Padgett Powell - Cries for Help, Various - Stories

And what would you say, Sir, to the chance we might mount a draft horse in chain mail and swarp down the enemy in rows like wheat?

Aye, bonnie good that, let’s do, and then let’s try not to dissect the swarping of our fellows and find less in it than heroism. Will we be able to manage that?

I am only thy valet, Sire. I can put thee on the mount, I cannot determine how thou ridest.

Cry for Help from Home

My grandfather kept bees. I never saw him at this enterprise and do not know precisely how I know that he pursued it. I have had the urge to have bees myself but so far have not procured a single bee. My father was a gambler. I think that was his essence. In high school he hustled pool halls, in WWII he joined the Marines before being drafted, in life he struck out in entrepreneurial ventures and real-estate developments. In his last hours he escaped the house and walked to the 7-Eleven and bought a lottery card, got lost and tired on the way home, and was brought to the door by two women who wanted to know if they could keep him. They had found him sitting on their low garden wall, they found him charming, and they brought him home. I have never gambled on a thing in my life.

Cry For Help from the Theater of Love

Jogging along lightly, nude, I encounter some Vermont-hiker-looking folk before I can cut off the road so say, “Finally tried out some really light backpacking ha!” and cut for the house, crossing the porch on which I had not noticed the preponderance of trash before, but I had only crossed the porch the one time before, ten minutes ago, and inside told the woman that I’d unfortunately run into the neighbors and she said, “And you would have to come in here.” She was immediately busy with two children on an articulation table of some sort, I thought at first an abdominal-exercise machine, and I suppose by one argument it was but it was finally more technical than that. And the older child on one end of the table that I took to have Down syndrome got up and crawled onto the smaller child at the other end of the table and affected to smother it with a lawn chair, to everyone’s delight, and I noticed through a window back toward the porch two girls exercising in wheelchairs, pulling themselves therapeutically up and down the room, one of these girls apparently disfigured or mutilated and covered up and the other absolutely striking but paralyzed in the legs, and ho, this was a bit of a rough scene here all of a sudden, where ten minutes ago this woman had just offered herself without all these complications, just these perfect rouge silver-dollar areolae in an open shirt, which is why I had gone down to the pond and washed up and jogged back, and found all this. Man. Locating succor is getting hard.

The kind of exhaustion I am talking about is, simply, or not simply, the broken heart. It makes you long to hold hands with someone you have not hurt who has not hurt you. This longing would be immediately and hotly extant if a dark girl offered you a cup of flan.

The aerie feather-brained quality is upon me today, I am slightly dizzy and nauseated. Got to ride over to the foundry and smelt some ore. My eyeglasses are featuring that snot-smeared effect. I hate that. My buddy was chased by a pack of dogs that scared him so bad he shat a little in his pants, and he hates that. I knew several distinguished older men who have died who had a better grip on things than I do. I wonder if they can see me floundering. I know that one of them in particular, with a scotch and pretty women about him in heaven, would enjoy sending annoying telegrams of advice like “Buck up” if he could. Most of them, though, I suppose would elect not to send a telegram even if they could. This is why they were regarded as distinguished on earth. They had the astute capacity not to deign, presume, meddle. They hunkered down within the castle walls of their particular potency, whatever it was, and did not send loose emissary of themselves about the uncharted ground of their purlieu.

It seems to me that if you do not deign, presume, and meddle, though, that the forces of the world at large, sometimes in the form of a kind of anonymous aggregate power, will pile up on you in an ambient deigning and presuming and meddling that will render you helpless. It is this way today: I am helpless here, dizzy and looking through badly fouled glasses at the bright, challenging world. Of course a non-anonymous, specific, particular force can deign, presume, and meddle with you also, like the phone company, or Ms. Trujillo at the phone company, who might withal be said to be but an accidental agent of aggregate force. But if, say — oh, you get the picture, you must, you are in the picture yourself. If you don’t get the picture and fancy yourself not in it, I would say you are deigning to presume and are meddling with me, tacitly accusing me of being off rocker a bit. You are part of the problem. But I do not think that you are part of the problem. I think you are with me. I think you and I could dance across this floor of doubt in a cuddly promenade if we could know what our feet are up to. If I knew what my feet were up to, I would be distinguished, alive or dead. It is easier to be distinguished dead than alive.

I have lost the capacity to make a fist with my head, is what I mean. It is a matter of mental muscle tone, and I’ve gone as slack as pudding. I need to drink me some brain Jell-O, get some pearls growing in that oyster. At the very least I’ve got to wash my glasses and shut up.

At dusk, the girls visit. We ride out to meet them on our horses, with our guitars. Our guitars are made of boxwood.

The girls are of flesh and they are agreeable to our every suggestion profane and genteel. They come at dusk. By dawn they are gone wherever they go. We live in a valley of cattle and history. Conditions are dry but there is water in the wells. All in all it is Spanishey.

The boxwood is a small hedge in my experience, and that my guitar is made of boxwood troubles me. The girls are taken with the tunes from our guitars, withal.

In history there has been force and badness and an eking along of goodness. There are broken guitars, but also new guitars. The girls are broken, but whole and trying. We too. We meet them when they come at dusk, at the gates of the ranch, a good place to meet. The cattle, the air, the past, etc. is there to enrich the moment. We are there with our boxwood guitars. The girls smile every night. They smile just the same way.

We will not be able to hold this moment forever, though we will try rabidly. A rogue boxwood plant on the impossibly long drive to the gate to meet the girls holds us in thin regard.

In history, before this moment and after this moment, some powerful men will drive this impossibly long drive with Mercedeses and it will be possible, the drive. The girls they meet will not be coming to them on foot, however, and will not be smiling. In a Mercedes, in fact, the drive will look practical. There will be no guitars, not of boxwood or anything else, then. Their girls will not be wearing colorful handmade skirts as ours do. The skirts are so folksy and authentic you couldn’t take it if they were not on genuine girls who have come to see you. The men of Mercedes history, before this and after this, will have to drive far to procure their women, and the women will wear basic black and be expensive. That kind of woman is not for us, indubitably not for us.

Our names are so common we have forgotten to use them for some time. It has not mattered. We probably have not actually forgotten what they are, our names, but it might be close. We would abjure a test. We remember our girls at dusk and our guitars. I remember the boxwood holding me in its shrinking regard. How is there enough wood in the plant of a boxwood, or in many of them, to make a guitar? Does my guitar speak to the plant? Does the plant weep, or mourn, to see us pass with our guitars of itself? If you think this way, you are compelled to drive the impossible drive on a horse, not in a Mercedes. The horse has some non-Mercedes thoughts of its own. The girls are not about to be seen getting into Mercedeses either. We have all gone the other way. We are not powerful, except in our disregard for power, which is a weak form of powerfulness, we are not under delusions here. We are clear-headed, clear-voiced, clear-intended to our girls, who come at dusk.