Padgett Powell - Cries for Help, Various - Stories

Their skirts are a sunset under their smiles, and a sunset is behind their smiles, the same every night. Our guitars speak to the girls, to history, to the boxwood who disapproves of us. We inhale the history in the air, the past, present, and future. Too much of that will give you a headache so we do not do too much of that. Too much of that will accelerate your forgetting your name also. One girl is named Angelique. One is browner than the others and looks chewier, if to say that would not give offense. We deem, now that we have said it, that it would, so we retract it. Shall we say that the browner girl appears sturdier than the lighter girls, that her smile in the dusk appears brighter because her white teeth flash in greater contrast to her face than the teeth of the lighter girls flash, etc., and so the possibly very fraudulent conclusion may be drawn that the browner girl is happier and therefore readier for the rough handling that men with boxwood guitars and no car are going to mete out? And that these men who regard men in Mercedeses as caciques in history, even if they are but heavily mortgaged realtors, are the kind who would formulate that a girl looks chewier not with an eye to offending but merely with an eye to avoiding blather? Yes. She looks chewier then. Very chewy and she gives us a good feeling just being around her, as do equally the other girls, the less chewy-looking ones in the dusk. They are every bit as chewy-looking in the full day and in the full night. The browner girl has this advantage only for a few minutes per day. That does not seem unfair.

The guitar is easy to tune, the Mercedes not. As men of the weak powerful sort, who abjure the test of name recall, our own, we abjure also the notion of fairness, we know better, but it creeps into our thoughts sometimes, like bilge water. It obtains, pitch all you want. No craft does not leak. The thin boxwood holding us in thin regard was eaten by a bull. Or an antelope for all we know. We do know we had to run, guitars and girls bouncing a lovely discordant concerto across the present frame of history, from a shorthorn bull as wide as three Mercedeses and half as fast, but not for an impossibly long distance. The girls were happier and chewier all after that, our guitars sounded more splendid than usual, and all of us but me had failed to notice the missing boxwood.

I have, I think, two apartments in France and so seldom use one of them that I somewhat forget I have it or where it is when I do recall, alarmed, that I have it. In this respect it is like the course exam you are scheduled to take in dreams for a course you have not attended and do not comprehend your enrollment in. My second apartment, or first if you will, is somewhat more on the map of consciousness — to say, I have a clearer idea of what it looks like and where it is (it is airy and on the front of a building; the other is dark and in the high dank rear of a building) — and I believe I have spent time in it, but not much. This must leave me actually living yet somewhere else. I am in general very nervous in France.

My brain and my heart are as small as a songbird’s. I tweet a little, flit, do not overthink. My emotions are a green and purple sorbet.

I wear a corset and a codpiece under my clothes. Whenever I am tempted to act, rare, I step back and secretly tighten the undergarments to further restrict motion, and thereby the temptation to act. A life of action is a wasted life.

Julie-New Sanchez-Manchez-Holt-Durgen is coming over for some covert sex that I may not appear to be very interested in lest it put her off that I am a typical male. The fact is that I am not up for appearing uninterested in sex, whether that is typical male or not, and I am not up for the sex with Julie-New Sanchez-Manchez-Holt-Durgen itself, whether that is typical male or not. I am not altogether up for a visit by Julie-New Sanchez-Manchez-Holt-Durgen except insofar as she can give me some inadvertent clues about my apartments. Sometimes I think I am living in her apartment and she is coming not to visit me but to discover me in her place, at which point she might legitimately expect to govern how I act with respect to sex or anything else. I wish I could get some claritude on some of these issues. The weather outside has shifted from a pleasant balm to some kind of typhoon-acting thing that has the walls heaving in and out visibly, audibly straining. I have wedged a towel into the front-door sill to stop the seepage of water. I have activated a small electric teakettle and I plan to drink tea if I find some. I will hold a warm crockery cup in my hands and take comfort in the warmth. The tea would soothe my nerves were my nerves unsoothed. My nerves are soothed in direct proportion to the force of wind around them. I feel as calm and serene as a dead man.

I read that Ted Turner has lost all his money and that there is some talk, commingled with the historical end of his father, of Ted Turner’s killing himself. I pray that this is not the direction Turner rides his sunset pony toward, and in fact now that the little teakettle is starting to whistle I say, and I say it out loud, in the apartment I think in France that I myself rent or do not, Ted, do not ride your sunset pony that dark way. Steer the mean little bastard into the light, Ted, and don’t let it bite you. You have a million dollars in your pocket and Kofi will just have to wait on the billion, so you keep on keepin’ on, Ted. If I can, you can.

Taupist cold-cut shirt. We were wearing that. Them. A shirt of cold-cut discs, like shingles or chain-mail medallions. They were fragrant, the discs, the shirt. We were nervous, not knowing if large animals would attack us. We hoped that olive loaf would appeal even less to them than it did us. The Taupists make these shirts, we presume. We further presume they are some kind of monks, meat-shirt-making monks. The Taupist label in the shirt said Do Not Remove Under Penalty of Flogging, or We Will Make You Wear This Shirt a Long Time in the Sun. We could see ourselves in the sun in the meat shirt drying up like fish scales and being pink and rancid and then green and rancid and we were afraid to tamper with the Taupist label or to take the shirt off.

I broke into an apartment seeking information on snake hunting in the area and discovered three loose rattlesnakes in the apartment. One of them crawled near my brother whom I told to be still, but he was agitated and the snake bit him in the shoulder blade and hung on. I ripped it loose and slammed it on the floor, uncharacteristically. I was having trouble with 911 when the girl whose apartment it was let herself in, and I told her who I was and apologized for killing one of her snakes and said I was having trouble with 911. My brother was by this time in the bathtub to his jawline in hot water, giggling. Outside the bathroom the girl had taken off her shirt and bra and was on the floor in her skirt looking attractive (very brown and firm); she waved me away when I veered toward her. In the other room I found her brothers in karate gis. They attacked me with a lot of Oriental postures. I could not persuade them not to try to defend the honor of their sister, or of their sister’s apartment, or snake, or whatever it was they were defending. I could not control them, or their sister, or 911, or my brother. All I could control was the snakes, and I had stupidly killed one of them. Had I thought about it I’d have said it was not a good day overall.

And when we finally worked up the courage to take off the meat shirt and drop it in the desert, where it sent a spiral of delicious toxicity up into the nostrils of buzzards, and we were certain that Taupists, whoever or whatever they were, were not in pursuit of us, we felt like having ice cream. You would, in the desert, having shed your meat shirt, understandably want some ice cream, born of cream and sugar and ice and salt, and of course you can walk, or ride, a long way in the desert, whether in a meat shirt or not, afraid of Taupists or not, with a belief that such a thing as a Taupist who would manufacture a meat shirt and require you to wear it under penalty of flogging exists or not, before you find ice cream.