Padgett Powell - Cries for Help, Various - Stories

Unlike the police chief’s son, Thang Phong had direction and conviction: he was, before this clown got in his way, on stride and on time, precisely on time, for his piano lesson with Mrs. Guerre or Mrs. Garre or Mrs. Huarre. In his head he was going over the piece he was to play for her when suddenly someone was blocking his way and apparently finding it funny, and to Phong’s acute sense of smell the boy seemed unwashed. This sour-milk smell might have panicked Phong, for he was antiseptic in his outlook and habits. He touched the son of the police chief deftly in the solar plexus with his middle finger and the son of the police chief collapsed on him. The finger went to the correct spot and stiffened from Thang Phong’s root, which came out of the ground with the power of the earth. It was a thing Thang Phong had not thought of since a boy when they had all done martial arts as, say, American boys all do Little League baseball. He knew how to touch the son of the police of chief with maximum effect, and without malice, just as an American man will know, thirty years later on a softball team, to charge a grounder, when he would otherwise wait for the ball to come to him. When Thang Phong’s middle finger went into the soft center of the police chief’s son, with his two other fingers flanking it in what he had known thirty years ago was called a snake strike, he touched something down in there very firmly, like playing that gratifying E-flat in the opening of Beethoven’s fifth, and the boy shuddered as the piano would, but unlike the piano the son of the chief of police lost his breath and grasped for Phong to try to keep from going down to the sidewalk. The clabbery smell and the clammy feel of the son of the chief of police panicked Phong more deeply as he was grabbed onto, and he twisted hard and inadvertently elbowed the boy in the temple, again with a ground-root force that he did not intend and that seemed to come from the provinces of both martial arts and music. The police chief’s son’s creepy smile dimmed a bit and he went to the side and down hard on the sidewalk, hitting first on blubber and then on his head, and he did not move.

Thang Phong was upset that this encounter had made him late for his lesson with Mrs. Legare. It did not occur to him that the man in his way was hurt. He wanted now to somehow take a shower before playing his piece for Mrs. Garreisen but he knew this was impractical short of his getting there and asking her if he could take a shower. You did not do that at a piano lesson or at any other occasion when entering someone’s home, and especially in Mrs. Heinson’s house it would be a problem because she would have to set out a matching set of towel and face towel and washcloth for him and these would have to match the rugs in the bathroom, which matched covers on the tank of the toilet and the cover of the toilet, which upholstery Thang Phong had already made note of in his innocent use of the bathroom on other less trying occasions when he had merely needed a toilet and not a shower. He resolved to march through the pain of being dirty and play his piece well for Mrs. Garhoolie and not be such a whiner.

But when he got there, a tad breathless from hurrying, and Mrs. Jeemstripe opened the door and received him with her warm smile as she did every week, he burst out, “Mrs. Hometapes, some crodhopper slime me, I needa take shower prease.” He was wrong to have anticipated an ordeal, because even though, as he had predicted, a complete matching stack of high-grade earthtone terrycloth was supplied him, it was done instantly, without fuss, and Mrs. Thorsenguille even drew the water and had the shower running and was closing him into the bathroom before he could say another word and retract his request and insist he could play with germs on him almost as well as he could play without germs on him. The image of Mrs. Tomarre smiling at him so solicitously as she closed the bathroom door was so motherly and generous and she seemed so genuinely happy in being helpful this way that he thought of her at that moment as his mother, and he could not momentarily picture his own mother. He said aloud, “Who was my mother?” No image or idea of his mother or of any family at all came into his head, which he held in one hand, trying to think, absently fondling his genitals in the shower stream with the other hand, when the shower curtain ripped open and Mrs. Theneglassen stood there naked and white as a powder puff except for her dark triangular business in the middle of the largest white triangle of her, grinning at him hugely, stepping in, and Thang Phong recoiled and slipped and going down he grabbed behind him for purchase with the hand that had held his head while he had tried to think, and with the hand that had absently been at his genitals he formed and sent the snake strike that was now becoming second nature to him into Mrs. Horbeglieve’s throat.

My problems exceed those of Thang Phong. But not by much. I am freshly divorced and at the age (a preserved fifty-plus) that forces young women to gauge their readiness to take on a man as old as their fathers, with a fathery set of smells. The less imaginative of them, which is nearly all of them, regard a fifty-year-old man’s owning a red sports car a midlife crisis, a phrase of which they are most fond. The intractability of young women is not my real problem; it is but the problem I like to think about. The real problem is that I have no ambition or desire for anything at all — not for the women, not for work, not for barbecuing, not for life. If I have a problem, it is that I have no problem.

I have made Thang Phong also have, strangely, no problem where he should have a huge problem. He reached toward Mrs. Wallenstein more for balance than to strike her, which he did only inadvertently, as was the formation of the snake strike inadvertent (for the second time in the day, for the second time in thirty years). He dressed neatly, refolding the towel he lightly used, and left Mrs. Thorsen where she lay asphyxiated on the mauve polyester bath mat that also matched the toilet upholstery and the towels. He was remorseful to see her indisposed like that but not overcome by grief or anxiety. Two people had tried to put germs on him within a space of about twenty minutes and both of them had fallen down. Mrs. Terrebone had been really going to put some germs on him.

Mrs. Treglassen was found the following week, assumed to have slipped and crushed her trachea on the edge of the tub, which she had in fact done after Phong touched her, and no inquiry was made. The son of the chief of police was found by the coroner to have died from a heart attack with an incidental non-fatal blow to the head from his fall, which was accurate. No witness saw Thang Phong at either site and no one thought to inquire of him if he had had his lesson with Mrs. James on Friday and been thereby possibly the last person to see her alive. He would have said he had a very instructive lesson and that he had indeed been the last person to see her alive if they said so.

There are secret thoughts that each of these people had during these somewhat sad, possibly tawdry, conceivably whimsical events I have recorded. The son of the chief of police, as he Willie Pepped with Thang Phong and could not get by him, suddenly thought that if his father had said he played for Barry Switzer instead of Bear Bryant he would still be in office — it was dumb to lie but there were smart lies and stupid lies — and then he just could not breathe and tried to grab the guy in front of him to keep from going down. Mrs. Horve thought she should have taken Thang’s hand at the keyboard during any one of their hundreds of piano lessons instead of going whole-hog overboard like this and probably scaring the poor thing to death, and then she too just could not breathe. When she saw Thang Phong falling backwards with an alarmed expression on his face, she felt a small hurt of rejection for just a second before the more pressing issue of no air overrode her hurt feelings and in fact wiped her emotional slate, which had been moments ago bristling with hope and energy and girlish moist ideas, clean.