Padgett Powell - Cries for Help, Various - Stories

“Fenster.”

“Larry.”

“Fuck you two guys. Bonhomie.”

“Travis.”

“Turk.”

“Tork.”

“Sam.”

“Turl.”

“Teal.”

“Tod.”

Okay. There were ten of us. That made things handy. We might as well use a base-10 numbering system if we got around to that.

When it was full dark, the parrots removed to the trees, we longed for girls like the smiling one to come out of the village and visit us but they did not, and airplanes rolled in issuing thunder and lightning, black-and-white brimstone and fire. This, we knew, should have frightened us, but it did not. We did not take cover. It would be a better learning experience to observe the damnation with our full attention. Our full attention would be compromised if we were to scramble under, say, pieces of tin and culverts and banana trees. So we sat there as if at a noisy picnic. No one got hurt. The village went up in flames. The villagers danced in silhouette against the orange mayhem.

Fenster yelled, “Take me down to funky town!”

Larry said, “Shut up.”

Tork said, “Teal, that is the gayest name I ever heard.”

Teal said, “I don’t dispute it.”

“Look at that ,” Turk said.

The woman with the red lips flew by on a flying carpet doing this Egyptian dance thing, her palms pressed together and her head doing that side-to-side thing. It was a joke dance, a cartoon of some sort of cultural irony, we thought. We think we thought this. It was a big thought, unsafe for empiricists, and difficult to entertain even in calm tranquility, and we were not in calm tranquility, we who were being bombed.

“She’s goofing,” Bonhomie said. “She is not doing that as a serious expression of herself.”

“What I want to know,” Turl said, “is is that number serious any where? I mean how does someone presume to know how Egyptians moved ?” This was the position we held. She flew on into the jungle, into darkness not illuminated by the exploding ordnance, her bright red mouth decreasing and disappearing like a taillight.

We awaited her return, and we knew that awaiting her return was at once what we could not avoid and what would paralyze us and doom us. There was nothing for it. Paralysis and doom and belief in something better than paralysis and doom is all we are given, men with assumed names and occasional parrots and bluster and bad memories in a black-and-white landscape. We were hound dogs who would never catch a rabbit and we were no friends of ours.

I don’t think, today, that I think much or have much to say. But let’s sit here and see. That is a compound verb. I do not have a compound eye, or brain. Some people do, the latter, some insects the former. They look menacing and intelligent. The dragonfly in particular looks like a small but lethal military unit.

Now I am thinking of turds, small and lethal non-military units. It is snowing so I do not have to go to the gym. I should want to go to the gym, and maybe I do, and maybe I will, go.

The snow looks like blown rice. I am new to snow. I like it when it resembles popcorn and floats back up, and thwartwise, at points on its way down. I wish I had a place to plant five thousand trees on. Blue trees, perhaps. I would like it most if they were from seed in good rows about five inches high, no bigger than annuals, blue, in perfect grid array, a tree carpet. One of the benefits of living alone is unguarded farting.

Another is no one watching when you sleep, and when you don’t. You may pursue whatever is mindless until you yourself are tired of it. You may control the density of stuff in the refrigerator. If you find your fly open, you may leave it so for a bit. No rush.

Lonely and a little chilly, I go down to the Thumb and Thumb Lingua Spanka Academy for some human intercourse and convivialismatic rompromp. Earl Thumb gouges my eye not five feet in the door, and Wonka Thumb comes over with a broom and pretends to sweep me, trash on the floor, back out the door. “You fuckers,” I say, and Earl is at the computer telling me I am not paid up, and Wonka drops a knee on my stomach and hisses viciously, “I bet you think you need a woman !” He begins outright beating me with the broom as Earl hands me a dues bill. It’s always good here, always fun. A child runs naked screaming through the room with a smile on his face, looking for approval, and disappears into the locker room. “Who’s that?”

“That’s a boy we are going to adopt,” Wonka says, “as soon as we decide what to rename him. Negotiations are underfoot.”

“Don’t you think Eel is a good name?” Earl says.

I say I do or I don’t, it depends on the boy’s character. If he is an Eel, well then maybe. You have to wait it out, as with a dog. “Great character-warping injustice is done at the maternity ward with the birth certificates,” I say.

“Eel Thumb,” Wonka says.

“Eel Thumb,” Earl says.

“He belongs to one of Earl’s ex-wives.”

“Can you lend me ten dollars?” Earl says, apparently to me. They want to buy supplies to make pull-candy to entertain the boy, and I contribute ten dollars.

I go on my way, feeling better.

At the used-car dealership around the corner a fat salesman is leaned into the open hood of a car throwing onions from it without regard to where they fly. “There’s going to be hell to pay when I catch the fuckers did this,” he says, still in there, addressing no one but himself. I cop two whole nice onions.

The zoo has about a 65 % occupancy rate as near as I can tell. It is finally better to determine a cage outright empty than to contain a moribund specimen of this or that, and 35 % empties makes for a mood-lightening visit. The concessions are all closed, which also helps. The little train is not running. No geese are around the lake. The action is limited to a BFI truck arming up dumpsters and banging them into itself and setting them back down. The bull elephant gets a boner standing in his compound by himself. It pulses down to the ground, looking part leg, part trunk, touches dirt, and then throbs shrinking back up into himself. Fine day at the zoo all around.

The helicopter factory, where I am said to work, has an area of rotor blades that I love. It is two acres of stacked, carefully packed alloy blades that look like giant slender knives, sashimi knives for whales, say. The blades are coated with Teflon-ey stuff in subtle yellows and grays that makes them just reek of well-made . I like to feel the coatings, thump and pat and stroke the blades. I object to wearing my hard hat and in a stupid protest have pasted a nude Ridgid Tool calendar girl inside it, distorting her as I am told the figures are distorted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It is hard to tell in fact that it is a naked woman inside my hat. Nonetheless, this announces somehow that the hat and my wearing it I regard as absurd. I would never have an upright and intelligible picture of such a woman on, say, the door of my locker.

Not having pets is depressing, but having pets is a troublesome prospect. So I hold steady, without.

I had a wife but she ran off and married the President of the United States. Her ultimate choice of mate subjected me to an unusual level of scrutiny from our government. I was at first regarded as part of her background, as something about which all should be known, and then I was regarded as a potential threat to her and to the President. I have assured three branches of federal law bureagents that I am happy for her, and for Him. They almost believe me sometimes. A brown car is parked at all times on my street with one or two bureagents in it. The best I can do. I do not overtly notice them, which they prefer. You may not, I have discovered, offer baked goods to your stakeout men without causing them some paperwork they would prefer not having to do. I remember when they explained all that to me (“off the record”) saying, “Gee whiz.” That’s all I could come up with. Not Holy cow, not Boy oh boy, not Dang, not Darn, not Fuck that, but Gee whiz!