Padgett Powell - Cries for Help, Various - Stories

We look at my wet boots and socks on the grass, exhausted. As mornings go, or days, this one has been, for me, singularly good. I feel ennobled to have distracted the Sheriff, abandoned my role in reversing history, and now to be a boon companion to a man who has mopped shit in a room since five a.m. We are the ungainfully employed, unjailed, unlettered, unprotected fair boys left in the world. I feel a little high with my numb feet on the green grass beside my sodden socks and boots, my new friend smiling at them and not asking one question about them, or me, or the Sheriff, whom he saw deposit me in the ER drive-thru. These are lousy details of the quotidian and they do not merit the attention of men thinking about larger things, like cleaning whole rooms fouled by unfortunate exploding men.

“He had six hundred dollar in his wallet, in his pants, hook on the wall, all spray with shit. I took ten dollar. Only. I put his clothes in the laundry. Special service. Ten-dollar tip, moreso.”

“I dig where you comin’ from.”

“Dude esploded .”

The way this fellow shakes his head, incredulously admiring the misfortune of the exploding patient, and the way we snicker together on the lawn, is pleasing, very pleasing, in the long array of not final things during our time on Earth. The way the day has gone has made me think things like “the not final things during our time on Earth.” I am happy, happy not to be a horse-rustling poet, a culture starter, on a lawn with cold blue feet in the sun, my bowels not urgent, a friend to chat with.

I walk around picking up raw bits of meat in the soles of my shoes. The old Converse high-tops pick up the meat and apparently mold it into these rather blunted pyramid-shaped nougats, or pills, what would you call compacted meat in roughly the shape of pyramids such as what fall out, a little dusty, from your shoes? I have these Docksiders with a wavy razor-cut tread that picks the meat up into the thin voids of the tread and presses it into ribbons that suggest tapeworms, or would suggest tapeworms were you to get the meat out of the tread in a piece. Meat pressed into shapes like that is disturbing to me somehow, so I am not unhappy that it can’t be got out in that configuration, the tapeworm or audio-mylar configuration, but I am not altogether happy that it, the meat, remains up in the razory tread of my shoes either. I wash the shoes but am not convinced you can really clean up in spaces that tight. I question the design, the intellect that decided to cut rubber into waved micrometer slices to shoe men who want to be sailors at heart, or even pretend sailors on sidewalks in their chinos hailing their girls, etc. The waffle-iron idea of the Converse engineers seems by comparison a much more wholesome approach. I am going with the flow mostly here. I am mostly going with the flow here, I mean. Trying to, with meat on my shoes. I know a poet named Rachel.

September is my yellow month. I can be down in the mouth but not blue in my yellow month. Rachel is pink. I am not going to mention her again, at the request of one of my friends.

Janis Joplin at her desk regards Charlie Dickens at his, and wonders. That boy could be the answer, or one of the answers, to the long question that will trouble her. Will I be the loneliest girl on Earth? The dog of loneliness is already at age nine nuzzling her. Because it is, after all, a dog, and nuzzling, and she nine, the dog of loneliness nuzzling little Janis Joplin at this point is merely cute. It will not be so cute later when she has bad skin and has wrecked her voice and swings that bottle of Southern Comfort at it as it tries to lick her face all sweaty on stages. . oh my this is poetic. Let’s abjure poetry because the conceit of this — Janis Joplin and Mr. Dickens a century out of his time — is already inane. We will stick to the facts and try not to be pretty.

She has heard Charlie Dickens use pretty big words early in the third grade. Unlike other children she has not been inclined to roll her eyes at him when he deploys a doozy. Even the teacher has rolled her eyes, or done that thing where she takes a deep breath and lets it out and says, “Okay, Charlie, can you state that in other words?”

To this Charlie has said, “In other words?” seeming to be honestly perplexed. It is clear to Janis at least that he is not dissembling, to use a big word that cannot properly be in her brain either. What she means to think is that Charlie is not pretending not to understand the teacher when she wants other words instead of the perfect ones he has apparently just used. Janis assumes them perfect anyway, because she doesn’t herself know their meaning and she will give the benefit of the doubt to a boy in pleated short pants with his hair wet-combed and speaking clearly without giggling or mumbling. She’d like to mount Charlie Dickens, in the cloak closet if she has to, but in the bushes right outside the windows on the side of the school facing the orphanage where he lives would be better. It is not usual for a nine-year-old girl to have visions of mounting people but Janis is not a usual girl.

Charlie for his part is unusual too. He has about given up talking in class, participating in the teacher’s notions of good-pupil citizenry, because it is clear she does not really like good-pupil citizenry or she would not be inhaling and sighing like that and asking for other words. Last week he said, “Crazy wooden galleries common to the backs of half a dozen houses, with holes from which to look upon the slime beneath; windows, broken and patched, with poles thrust out, on which to dry the linen that is never there; rooms so small, so filthy, so confined, that the air would seem too tainted even for the dirt and squalor which they shelter; wooden chambers thrusting themselves out above the mud, and threatening to fall into it — as some have done; dirt-besmeared walls and decaying foundations; every repulsive lineament of poverty, every loathsome indication of filth, rot, and garbage; all these ornament the banks of the ditch behind the orphanage in which I am not alone confined.”

He thought he had got it about right until the teacher then said, “Can you, Charlie—” sigh—“say that in other words?”

“I’ll try,” he said, “but later,” and sat down, because he was winded and he did not think he knew other words and he saw Janis looking at him in that way he had no words for yet.

He tried later that night to formulate words not other than those he had used to describe his mean privation but to describe the kind of looking at him Janis Joplin did. It was shy, spittlely, askance when not directly at him; diffident , not shy , he thought; perhaps sidelong rather than the awkward askance when not direct; spittlely was terse but not elegant, better to string it out with a little gobbet of spit in the corner of her mouth as if she were hungry. Janis did look hungry, but not in the way his peers at the orphanage looked hungry. They looked like they wanted to eat Twinkies and Janis did not look like she wanted Twinkies. Janis had this odd way of looking like an old woman sometimes, an old woman in a bed like Miss Havisham, a woman he could see in his mind, the vision of whom mystified him: he did not know who it was or why he had a name for her and could recall no one remotely like her in his life at the orphanage outside Austin, Texas.

On television Janis has seen an interview with Ray Charles that has made her interested in Ray Charles and indeed in music itself in a way that she was not interested in either Ray Charles or music before she saw the interview. Mr. Charles had on magnificent, gleaming sunglasses and rocked his head around in the air like a bird dog looking for a scent, which she knew he did because he was blind, or was supposed to be blind. Too many singers claimed to be blind for them all to be blind, she thought, but she thought Ray Charles was probably not lying, about that. If anything made her suspicious of his blindness it was simply how good his sunglasses looked. They had gone to some trouble getting those magnificent glasses, movie-star glasses that could have been on an Italian actress if they were not there waving around like solar antennae on Mr. Charles’s face. Anyway, right out of those glasses came this white sizzly blinding light into her own eyes as Mr. Charles said, “You can only make love to one woman at a time.” That remark transfixed Janis. She did not know why he said it or what he had been saying or what the question was. In fact she did not know, really, what “make love to a woman” meant, let alone one at a time, but it was an idea that held a great appeal to her, clearly up there on the tree of adult knowledge. And when he said it she knew he was not lying about being blind, or about being a good singer, or about being a good singer being a good thing to be, though she did think he might be lying when he said you could only make love to one woman at a time. It sounded like he was denying something rather than just stating a fact, whatever the fact was, or whatever the denial. She could eat two apples at one time. It was dumb because they both turned a little brown as you did it but you could do it. She wondered what in fact there was you could do one of that you could not do two of at one time. She could sing two songs at one time, or five, and she did this in the bathtub and she mostly did it when she forgot lines to one song but remembered those to another but sometimes she did it for fun. Ray Charles was not on the level about that woman thing, but he was guarding his being on the level about the music thing. She thought: What if I be Ray Charles on the music thing and myself on the woman thing? I’ll say you can make love to more than one woman at a time. She already sang very well, in the bathtub, and no one ever told her to pipe down, one reason she thought she was pretty good. José Feliciano, Stevie Wonder, Ronnie Milsap, and Ray Charles? It was too much. At Blind Lemon Jefferson she gave up.