Padgett Powell - Cries for Help, Various - Stories

A cute girl with a nice pink backpack with a white cat in leaping silhouette on it has just gone by the window on a moped. I don’t need her.

Last night a woman came and laid herself across both arms of the overstuffed chair I was in and asked if I did not want “some cocktail.” I said I did not know what “some cocktail” could mean but that I guess I wanted some. I touched her stomach. She was on one elbow across the arms of the chair and her stomach was firm. I’ll have cocktail if that’s the thing to have, I said. I admired the tension of her stomach that I had touched but did not so comment. She knew that I admired the tension of her stomach but did not so comment. I teared up a bit. She touched the side of my face, paying attention at the same time to people behind the chair who might witness this. This woman was vaguely redheaded but not in that arsenical juicy weird true-redheaded way. She was bleached out by troubles of her own, but holding it together. She was going to engineer to get me some cocktail and see that I had a decent time. I was most thankful to her.

We were so loaded that these loose bricks outside Bobby’s place floated around in the house with us, directed by gentle commands like “Here, boy.” They wanted to float into the refrigerator when you looked for beer in there and you had to shoo them out. We did not want to asphyxiate a brick in the refrigerator.

The meeting of the World Stone Club was called to order. Bobby started to read the agenda and the order broke down. Janey Farrington said all the girls were tired of taking off their shirts like it was the sixties and Julian said so what he was tired of his own name and wasn’t going to do that anymore either. This was funny, not going to “do” his name, like a drug, so Phyllis took her shirt off and showed herself to Julian and Julian said he wasn’t tired of that yet and he should not have been because in point of fact the shirts-off accord was best intended or designed or I should say, well I don’t know what I should say except that it was Phyllis above all the girls, maybe really by that point she was the only girl, who had any business taking her shirt off, aesthetically speaking. She has ski slopes and puffies and it gave you a buzz.

I pushed a brick out of the way to see them clearly even though she had turned sort of privately to Julian, and the brick glided all the way out of the room into a lampshade in another room. Bobby’s mother had died last week and the house was starting to show it. Nobody mentioned her. I had liked her though I never said anything to her. She wore these pastel dresses with belts and had a permanent in her hair. I don’t know what she died of; she had not to my mind been sick and she was not old-looking either. It was in a small way like hearing June Cleaver or Harriet Nelson had died — you couldn’t believe it but it probably happened. I was sitting there considering asking Bobby if he had buried his mother in the crawl space under the house like John Wayne Gacy when I looked over and Phyllis was on her knees against Julian on the sofa, grinding herself into his face, and Julian was crying and trying to suck on her, blubbering and slurping like the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a phrase I had never appreciated until that moment. He was a lonelyhearts and Phyllis had figured it out and she was giving him a tune to beat the band. It looked like a lot of fun. Her nipples were the color of the bricks, several of which were hovering near the action, like flies. Julian’s eyes were the same color red from his crying. It honest to God looked like he was crying those bogus tears of joy you hear about. I was ready to cry a little myself. Crying a little is a good thing if you can turn it off.

This had never happened before, congress between members of the Stone Club during a meeting. The shirts-off thing had been political and we had been supposed to carry on like nudists. Now that the shirts-off thing had been repudiated, we were apparently free to act like reasonable people, so Phyllis mounted Julian and the rest of us watched and shooed bricks out of the way and wondered what Bobby had done to Mrs. Thames.

I got up and called a state park in Georgia I had been thinking about and booked a cabin for a whole week for $264. Some outright solitude would do me good. With outright solitude you can do nothing, just lie there and not get up, or get up and lie back down, all day, or all night or any other stupid misuse of time because there is no one to look over your shoulder, if that is the right expression, and that is another thing about solitude, no need to worry about the right or wrong expression because you needn’t use any expressions at all.

I was just sitting there having put the phone down, thinking fondly of the prospect of my week in my cabin, which I knew was a good log cabin built in the thirties by the CCC except they had been fitted with new stoves and central air, when Janey Farrington slipped into the chair behind me and took the phone cord and got it around my neck and started to make like she was strangling me, and this was a trip because I think she was dwelling on Phyllis and Julian’s thing and on Bobby and what he did to his mother too, plus being mock strangled was fun, and I turned to her and kissed her and she asked if she could go with me to the cabin without effing everything up, as if she had read my mind, because even if she heard the whole my side of the conversation with Georgia Parks or Reserve America dot com or whoever it was I didn’t see how she knew what the cabin meant to me, maybe I had been talking out loud there. Anyway she was going wrenk wrenk with the cord, delivering these sound effects like the Psycho slashing scene a little, and these noises of exaggerated struggle like she was working hard to choke me out, and I got a brick-colored nipple in my mouth and started crying, and it felt really really really wonderful, I can’t understand it, I can’t understate it.

It was clear to me then that Bobby was going to have trouble getting anything done officially with the World Stone Club meeting. This somehow served him right, though to that point I had had no quarrel with Bobby at all. I got the phone away from Janey, who was now kissing me all “Love Me Tender” style, like she was in high school, and called 911 and said, “I am at the Robert Thames residence on Leesville Road, and we were told that Mrs. Thames died but we wonder if an investigation should not be made, no this is not an emergency, no I am not calling another number because I have called this one, thank you, good-bye.” I returned Janey’s kisses at that point. She said, “What did you do that for?” I said, “Because it feels good.” She said, “No, call the police.” I said, “I meant calling the police feels good but I see you thought I meant kissing you back feels good and it is too much work to straighten it out further and does it matter anyway, they both feel good,” and we kissed some more without any more questions.

We were perfect idiots in a chair, happy. She tasted good to me, and I must have tasted good to her, as impossible as that sounds. The room was dim and I couldn’t hear anyone else anywhere in the house and I did not see any bricks. Janey Farrington has irises that are very small and aquamarine. Her skin is fine and white. Her eyes look like some kind of seawater seen the wrong way through a telescope. It would not last for long, but it would last for a bit.

Put that nice blue and white pitcher on the marble washstand. Determine your sock size. Play favorites. Have some. Be all you can be and all anyone else can be. Fall back and regroup. Be for heroes. Try not to fail. Recall your mother. Forget your father. Please release me. Let me love again. Trust that I will be okay.