Padgett Powell - Cries for Help, Various - Stories

There is something so noble about cheap, bad clothing.

The whole business of being a refugee. What is more noble than that?

Are we refugees?

We are. We are armchair refugees, but still refugees.

We have refuged, or been refuged. . how does the word work?

I do not know. I only know that it is the club you want to be in, short of starving to death. If you are not in the club of the refugee then you are with the oppressors, the people who listen to themselves talk.

The people who dismiss your bathing suit as out of fashion.

Who scoff at squirrels to breakfast and porcupine earrings.

We better be careful. We have a narrow line to toe.

That we do, sister Yanniling. I feel a Pop-Tart hankering coming on.

The slender means of tying up the anaconda were in the Manual of Bevels . We did not have the manual. We had no idea what “bevels” meant. But it was a manual; we thought it was our survival manual. We had lost it, we thought. We were on the edge of a village, we surmised. The people looking at us seemed to be villagers, and behind them seemed to be a village. We had debated all morning what we were: insurgents or counterinsurgents, mercenaries or government troops, rebels or establishment. There was a proposition on the floor that a group of us go to one end of the village and pretend to be drunk and say “Danny Ortega” and see what happened, and another group go to the other end of the village and pretend to be drunk and say “U.S. Marines” and see what happened. No one wanted to affix himself to either group. It was thought that we might actually be drunk and need not pretend. We had had nothing to drink, we thought, but still it seemed tenable that we were drunk. We were not hiding from the villagers as caution might have suggested. We had no weapons or any other signs of militariness about us but several of us were convinced we were somehow on the violent side of the fence, if there was a fence down here, wherever we were. It was the vaguest feeling, this notion that we were brutes, and no one was unhappy with it even if he doubted those who argued so hard with no evidence that we were soldiers of some sort.

The one certainty was the big anaconda that we thought we had once had instructions to tie up. Two of us spoke with certainty of the Manual of Bevels and the rest of us felt vaguely familiar with the title and did not outright dispute that in it, if the book existed, there might well be instructions for neutralizing a large anaconda. The anaconda was, however, very passive. He looked about two hundred pounds and as if he could easily down a goat and no one really saw the need to tie him up.

Someone said he thought the anaconda could talk, and no one disputed even this. We were not certain of much. A good-looking girl came by and smiled and no one knew what to do about it. Four or five of us proposed we sleep some more. This sounded like a good idea but we were nervous. Fenster Ludge said he would urinate on anyone who went to sleep, and four or five of us instantly napped out. The rest of us watched Fenster, who did nothing. Fenster was perhaps a person we knew to be all bluster. This was the most we thought we knew at that point in the ordeal.

We wondered if we could get scrambled eggs from someone in the village. They had chickens running the range and the eggs might be very good, we thought. We came, we thought, if we thought free-range eggs good, from a place where the eggs were not very good because they might be not free-range. We could be Marines after all. “Yes,” Fenster said, “those are not Frank Perdue chickens.” Someone asked what he meant and he said he had no idea, but several others said that what he said felt as familiar as the Manual of Bevels and tying up an anaconda.

“I am tired of this shit,” Larry said. “The manual is in the plane, the plane crashed, we walked out of there with amnesia, our guns are in the plane, fuck the anaconda, fuck Danny Ortega, I am going to get that girl.” Hear, hear! some of us cheered, but no one, including Larry, moved. Then Larry started taking off his clothes. No one paid much attention. Larry started inspecting his clothes closely, as if he did not quite comprehend what they were. He had them off and the rest of us also regarded them as curiosities, rather like a word that has been repeated many times until it seems perfectly odd and meaningless. Yet it did not occur to us to so inspect our own clothes or that our own might be curious also. When he had reached the point in his examination of his clothes that their meaninglessness itself seemed meaningless, Larry put them back on, agreeably shaking his head. Like the odd and meaningless word we agree to continue to use in spite of its nonsense, the clothes had a utilitarian value. Every one of us imagined the anaconda in Larry’s clothes. We looked at Larry and at the anaconda and back at Larry and then at each other and all laughed, all clearly on the current of the exact same idea. Of this we were certain, and nothing else.

Fenster seemed to nap out and awoke in an agitated state saying his wife was leaving him. Larry said, “Fenster, that is what wives do.” This had a calming effect on Fenster, and on the rest of us. Conversation developed then that explored the wife-specific lacunae of our situation. We did not know, for example, that Fenster had a wife, nor did he, finally, know that he had a wife. Larry did not know if he had one. None of us knew anything about wives, our own or others’. This gap fit with the other gaps. The wives, we decided, were at the crash site, or at the altar, or they had repudiated us entire, perhaps before we had met them. We had wives but we had never met them. This is the way it always is and always will be, we decided. We were fairly secure and comfortable after this resolution of the wife lacuna.

A rain of parrots came down on us. Bright turquoise birds with orange heads alighted on us. Some of us had two and some up to five birds. They did no violence to us, and no defecating, which we discovered were our two chief anticipations if a large bird were to land on you. The beaks of these things were as large as cow horns. We discovered that we were, festooned with parrots in this way, the only colorful spot in the landscape of the village. The village was a drab black and white, like a movie before Ted Turner got to it, someone said. Someone else said, “Get out of here.” Someone else said, “That girl who came by, smiling, who Larry said he was going to get, what a hound dog he is, never caught a rabbit and he ain’t no friend of mine, that girl had a red mouth.” This seemed to have been so. We concluded that the parrots and the girl’s mouth had color. The rest, to include us, was bleached out, or never filled in. To say, we did not know if our condition of colorlessness represented a removal of a quality or if colorfulness was an addition to a basal state of colorlessness. “We’d better be content,” Fenster said, “to just be cautious empiricists, given. .”

“Right,” Larry said, “Whoever said I ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog, fuck you.”

“You two should fight.”

“Right,” Larry said. “Who said that shit about me?”

No one could remember. Whoever said it was not afraid to confess but he was as unable as the rest of us to recall if he said it. We could not identify him partly because we could not remember what happened two minutes ago and partly, we thought, because we did not know our own names, beyond Fenster and Larry, who, having known names, suddenly looked to us, and even to themselves, very suspicious, as if they were plants or spies or some other stripe of interloper among us normal guys. We decided to have a roll call. We gave ourselves five minutes to recall or make up the name we would go by. We agreed to abide by whatever we came up with, as you agree to sit the entire semester or year in the same seat you first choose in some classrooms.