Padgett Powell - Aliens of Affection - Stories

“I took a bunch of ’em,” Scarliotti said.

The nurse was squinching her nose as if she smelled something.

“I know you want to get well, Rod,” she said.

“I am well,” he said.

“Not by a long shot,” she said.

“I ain’t going to the moon ,” he said.

The nurse looked curiously at him. “No,” she said, “you’re not.”

Scarliotti thought he had put her in her place. He liked her but didn’t like her preaching crap at him. He was well enough to spend the $250,000, and that was as well as he needed to be. It was the Yankee Arab horse breeders were sick, not well enough to pay their debts when they go running over people because they’re retired and don’t have shit else to do. The nurse was putting the arm pump-up thing on his arm. She had slid some of the pills around with her weird little pill knife that looked like a sandwich spreader or something. He wanted to show her his Buck knife, but would reveal the beer and the pee if he got it out of his pocket.

“It’s high, again. If you have another fit, you’re back in the hospital.”

“I’m not having no nother fit.”

Scarliotti looked at her chest. The uniform was white and ribbed, and made a starchy little tissuey noise when she moved, and excited him. He looked closely at the ribs in the material when she got near him.

“Them lines on your shirt look like…crab lungs,” he said.

“What?”

“I don’t know, like crab lungs. You know what I mean?”

“No, Rod, I don’t.” She rolled her eyes and he saw her. She shouldn’t do that. That was what he meant when he said, and he was right, that the medical profession did not know shit about mental problems.

The nurse went over everything again, two this four that umpteen times ninety-eleven a day, which meant you’d be up at two and three and five in the morning taking pills if you bought the program, and left. He watched Barney Fife get his bullet taken back by Andy. He wanted to see Barney keep his bullet. Barney should be able to keep that bullet. But if Barney shot at his own foot like that, he could see it. Barney was a dumb fuck. Barney looked like he’d stayed up all night taking pills. There was another noise outside. Scarliotti had had it with people fucking with him. He listened. There was a timid knock at the door. He just lay there. Let them break in, he thought. Then, head wound or not, he would kill them.

The door opened and someone called Hello. Then: “Anyone home?”

Scarliotti waited and was not going to say anything and go ahead and lure them in and kill them, but it was a girl’s voice and familiar somehow, but not the nurse, so he said, “If you can call it that.”

The girl from the Lil’ Champ stepped in.

“I’m down here.”

She looked down the hall and saw him and came down it with a package.

“You paid for a case,” she said.

“I could use a case,” Scarliotti said.

“Pshew,” the girl said. Even so, she was, it seemed, being mighty friendly.

“Well, let’s have us one,” Scarliotti said.

The girl got two beers out of the package.

“You like Andy Griffin?” he said.

“ Fith. He’s okay. Barney’s funny. Floyd is creepy.”

“Floyd?”

“Barber? In the chair?”

“Oh.” Scarliotti had no idea what she was talking about. Goober and Gomer, he knew. The show was over anyway. He turned the set off, holding up the white remote rig to show the girl.

“They let you off to deliver that beer?”

“I’m off.”

“Oh.”

“On my way.”

“Oh.”

Scarliotti decided to go for it. “I would dog to dog you.” He blushed, so he looked directly at her to cover for it, with his eyes widened.

“That’s about the nastiest idea I ever heard,” the girl said.

“My daddy come by here a while ago, took a swang at me,” Scarliotti said. “Then the nurse come by and give me a raft of shit. I nearly froze the beer. Been a rough day.”

“You would like to make love to me. Is that what you’re saying?” Since she had touched him in the store and he had said what he said, the girl had undergone a radical change of heart about Scarliotti’s repulsiveness. She did not understand it, exactly.

Scarliotti had never in his life heard anyone say, “You would like to make love to me,” nor had he said it to anyone, and did not think he could, even if it meant losing a piece of ass. He stuck by his guns.

“I would dog to dog you.”

“Okay.”

The girl stood up and took her clothes off. Compared to magazines she was too white and puffy, but she was a girl and she was already getting in the bed. For a minute Scarliotti thought they were fighting and then it was all warm and solid and they weren’t. He said “Goddamn” several times. “Goddamn.” He looked at the headboard and saw what looked like a dent where his father had backhanded it and was wondering if he was wearing a ring done that or just hit it that fucking hard with his hand when the girl bit his neck. “Ow!” he said. “Goddamn.”

“You fucker,” the girl said.

“Okay,” Scarliotti said, trying to be agreeable.

“Good,” she said.

Then it was over and she no longer looked too white and soft. She was sweaty and red. Some of Scarliotti’s hair had fallen out on her from the good side of his head and he hoped nothing had fallen out of the bad side. The trailer had stopped moving from their exertions. There were ten beers sweating onto a hundred pills beside the bed. The nurse and his father would not be back before the trailer could start ticking in the heat and bending on its own, unless they bent it again themselves with exertions in the bed, but all in all Scarliotti thought it would be a good enough time to have some fun without being bothered by anyone before the trailer found its way down the hole.

Scarliotti woke up and took the sweating beers in his arms and put them in the refrigerator and came back with two cold ones. “They look like a commercial sitting there but they don’t taste like a commercial,” he said, waking and mystifying the girl. “Women,” he said, feeling suddenly very good about things, “know what they want and how to get it. Men are big fucking babies.”

“How do you come to know all that?” the girl asked.

“I know.”

“How many women you had?”

“Counting you?”

“Yeah.”

“Three.”

“That explains how you know so much.”

Scarliotti started laughing. “Heh, heh, heh… heah, heahh, heahhh —” and did not stop until he was coughing and slumped against the wall opposite the bed.

“Quailhead,” he said.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“You call me quailhead?”

“No. You want to go down to the Green Room and eat free grits?”

“Eat free grits,” she said flatly, with a note of suspicion.

“Yeah.”

“I thought you were going be a millionaire.”

“I am. Pert near. That’s why I don’t pay for grits.”

“Well, I still pay for grits. I ain’t eating no free grits.”

“See? Heh, heh…it proves what I said. Women know what they want.”

“And men are babies.”

Scarliotti started the laugh again and crawled into bed with the girl.

“Be still. Shhh!”

“What?” the girl asked.

“Listen to the trailer.”

“I don’t hear anything—”

“Listen! Hear that?”

“No.”

“It’s ticking. It’s moving. You ever thought of living in a sinkhole?”

“No.”

“You want to go down into a sinkhole with me?”

“No.”

“You want to go to the Hank show?”

“Okay.”

“I mean, us all, whole thing going. Trailer and all.”