Padgett Powell - Cries for Help, Various - Stories

For a moment he fretted the position of the chair as to whether it was in the sun or not, or in too much sun if it were in the sun, before realizing that that fretting was bootless because the sun would lower and leave him no matter where he sat, and he was not going to follow it. If he were going to follow the sun, he might as well take city buses to and fro all over the city and observe the world and issue copious remarks upon it. He might as well live a long chattering gay life before hopping into his hole all bones. He almost thought that people must be attempting, in their festive pointless frenetic living, to be gathering momentum which would carry their bones into the next world still animate. Perhaps in the next world there would be no forces to oppose the energies of a skeleton and it would, with an ounce of momentum, go on forever. That could possibly explain why people insisted on running their marathon daily lives as they did, going from point to point, eating, observing, making their points, delivering their opinions, then excuse-me resting up for tomorrow’s round. They were trying to deliver their frames unto eternity with a running start. There they planned to go on chattering forever and forever gay, as clicking and clacking bones, no longer pestered by, or pestered in a different way by, weight problems. They were quite clearly trying to remain in the sun all day and all night if they could. The sun was a very symbol of what he had come to quit in quitting the regarding and the remarking and the going. He had also quit the sun.

He sat in the odd corner of the patio, then, having quit. Matter of time, he thought, matter of time. That meant more than he wanted it to mean, so rather than ponder it — a species of observing, remarking, going — he reissued it: Matter of time now, matter of time.

Matter of time.

He was perhaps not the happiest man alive, but he was, he was sure, not the unhappiest, and he thought he had a good chance of being the happiest man not alive. That was tenable, and a matter of time would tell.

Not regarding the world and not remarking on it from his chair in the sun or not in the sun was going to prove an unworkable position from which to execute his duties as a judge of circuit court, so Mr. Hollingsworth made preparations to retire. The day he did retire he came home to find one of his daughters telling him that his wife had lost her mind. His orientation and attitude in his chair required for that a momentary adjustment.

His daughter, who had never been fond of him, was now fondly showing him a drawerful of loose longhand pages that she claimed was the surest sign her mother had finally gone over the edge. He admitted to himself that that much writing under any voluntary circumstances did look suspicious, but these pages looked even odder than they might have in their condition and context. They were as beat-up as hard-used currency, and stained like cookbook pages, and had among them snapshots and birthday candles and a screwdriver. Even a glance suggested they were somehow about Nathan Bedford Forrest, a confederate general whom he, Mr. Hollingsworth, knew something about but whom he didn’t know she, Mrs. Hollingsworth, knew anything about. A second glance, which he made sitting at the kitchen table attempting to dislocate his daughter from his ear, suggested that what Mrs. Hollingsworh knew about General Forrest appeared to be entirely fanciful. He could not give his attention to the document because the daughter was now silently but desperately gesturing for him to come look through the keyhole of the bathroom door at, presumably, his wife. “She’s taking a bath !” the daughter stage whispered, as if it were the height of outrage. He found the idea of peeping at his wife agreeable, if the daughter were not there. The entire situation here suggested that somehow his wife had also managed to take a seat in the chair of disregard that did not follow the sun. It appeared, moreover, that they had sat down simultaneously and independently in the same chair, in one another’s laps as it were. They had been remote from each other for some time. This was a surprising and agreeable new intimacy, if that’s what it was. For the sake of simplicity and hope in a better world, Mr. Hollingsworth decided to assume that that’s what it was. He and his wife were, somehow, magically and newly intimate.

He said aloud, “Hot damn Vietnam,” part sign of his cheer and part signal to his daughter that if she thought her mother insane she could afford to batten down for more high water. She could come away from that keyhole and sit at the dining-room table and hear some truly odd music from him .

The Milledgeville Mole bears down upon himself with ruby-red precision. He takes coffee in his tea. His underwear is stained. There are global coordinates in his brain. The activation quotient for the bank robbery is below the level at which he would need find a gun and commence. The doughnuts are more important, from Ryall’s, where the heavy girl in the weird old-fashioned light-green uniform dress is smart and nice to him. Her teeth are okay, and his are not.

His camp on the riverbank across from where Sherman camped is a dismal mess. Coons came and redid the feng shui the last three nights running. He feels there is mildew and coon spit on all his effects, even on the Grundig console radio that weighs a hundred pounds that he cannot move or listen to because there is no power but which looks very good there, like he is somebody. With all the coon spit and the mildew he would most like a flood and then a fire, or a fire and then a flood, to clean away the soot, or maybe it would be better to move altogether. Where did Sherman camp next, he wonders. Go with the flow, historically thinking. Why did Sherman not become President? Why Grant? Why is he, the Milledgeville Mole, an unemployed lout and not a fine bank president with a Rotary Club meeting this morning — a breakfast with a steam table! — or the owner say of the big Ford dealership out 441? He would live in a big house out on the lake and his pets would be dogs, big expensive dogs you take to the vet in their own SUV. He would not be predated upon by coons. The coons took every generic fig newton he had. A coon, he has noticed, does not leave something for later and a coon does not overlook anything, ever. They are like smell itself, if that makes sense. They should be used in airport security.

He flew to Las Vegas for the purposes of playing in the World Series of Poker and to play guitar with the group Van Halen but neither of these ventures worked out. He fell back on —he was a little tired of the expression to fall back on, but it was handy, and his mother had used it a lot in instructing him on how to live — he fell back on house painting for two weeks after that. The Las Vegas thing did not work out at the Milledgeville airport, where he had no identification to get on the plane with. A plane is not a Greyhound bus, he is fond of saying, or was, he no longer is. God his shoes are thin and rank and shitty-looking. If he could steal a pair of stout shiny shoes it would be a way of feeling better about things. He wonders where he is in the water column of history. He feels he is sideways to a lamb and talking to the worms. A school girl kicked him with a pair of these shoes they wear that have contrasting stitching like big dental floss, and he would like a pair of those, very effective weird-looking shoes. “Excuse me,” he periodically says to himself, “I have to go kill someone now.”

When we see the baby, it is swaddled in a tight charcoal wool coat that suggests Chairman Mao. It is held gently in place beneath the seat of a buckboard by the hobnailed boots of the coachman. From the baby’s vantage the seat above it is a maneuver of wood and steel, and the boots of the coachman are towers of oiled leather. The heel of each boot holds a fold of the Mao coat to the buckboard floor. The jarring and jolting of the buckboard produces a finally pleasant aggregation of shocks that affect the child with the sopor of morphine. It is a not unhappy baby.