Padgett Powell - You & Me

Not for me, probably for them.

Fuck them. Are they not the party to whom I am speaking, whom I seek to impress with my meaning and get them off our back and stop begging us for sugary food and stop petting our inherited dog from a man dead fifty years who skied with his nose down the ramp of Mansfield’s Alps — are they not whom I seek to have comprehend me and thereby desist in their presuming upon us? Well then fuck them, I will not be clear merely because being clear is my object.

Well put. As well put as any failed man ever put it.

Thank you. Thank you, Constant Rectitude. I would be obliged were I to be henceforth known as Inherent Muddle. These are our new Indian names. I saw two arguably better ones in Poplar, North Dakota, just off the Fort Peck Reservation. They were Kills Twice and…

And?

I have forgotten the other name. Also Something Twice, but it was something mundane, not killing, something even faintly ignoble, like Sleeps Twice. I can’t recall it.

Failure is to success as water is to land.

I should have written down the names. I was sure I would remember them. They were likable Indians, I presume, those brothers Kills and Forgets Twice or whoever they were.

If we had better names, we would be better men, is what we seem to have arrived at.

I’ll not argue with that, nor do I know a sane man who would.

When the fucking codgers come over here, just ask them who the hell they are, and when they say their names, just snort!

Snort like a hog inhaling a new potato!

Snort like an armadillo reading a newspaper!

Snort like a man gasping for air in the Alps!

If that school bus goes by here any slower, I’d say it’s prowling looking for houses to break in to.

Codger at the wheel?

Codger at every wheel on earth.

I forget where we are.

Me too. I too. What do you mean, exactly?

We are over here, I see that, and all that is over there, and this over hereness and that over thereness is a small part of infinite other relations of hereness and thereness, I see all this, but then I get a bit forgetty, and, just, don’t have this particular-in-aggregate setup in my head, and I say something like “I forget where we are.” Then I recover, regain my purchase on the system of therenesses, and see the finite hereness of us, but of course by now I realize I have no idea where any of this is, where we are, what we are doing, what we are, in the large picture that makes an aggregate of all the particular systems—

Just shut up.

The driver of that school bus is prowling the streets looking for a stray child to molest. He has the perfect cover. Almost any child on earth will voluntarily enter that bus if the door opens and the monster sweetly proffers a ride.

What is your point?

Was there a time before this, say when Studio Becalmed went to the war, when a school bus itself did not represent the moral depravity of the world?

You had like the Lindbergh baby did you not?

Isn’t that different?

I suppose. Why are we now so feckless when we were once arguably heroic, just two generations ago, do you mean?

Precisely what I mean. Two generations ago we would go out there, yank that codger out of that bus, give him a good beating that did not actually put him in the hospital but which decidedly ran him out of town, our object, and the matter would be handled, no legal repercussions, no perverse crimes on our watch, no counseling services involved, no law, nothing but bluebirds and rocks and sticks and good picnics and war when necessary and good heavy phones and not too many of them.

Mayberry.

Yes.

It cannot have been so easy. We are suffering some kind of distortion, I feel certain.

I don’t argue that. But do you not agree that we should go out there and beat that pervert off that bus, and that we won’t, and that if we won’t we submit to the prevailing illness that is here now, whether or not it was there then?

Yes, I agree.

Then Q. E. effing D.

Are we going to be okay?

No. No, we are not.

Okay.

How many of us are there?

There’s the two of us, right now. You and me. You and I.

Right now, still all two of us—

Right, we have not become less than two, yet. Still two people here, not yet disintegrated into less than two, although we are arguably indistinct from another, so that the proposition that there are two of us may be limited to a kind of biological truth. Truth is not the word I want…

I get your meaning, Kemosabe.

The two of us indistinct from each other, in the here here not altogether distinct from the there there, but we are two of us here and okay so far.

But shaky.

Yes, shaky.

Okay. What I want to know is, you know that controversy over butter versus margarine, what I want to know is how did they ever purport to sell something they elected to call oleomargarine ? Can you tell me the etiology of a word like that, and even if it is a scientifically honest word why would they not have changed it for palatability as it were? Like a movie star’s name? Did you know that the fighter Jersey Joe Walcott, for example, was really named Raymond Cream? Rocky Marciano versus Raymond Cream. Don’t put butter on that, here use this oleomargarine. Fix you right up. You are going to have great difficulty tonight with Mr. Cream, Mr. Marciano.

I can’t help you with any of this which troubles you. I have my own problems.

Another thing bothering me: what is the song involving a Mr. Bluebird sitting on one’s shoulder? I like that song. I can’t recover enough of it for it to be of any comfort, but I like it, or think I like it, if there is in fact a song with a Mr. Bluebird witting on one’s shoulder.

Did you say, “witting on one’s shoulder”?

I meant sitting.

You might have said shitting.

Yes, but I said witting. It’s a new song, I like it. I want a bluebird witting on my shoulder.

Don’t we all. Imparting the wisdom we lack.

Our problems will soon be over, when this bluebird alights.

I don’t think we should go down there anymore across that little stream, over that… what is that, a vacant lot, for sale? and then by that store — is it ever open? was it ever open? — or by that school, across that impossible highway, looking into those seedy houses there, that one with the girl in it all the time, where are her parents or is her parent or at least her dog for God’s sake? and then just wander back home as we do… I don’t think we ought to keep doing that. I can’t say why. I get this feeling after we’ve done that trip that we are boys, it is the kind of route boys would make, pleased by the nothingness of it, the slim opportunity for some probably criminal event to offer itself to them or upon them, you have to admit if we were to encounter anyone on that trip it would be poor folk, it could not be else, and they would fuck with us if we were boys, but since we are not, more precisely since we don’t see them anyway, they don’t, I don’t know, I just don’t think we should take that walk anymore. We should go see famous cathedrals and art. Don’t you think so?

I do think so.

Because that girl in that house reminds me of once talking a girl into showing me the goods in her playhouse, all very genteel you understand, a cute playhouse with proper cardboard appliances in it behind her proper suburban home, a lovely affair really until one day during the goods display she flinched and looked out the window and I asked what was it, and she said, “Nothing, but my father told me not to do this anymore,” and I bolted, end of affair, I not knowing that was a father’s job in this context and not knowing that it did not include persecuting me, I did not want the fellow after me and most certainly I did not want him knocking on the door of my house and involving my own father, not knowing my own father’s job would have been to smile and promise to handle it and secretly approving to have gently dissuaded me from any more affections unto Kathy Porter because she was not, apparently, to be trusted — knowing nothing, I ran from the playhouse, not stopping as per usual to climb the long rope swing into the live oak which had been my end of the bargain, Kathy’s reward for exposing the goods: she got to watch me make this heroic climb into the mossy ether and become a little Tarzan to her Jane by sliding back down the rope, hands and legs and loins on fire from the titillation in the playhouse and the friction of the exhausted fall, the most agreeable fall. There I’d be tumescent in the dirt, which Kathy knew nothing about and I was only starting to know something about. It is for these reasons that I no longer wish to walk in that neighborhood and see that poor girl alone in that ratty house and wonder what is to become of her.