Padgett Powell - Aliens of Affection - Stories

There was a girl he met in the Navy in the Philippines. She looked entirely American but swore, in perfect English, which made it harder to believe, that she was Amerasian, a soldier’s bastard. When they fucked she started shaking and kept shaking until he thought the cot would come apart. When they were done she put her face in his neck and held it there for a long time, which made him think she was crying and was entirely American. Wayne thinks of this now, looking at the woman behind the bar smoking, looking in virtually any direction but his, who calls him “sugar” when making change. The Navy was a desert but it wasn’t like this.

“Have you ever heard of a song,” Wayne says to the woman behind the bar, “called ‘The Navy Is a Desert but Nothing Like This’?”

“No,” she says.

“Good song.”

“I bet, sugar.”

“No, you don’t,” Wayne says under his breath.

“You ready?”

“No,” he says, and walks out, anticipating the secure barreling unfraught ease of the heavy Impala on straight road. He hopes for a no-Pakistani motel tonight, but even on that he’s wearing down. “No Pakistani ever called me redneck,” he says to the rearview mirror, laughing. This gives him the cheering idea of registering in Pakistani motels as Muhammad Ali. That would establish everyone on even footing, somehow. “Mr. Ali will need a bar of soap,” he will tell them. “Mr. Ali will need sheets that are white.” “Mr. Ali will thank Allah for whiteness and soap.” He’s lost his mind and he doesn’t mind. He hates bathing. There’s not a Pakistani in the world dirtier than he is. Some guys in the Navy once had to gang-wash him. But still. White is white.

Wayne goes home. California was out. There was, all in all, too much desert between his hangover leave-takings of Pakistani motels and his not altogether enticing visions of California. These were of Beverly Hillsesque inaccessibility and of Venice Beach, where everyone, including the women, had more muscles than Wayne did. All he could see was pink skates and purple spandex and no pussy at one end of things, and movie-star houses seen through a bus window on the other. So he turned around. There was nothing to go home to, but there was nothing to not go home to. He wondered if driving back over the same ground would have the effect of making the desert look different, possibly better (it couldn’t get worse). The phenomenon he had in mind was of how carpet sometimes looked different if you looked at it from the other side of the room. He wondered if the desert was like that. He bought five cases of Coors and did not plan to stop at any more motels, Pakistani or not. When he had packed the beer strategically in the trunk and got back in the Impala — he thought of the beer as ammo for a protracted military campaign — there was a bird in it with him. “Stone!” he said to the bird, fired up the car, and planned to have the bird cross the desert backwards with him. About a mile down the road the bird lit on his shoulder, shat on his shirtfront, and flew out the driver’s window in front of Wayne’s face. That was the desert for you. In the Philippines birds sat around on their own perches and talked to you. How a God-made, natural thing like the desert that was so Santa Fe and all that and Indian holy shit ground and Hopi boogie shit got to be worse off than a man-made piece of shit like the Navy and Subic Bay and two-dollar blow jobs from skinny guys’ little sisters was beyond Wayne.

When Wayne got back from not going to California, the HoJo in Scottsdale still leaking, he hoped, but didn’t see how, since if it rained in the desert it wouldn’t be much, he drove over to his and Felicia’s house, which was now Felicia’s and the kids’, and walked in as if it were still his, too. Felicia was standing on what looked like a miniature walker for old folks. It had four chrome legs about a foot high and a pink vinyl pad on the top and was slanted backwards just like a walker. Only, Felicia was standing on it and looking at herself in the mirror over the sofa. Wayne reached under the cushions of the sofa and withdrew his Army WWI bayonet, which he had kept against intruders when he lived there.

“What the hell you doing?” he asked Felicia.

“This,” Felicia said, turning one way and another to look at her hips, which were in pink shorts the exact color of the vinyl pad she stood on, “is a Exerstep.”

“A what?”

“You step on it.”

“I see that. Any beer?”

“No.”

Wayne looked at his bayonet: it was the narrow kind, very heavy, with the most prodigious blood groove he had ever seen on a knife of any kind. It was not imaginable to him that a bayonet like this one could kill someone better, or more efficiently or quickly, or let you get it out of the victim easier, or whatever the hell a blood groove actually did or was supposed to do. Blood groove. It sounded like a joke, or something to tell a recruit and laugh at him if he believed it. It was probably a way to save steel.

Felicia stepped off the Exerstep and back up, and stepped back off and back on, and looked at her hips some more. Wayne pressed his crotch to her leg, at about her knee.

“Hey, ugly.”

“Don’t say that to me, Wayne.”

“Okay. How about a knobber?”

“Not now. Later.”

“Sounds like a weenie.”

Wayne struck an elaborate, stylized martial-arts pose and said, “I’m a burnin, burnin hunk of love,” and threw the bayonet at the back of the front door, which it struck not with the blade but with the short, heavy, fat machined handle, making a deep, dull contusion in the door and falling to the floor with a thick twang. Two boys ran into the room at the sound and saw immediately the bayonet and the fresh wound in the door and Wayne and said, in unison and looking at Felicia to gauge her approval, “Cool!” Felicia was expressionless, so the boys leaped on the bayonet and fought over it until Wayne took it from them and put it through his belt pirate-style.

“Git.”

The boys did.

“There is some beer, I think, Wayne,” Felicia said.

“Who brought it?”

“Nobody.”

“Nobody, shit.”

“Nobody, Wayne.”

“ I didn’t leave it.”

“Wayne, you left .”

“Okay. Okay. Don’t give me the fifth amendment or third-degree burns or—” He stopped speaking, overcome by the sight of Felicia’s pale thigh going into the Exerstep-pink nylon so loosely a hand could easily glide up there, meeting no restriction.

“Our Lady of Prompt Succor!” he declared, brandishing the bayonet and trying to kiss her.

“Don’t. I’m sweaty.”

“Okay.”

Felicia went to shower and Wayne went to the kitchen, where he parted items in the refrigerator with the bayonet until he found the beer. These he would have stabbed to extract if it wouldn’t have wasted a beer. He felt good, suddenly very good. He almost took a beer into the back yard and punctured it with the bayonet to test out the blood groove, but did not. Yet. “Goddamn beer groove ,” he said aloud, holding a beer in one hand and the bayonet in the other. He regarded the bayonet and its groove a moment, put it on top of the refrigerator, and walked back into the living room holding his crotch, with certain fingers extended and certain folded as he’d seen black rappers do. The fingering was the same as the Texas Longhorn Hook ’em Horns sign.

What do they call it — fragrant dereliction?

What?

Romans. Somebody. Napoleons.

Be quiet.

I’m about to pop.

Don’t.

I could come back, do this to you all the time.

No, you couldn’t!

Come back, do it sometimes.

Not come back. Sometimes, maybe.