wet? Bats or blind catfish? The most positive speculation he could come up with was it was going to save on air conditioning, then maybe on clothes. Maybe you could walk around naked, and what about all the things that had gone down sinkholes over the years, houses and shit, at your disposal maybe — he heard a noise and thought it was the nurse and jumped in bed and tried to look asleep, but when the door opened and someone came in he knew it wasn’t the nurse and opened his eyes. It was his father.

“Daddy,” he said.

“Son.”

“You came for Tomos?”

“I’mone Tomos your butt.”

“What for?” Rather than have to hear the answer, which was predictable even though he couldn’t guess what it would be, Scarliotti wished he had some of those sharp star things you throw in martial arts to pin his daddy to the trailer wall and get things even before this started happening. His father was looking in the refrigerator and slammed it. He had not found the beer. If you didn’t drink beer you were too stupid to know where people who do drink it keep it after a thirty-minute walk in Florida in July. Scarliotti marveled at this simple luck of his.

He looked up and saw his daddy standing too close to him, still looking for something.

“The doctor tells me you ain’t following directions.”

“What directions?”

“ All directions.”

Scarliotti wasn’t following any directions but didn’t know how anybody knew.

“You got to be hungry to eat as many pills as they give me.”

“You got to be sober to eat them pills, son.”

“That, too.”

The headboard above Scarliotti’s head rang with a loudness that made Scarliotti jerk and made his head hurt, and he thought he might have peed some more. His father had backhanded the headboard.

“If we’d ever get the money,” Scarliotti said, “but that lawyer you picked I don’t think knows shit—”

“He knows plenty of shit. It ain’t his fault.”

“It ain’t my fault.”

“No, not beyond getting hit by a truck.”

“Oh. That’s my fault.”

“About.”

Scarliotti turned on the TV and saw Adam yelling something at Dixie. Maybe it was Adam’s crazy brother. This was the best way to get his father to leave. “Shhh,” he said. “This is my show.” Dixie had a strange accent. “Don’t fix it, then.”

“Fix what?” his father said.

“Tomos.”

“Forget that damned thing.”

“I can’t,” Scarliotti said to his father, looking straight at him. “I love her.”

His father stood there a minute and then left. Scarliotti peeked through the curtains and saw that he was again not taking the bike to get it fixed for him.

He got a beer and put the others in the refrigerator just in time. He wanted sometimes to have a beer joint and really sell the coldest beer in town, not just say it. He heard another noise outside and jumped back in bed with his beer. Someone knocked on the door. That wouldn’t be his father. He put the beer under the covers.

“Come in.”

It was the nurse.

“Come in, Mama,” Scarliotti said when he saw her.

“Afternoon, Rod.”

He winced but let it go. They thought in the medical profession you had mental problems if you changed your name. They didn’t know shit about mental problems, but it was no use fighting them so he let them call him Rod.

The nurse was standing beside the bed looking at the pill tray, going “Tch, tch, tch.”