Padgett Powell - Mrs. Hollingsworth's Men

Egg

Mrs. Hollingsworth regarded Hod Bundy and Rape Oswald with misgivings beyond their unplanned presence on her list. Was she making fun of a history that should be hallowed? Was the entire business of corrupting the memory of Forrest a charged irreverence? This war that had come to haunt her: it was a colossal waste and shame, and her Forrest put it mildly when he said they were marked by the bones of boys. How l could she make fun of the bones of boys? She sat there. She put on an egg to boil and sat there some more. How could she not make fun, she thought finally, of the bones of boys? They might otherwise kill you.

She was in this regard malaligned for proper reverent living, at least on bourgeois American earth, and she always had been. She wondered if malaligned was the same thing as maligned. You could not tell where elisions had obtained in English, unlike in French. She recalled the first instance, perhaps, of her irreverent malalignment, and it was in French class. The teacher asked them to translate le chant noir and she had popped out with “He shat black.” The laughter was so immediate and forceful that she had had to go along with it and act as if she had fully intended this as a joke, and in fact it is true that in the middle of her answering she had seen that it was a joke, but in her impulse to speak the answer and to be first with the answer, she had not been aware of the egregious error that was coming with it. She in fact still wanted to read French articles as pronouns. Her whole life, it seemed, had been this way: meaning no harm, she could say someone shat black. It got to be a force of habit, finally. She was the sort of person who did not say the cat is black if there was a chance, accidental or deliberate, not to. And it seemed a little late to put in for a character change. She was going to make her list for her meal for the largest fools starving on earth. “Come and get it, boys,” she said aloud to the egg rumbling on the stove. “Call me Mama.”

Orders

The one called Hod Bundy said to the one called Rape Oswald, "Read me the orders again. I was too nervous to hear them good when Roopit read them. Plus that Mrs. Mogul is a distraction."

Oswald put down his half of the equipment, which appeared to be a heavy power supply, connected by a large-gauge, multistrand umbilical to the half of the equipment carried by

Bundy, which looked like a camera or radar gun. Bundy was jerked to a halt by the tautening of this umbilical, because he had kept walking after Oswald deposited the power supply.

— God damn, Rape.

— God damn what, Hod?

— You might give a warning signal.

— You said stop.

— I said read me the orders. I didn’t realize it was chewing gum and walking for you.

— The orders is tucked away.

— I see that now

Oswald procured the orders in the form of a linty wad from his pants pocket. He procured two Swisher Sweet cigars from a box in his shirt pocket and handed one to Bundy and lit them both and read the orders aloud.

Locate a man who can recognize the hologram cast by this unit — which is charged out to your account and for which you are responsible — and moreover recognize the significance of the hologram (Bedford Forrest). My people in science tell me the emotionally disturbed man may prove most sensitive to this kind of image, but I do not want an unstable candidate. The successful candidate will serve as a prototype man for the New Southerner, a man, if I may say so, much like me, whom I will then have eugenically engineered to found a line of men in the New South who will perforce raise up the Old by eliminating the genetic dearth effected by the War, thereby eliminating builder’s bottom and other ills. Bring him to me.

Mrs. Hollingsworth thought it funny having a media mogul say “builder’s bottom.” She was perfectly aware it was a “manipulation” of her media mogul, putting “her” words in “his”

mouth, also a laughable idea at this juncture. Oswald and Bundy had supplied her media mogul with the name Roopit, whose origin and meaning eluded her. They had also envisioned a Mrs. Roopit Mogul for her, impossibly blue-eyed and gorgeous. Her mogul would say "plumber’s ass."

Bundy said to Oswald, “You get all that?”

Oswald said, “What does ‘moreover’ mean?"

“It’s a word people like Mr. Mogul use. I have no idea.”

Oswald discarded the Swisher Sweet box, took a bite from the corner of the hologram orders, made to chew it, made a face, spit the paper out, wrapped the remaining cigars in the orders, returned them to his shirt pocket, and then had the idea that he and Bundy should take the equipment just over the hill to the Jacksonville Memorial Gardens and aim it at bereaved

men coming out of the viewing parlor until one of them reacted right. In silhouette against the dusking sky, they wont over the horizon yanking at each other with the umbilical and cursing

and stumbling. Sounds that suggested a fight drilled from their progress.

"And what the hell is builder’s bottom?" one of them said, from the dark.

Skeleton

Mrs. Hollingsworth had more doubts about her list, and she was getting tired of them. As ’twere a profanation, she said to herself, recalling the little Donne she knew and liked, of Forrest and the bones of boys — and what about, in sketching these two fond lunatic fools, profaning the memory of the victims of Ted Bundy and indeed — look both ways! — the memory of John Kennedy. What about this?

She put an egg on to think and put eggs on the real list. It came down to this: how do you profanate the already profane? As much as she detested the craven driving around in their Volvos with their children in crash helmets, there was a reason they were driving around out there like that. Bundy and Oswald were out there littering Wal-Mart parking lots with used

Pampers and otherwise trying the burglar bars on their homes. The prisons were full of bad dudes, which was alleged an expression of racism and classism, but it seemed to her, and to the people in the Volvos, that it was an expression of bad dudes knocking people in the head. It was a wreck out there. Forrest had not hidden, and she was hiding, so there be it.

Silly or not, the little love and hope in her golden room over the café were greater than those that operated outside that room in the world outside, or inside, her kitchen. Mr. Mogul’s builder’s bottom was handsomer than the plumber's ass likely to come into her own kitchen if she made in real phone call. She could do nothing about the casualties of war, past or present, and nothing about the souls of the victims of murder, except to entertain herself as best she could while she herself became a spindly skeleton preparing to get into her own uneven grave.

Her Bundy and her Oswald were proving noble in the vigor of their lunatic stupidities. Like any party crashers, they stood a chance of livening things up, if they did not turn out to be utter boors. She was starting to like them, uninvited or not. When had she got the notion that she could invite, or not, to this party? If to list was to listen, and you listened, you did not speak , you heard.

Breast?

One morning an early part of the list caught Mrs. Hollingsworth's eye. She had entered an item called First Breast Not of One’s Mother. Why had she not entered an item called, say, First Member Not of the Father? Why would a woman enter a Breast and not a Member? She had written of the man’s desire for the woman, and not of the woman’s for the man. She

could not entertain a section called Member. What Sally thought of Lonnie’s tallywhacker, a word it occurred to her Sally might have used back then, for reasons she could not fathom,