Padgett Powell - You & Me

What if we called the Salvation Army and had them come over here and clean us out?

Like, strip the joint?

Take everything here except us and what we’re sitting on.

What would be the point of this?

I am not sure.

Do you have any relatives living?

I must. Somewhere.

Me too.

Are you essentially alone?

Yes. It’s you and me. You and I.

God.

Tell me . Does this relate to having the Salvation Army come over and take our shit?

I think so. I have a vision of our sitting here, rather nattily somehow, in a clean place unbothered by biographical detritus and other riprap.

I love that word. After the Salvation Army comes and rescues us, though, we cannot make a cup of tea, or sleep well.

This is true. Maybe there is something wrong with my vision, technically. But… holistically — is that really a word? — I think I am onto something. If we could sit in these chairs unperturbed while everything was taken and have nothing then around us but the air we breathe and a thought or two, and our monkey chitchat, we would somehow be very superior.

I think you are having a monastery vision.

Maybe I am. I am a monast, or want to be. May one say that? Or is it monk?

Totally out of my ken, monking and all its affairs.

I heard a child once counting to one hundred to prove that she could, and when she said “forty-four” she stopped herself and said, “I love forty-four!” and then resumed counting. It was funny, and only a child could have done it, and only once. It was a unique moment in that child’s life, and in mine.

Are you going to cry?

I might.

Go ahead. Don’t call the Salvation Army while you are blubbering. And don’t be blubbering after they come and take our shit.

Of course not. We’ll need a stiff upper lip after that.

Mr. and Mr. Stiff Upper Lip sat in their chairs stoically as the Army of Salvation invaded their home and made natty and uncomplaining monks of them. The bums who toted their belongings past them could smell the fine cognac in their snifters.

That is a fine vision — you’ve put a Degas touch on my original pedestrian idea. I’d call the Army right now if it did not require my finding the phone book. Do you think if I called 911 they would refer me to the Salvation Army?

You could tell them you need emergency salvation and see.

Is it possible that we do have some cognac?

Not.

That’s the funniest thing kids have come up with in forty years. Before that it was the Jim Thorpe thing, I guess. It was similar, syntactically.

Man, there was a horse.

Apparently.

Cowboy up. Let’s go to the liquor bunker and get cognac and evade the angry brothers and get back here and be damned glad we have chairs to sit in and beds to lie on and toothbrushes to perfect our smiles with, and like that. I am not ready to sit for Degas yet.

A dark thing.

A dark thing what?

I had a vision of a dark thing—

A dream?

No, not a dream, just a sense of something dark, a dark place or effect, an ominousness…

And?

And I can’t develop it. The nearest equivalent I can think of is that alleged cold space said to obtain in haunted houses. It had that, but it wasn’t overtly paranormal or threatening or weird; it was just a sense of some muted thunder under a place or a time, a set of emotions that was like a dark curtain, ever so slightly foreboding. I thought I was going to be able to get up and seize it and make literal sense out of it, you know, a set of objects terminating in sensory experience, but I can’t.

Are you quoting Trouser Snake?

Indeed I did.

Don’t. Anymore.

Okay.

Quote Studio Becalmed or quote no one.

Studio, bless his short mortal soul, did not say enough for us to ferret out quotes. He was, after all, Studio Becalmed, not Studio Blather. I don’t think Studio could have ever been troubled by a “vision of something dark” that he couldn’t put his finger on.

No. In our mythology of Studio, he went fishing or walked around in the woods and then saw Jayne one day and romped thereafter in the Alps of Heaven, dead or alive. He was not given to analysis of figments of his imagination.

More importantly, he was not confused. I am confused. And getting confuseder.

I am getting wonderier about our mental welfare.

Well, you should be if I cannot get up from the bed and recover the wanton emotions of the night. It’s very cold outside. I saw this mechanic wearing a pair of overalls into which he had inserted a heating pad and he had plugged himself into a power strip and was working comfortably. We could make rigs such as that.

If we got a generator and put it in a red wagon we could make it to the liquor bunker warmer and making more noise than all the brothers’ Buicks combined.

We would never be fucked with hooked up to a generator.

Are you making some roundabout insult?

I am just having a vision of us wired to a loud Honda generator, smiling in our superwarm jumpsuits, and carrying large unbreakable bottles of vodka unmolested through the ghetto. That is all I will confess to.

It is not a bad vision.

It is a happy vision. It is not a vision of a dark place I cannot rescue from abstraction. I am done with all that. This Red Flyer walk in heated suits is a Studio-Becalmed vision, and I am going totally with it.

I want orange electrical cords and orange suits, like jail suits.

That will be our very best protection, if we look to have escaped and are not in a panic to conceal our prison garb.

We will be bad. Unspeakably bad and loud and bold. One of us stays with the generator while the other goes in the store.

Right on.

I can see Studio camped in a pup tent beside Lake Rosa. He gets up at four in the morning under a moon and casts a Dillinger on the lake and catches bass the size of fire hydrants. His uncle remains asleep. There is coffee later, black coffee boiled in a black pot over a fire. An easy morning.

What is a Dillinger?

Torpedo bait, propellers fore and aft, striped like a zebra.

Is this a joke about primitive bass fishing?

Well, it was a funny bait and the fishing was primitive — the bass back then hit anything in the water, as near as I can tell. Water snakes — there were enough of them that they rained from trees into the wooden rowboats.

You are on a full-on nostalgia roll now.

I am. I am about to envision drinking the tangy water from the orange metal tumbler and petting the rogue water moccasin.

Do we have any heating pads?

No.

Jumpsuits?

No.

Metal tumblers?

No.

Dillingers?

No.

Did we party last night?

Not, to my knowledge, beyond the usual, the genteel talktail party we always hold. Why?

Because I notice that all the knobs to the stove are off the stove.

They are gone?

No, on the kitchen floor.

Neatly or scattered?

I would say they are in a configuration that is between neat and scattered. As if they fell from the stove behaving like apples falling from the tree are wont to behave: not far.

That is an interesting idea, stove knobs as fruit of the stove.

Well, the fruit is on the ground.

I am without answer.

A stove-knob burglar came in and was frightened off the booty by something?

One of us sleepwalks and likes to pull appliances apart? Were you punished for playing with the stove as a wee?

Did another appliance molest the stove — did the toaster oven pull her knobs off?

Did a bull come into our china shop? I would like to know who coined that conceit, the bull in the china shop, it is not bad at all.