Padgett Powell - Cries for Help, Various - Stories

I am free now, too, to have a dog. I did not think it fair before to subject a dog to presidential protocols. And my dear Naina objected. Now we have parted, she and I, and I leave any explanation of that to her. I wish her well. I consider a dog.

None of the girls drawn to me, with or without the power of the suitcase, has voiced an objection to my having a dog. For this and other reasons, like their modern underwear, I am fond of their company. The difficulty with having a dog, from the perspective of a free dancing man who can destroy the world, resides merely in selecting which breed. After that the matter is downhill. I know how to look at a pedigree and I know how to evaluate a puppy. If you have been leader of the second-most-powerful nation on earth, the elected leader, and the first such to leave office voluntarily, you know how to administer the puppy test. You place him on his back and hold him there with the palm of your hand and see if he accepts it and stays, or struggles to free himself.

Many of the girls who have come to me have been in the movies as James Bond girls. They are relieved to discover that the suitcase is real, unlike Bond’s gadgets, which they with some measure of disgust dismiss as phony, all. I wonder at their naivete — what did they expect? — but with girls of this sort, looking the way they do, silicone bombshells, I would be a bit naive myself to point out the lunacy of thinking James Bond should be possessed of real weapons. It occurs to me that Putin is like James Bond in this regard, a humorous conceit.

I have given some thought, as I dance and have many perfect girls and visit kennels, that I might seek employment. What I would most like to be is a television weatherman. I detect that one has little need for a background in meteorology, as indeed the news broadcasters are not required to be, or to have been, reporters. I have this fuzzy vision: dancing in place, my dog at my side and my suitcase in my hand, I point at snow on the map, my white hair looking like snow itself over my florid face, a bursting red tomato of happiness, applause issuing from the studio audience of Bond girls. I call my show “The Good News of Bad Weather.” The suitcase is in view at all times as I predict dire weather. What fine irony! Even the girls appreciate it: the bad weather is in the red thing at my side, they know. I am so not James Bond, they say. This is true.

With or without such a sinecure, do I not have the world by its yaitsi ? Few men evolve to such Elysian fields in their lifetime. I am lucky, lucky man.

We’ve got to get these wagons unloaded. The channel, tubing, I-beam, pipe, rod, conduit, connectors, the milled bombs, the forged doohickeys — I forget what they’re called, are those bells ? Why are we stocking bells? — those drilled blocks, the bolts, the cams, tailpipe, Torquemada, tensiometers, and if that is a case of Hi-Bounce Pinky I can’t believe it, but maybe we are to improve our morale with ball games, unload them too, unload it all. The mattresses, the dressers, the mannequins, the raincoats, the marshmallows, the monster makeup, the marble cake, the crabs, the electrical tape, the torque wrenches, the pills, the mustard plasts, the canaries, the tomato starts, the non-medicine, the dogs, the magazines, the men’s underwear, the dailies, the trusses, the small-caliber arms, the hex nuts, the candy. Did anyone see my wife drive up? Might have sat there a bit and then eased off? I have found her before down at the corner pottoed after easing off like that, no honking or attempt to notify me that she’s here, just sits there two minutes looking straight ahead and then eases down to Raben’s and has about six gin and tonics before anybody can get there, I have no idea what it is all about.

I have no idea what you and your wives are all about and I have never seen any of them at the loading dock or in Raben’s I don’t think — there is never anyone in there but my wife and a bartender who appears to be mute, and possibly deaf, who at first I thought was Boris Yeltsin and nothing yet has made a very strong argument that it is not Boris Yeltsin except that I don’t know how he’d get here and get employed, etc. My wife’s odd behavior is so. . odd that I finally decided that if it was Boris Yeltsin maybe that was so odd that it began to explain her behavior, because nothing else did. She sits there and is truculent if that is the word, she kind of pouts, and says nothing, as I sort of console her off the stool and steer her out. Defiantly sad, is that better, yes, and she doesn’t look at Yeltsin, but Yeltsin looks directly at us, intently, as if he has no American manners; I don’t know for a fact that some Europeans have the manners of children when it comes to looking directly at what they find curious, but I think I have heard something to that effect, and if I have then this looking right at us of Yeltsin’s is another circumstantial thread or tiny fact or twin premise upon which I base the conjecture that it is Boris Yeltsin actually tending bar in Raben’s right here in Youngstown. There is no talking to my wife about it. If I say “Is that Boris Yeltsin serving you these drinks so fast?” she looks at me incredulously and does not say a word. If I say “Why do you not wait for me?” and “Why are you smashed?”—nothing. She goes to bed and sleeps well and there is no mention of any of this until the next time it happens.

None of you has had your wife do this? Have any of you been in Raben’s and seen this Yeltsin character? Well, somebody go, I’m feeling a little isolated here.

I have procured a cage of canaries to go with the red nuclear suitcase, literally and aesthetically balancing me as I move from room to room in the free-market world. They look good together, in one hand the fluttering yellow birds inside the brass wire, the red anodized solid bomb valise in the other, white-haired I tottering stoutly between them, these my chief worldly possessions. The Porsche given me by Kohl I have lost. I have a toilet kit and a preserved leech in a bottle. I am fond of this in a way hard to understand. I do not know how I acquired it. The leech is beautifully segmented and looks like prime, chewy licorice in saline. The bottle cap is matching black. It is all in all a handsome if unusual accoutrement for a traveling dancing nuclear man.

Something somewhat alarming seems to be happening to, or with, or on, or in, or about — I hardly expect to get the English preposition right, whoever can — my fingers. They are shrinking and drying. More precisely, I sense that they are stubbifying and desiccating, becoming, that is, more blunt and more psioritic. They are becoming small fat white bratwursts as dry as toast. It will be difficult soon to carry the suitcase and the birdcage. I have the hope that if I can sling some blood into them that my fingers can grow, reverse this trend. You may see me on the dance floor whirling in an excessive-looking way, arms out like a child pretending to be a gyrocopter. I am aware that this is inelegant dancing, trust me, but I sacrifice style to health, or under health, or into health, whatever. I think most sympathetically of the cartoon character’s three-fingered hand as I seem to tend that way myself. And small stubby hands do not attract chicks. I keep them hidden, or safely in prominent view when holding the red suitcase. No one regards what holds the suitcase. No one regards who holds the suitcase. The red suitcase diverts attention from the very disco ball itself.

Dancing is the meat-eater’s meditation. When you have a disco ball overhead and a plexiglass floor of flashing neon underfoot and 120 decibels in your ear bones, you are nowhere else but in the room and thoughtless.