Padgett Powell - Cries for Help, Various - Stories

Now that I have declared myself idle I have time and inclination to look out the window and appreciate the weather. The sky contains heavy low blue flat clouds slowly sliding to the north and looking like rain. I have heard some thunder. The humidity is high enough to have wilted the banded water snake skin I have that I dumbly left draped over a table edge the last time the humidity was high enough to wilt the skin. When that humidity evaporated, if you may speak of evaporation with respect to humidity, the skin of course crisped out and preserved the angle of drapage. I have been waiting for a bout of new high humidity to allow the skin to relax and flatten out and today I have it, and the skin is limp and restored, and it was touching the Randall Number 23 when I found it, and I took up the knife expecting to see salt contamination where the skin had touched it. I saw no salt damage but I did see the gradu of old polish in the thumb notches so I have applied my energies and resources, nearly all of them, to its removal.

There is a woman down at the dojo where I work out who stopped coming in because she became a real-estate agent and I miss her. She was forty-three, I believe, and in perfect shape. Her body fat does not, or did not, exceed five percent, I would have guessed. There are certain exercises in a dojo in which you have occasion to touch a partner and it was a pleasure to touch this woman. I do not mean this in a precisely sexual way or in a precisely nonsexual way. If there is a neutral interface between sexual and nonsexual, I mean that. When you touch this woman you feel either pure muscle or muscle with bone close under it or just bone itself and you want to squeeze her a bit as if to say, Good for you, girl. And if you did slip up and actually say that, and I think I might have here and there, she would not take offense but would know the remark to be a high compliment, and she would know she worked hard for someone to feel only that muscle and bone and that you knew how hard she worked and that it, muscle and bone and nothing else, was such a good and rare thing that a man could be forgiven for misspeaking or for letting his grip linger longer than absolutely required in the exercise. If the exercise called for striking one’s opponent, she could be struck as hard as you’d strike a man. If it called for an excruciating number of abdominal contractions in, say, a tandem sit-up exercise called a cockpit, you would have to work very hard to keep up with her and not be embarrassed by your not keeping up with her. Now she is selling houses and there is no one at the dojo to feel thrilled by touching.

I wonder if there is a correlation in real estate between the body fat of the agent and the commission the agent pulls down. If the two are directly proportional Peggy will have to put on weight. If the relationship is, by some freak chance in a land that worships sugar, inversely proportional, then Peggy is already retired. Were she already retired, I would see her back at the dojo. I presume. I hope.

I hope for something. It is not a strong hope. The strength of the hope does not exceed — I am now seeing lightning out the window — let me restart this sentence. The weak hope I have is congruent to the weak vision I have of whatever it is I hope for. I hope weakly and vaguely. The weakness matches perfectly the vagueness. I would think that this proportionality is the best arrangement. If one hoped very hard for something one could define very well, it would be okay except for the chance of high disappointment. If one hoped very hard for something one could not define, the chance of disappointment it seems to me would be exceedingly high, if not guaranteed. If one hoped very weakly for something one could define, I would ask what is the point of hoping weakly for that which you see strongly. I hope weakly for that which I see weakly. I’ll be okay no matter what.

Today we want to glue some wood to some wood. We will get all the surfaces clean with sanding and then by wiping the wood with our coarse brown paper toweling, which itself is limp wood. We will apply the good wood glue, which is the color of banana pudding, to both surfaces, liberally, and align the pieces and press them together. Before the final fit it is important to slide the pieces back and forth just a bit, or twist them a bit, depending on the configuration of the pieces; this lateral friction, as it were, is to displace small pockets of air that may be trapped in the glue if the pieces of wood merely come together head-on. Once we have a good airless fit with plenty of squeezeout we should wipe the excess glue with more paper and clamp the pieces firmly together or effect a clamping by means of weight upon the pieces. Clamping can also be effected by tying the pieces together, often with bungees. The pressure should be that of a very firm handshake. Wood being married to wood likes a good handshake. If there is more squeezeout it may be addressed after this clamping or the dried excess glue may be sanded off later. You can use your anytime minutes on small squeezeout. If one of you would go get me a Musketeers the morning would be better. Some of you know how I put a Musketeers in a Dr. Pepper and how the acid in the Dr. Pepper will make the Musketeers into something like a very tasty sea slug. Which if it goes too long though it can be difficult to lift it out in one piece. I call that the Drooping Musketeer and I don’t really like it, I don’t. At a certain point you have to just stir the Musketeer into the Dr. Pepper. A Baby Ruth looks like a turd. A Butterfinger is wont to explode. Never recap your Dr. Pepper if you are using Butterfinger. I must tell you that because the Surgeon General won’t. The cleaning industry tells you not to combine its stuff but the candy industry does not. If there is no caution statement on a candy bar telling you that it is bad for your health in several ways, chief among them obesity and Type 2 diabetes, it is not finally surprising that they not tell you that under certain conditions the candy unit will explode and perhaps blow your pop bottle apart and blind you, or worse. The good wood glue we use here is pretty set up in an hour. Tomorrow we will start in on the router. The router is essential but many a one thinks it is just some kind of dangerous cosmetic tool. It is not. Get your wood and get to gluing and stop wasting time.

The hermit knew he was illiterate but had not thought, in the beginning, that illiterate necessarily also imputed retarded. As he got deeper into the hermitage, and more dim-witted when he infrequently ran into people, he began to sense that retardation was actually part of the deal with him. He realized that he had always been stupid but that his energy as a youth had been sufficient that he had been able to mask stupidity with avidity. As his avidity waned he saw clearly the stupidity that had been underneath it all along, like the mud flat that is under a receding tide. The happy frisky bright blue waters drew slowly off, leaving a dull flat plain of mud. This was his brain.

His next realization on this score was that he was so retarded, in fact, that the discovery of a mud flat in his head did not overly bother him, except for the embarrassment of having thought himself not stupid most of his life. He had had little tolerance for people who overrated themselves in this regard, and now he had to admit that he had been among the worst of the presumers. But with an admission of stupidity can come an admission of amnesia when it is convenient, so he conveniently forgot that he had once presumed himself smart, and he became more and more comfortable in the fact that he was dumber than a post-horse on radio day. That was the kind of locution that might strike him in the new fulgent retardation, and he would happily use such a locution notwithstanding that it meant nothing. It did mean something: it meant he was in fact stupid if he used it, as stupid as a post-horse on radio day. As stupid as a lean killing machine on Tuesday. As stupid as a cloud. Dumber than God on the day he made incense.