Padgett Powell - Mrs. Hollingsworth's Men

For the rest of her life she would shop, for herself and for whatever hungry fools came by to partake of her improbable food. This resolve filled her with so much cheer that she hatted up and headed out to the real store for some probable food. Waked up, part of her vision intact, the ghost of her lies in her purse, she was not altogether in despond. She Volvoed forth into the real fog.

Blueberries

At the grocery store Mrs. Hollingsworth found herself stopped at a long chest freezer containing packaged vegetables and fruits, The handsome simulations of the vegetables and the fruits on the packages drew the eye agreeably to their gay colors through the calming fog of frozen air hovering over them. She stood there, absently handling this and that. She rarely bought any frozen food of this sort, precisely because the packaging was so nice she felt it had to conceal something fraudulent. She was aware that frozen food had passed out of middle — class favor and was now a food of the lower classes. But there was a brand of bulk vegetables from Georgia of the country-people sort — cut green beans and okra and field peas — sold in two-pound undecorated clear plastic bags that she would buy. These vegetables were good, and they interested her because all it said on the bag, virtually, was “Moultrie, Georgia,” as if that would, or should, be enough to sell the food in the bag. And it was. All the other frozen produce, in full-tilt packaging, which she thought of as emanating actually from Hollywood, turned out to be from a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a subsidiary of Coca-Cola or General Motors, in Battle Creek or Stamford or who knew where.

She imagined Forrest riding in here and laying in a plain bag of cut okra for each saddlebag, to pop in his mouth like popcorn all day through a long fight. She actually looked around for him, realizing as she did that she looked exactly like the man on the bed’s grandmother, who would slap childrens hands to protect her pickled tongue, the time she escaped from her nursing home and petered out in the sunny foyer of an apartment building two blocks away saying to passing strangers whom she mistook to be her rescuers, “What took you so long?" The old children-knife-slapping poker queen mistook each passerby to be a saber-slapping Forrest. Mrs. Hollingsworth had that same desperate lost hopeful look standing there with a bag of okra in her hand. She put it down. Forrest could do a lot, but rescuing her in here was not one of the things he could do.

She beheld, next to the okra she had put down, a box of` blueberries. She knew that the box itself was plain, gray, thin cardboard folded together none too sturdily; what shored the affair up was a perdurable waxed paper well sealed around the box, a light unwettable paper as nice as good wrapping paper, and this delicate slippery material held the coarse, loose box of berries together, a kind of intimacy she found sexy. The wrapper was pure white, and on it was printed a prospect of blueberries that looked like no blueberries on earth, or none that anyone on earth had ever seen, at any rate. They were cold-looking and “garden-moist,” the wrapper proclaimed, a remarkable effect given that the blueberries she’d seen had looked like hot purple peppercorns. These Hollywood berries were princely, each with its dainty spiked crown. The photograph did what Van Camps or General Motors or AT&T or whoever asked of it: made the human being want to eat blue food, an improbable thing in his general habit.

In the portrait of these surreal blueberries, Mrs. Hollingsworth saw the man on the bed get up from it and look around and see that the impossibly beautiful woman was gone. This perception on his part put a waft of momentary desperation through him, followed hard by a waft of determination to endure the loss of the woman. Sexual deprivation quickens the step, Mrs. Hollingsworth thought, seeing the sentiment penciled over the scene as if it were one in a comic strip. It was a comic strip, she thought then. She had no trouble with that. She herself was comic.

She saw the man put on a crisp new shirt of a plaid fabric so thin it could be seen through. He dropped the tissue and the straight pins from the shirt packaging onto the hard golden floor of the room. It was the first time anything — even Helen of Troy’s clawing through it — had detracted from the stunning perfection of the floor. The momentary carp flowing over it had no more marred it than fish mar water. The pins and the tissue fell to the floor and stayed where they fell, the shiny glints of the pins random and vaguely dangerous, the crumpling of the paper humanly messy. They were harbingers of something, Mrs. Hollingsworth thought. She loved that word. They were harbingers.

The man stepped lively onto the street. He had complemented the hick shirt with a pair of pants too short to conceal his brogans and white socks. He looked a perfect clodhopper. She liked him very much. She had not liked him much lately. Now that he was out of his moony phase he was looking okay. He had determined to get himself a job, any job, that day, right there in Holly Springs Mississippi. That was pluck. He wasn’t going to get a job that day, or probably any other day, in Holly Springs Mississippi, where he knew no one, and even he knew it, but that did not stop him or Mrs. Hollingsworth from seeing the possibility of it. What mattered was that he was taking himself in hand — this resolve was fairly pinned on him, like a blue ribbon he’d been conferred at 4-H. He’d won the prize for Taking Himself in Hand.

The impossible job he would not get that he would somehow get would be on the order of the lowest hand at the feedstore. He would carry fifty-pound bags of feed and fertilizer and seed to pickup trucks while his superiors at the store, some of them much younger than himself, handled the transactions at the counter. These would involve a total figure that was rarely particularized, a check that was never questioned, and some talk about cutworms, or bots, rust, whatever the hell the new rot-thing or bug was; the county agent might know, might not, would pretend to until it was too late. Was it true sixteen-gauge shells was going to disappear? No, not that we heard, anyway. What is this shit about not being able to vaccinate your own dog for rabies? I don’t know, that’s what they say. Well, they ain’t worth the powder it’d take to blow them.

The man lately from the bed would grunt all day beneath l his loads in paper and burlap sacks, some of which smelled good enough to eat. A thick-necked, thick-shouldered high school football player, traditional holder of his position at the feedstore, would one day beat him up behind the feedstore. Or, more precisely, two other football players, on behalf of the jobless football player, themselves without feedstore aspirations, would beat him up. Whoever did it, they would not realize that the wild and lucky moves the man came up with in the hopeless defense of himself were inspired by fear. They would see only that he had the balls and the surprising skill to somehow nick them and so would not extinct him altogether but would leave him there and say, “Go on in there and tote your bags, old man,” and the man would notice that, wing them or not, he had not disturbed even the Skoal tucked in their lips. No one after this would ever bother the man again.

He crossed the street now in his red-plaid highwater nattiness and approached the council of elders in their herringbone and suspenders. They regarded him without cheer. He said to them, “Wondering where I might find work.”

They appeared not to have heard him. Finally one of them — the man could not tell which one — said, "Woik. Heah ?"

“Yes."

The elders looked off with far and indifferent gazes, each in a different direction away from the man, as if they expected something more interesting to appear over the horizon.