Padgett Powell - Typical - Stories

The driver, with a motion of his thumb, indicated we were to get on the truck flatbed. We got aboard and were arranging ourselves on the boat cushions we bought with the cooler when the cab rear window slid open and the oiler extended both arms through it. Mr. Irony and I managed to interpret this, and I handed the oiler two cold beers.

“Fatherlaw died last week,” he said, pulling back into the cab with the beer. With a jolt we were off.

Several miles down the road his arms came back through the window, and he was delivered two more beers. “Wife daddy died,” he said, going back in.

Through a rare, obvious communion, Mr. Irony and I were clearly taking extreme pleasure in the ludicrousness of our scene, glancing squarely and without expression at one another during these utterances from the oiler. We were bouncing clear off the truck, on a clay road that now had over it behind us a cloud of dust as far as we could see.

We braked to a halt, and while Mr. Irony and I were still struggling for balance, the driver and the black guy were pissing in the road beside open cab doors. “Pit stop,” the oiler informed us, a bit gratuitously. We got off to piss.

Mr. Irony was boring into the clay in front of him when the black dude said to him, “Nice boots, homeboy.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Pointy-like. Match your head.”

“They do, sir.”

“Spensive, bet. How much they coss, homeboy?”

“Three.”

The oiler interrupted this discourse by letting himself out of the truck and collapsing on the roadside.

“Lumpy daddy died!” he said, rocking on the ground like a child in a crib. Mr. Irony bent to inspect the bereaved form.

“Pay no mine, homeboy,” the black said to Mr. Irony. “He in moning. Would like them boots.”

“For the asking, sir.” Mr. Irony was already seated on the truck bed pulling hard on one of his Luccheses. It was this willingness, this anticipation, I think, that saved Mr. Irony’s boots. The black looked with just a hint of surprise at Mr. Irony sitting unshod, swinging his socked feet.

“I just try ’em on, homeboy. You all right.”

“Might I kick a few clods in those brogans?”

“Righteous. You bit crazy.”

The two of them exchanged footwear, and the black walked awkwardly around, stopping with the boots under the prostrate, grieving face of the oiler.

“How these look on me, Taint?”

“Leave him alone, Rooster,” the driver said. “Pick him up.” He was smoking, leaning against the truck studying his calloused hands.

“How they look, Taint?” Rooster repeated.

“Lumpy daddy died.”

Rooster leaned over, off balance, and with one arm picked the oiler up, setting him down on his feet hard, giving him the slightest steadying shake. “Get hole on yourself, man.” The oiler suddenly reminded me of a creature I saw once in an aquarium that I thought merely remained still for a very long time and that I later discovered to have been all along dead, hollowed out.

The driver flicked his cigarette into the woods and got in the truck. “That fag magazine don’t pay us shit for this shit. You boys get on.”

Mr. Irony, who had been speaking with Rooster, unhooked the boom cable and Rooster released the winch. Mr. Irony pulled ten feet of cable out and got aboard with it. “Homeboy want him a seat belt,” Rooster said, to no one. He stuffed the oiler in the rider’s door. “Homeboy I think may be hisself part nigger. Here. Peench like motherfuck anyway.” Mr. Irony’s Luccheses came through the rear window, and Rooster’s brogans, loaded with beer, went in.

Mr. Irony put two half hitches of cable around his waist and looked to me with a gesture offering some cable, which I declined. He took another half hitch for himself and we settled in, looking backwards, for the ride to Dillon.

Once we had a head of steam and the dust trail behind us well up, Rooster’s arm came through the window and touched the winch control. Mr. Irony put two beers in his jacket, felt his waist, took a deep breath, gave Rooster a thumbs-up, and Rooster winched him free of the bed. He swung out and back, spinning, and settled bed-high beneath the log boom, blowing, turning, already taking on the color of clay, assuming the orientations of a sky diver, the expression on his face rapt.

Just before he disappeared for good into the thick clay air, Mr. Irony managed to face forward, horizontal, with arms out front, and shout, “Superman at His Best!”

“Life insurance is the best investment money can buy. You are investing in your life —and what could be a better investment than that? What?”

“Don’t you have to die to cash in?”

“Alack! No, ladies. That’s a thing I read in a Shakespeare story. Nooo, ladies, you do not have to die to enjoy the extreme uncomparable benefits of cash-value life insurance. You may borrow against your policy, and it may mature and pay before you die, and—”

“What’s this?”

“What?”

“It says, ODOR KILLER — CITRUS. AN ENTIRE ORANGE GROVE IN A BOTTLE.”

“Hey! Don’t squirt too much of that!”

“Open the windows, for God’s sake.”

“Entire orange grove in an entire goddamn car.”

“Well, I told you—”

“What’s this? It stinks.” Pampa sniffs a cardboard coaster suspended from the rearview mirror; on the coaster is a painting of a largemouth bass.

“Air freshener,” the life insurance salesman says.

“Fish air freshener?”

“Well, no. It’s—”

“Here’s some Eau de Paris — NOIR.”

“That’s expensive.”

“Oh!”

“Windows! Stop that shit, Borger,” Pampa says.

“What is all this crap?” Borger asks.

“Yeah. Are we in the presence of a complex here?”

“No, I just like to keep my car spotless. I live in this car — work in this car fifteen-sixteen hours a day.”

“Well, it doesn’t have to smell like a whorehouse.”

“Well — you know how sometimes a car just gets an odor in it that … doesn’t go away?”

“No,” Pampa says.

“No,” Borger says.

“You know, kind of under things?”

“No.”

“No. God. Did he fart?”

“Heysoos. I get the picture. Spot of ORANGE GROVE up here, Borger.”

A stop is made for urination all around. Mr. Irony, whose clay-caked face resembles a terra-cotta mask, declines to unwinch and pees from the Superman position.

“Look, Mom, no hands,” he says.

Rooster says to me, “That is one trazy white man.”

The oiler heads for the ditch in a mincing wobble and appears to start to wilt when Rooster suspends him by the back of the shirt. “And he still dead, Taint,” Rooster whispers to him, shoving him back toward the truck. “Pitiful. Pitt-ee-full.”

“Load my bomb bays, kind sirs,” Mr. Irony calls.

Responding as to a regular call for workaday lubrication, the oiler pulls himself to with a big sniff and hurries to Mr. Irony with two more cold beers, which Mr. Irony instructs him to slip into the pockets of his jacket.

“You will surmount your troubles, son,” Mr. Irony says to him. “Your wife’s father died and he will remain dead, as Mr. Rooster has so sagely informed you. The world means you no harm. Be brave, be brave, and be strong.” Mr. Irony makes a gesture in the air that suggests a blessing and that throws him out of the Superman orientation, and we fire up and are off in a scratch of rock and rubber and clay, Mr. Irony in a spinning circle-within-a-circle boomerang motion.

“Well, thing is, see, she’s a young girl — big girl, you girls would like her, being as you’re from Texas and all, fine state, did my time out there yessiree on rigs outside Odessa, nice folk, hospitality-wise — she’s young, Debbie, and absolutely in love w’me, see — she’s never been that before so she’s, like, skeptical.”