Padgett Powell: Cries for Help, Various: Stories

The other horse traders are over there in the 7-Eleven. These horses are jittery and I don’t know how long I can hold them. That piebald one there — or is that a paint? It’s a Holstein for all I know, and that is one of the galling things about this enterprise, people saying the roan this and the buckskin and the paint and the quarter and the Indian pony and that and this and you have no idea which goddamn horse they are talking about, they are talking about one of fifty things we have here which can get us hung if we are caught, can kill you if you get near one in the wrong way, and can run off and get you beat to shit by the hombres who affect to know how not to have them run away, I have just about had it with this shit, what with most of the crew over there in the 7-Eleven and the Sheriff cruising around out here, around me and the herd and the hot dog wrappers, and the horses are nervous in the wind and the swinging stoplights, and all the fellows with the handlebar mustaches are inside getting coffee, and I’m out here looking like a plebe in a fraternity with fifty stolen monsters I can’t tell apart, and there’s the Sheriff, and we are beyond the day when he can be shot and we go on our way.

Do not ask me how I am involved in rustling horses in the 21st century over asphalt with the law in big Ford Crown Victorias. I do not know. They are in there in goddamn period chaps and I am out here in Army Navy discount camo fatigues I got for five dollars. I look like a dope dealer. I’d feel better if I were a dope dealer. You will not believe what we are up to. No one will credit what we are up to. I do not myself. If the Sheriff interrogated me right now about these fifty horses by the highway with their drovers in the 7-Eleven getting coffee, and I told him the whole story, he would not believe what we are up to.

The silhouette of a man — rather like the Tin Man, they said, improbable large straight lines and a hollow sound from it — stood in the doorway during what must have been a big cowboy drunk, or a big cowboy-poetry drunk, because I am convinced also that some of these drovers are cowboy poets, given their proclivity to be on the phone and their attention to their costumes and their pallid postures and the way they seem to want to hear themselves talk and what can start a fistfight (one said another used too many feminine endings and the second asked just what was that supposed to mean and hit him). . where was I? I have a headache, it is snowing lightly, the 7-Eleven still holds twenty poet horse rustlers, I am telling you what you cannot believe: that a Tin Man came to these men in their revelries preceding the current larcenous overland march and told them, in a thundery but soft voice, to take horses into the Big Horn and to be ambushed by an equal or larger band of Indians and surrender them, the horses, to the Indians, and by so doing initiate a reversal of history that would at the other end of its drift restore thirty million buffalo to the Plains and his integrity and livelihood and independent character to the red man. “Reverse history?” one of the cowboys is reputed to have said. “We gave them the horse in the first place. To reverse history we’d have to take the horses away, it seems to—”

“Sewerage,” the Tin Man said, or some aural approximation thereto, for the sound from the thing was soft and not trippingly tongued, which lent a force to its supernatural-seeming authority. A foul odor, identical to sewerage, then filled the barracks, as they like to call their quarters, and some of the more excitable ones maintain that a soup of actual septic-tank flotsam then filled the room to a level of two feet before receding cleanly away, but other witnesses, the more formal of the poets, in my estimate, ascribe this vision to the overactive imaginations of their lesser trained and less reliable brothers. Nonetheless they all obeyed the call of the vision, stole fifty horses, and now drink patriotically large quantities of gourmet-blend coffee from convenience stores en route to reversing history and righting the colossal imperialist genocide of the West, while I hold the horses. The horses are the starter culture, as I see it, if this history we are to reverse could be viewed as yogurt, and I don’t see that that is an inapt conceit. That is my exact plan if I find myself interviewed alone by the Sheriff, in fact: I will tell him the horses are starter culture, and that is all I will say other than asking they appoint me a lawyer, and a psychiatrist if that comes with the deal now. Hanging out with men wearing Polo clothes and affecting to punch each other over the matter of feminine endings should alone establish a sound insanity plea. I will walk away from the horse-stealing charge.

“Boy, what you doin’ with all that horseflesh?” the Sheriff finally asks, purring loudly beside me and the herd in his big throaty Ford.

“I have succumbed to deer pressure,” I tell him. At this he smiles.

“Y’all need a permit drive livestock loose up a road like iss.”

“Sir, what is that?” I indicate a jar of dark-colored liquid on the seat beside him.

“That? Blackstrap molasses. Boy give it to me dudn’ want me lookin in t’is business.”

“Could I have a taste?”

“You can have the whole thang, son. I’mone bust that boy for whatever it is he doin’ pretty soon.”

I have had a fascination with sorghum and molasses for some time because I do not know what they are. I finger up a taste of the stuff and pour a quantity of it into the ankle collars of each of my boots and step about a bit to get the molasses into the socks and crackling good. The Sheriff smiles at this too. This will keep me out of the Big Horn culture-reversing ambush.

“Sheriff, I need to go to the hospital.”

“I see that, boy.”

“Could you take me?”

“I can call you a amblance but I can’t take you myself, it’s regulations—”

“Aw for get it, Sheriff. I’ll walk.” I affect to start for the hospital, abandoning the horses. I wonder if the poets will appreciate my forestalling and deflecting the Arm of the Law from their date with the Indians. The Sheriff lurches the big car up to me and pops it in park before it has stopped and chirps to a passionate little stop beside me in the huge idling machine. Now he is not smiling.

“I feel the same way. About all this”—he feels at something on his face and looks at himself in his side mirror—“regulations shit. Get in the car. You need help.”

I get in, rider-side front. The Sheriff says, “What did you do that for?” as I with some difficulty gum and crackle my feet into the car.

“Do what?”

“Nothin’.”

We ride, and we ride well, and I never see the horses or the poets again. I do not read of a reversal of history that begins at the Big Horn. They did not admit me to the hospital but told me to get my nasty shoes back outside.

An orderly seeing me taffy out, by this time hobbling as if I am in ankle chains, ripping blisters and wincing, caught up to me outside the ER and provided me with a small handle to a spigot and I washed my boots in cold water from the side of the hospital and then returned the spigot handle to him.

“Old guy in here last night?” he said.

“Yeah?”

“Come in here moaning and shit, like food poison?”

“Yeah?”

“He get all booked in? They put him in a room? The doctor gerng come?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, that dude esploded !”

“What?”

“Shit all over the room. Had to get his ass brand-new room. I been cleaning it since five this mornin’. That why I have this handle.”