Padgett Powell - Typical - Stories

Today Mario did like the nuclear business, perhaps because he was yet mindful of his radio having blown out driving by a power station. The other defenses were also attractive at times. Some rather romantic, if not downright somber, types went for a strategy that posited Etruscan, or earlier, tombs beneath the vines, and featured the hungry tips of the grapevine roots tubering into ancient skulls, even into still oily bandages that covered 2,500-year-old human organs resembling carrots and peas. An accident in which a tractor had slipped out of gear had resulted in the tractor pulling up a large vine with a whole mummy wrapped in the roots. A giant, subterranean den of vipers could be advanced if the client appeared remotely Satanic, though they had never worked out a responsible scenario for how the poisons might get into the vines — it was preposterous that sensible snakes would bite plants. Oversexed folk, or for that matter those that might be judged undersexed, fell prey to an account of a buried cache of aphrodisiacs sent north by Cleopatra during troubles at Carthage. These strategies could be pitted against one another in endless shadings of credibility and incredibility, and it really didn’t seem to matter how they were blended or denied if you could get one honestly laced bottle down the hatch.

They had no trouble getting a bottle down the hatch of the advanced Frenchman. During the first two — the customary complimentary dosage used to ply a prospective buyer — the Frenchman disported himself about as any other corpulent, half-drunk foreigner. On schedule, he did at one point look at his bottle, then at the ground, and then at the hand that had held the bottle. Most customers here began to compose reasons for being on their way with wine for the road. But the Frenchman drained his current bottle by turning it to the sky, then sighted through the green bottom of it into the heavens and asked that another bottle be opened. “I’m treating myself for cancer,” he announced, a remark that struck Mario and the Buffala brothers as on the nail. Mario could diagnose — he had a fantastic nose for diagnostic marketing.

Mario and the Buffala brothers continued to nimbly and passionately accommodate the Frenchman. There was of course no calculating the benefit to accrue from a mention in the Michelin guide. Mario was just a little disconcerted at the length of time the Frenchman wanted to drink. This was predictable enough; it was not uncommon for the large man who would think nuclear to want to dawdle. But Mario had seen, while entertaining the Frenchman with some gesticulations about the absurdity of mummies, his wife pass between rows of grapevines several hundred yards from where they sat.

What was decidedly puzzling about this was that she appeared positively cheerful again. He had clocked her as losing that rosy aspect by now. If she was still cheerful in this absurd dalliance, he wanted immediately to go home and secure the house against her inevitable return. For surely that’s where she would go when all this false cheer wore off, when she came out of her fantasy of wanting another man. Another thing that was fantastic was the amount of walking she was doing. This was not like her. She never walked anywhere. That is how Mario came to marry her. Every day for three months he found her in his cab. Every day she looked better and better in the rearview mirror. Mario knew the absurdity of that — no one could possibly look better each day for three months. Even if you started with some kind of warty witch, in three months of absolute improvement, you’d be somewhere beyond Helen of Troy, whom Mario regarded as the equivalent of the speed of light in women. You do not go beyond the speed of light, in physics or in women.

It was safer just to say that his wife grew on him. One day he looked up and said into the mirror, “If you married me you would save a lot of money. I would have to drive you around for nothing.” So they got married, and Mario stopped raising the flag on his meter when she got in his cab. And he took her everywhere. In that respect, his proposition might have been imprudent. But otherwise their marriage had been happy, until this fantasy of hers. To see her walking was perhaps the hardest evidence yet that she had lost her senses. It made Mario extremely uncomfortable to be out in the Buffala vineyard working a large sale while subject, conceivably, to a sudden assault by, or confrontation with, his crazy wife. That was private business, to say the least.

“Your wife, signore,” Mario suddenly heard, making him for a moment wild-eyed.

“Your wife,” again. It was the Frenchman.

“My wife what, masseur?”

“Your wife — does she gesticulate passionately and is she all movement?” With this, curiously, the Frenchman stood unsteadily up and began to paw the ground with his dainty shoe.

So relieved was Mario that she had not been seen approaching them that he uncharacteristically revealed an intimate matter. “She has great desire and above normal accommodation. She has to. I have large size.”

“I would like to meet her,” the Frenchman slurred.

This remark had a most curious effect on Mario. It seemed to come from the mouth of the officer who had spoken of wanting to meet Cicciolina as well as from the mouth of the advanced Frenchman, and it seemed as if this rather hybrid speaker were somehow speaking of wanting to meet the same person. Yet the officer was not the Frenchman, and Cicciolina was not his wife. What a fantastic blend of lunacies that was. He and the Buffala brothers were supposed to be drinking good wine — he wondered if they had made an error and got some of the house stuff. All he could do, under the circumstances, was try to be as sane as possible. That was his advice to himself whenever things got strange: Be as sane as possible.

The sanest thing he could imagine was that the Frenchman must know something about his wife. The most practical way for that to be true would be if it had been the Frenchman she had run off with. It was a fact that the Frenchman was large-size. Whether he had large size was open to speculation. The sanest thing to do here would be to ask the Frenchman to take down his pants, but that might mess up the Michelin mention. The next sanest thing Mario could think of was that it had been the Frenchman prowling his house the night before, and that he might have seen his wife inside, before she took off on her fantasy. It could, in this light, be a quite innocent question from the advanced Frenchman, under the circumstances. Still, this left the fact that the Frenchman was at least a prowler. It had been dark and visibility poor, especially since Mario had not slowed down when he saw the figure at his windows, but he could have sworn that the man was smaller than the present Frenchman, that it had been one of the wiry variety allegedly good with the wire on the German lines in the war. He really didn’t know what to think, and not knowing what to think — feeling things slip a little in his head — made Mario more nervous than the prospect of his deranged wife rushing up to them and making some kind of scene, possibly involving the relative sizes of himself and the giant, advanced, intoxicated, sweating Frenchman that they so badly wanted to make a favorable impression upon.

“I would like to meet your wife,” the Frenchman said again, confirming Mario in his belief that there was a connection between his fare for the day and his perambulating wife, and firming his resolve to think as sanely as possible through the mess and act accordingly. He decided that the best thing to do would be to bury the Frenchman alive. Whether they put him in with the mummies, or fed him to the vipers, or burned him slowly to death with hot nuclear wastes, or exploded his giant desire with an overdose of Cleopatra’s aphrodisiacs was of no concern to Mario — you could not predict what would really happen in the mind of a large, advanced Frenchman under a vineyard. They only had to dig a good, fat hole and put the fat frog in it and cover it up. He was suddenly very passionate about his lack of concern for the Frenchman’s fantastic psychology.