Padgett Powell - Aliens of Affection - Stories

Whatever. Changkaichek!

Oh, Wayne.

Hey. That mudpuppy’ll be back hard in ten minutes.

I don’t have ten minutes.

What?

Work.

Sounds like a personal problem.

Actually, it is, Wayne. I have to have two jobs now.

Oh.

And…

And what?

Don’t be here when I get back, if you want sometimes.

Sheeyit.

That’s right.

Wayne left without showering, wondering where Felicia’s second job was, where she…how she took care of four kids. It was a vague, troubling haze of guilt that felt like a huge ball of tangled monofilament filling the back seat of the car. A ball of monofilament that size could not be dealt with with less than a flamethrower. It would ensnare birds, it would hook something, it would trip you, you’d see a piece of good tackle in it and never cut your way in, it would foul your next cast, it would williefy your entire life. If his life was a happy, larky fishing trip, he had a ball of monofilament half the size of the boat beside him. And it didn’t have anything to do with him anymore. Felicia had had it. She wouldn’t let him untangle it. Which he didn’t want to, couldn’t do anyway. How did marriage and kids look like such a hot idea before you had it and like such a clusterfuck after you got it? It was like praying for rain and getting struck by lightning.

“I feel like going to Italy,” Wayne said aloud in the Impala. He pictured wearing rather pointy, thin-soled shoes and yelling at people without having to fight them and drinking things he’d never heard of (and liking them) and mountains, maybe, and fountains and marble and beautiful women who would talk to you whether you understood them or not and whether they understood you or not, a problem that sign language would solve anyway, and what it would be like sleeping with dark world-famous-loving women who did not wear pink shorts the same pink as a miniature geezer walker, stepping on it about once an hour. He was ready for a beer. He was not ready for the want ads, but it looked like time.

Wayne drove down to a bar called Taco Flats run by an agreeable Mexican who would pretend he understood your bad Spanish. Blocking the lot to Taco Flats were cars lined up to do window banking at the bank next door. Wayne wished one of them would just rob the bank and dismiss the line of traffic. He wondered why he didn’t rob the bank. He had the bayonet, against the day Felicia cut him off and changed the locks and denied him his things, or moved in the night with them all, or whatever a woman going up and down on a geezer walker might come up with. He could rob the bank with his bad Spanish and a bayonet. “Cabrónes! Tú probablamente anticipare un hombre with pistole. Es un blood groove!” Blood groove shouted by a white-looking Mexican bandito would scare anyone in a bank in suburban San Antonio. The line of cars opened for him and he drove into the Taco Flats lot. It was lunatic to rob a bank without a gun. He had over a hundred dollars left from not going to California, anyway.

The agreeable Mexican who ran Taco Flats, Harry, gave Wayne, whom he had once overlooked passed out at a corner booth and locked in Taco Flats for the night, a wink and said, “Qué pasa!”

“Stone!” Wayne said. “Mongo firo bira, per favor.” He meant to say frió beer — cold, a word he knew — but never got it right. This was the sort of error Harry allowed by never correcting. He would in fact corroborate and advance these idiocies people came up with.

“Aquí, a fiery beer, my friend John Wayne.”

“Wayne,” Wayne said.

“Sí. John Wayne, if you go to sleep and something today, let please a bandanna on the table for indication of surrender.”

This was the height of Wayne and Harry’s communion: a manly, head-on reference to Wayne’s humiliating overnight stay and Harry’s jovial acceptance of it.

“Chingasa!” Wayne said, squinting with mirth and a mouthful of extremely cold fiery beer.

Harry would move on to other customers, forgetting Wayne except to ponder how someone as unlike John Wayne got to be called John Wayne. Wayne had no idea how he came to be called, by Harry, John Wayne, but it was in the fabric of not correcting anyone or anything to let it go. Besides, he had tried and it didn’t work. He drank like John Wayne, Wayne thought, if John Wayne drank. Did John Wayne drink? Did Dean Martin say, “Circle the wagons, the Injuns are comin’”? Were dress designers gay? These models you saw, runway, were so goddamned good-looking. He tried to picture Calvin Klein or Perry Ellis in the Navy. He couldn’t. He could see male models in Klein underwear in the Navy but not Calvin Klein himself. He did not have the balls to rob a bank. Bayonet, Biretta, shit, Uzi. Kalashnikov. He wouldn’t rob a bank with a bazooka. He wouldn’t hold up Fort Knox with an atom bomb. He couldn’t do shit.

Well, why should he? What was wrong, exactly, with not having the balls to rob a bank? Someone tell him that. Someone tell him what was wrong with being afraid to rob a bank. He wished he had had it out with that woman in the desert who called him Sugar. It wouldn’t have worked. “You’ve never heard the song ‘The Navy Is a Desert but Nothing Like This’? Do you think it’s unmanly of me not to rob a bank? Do you?” She would have said no. And that would have been the end of it. It was hard to get anyone to actually talk to you, and harder, if they did, to get them to make sense.

In this reverie Wayne suddenly smelled tar pitch. He looked around. People had come in. A black guy was saying to Harry, “Harry, is Cabriolet a goat and a Chevrolet or what?” Harry looked at him. “You know, man,” the black guy said, “cabrito.” The guy had on a T-shirt with a picture of the Last Supper or something on it over the words IT’S A BLACK THING, YOU WOULDN’T UNDERSTAND. Wayne thought the wearer of the shirt ought to understand what the fuck a Cabriolet was. It was a goddamned car.

“It’s a car, Stone,” Wayne said loudly. He had the balls to do that. The black guy looked at him and Wayne realized the tar-pitch smell was coming from him. “You a hot man, Stone?”

The black guy turned back to the bar and ignored him.

Wayne went up to within two stools of him. He could see the left side of the table of black luminaries on the guy’s shirt. The figure closest to him looked like Jesse Jackson. That seemed right to Wayne: he’d never understood Jesse Jackson. You’d think anyone who spoke in rhymes to uneducated people in the ghetto would be understandable, but he was not, to Wayne. Wayne called Harry and bought the black guy a beer and had Harry give it to him, and when the black guy looked at him Wayne said, more embarrassed than he anticipated being, “I don’t understand Jesse Jackson,” and the black guy looked at him as if he was crazy.

“Well,” Wayne said, apologizing by raising his palms off the bar in a shrug, “I don’t. I just don’t. Cocaine is a pain in yo’ brain, I guess I get that. No, I don’t even get that. It feels pretty good to mine. You work hot roofing, right?”

“Okay,” the black guy said.

This threw Wayne a bit. Okay? Okay what?

“Okay what?” Wayne said.

“The beer.”

“Oh. Okay.”

Wayne drank his own beer as a kind of confirmation that they were drinking together. That seemed to be the way the black guy took it, too. When they had finished the beers the black guy bought the round and Harry gave Wayne a beer without having to acknowledge where it came from. Wayne said “Stoweno” to Harry.