Padgett Powell - Cries for Help, Various - Stories

Janis Joplin wonders how a boy who insists on wearing a trench coat and who clowns around all day, and who once ran and slid baseball style under a table when Ms. Turner was out of the room, and because under the table his feet touched a dead bird none of them had seen before that must have come in the window and died in the night stood up quickly announcing,“I killed a bird!”—Janis wonders how such a boy can be smart “in his way,” in any way; she wonders if Charlie Dickens is not being kind as adults seem to be and want children to be instead of picking on each other as they deserve, and all of this wondering she would prefer to do, there still on her hands and knees over Charlie Dickens just like the dog he has called her, rather than think about what Gail Crutchfield did today in class, a thing that excited her and made her mad also because she has been working on something like that in the bathtub, not that song, which she knows is a Hank Williams song and not as she thinks Gail Crutchfield probably thinks a Patsy Cline song, this she can tell from the way Gail sang it, all kind of bossy instead of scared and shaky as Mr. Williams sang it. How to tell Charlie Dickens all this on her hands and knees in front of his face, the smartest boy in the world? “I have been singing in the bathtub a lot,” she says finally.

Charlie Dickens regards her for a long time, just exactly as if he is thinking some large-word things up that cannot be put in other words. “You sing in the bathtub, Janis, if I may be familiar,” he says at last, “and I am afraid that I wallow in a slough of despond. I am not apparently coeval with my time.”

“No, you are not ,” Janis says, meaning by it nothing that Charlie can be certain of. He does not expect that she can understand him. He suspects she means that she does not deem him evil, and this is good enough and does not merit an explication of his inveterate, inscrutable, ineluctable way of speaking, since that impossible speech is primarily what he is talking about.

“I don’t fit in today,” he says, “but you do, as shy as you seem, and as troubled. Your desperation is within reach of its targets, I mean, Miss Joplin. Mine is not. Mine is well lost. I feel, in other words”—they both giggle—“very old somehow, and you are very young. My desperations are behind me, as odd as that may sound, and yours are ahead of you, yet to be discovered.”

This relaxes Janis. She can see herself kissing him again, and singing in the tub, and singing standing on her own desk chair, showing them the weak and shaky and real way to sing songs. “I want to have big boobs and blond hair,” she says.

Charlie Dickens shakes his head ever so slightly, like a wise man. Like some grandfather in the cutest short pants who lives in the Baptist Home! Janis thinks.

“You might want large breasts, Janis, but you do not want blond tresses that are fine and flaxen because, well, it is a hard matter to put delicately, but men do not want, in spite of all their proclamations to the contrary, to see Johnny Winter down there — excuse me, I mean Edgar. They do not wish to see Edgar Winter in the perturbations of their rut when they are weak with need and not ready to see Edgar Winter. Down there.”

“Down where?”

“In other words, in your pants.”

“Charlie, you are too weird. Who is Edgar Winter?”

“You will learn who he is. You will make a mark.”

“You are so smart, you will be famous, Charlie.”

“No, quick child. I think not. It is improper, or at least it would play verily at the edges of the field of impropriety, for me to burden you with my troubles. They are vast. As I have intimated, I am an old man, somehow, ill-befitting this age, and my age. This will precipitate in me a long degrade of faculties, what is called I believe a nervous breakdown. You will have one of these too, but your taper burns at the other end, as it were, the correct end. Mine burns from the base.”

Janis giggled at this speech, and with it Charlie began to struggle to his feet and Janis let him get up. In two months’ time third grade would be over, she would have kissed Charlie Dickens two more times, and he would disappear over the summer and not be in school in Austin, Texas, for the fourth grade. She would discover the books written by Charles Dickens, hear Grace Slick tell Johnny Carson, “I would have blond hair and big boobs,” when he asked her, “If you could do it all over again, what would you do different?”, see both Johnny and Edgar Winter play their guitars in Port Arthur, sing herself well beyond the bathtub, and never properly be as much in love as she was the day Charlie Dickens told her all that he told her in the bushes outside the classroom, his cute boy knees and his difficult man mouth.

The odds that Mrs. Fiberung were to retire that day after thirty years of service and set her car on fire inadvertently and narrowly preserve the Girl Scout cookies from its trunk and mosey on home eating them with great satisfaction and get there and find her son cavorting in the swimming pool with a girl, when she had theretofore thought him uninterested in girls, and a letter of foreclosure on the house, and two lizards either fighting or mating on the kitchen table, and a volleyball net inexplicably strung in the backyard, and a complete inability to recall her husband and the nastiness of the divorce, and a strange and harmless man slumped in a corner of her garage, whom she shooed away without calling the police, which was probably against principles of bourgeois suburban protocol, was incalculable. Were incalculable. The odds. Who wished to calculate anything these days anyway?

Who broached the notion of odds and their calculability? Her car was on fire, her son was in the pool with a girl, lizards were going at it on the table, the cookies were good, she felt better about life in general than she had in years. This is a gift horse not to look in the mouth or the rear end either for that matter. Let it be lame. Accept it.

She called her son in and his girlfriend and they stood there apprehensively dripping on the carpet, shivering a little, their shoulders narrowed under their towels, which were draped over them. “Cavorting in the pool like that with no one here to chaperone you will make the neighbors talk,” she said. “Go up to your room.” The girl looked from her to her son incredulously and then followed her son, who had already started up, to his room.

Mrs. Fiberung hoped they took full advantage of this chaperoning. She was an expert militant chaperone and believed in the full exercise of the seditious power a chaperone was in position to wield. While she had thought her son homosexual she had of course maintained there was nothing really wrong in that, but she now discovered a very strong sense of relief in herself, almost a joy, a high that she sought to confirm and prolong and deepen by sending the two of them to a private room. They were nearly pickled by the chlorinated water anyway, she had noticed.

She put on a trench coat her husband had left and modeled in it before a full-length mirror, looking like a spy. Some odd words and ideas came nearly to her mind that she could not completely grasp or assemble: furtivclature was one of them. She took that thought out to the pool and got in a chaise, still in the coat, with a drink, and found that furtivclature had shifted to numenboles or numenbolus . These entities in her head, whatever they were, suggested to her the idea that she wanted to become a radically different person from that she had been to this point in her life. Was that possible, or was it only an idea that everyone entertained once in a while and, like these oddball words, could not quite really possess or effect? Did the urge just not leave you, like these new words, incomplete and unformed and undefined? Was it not the case, for example, that in launching into a “new you” you typically got about as far as drinking by your pool in a spy coat in the middle of the afternoon and hoping your son was seizing the day upstairs in his bedroom? Was it not more likely that the two of them would be regarding her now through the slit blinds of that room and speculating as to what was wrong with her, and that soon she would abandon the poolside chaise and return the coat to its hanger and be back exactly to herself after the girl went home properly unmolested?