Padgett Powell - Typical - Stories

“We trust you encourage her in that skepticism,” Borger says.

“Hey, what’s that supposed to mean?”

“There they are,” Pampa says.

In the parking lot of a boarded-up convenience store in the center of Dillon, S.C., is the log truck, and drinking beer are the blue-Rebel-capped driver, the crumbling oiler laughing with his head thrown back, Rooster, the student of low-affect living edged with self-deprecating irony, and, suspended yet from the boom, orange as a kapok life jacket head-to-toe, Mr. Irony himself.

“Is that your not-husband?” Pampa asks Borger.

“Goose by any other name,” Borger says.

“Hey. What’s the deal? That’s a dude?” the insurance salesman asks.

“That’s a dude, mister.”

“Hey. All right. He looks like I could sell him some life insurance, you think? What you think? Worth a try or not or what!”

The life insurance salesman gets out of the smoked-glass Blazer and shakes down his pants legs over his Italian ankle boots and walks in a confident stride for Mr. Irony. Before he reaches him, Borger rushes to the orange horizontal figure with the hurried pumping vigor of a sailor’s wife greeting her sailor after six months at sea, and she kisses the unbooted end of it fully upon its clay-caked crusty terra-cotta lips and says, “Oh, honey, you smell good!” and the life insurance salesman turns on his heel and retreats, his face a configuration of pure confusion.

Swatting handfuls of the thick, nearly leavened clay dust from himself in a three-quarter beat, Mr. Irony said, to the beat, in time, “Dark, dark candy; light, light pain; green, green fruit; trying, trying times.”

“Is that a quote?” the driver asked.

“Yeah, I’ve heard that somewhere,” the insurance salesman said. “Maybe Shakespeare.”

“Do I detect shower stalls across the boulevard?” Across the street was a coin-operated car wash, to which Mr. Irony made a straight path, removing his boots as he went. He held the long water gun by its barrel, aiming it down at the top of his head, and with the insertion of a quarter engaged the works, disappearing into a vaporous high-pressure cone of suds and steam.

The rest of us stood about somewhat ill at ease. The oiler shortly had the presence of mind to offer Pampa and Borger a beer, and we adjusted into as comfortable a group as we could standing around a log truck drinking beer in a shut-down convenience-store parking lot watching Mr. Irony shower in a car wash. I personally felt negligible, and had for some time, and thought to remove myself from the affair, at least as a dramatis persona, it being arguable whether I was contributing much toward my narrative end of the stick; further arguable whether I would ever be able to demonstrate in telling fashion that I had in fact picked up self-deprecating ironic ways from Mr. Irony, whose student I allegedly was, and who (Mr. Irony) was, having finished his shower, walking sopping wet into Bill’s Dollar Store next to the car wash. I could serve the tale best, I thought, and finally not without considerable self-deprecation and irony, by removing myself from it, and decided thereupon to do so, and hereby pronounce myself expunged from this affair as teller — Pampa I intend to continue to have relations with, but that coupling is a private matter and is not to be hereafter mentioned. In point of fact, I had felt for two hundred butt-pounding rough miles that the oiler was the proper student of Mr. Irony, a figure of such unironic beginnings that something like true biblical salvation and conversion, if not a bona fide saintly transformation, was available to him if Mr. Irony attempted to bless him with the vision which would let him stop seeing as important his dead father-in-law and his life as minister of lubricant. Mr. Irony emerged from Bill’s Dollar Store bearing gifts for the crew and for the Available Traveling Women and none for me — confirming me in my resolve to defect. A fair fare-thee-well to you all.

The presentation of gifts began with a stir — Mr. Irony presented Pampa and Borger with panty hose—“Apologies, ladies: not designer pants”—and persuaded them to don them in the cab of the log truck. When the women emerged, glossy-legged and matted, the crew and the insurance salesman all adopted a deliberately calmed-down demeanor like that of men in a bar before the storm of a bar fight.

Mr. Irony presented the driver with a case of Skoal, a particolored welder’s cap made of dungaree cloth, and a Buck knife, which, as the driver reached for it, Mr. Irony threw into the adjacent wooded lot. “The knife is guaranteed for life, even against loss, sir.” The driver donned his new cap, backwards, took a big pinch of Skoal, pocketed the fresh tin of snuff on his butt, looked sidelong at the panty-hosed women, and walked jauntily and juicy-lipped into the woods.

“A good man,” Mr. Irony remarked. He pulled from a carton a model 44 Husqvarna chain saw, started it, cut the air after the fashion of a Shriner with a big sequined sword, and motioned to the oiler to come relieve him of the saw.

“I don’t cut,” the oiler shouted over the saw.

“You cut,” Mr. Irony bellowed back. “Cut that billboard down.” Mr. Irony allowed the saw to idle.

“Taint gone fuck hisself all up,” Rooster said.

“Mr. Rooster,” Mr. Irony said, “shut the fuck up. Taint ain’t.”

The oiler, carrying the saw somewhat apprehensively, at arm’s length, addressed the billboard on which a candidate for sheriff promised to restore law and order to Dillon County, and cut through the first creosote pole with a clean, flexed, low turn of his body, one with the saw, and stepped to the next pole in the same crouch, and to the next and the next, and the candidate for sheriff fell on his face into the parking lot, blowing full beers off the log truck and crushing the insurance salesman’s Blazer.

“Oh shit,” the salesman said. The parking lot began to smell of perfume. “Oh God.”

“Oh boy,” Borger said.

“Yes, ma’am,” Pampa said.

“No event is unplanned for the intelligent purveyor of insurance, is it, sir?” Mr. Irony said to the insurance salesman.

“What?”

“The readiness, I believe, is all, sir?”

“Not — not cars. I sell life insurance.”

“Receive your gratuity, sir.” Mr. Irony handed the salesman a boxed leisure suit the color of green mint dinner candies and a gun-style hair dryer. The suit had contrasting yellow stitching and the blower a barrel the size and shape of a grenade mortar, the opening of which the salesman was measuring with his spread hand. “Damn! I can get another car!” he suddenly said. “No problem! Hey!” He passed his fist into the hair dryer.

The oiler dropped the chain saw on the truck bed and opened two beers, taking a sip from each. He sat on the truck bed beside the saw and crossed his legs with an odd, pensive, pursed-lip expression on his face. Mr. Irony addressed him.

“You do cut, sir, and with élan.”

“My knee start to give out on me.”

“Understandable. You were configured as low and sturdy as Johnny Bench.”

“Down there, wudden I?”

“Yessir.”

“Got to fish sometime, right?”

“Right on.”

“Can’t cut bait all your life.”

“No sir.”

“Can’t cut bait all your life, right?”

“You are right.”

“Taint gone mess up,” Rooster said.

“I ain’t teether,” Taint said.

“Mr. Rooster,” Mr. Irony said, “Mr. Taint is in a rehabilitative power drive that needs no gainsaying.”

“That his saw?”

“’Tis.”

“Gone give me them boots, homeboy?”