Mrs Hollingsworth's Men - Padgett Powell Read online

  ——Well, these are pretty low-tech-looking boys wielding the gizmo, if that makes any difference.

  ——Might. Just might.

  Scientists

  ——I caint quite tell if she can see him or not, Hod. I know he can.

  ——Whyont you run Forrest now?

  —— Shit, Hod, em nappy pappys already actin spooked. I run him right through them last time, they so whooped by it one of em says he smellin bream beddin!

  ——Naw.

  —— Swear to God.

  ——Well, all right. We got what we want anyway. If she can see him too, that a extra. Mr. Roopit Mogul gone be very pleased with his field hands, I’d say. The New Southerner to order! Man who caint remember who he is, one; caint forget who he supposed to be, two; can see Forrest and be spooked by it and have half a idea what the hell it is, three: that was our orders. And to boot, to judge from the looks a her, he aint queer—

  ——That’s a miracle, way it going.

  ——Theys more wrong in the world than being queer, Rape.

  ——They is? Like what? You hidin something from me, Hod?

  ——No. It aint nothing but a thang. Now see can she really see him. Put him on Talk. I bleve we in position for a bonus, Rape, Mr. Mogul find out we got him a mating pair. Don’t run him through them old men no more. No telling what this does to people.

  ——Fuck people up when they see it, I'd say.

  ——Yeah, but I mean when they don't.

  ——Make em smell bream when they don't. That much we know.

  ——Yeah, Rape. We a couple reglar scientists.

  ——How reglar we got to be, working for a dude nauno Roopit Mogul? That wife of his .. .

  ——All rich fucks got women look that good, Rape. its the law.

  Dandy

  The woman who no longer is Sally, if she ever was, pays oblique attention to the two men under the awning who are pointing something around the square. Those are as solid a pair of ne’er-do-wells ever scuffed shoes, she says to the man.

  ——I’m tired.

  ——I’m tired too, love. But it’s Ted Bundy and Lee Harvey Oswald down there aiming a ray gun at this window or I’m a coot on duck day.

  And then she sees Forrest—of this, from her expression, there is no doubt in the minds of those who witness her seeing him.

  Forrest appears unmounted, natty in shirt garters and whipcord trousers, not his riding attire, and wearing silver spurs. He takes a position near a granite pedestal bearing a likeness of himself. He disregards it. He says, in a voice surprisingly high and piercing, "I jingle when I walk in these things. They become me, if I am a dandy, and I become a dandy when I walk. That is why I ride fist skull stomp gouge and resent the everliving shit out of appointed leaders who dick around with cigars and bury boys. The bones of boys, mark me, will mark us forever. I am fire."

  Forrest turns to fire, his mouth a monalisa. His spurs melt into the ground like mercury.

  God damn, the woman says.

  Obsession

  It occurred to Mrs. Hollingsworth that she should do something with herself other than make this preposterous grocery list that was getting preposterouser with every item she added. It was taking on a powerful vigor of its own. The Bundy and Oswald figures, for example, had appeared on the list without her direct intention, it seemed. This equipment they had she could not properly identify except to know that it made holograms and was more technical than she was and appeared way more technical than this Bundy and Oswald who were charged with operating it. It was one thing to have a preposterous grocery list, she thought, and another to have a list you did not control.

  So to do something other than the list she went out in the country for a drive and saw some cows and two white doves in every green field. Then she went back home and organized the floor of her closet, matching shoes to boxes and noting that she had three expensive leather train bags and had not been on a train for twenty-five years. She did not in fact think a train bag was necessarily intended to go on a train. Then she sat back down at her kitchen table to resume the list. It was becoming obsessive, she told herself. She then told herself it was probably the absence, not the presence, of some good salubrious obsessions in a life that made it unsatisfying. What else did she have, really? In the end, a list like this one was better on the antibourgeois scale than one you actually went to the store with, wasn’t it? That, going to the store, would result in tuna casserole and a marriage with fog of Cooking in its background, which was precisely what she had and was precisely what had inspired her to sit down in this fugue about Forrest in the first place. So she listed on.

  Spot

  Only boy back air with Bobby Lee what could I hear fight ate lemons, believed in Jesus, and got hisself shot by his own men. And I am walkin round on spurs made from melted thimbles. We are in a spot.

  The fair ladies of Memphis have done made me a pair of silver spurs and now caint sew. When they get what men back they gone get back from this fight, it aint gone matter. The woman is gone pay for this for the rest of her everliving life. She gone put up with shanks and heroes what wasn’t there and the luckiest of fools what was. It aint gone make for no high cotton.

  Operator’s Manual

  ——Reason she seen fish in the room, Rape, and em boys smelt em, and that dude saw a pompano in the lake, is you aint know how to run that thang. A yellertail in the lake! We lucky Forrest aint come over here and kilt us.

  ——Hod, excuse me, Hod, excuse me, but did you see a operator’s manual? No, Hod, you did not. You did not see a operator’s manual with this ray gun, Hod. That woman is perfectly right in calling it that, because this is what it is. And ray guns just appear without no manuals, like in the movies, people just knowing how to run them. If you have a quarrel, take it up with It Mr. Mogul. I suppose he knows how to run it.

  ——If it’s really his, he might. Maybe he found it.

  ——Christ Almighty, Hod, you are not rational. Mr. Mogul does not find shit. He makes it or he buys it. The last thing he found was himself in a position to make millions of dollars I acause his daddy—

  ——Rape, he found us, didn’t he?

  ——Point well taken. We don’t count. What counts is him up there in that room, and we found him, and that does count.

  ——Read me them orders again.

  ——I caint.

  ——Why not?

  ——Lost em.

  ——Well, how we know we found what Roopit wants, then?

  ——I committed the orders to memory, like General Longstreet.

  ——Re1nember them to me, then.

  ——I caint.

  ——Why not`?

  ——I forgot what they said. Before you say anything stupid, let me inform you that no, committing something to memory is not the same thing as remembering what it said. Horse of a entirely nother color.

  Hair

  The man has his arm across his eyes because the glare from the floor, while comforting in its warm gold clarity and cleanness, is bright. He is tired. The woman has told him the room was full of fish, a matter he remembers now as one remembers sweet improbable lunatic moments from childhood when things did not depend on verisimilitude for their ratification. He is tired. He cannot remember not remembering Sally at the funeral of his father. He cannot remember that there is any connection between Sally and the woman in the room, or if he thought there was. He can remember only, and only sometimes, the citrusy heavy feel of her breast in his mouth, that last moment he fancied he knew who he was, well before he thought he knew who he really was, either then or now thinking of the way he must have thought then he is tired. Sally? he says to the woman on the chair.

  ——I told you, shh.

  The hair on his arm he can feel on his eyelids. It is a well-and manly-haired arm, and women have liked his hair and his arm, including the woman on the chair, of whom he can’t remember why she reminds him of anyone at all, let alone Sally, and he doesn’t think it was
a good idea to put hair all over the human body like this. Nor should a man, or a woman, be slick like a hairless dog, but there should have been better thinking going into this rampant hirsuteness, in his tired view, with his hairy arm across his eyes against the nice hurtful glare.

  Flood

  Looking at the back of his eyelids, the man saw not the colors he had read were called phosgenes and that some famous artist had said looking at was all he wanted to do; he saw a fast vivid replay of scenes with his father. These were both scenes he had witnessed and those he had only heard about. Once his famous father slept under wet sheets in a bathtub in Yulee Florida it was so hot. His father punched a relative of the states attorney general in the mouth at a country club in Tallahassee Florida once, and the attorney general, under whom his mother worked, and under whom she was afraid she would not work when it got out that her husband was punching his relatives at the country club, sent word by her to thank his father for punching the man. Once his father had his mother row them under a live oak while his father fished and they looked up and saw so many water moccasins that it scared not only his mother but his father too. His father said, “One or two, all right, but ..., " and laughed. “He laughs now, ” his mother said.

  His father told him of how his own father had not let him quit high school football after three weeks just because he was getting hurt. You finish what you start. So his father said he decided to hurt somebody back, and did not quit, and became locally famous once he reversed the hurt ratio. Yet when Lonnie Sipple went out for high school football, his father took him off the field and informed the coach he would not be back. His father had been in the Pacific but would not say anything about the war, except late in life to tell him how comically bad a soldier he had been, playing poker and drinking beer and being put on unscheduled picket duty and falling asleep in a bamboo tower. Once when Lonnie was in college his father visited him, and when he saw that his father was carrying a pistol for the road, he remarked that it looked paranoid, and his father was gone, home, when he came out of the bathroom. And then his father died, more or less. In a box that cost $5000 and looked like NASA could do something with it, and in fact had had to be cranked open with a stainless steel tool and sounded like a refrigerator opening when he had them open it in the desert, his father was turning to slime. His arm across his eyelids felt comparatively acceptable now. The room was filled with the golden light, and the woman was alive. He was too. But he was tired.

  Egg

  Mrs. Hollingsworth regarded Hod Bundy and Rape Oswald with misgivings beyond their unplanned presence on her list. Was she making fun of a history that should be hallowed? Was the entire business of corrupting the memory of Forrest a charged irreverence? This war that had come to haunt her: it was a colossal waste and shame, and her Forrest put it mildly when he said they were marked by the bones of boys. How l could she make fun of the bones of boys? She sat there. She put on an egg to boil and sat there some more. How could she not make fun, she thought finally, of the bones of boys? They might otherwise kill you.

  She was in this regard malaligned for proper reverent living, at least on bourgeois American earth, and she always had been. She wondered if malaligned was the same thing as maligned. You could not tell where elisions had obtained in English, unlike in French. She recalled the first instance, perhaps, of her irreverent malalignment, and it was in French class. The teacher asked them to translate le chant noir and she had popped out with “He shat black.” The laughter was so immediate and forceful that she had had to go along with it and act as if she had fully intended this as a joke, and in fact it is true that in the middle of her answering she had seen that it was a joke, but in her impulse to speak the answer and to be first with the answer, she had not been aware of the egregious error that was coming with it. She in fact still wanted to read French articles as pronouns. Her whole life, it seemed, had been this way: meaning no harm, she could say someone shat black. It got to be a force of habit, finally. She was the sort of person who did not say the cat is black if there was a chance, accidental or deliberate, not to. And it seemed a little late to put in for a character change. She was going to make her list for her meal for the largest fools starving on earth. “Come and get it, boys,” she said aloud to the egg rumbling on the stove. “Call me Mama.”

  Orders

  The one called Hod Bundy said to the one called Rape Oswald, "Read me the orders again. I was too nervous to hear them good when Roopit read them. Plus that Mrs. Mogul is a distraction."

  Oswald put down his half of the equipment, which appeared to be a heavy power supply, connected by a large-gauge, multistrand umbilical to the half of the equipment carried by

  Bundy, which looked like a camera or radar gun. Bundy was jerked to a halt by the tautening of this umbilical, because he had kept walking after Oswald deposited the power supply.

  ——God damn, Rape.

  ——God damn what, Hod?

  ——You might give a warning signal.

  ——You said stop.

  ——I said read me the orders. I didn’t realize it was chewing gum and walking for you.

  ——The orders is tucked away.

  ——I see that now

  Oswald procured the orders in the form of a linty wad from his pants pocket. He procured two Swisher Sweet cigars from a box in his shirt pocket and handed one to Bundy and lit them both and read the orders aloud.

  Locate a man who can recognize the hologram cast by this unit—which is charged out to your account and for which you are responsible—and moreover recognize the significance of the hologram (Bedford Forrest). My people in science tell me the emotionally disturbed man may prove most sensitive to this kind of image, but I do not want an unstable candidate. The successful candidate will serve as a prototype man for the New Southerner, a man, if I may say so, much like me, whom I will then have eugenically engineered to found a line of men in the New South who will perforce raise up the Old by eliminating the genetic dearth effected by the War, thereby eliminating builder’s bottom and other ills. Bring him to me.

  Mrs. Hollingsworth thought it funny having a media mogul say “builder’s bottom.” She was perfectly aware it was a “manipulation” of her media mogul, putting “her” words in “his”

  mouth, also a laughable idea at this juncture. Oswald and Bundy had supplied her media mogul with the name Roopit, whose origin and meaning eluded her. They had also envisioned a Mrs. Roopit Mogul for her, impossibly blue-eyed and gorgeous. Her mogul would say "plumber’s ass."

  Bundy said to Oswald, “You get all that?”

  Oswald said, “What does ‘moreover’ mean?"

  “It’s a word people like Mr. Mogul use. I have no idea.”

  Oswald discarded the Swisher Sweet box, took a bite from the corner of the hologram orders, made to chew it, made a face, spit the paper out, wrapped the remaining cigars in the orders, returned them to his shirt pocket, and then had the idea that he and Bundy should take the equipment just over the hill to the Jacksonville Memorial Gardens and aim it at bereaved

  men coming out of the viewing parlor until one of them reacted right. In silhouette against the dusking sky, they wont over the horizon yanking at each other with the umbilical and cursing

  and stumbling. Sounds that suggested a fight drilled from their progress.

  "And what the hell is builder’s bottom?" one of them said, from the dark.

  Skeleton

  Mrs. Hollingsworth had more doubts about her list, and she was getting tired of them. As ’twere a profanation, she said to herself, recalling the little Donne she knew and liked, of Forrest and the bones of boys—and what about, in sketching these two fond lunatic fools, profaning the memory of the victims of Ted Bundy and indeed—look both ways!—the memory of John Kennedy. What about this?

  She put an egg on to think and put eggs on the real list. It came down to this: how do you profanate the already profane? As much as she detested the craven driving around in their Volvos with
their children in crash helmets, there was a reason they were driving around out there like that. Bundy and Oswald were out there littering Wal-Mart parking lots with used

  Pampers and otherwise trying the burglar bars on their homes. The prisons were full of bad dudes, which was alleged an expression of racism and classism, but it seemed to her, and to the people in the Volvos, that it was an expression of bad dudes knocking people in the head. It was a wreck out there. Forrest had not hidden, and she was hiding, so there be it.

  Silly or not, the little love and hope in her golden room over the café were greater than those that operated outside that room in the world outside, or inside, her kitchen. Mr. Mogul’s builder’s bottom was handsomer than the plumber's ass likely to come into her own kitchen if she made in real phone call. She could do nothing about the casualties of war, past or present, and nothing about the souls of the victims of murder, except to entertain herself as best she could while she herself became a spindly skeleton preparing to get into her own uneven grave.

  Her Bundy and her Oswald were proving noble in the vigor of their lunatic stupidities. Like any party crashers, they stood a chance of livening things up, if they did not turn out to be utter boors. She was starting to like them, uninvited or not. When had she got the notion that she could invite, or not, to this party? If to list was to listen, and you listened, you did not speak, you heard.

  Breast?

  One morning an early part of the list caught Mrs. Hollingsworth's eye. She had entered an item called First Breast Not of One’s Mother. Why had she not entered an item called, say, First Member Not of the Father? Why would a woman enter a Breast and not a Member? She had written of the man’s desire for the woman, and not of the woman’s for the man. She

  could not entertain a section called Member. What Sally thought of Lonnie’s tallywhacker, a word it occurred to her Sally might have used back then, for reasons she could not fathom,