Padgett Powell - Cries for Help, Various - Stories

You can in fact walk a long time in the desert having shed your Taupist cold-cut-disc shirt, or still wearing it, hoping for ice cream and knowing, in equal measure, there will be no ice cream. Your walking and hoping, and knowing and despairing, will not abate. You will be an honest and clear-headed and perplexed and dishonest man, or woman, all at once. You will be like unto a dog. This, this steady trudge of belief and disbelief, is what you were made for. If you have shed your meat shirt and happen upon another meat shirt you might, and probably will, put it on and carry it on your voyage until you shed it, and then find another, and don it, and shed and don and shed and don all the livelong day. You will be approaching the end and denying it is the end. One step is knowing, the next step not knowing, one caring, one not, one presuming, one not, one believing and the next disbelieving and the next believing and the next disbelieving. This tiny pendulum is the engine of your heart, the motor of man. You will litter money and feces along the way. Kill and maim fellows and flora and fauna, and pollute. Wear meat shirts again and again. Be afraid of Taupists, then discredit Taupists. Debate the existence and nature of Taupists. And, finally, expire, to the relief of all.

We are glad to be rid of you, despite our maunderings at the cemetery, and we will be glad to join you, despite our hand-wringing and heel-digging. We’ll be there with you in the end, happy and done ourselves with the bipolar daily marching lies.

My daughter has become a spy. One prepares for surprises, but still. I had braced most against tattoo and mutilation, particularly the multiple perforation of the ear giving it the aspect of a python’s lip, and metal deep on the tongue also is very high on the low list of things I wanted to see, so her working for the CIA, if that’s who it is, has thrown me. She did not talk to me before her employ, and now she has official authorization not to talk to me. Trying to find out where she has been on a Saturday night may be a breach of national security. Instead of the hand, which I used to get, as she walked away from me, now I get a patronizing look as she holds her ground: Dad, the look says, please, I was on a date with Uncle Sam, okayee ? She does not retreat into the cover of her room, but pours a bowl of cereal and begins to eat it, open-mouthed, a secret agent staring me, nosy security risk, down.

As a young man I protested CIA recruiting on campus and clearly failed. They got her on a high-school campus, apparently, where we never would have suspected they’d go. I have come to the horrible suspicion that I am directly responsible for her taking up with the CIA by buying her as I did last year a BMW. Can the CIA have a spy in suburban American without wheels? Without good wheels? I bought her the good car so that she would not be broken down on the side of the road, and apparently the CIA thinks the same way. This at any rate is one straw I grasp at. One may grasp at straws all day. As my fuddiness comes on, accelerated by having a daughter not out of high school working in government intelligence, it would be appropriate for me to be code-named Straw Grasper were I to get in the field. My daughter wears a wire, I a diaper.

Now the spy wants a better sound system in her BMW. You would think that a matter precisely up her employer’s alley, not mine. “Why can’t they add a CD changer and do a speaker upgrade when they install the transponder?” I ask her. She looks at me with a patronizing smile, slightly shaking her head in that universal gesture of condescending incredulity.

You are so sad, this little one-millimeter shake of the head says. “Who is they , Dad?”

“The transponder people,” I say. I don’t say “The Agency” because I know better. “The Man. Let The Man buy some high fidelity.”

The proposition seems to be that a girl in her BMW without a subwoofer lifting bark off trees does not look like a proper girl in a BMW but suspiciously quiet, like a spy. My daughter the secret agent cannot of course articulate this to me; she merely says her radio rattles at high volume, that, in fact, “My radio sucks if I turn it up.” It sucks.

It has not snowed here in thirty years, and today it is snowing.

I wake up stunned and hurt. Should I not do sit-ups and push-ups until this little fit of stunned and hurt passes over?

The son of the ex-chief of police, gone to seed, walks fatly and loosely down the street.

Thang Phong ( tong pong ) will murder his piano teacher, whom he loves, or loved, very much, and respects, and calls, or called for years anyway, and probably will not stop calling after he has killed her, a “word-crass piano prayer.” Thang Phong will not be able to say why he killed her. He will remain cheerful about his long and successful tutelage under her and is himself accomplished at the piano, for which he gives all credit to Mrs. . We have, strangely, misplaced the name of the piano teacher — precisely, we have forgotten it. It is like Harrison or Garrison but slightly off, perhaps in a French or German way.

It is a little sloppy to say that the son of the police chief has gone to seed. The son of the police chief was not ever in that state one is in before he goes to seed — would it be ripe? In full bloom? At stud? Is a horse put to stud after his racing career not “gone to seed”? The son of the police chief was not ever virile or prepossessing or upstanding, but he was a young man with a nice fresh face and possessed of a cheer, if not an innocence, that you did not expect of a boy whose father was locally famous for enmeshing himself in minor scandal and being, after all, the chief of police. By one argument the sons of police chiefs are born gone to seed. There is no hope for them: they are juvenile delinquents whose fathers will keep them out of the system of juvenile jurisprudence. But this particular boy showed hope of a sort. He was, well, nice . It is easy to say now, having seen him before, and seeing him now, perhaps too nice . Something went awry. Like milk in a bottle, something spoiled. The teeth in the nice smile of the bright child of the police chief are now furry-looking, and there is too much saliva in the smile, which he still proffers. He is soft-looking now, and weak-looking, and a bit splay-footed. He has as he walks no apparent direction. That is not quite accurate. He has direction, but not enough speed to suggest he is really going anywhere he needs to go; nor is he ambling in such a carefree way that he appears to be walking for health. It is impossible to say what he is up to. He is the fat son of the police chief who, the son, was once almost handsome now with dirty teeth and an oblique smile and a loose walk. He looks like a young man who has said to himself, “I have nothing better to do, I should at least walk somewhere,” and has obeyed his own command. His father lost his office finally by claiming falsely to have played football for a famous football coach. He had also dislocated the affections of voters by wearing makeup for televised press conferences. This was not the casual makeup applied last-minute by a television crew to prevent a subject’s nose from shining, but makeup that the chief of police self-administered in unartful excessive quantity toward an apparent attempt to have himself resemble Elvis Presley. People seeing the chief of police in this plumage did not think of Elvis so much as they thought of men who liked to dress up as women. The son of the ex-chief of police ambling about as he does looks lost.

Had an observer seen the initial contact between Thang Phong and the son of the chief of police, he would have said it appeared to be accidental and he would be baffled by its escalation and its outcome. The first shambling misstep a little across the sidewalk by the son of the chief of police into the path of the approaching Phong, Phong’s halt, their both sidestepping the same way back over to the son of the police chief’s initial side of the sidewalk, their both stepping then back to Phong’s side, was a classic Willie Pep maneuver in which both parties, seeking to allow the other pass, inadvertently block the passage of the other. Perhaps it was the smiling, the wet yellow grin, by the police chief’s son, which smile does not seem to be extinguishable, a fact Phong could not have known — perhaps this salacious-looking expression on the face of the fat boy in his way put Phong on the defensive, made him think a large grub-like Westerner was deliberately fucking with him.