Mrs Hollingsworth's Men - Padgett Powell Read online

  she had no idea. Had Sally been in love that way with Lonnie? She thought so. So why all breast, no glans?

  It was as good a thing in the erotic landscape as a tit, certainly, but she did not want to dwell on it. Why would not a fully modern woman want to ponder a penis if she was prepared to

  dwell on a breast, and in particular on a man’s fond apprehension of a breast? Was she a fully modern woman? She hoped not, but this did not convey to her what she was, or what she

  preferred to be instead. Women had been martyrs, angels, seed vessels, plowhorses, helpmeets, home economists, hearth sweepers, sucklers, stand-by-their-mans, and now were soldiers except for combat and had cell phones in their pants pockets talking worse realtor/CEO goop than their male peers. What was she?

  What did it, Life, amount to? If you actualized yourself, became as talented as you could at what you could, bettered yourself in every way indicated desirable by the arbiters of culture in your surround, well then were you not but a fattened bee among the not so fattened bees all around you, all of you going to buzz along chewing something up and spitting something out until you buzzed no more? Now this here was a better bee than that

  one there. See? Its got more a them little hairs on it, like. Was it going to be better if you had hummed to Mozart?

  A breast was a sexier thing than a schlong, is what it amounted to. She kept her list as it was.

  Target

  ——That a “bereaved" right there, I’d say, Hod. He talkin bout beatin somebody up back inside the funeral home.

  ——What, that thing hears what they say too?

  ——I guess. How the hell you gone know they saw Forrest?

  ——By when they run into the next county if it’s anything like what Roopit showed us. Hodhawmighty, that fire thing was something—

  ——Yeah, but how you gone know what they thinking? Why they runnin, Hod? “Critical part,” I recall Mr. Mogul saying, and you noddin like a schoolgirl, like you in love with his ass, and now you don’t seem to remember what you noddin at.

  ——I am in love with a man what give me the kind of money we getting for aiming this ... whatever the fuck it is at people, I confess.

  ——Say he should beat up a dork in there.

  ——Who?

  ——Damned target there, Hod. Hello? You spose dork-beatin-up is a positive character trait for the New Southerner?

  ——I would think that a outright indispensable trait, Rape. Track on him. I got to pee.

  Certainty

  ——This was a nice room.

  ——Yes. Was?

  ——I think we should go.

  ——Why?

  ——A, because you busted up the floor digging your way in. B, fish can flood into the room, according to you. C, Bundy and Oswald are stalking us, according to you. D, its about time I consulted the sages on the sward, who will tell us where to go, what to do, in Life, they being Masters.

  ——E, you’re too tired to get up and do anything about Bundy and Oswald; F, how about I was the waitress in that cafe down there who had precious little else to do but try out a free

  man upstairs, and did not eat through the floor. That, my friend, is a dumbwaiter patch from yesteryear. My name is Sally, but it wasn't Sally, if that makes any sense to you.

  ——That doesn’t make any sense to me, Sally not Sally. Don’t say those things. They are vicious and cold and true. You clawed through that floor, now miraculously repaired and our best asset, like a nutria after a honeybun, and you were, in some surreal fog that inhabits the better part of my real brain, a girl named Sally with whom I was so purely and gonely in love for a second five hundred years ago that I cannot now afford to remember the moment and hardly the fact but in discrete snatches or curly wisps if you will of that fog, and then a pitchfork tine in my heart, somehow. And then I saw you at my father’s funeral and you were new to me but I could not love anymore and so stood dully before you. Isn’t this the way it really was—is? Won’t you sit on that black-lacquered chair in that orange light and let me

  behold your ligne pure? And can you deny Forrest?

  ——I never heard it called that before. No, I cannot deny Forrest.

  ——You cannot deny a man you have seen melt into the ground. There are positions and counterpositions in this logical postlogical plausible—deniability world of ours, where the cell phone and blather and the brain tumor rule, but you do not deny that a man has melted into the ground.

  ——If I sit on the chair, we do not leave the room?

  ——We do not. The chair, the window, the room, are all we need. And that radiator over there.

  First Run

  ——What about them other boys there, acryin?

  ——No no, we want thatn what talkin about heatin up somebody inside a funeral home. That the one, Rape. Something about that perfect.

  ——Ready aim fire gridley, then. Here we go. Forrest, Hide, Rear, Saber, Silent ought to do it. Hodhawmighty, Hod, lookit this.

  ——Ats bettern the durn demo. Look at that sombitch. Sword look like a razor blade. I want me one a them coats he got.

  ——And look at our boy, Hod. And you right, them others cant even see it.

  ——He look like he peein his pants.

  ——And he is stopped talkin bout beatin up people in funeral homes.

  ——What he sayin?

  ——He sayin he went one year to Nathan Bedford Forrest High School, which it is very near to here.

  ——Naw Is it?

  ——How the hell I know, Hod? All I do know is they a man whose somebody done died back in there where he wont to beat somebody up about it, and now he talkin about goin to Forrest High School and peein in his pants.

  ——Close enough for me. What Roopit say we spose to do now we found him?

  ——I dont know, Hod. Why do you keep asking me all these questions? I have run this machine and found our man first one I aimed it at, and you want me to do everthang.

  ——Read the orders.

  ——Shit.

  ——What?

  ——Where them cigars, Hod?

  Debate

  There was some debate between Hod Bundy and Rape Oswald as to what to do in terms of bringing their man in now that they had located him. They watched him walk from the funeral

  parlor to the gravesite, stoop and pick up the Swisher Sweet cigars wrapped in the media mogul’s orders, regard them closely, absently pocket the orders, and momentarily, in a

  bizarre scene that it seemed only they noticed, they watched the man have the casket opened in the blistering air under the striped awning, talk to the deceased (he said, "Hey, hud," which

  they knew because Rape Oswald was tracking his every move with the machine), lean into the ornate blue metal-flake box and appear to kiss the deceased, and then slip the cigars into the box with the deceased before signaling for the coffin to be resealed. He stepped back and looked around.

  ——He lookin to see did anybody see him kiss the corpse, Rape.

  ——He lookin to see, Hod, where Forrest is. Then they saw Sally Palmer among the mourners. They said “Hodhawmighty damn" in perfect unison, so that it sounded a little bit like a small choir singing a brief` tune.

  —— Son!

  ——Put that gun on her, Rape. See what she knows.

  Rape Oswald was so thrown by the beauty of the woman that he could not operate the machine, and they did not determine whether she too could see Forrest. They were both in fact so dazed by her that they had difficulty even following their man from the funeral.

  The man led them on an improbable three-state careering into a rented room in Holly Springs Mississippi. There, because they had lost the orders, which had been conceptually as opposed to technically procedural, and because the machine had possibly been damaged by beer in the course of their hauling it three states, they resumed operating the machine with some technical difficulties that had not presented themselves in the successful first run in Jacks
onville.

  They thought at times that the impossibly beautiful woman they now saw in the window of the rented room was the same one they had seen at the funeral; at other times they were convinced it was a second impossibly beautiful woman.

  The competing theories in this domain fought in the minds of Rape Oswald and Hod Bundy like two good dogs. If that sombitch could find 0ne a them purty as at, Rape contended, he

  could find two. It was so impossible that even one woman so beautiful existed that the existence of two women so beautiful did not further strain credulity. The opposing theory was that she had been a waitress in the café below the room. If that the case, Hod Bundy wanted to know, how come she aint still the waitress`? She quit, Oswald told him.

  She quit, Bundy repeated.

  ——Ats right.

  ——She dint quit, because she warnt there in the first place.

  ——I saw him atalkin to this girl in there.

  ——Well, was she a girl what suck the breath out your yinyang she so purty?

  ——No. Not as I recall.

  ——And if it was a girl that good-looking, she would not be here in a café. Hollywood would of come and got her.

  ——Well, if it’s the same girl, how’d she get here? How’d he get her here? He dint even know her like, at the funeral.

  ——That was maybe his strength. That what got her interested in him. It always pays to forget em. Run that thang one more time, Rape. I am heavy bored.

  But Rape Oswald could not operate the machine as he looked at the woman, again in the window. Instead he began speaking, in an oddly high voice: Were they a God, Hod, he

  would not allow the Tyranny of Pussy. He would not, not in no benevolent universe, give boys a dick so hard they make fools of theirself all their life for that right there.

  ——Give me the goddamn machine, Rape.

  ——You don’t know how to run it.

  ——You said yourownself they aint no operators manual.

  Queer Friendlys

  ——Imone have to look at that woman along time, Hod.

  ——You already looked at her so hard she seen us. Why you wont to keep on?

  ——I got to see something wrong with her, get some relief. I could get aholt of her, it’d be like when they put Floyd dogs with Maurice bitches. Set a new pace in dogs they done that.

  ——Oswald, you is a dog. Take it or leave it, myself.

  ——What you got against dogs`? Dogs is good. You worry me, Hod. First the queer friendlys, and now you don’t even want that—

  ——The queer friendlys, as you put it, is just reason. It stands to reason some boys might see pussy aint all it’s cracked up to be. You said that yourself.

  ——No, Hod. I said God whupped us with the Tyranny of Pussy, ats—

  ——Okay, Mr. Buckley. Some boys just said no, like Nancy Reagan said they was suppose to, except they said no to pussy. I don’t see why a man need to herniate hisself over that.

  ——Maybe acause they said yes to dick? Could that be it, Hod? The, like, Bible and all?

  ——Swaggert under his glass table, you mean, telling us what’s wrong with queers, paying a girl sit naked on a glass coffee table`? You lost your goddamn mind, Oswald. And stop playin with yourself. Whole damn world see you got a rod on.

  ——I need her.

  ——Give me the machine.

  ——You don? know how to run it.

  ——You jack off, I’ll take the General out for en walk, see if that girlfriend of yours wants him or not.

  ——I got to look at her a long time, Hod. Got to be something wrong somewhere. That the only way you can survive them not wanting you, find the flaw.

  ——What is Skate?

  ——Aint no Skate.

  ——Yeah there is. Saber, Scream, Scour, Skate. I want to see the General can skate.

  ——Give me that thing.

  ——No. Set there and play pocket pool and don't mess with me.

  ——You messing with my hard, Hod.

  ——Boy, you all right?

  Tongue

  The man, tired on the bed, recalls the blackened knife his grandmother slapped his father with famously. He did not ever witness that, of course. He witnessed her carving pickled tongue with it, though. She kept entire beef tongues on plates and sliced the tongue meat off and made you a sandwich of it with soft bread and bright, tart, yellow mustard. They were extraordinarily good sandwiches until one day he saw the tongue itself, thick and furry on the plate, and cold, massive. Until that moment he had thought they were eating some kind of composite lunch meat, like Spam, spelled Tung. There was in fact a local product called tung oil from a tree called a tung tree, and there was a semipro baseball team called the Tung Nuts that his father had played on, but of this the man as a boy was innocent when he balked at tongue upon his discovery it was not tung.

  Bundy has wrenched the ray gun from Oswald, love, the woman said. I believe Oswald is exposing himself to me. It’s picking up out here on the square. The nightlife is setting in. The warm golden light of the room, which was even warmer and more golden as the sun set in the west and shone in the window at this time of day, suddenly flared into something else. It was an electric—feeling light, like that before a tornado, with an odd pastel lilt to its edges, or where it illuminated the edges of things. The black—lacquered chair on which the woman sat looked as if it had been wet with gasoline. A caustic-looking rainbow of color shone from it.

  A turbulent tan-colored air pressed up against the window, forcing the woman back from the chair. She had somehow felt a roughness from this air, as if it were strong wind, but it did not appear to be moving, or blowing, much. Nor was it like smoke, though there was a quality of semi-opacity about it. She could still see Bundy and Oswald on the square, though not clearly. Bundy had dropped the ray gun and stood aghast. Oswald was on the ground, masturbating, unless she had altogether lost her senses. She had never seen a man do that on the ground in public. The light made you unsure of things, as if you had taken drugs and now could not be sure whether things were suddenly strange in themselves—this happens, after all—or strange merely in your altered perception of them.

  There was a noise almost surflike at the window, loud and abradant. A huge voice sounded outside. It had the impact of bombs, the woman thought. Or perhaps bombs would be sharper, but not as loud, she thought. The voice said, "I'd not have picked you wiggas, but you is volunteered, and you, I see, like to ride. Let’s us see how well wiggas ride. Mount your boards, boys!” And the roughened air got rougher, and the l bombing noises more bombing, and the town dissolved in the brown, tortured, tearing air.

  Drive-in

  ——What the hell you doin, Oswald?

  ——Whippin puddin, what it look like. Better pay attention to your boy Forrest there. Sumbitch biggern a drive-in pitcher show. Looks like the goddamn Wizard of Oz.

  ——You look like a kid down there. I don’t believe you layin there on a sidewalk wanking.

  ——The mood struck. What, you only do it in bed? You romantic?

  ——I don't do it period.

  ——Oh. John Effing Kennedy. You are entirely fucking with my hard.

  Forrest is five stories tall and on a skateboard. His dirty duster is backed up against the window, strafing it when he gestures to the crowd of hundreds of boys in great blooming pedal pushers in the town square. Each holds a skateboard at parade rest. Girls come from the edges of the square and give, each girl to each boy, a silver thimble. “These is non-issue helmets, boys,” Forrest says, “like my spurs. They will protect the pinky bone, but only the pinky bone. Your other bones you are to protect yourself at all times. I do not trade in the bones of boys, but some what I know do. So watch yourself. Now mount up. Ride, fist, skull, stomp, gouge, slay, skate!”

  The giant leader wheels out first before the improbable parade of gangly and game boys buzzing after him like bees.

  Surreal Fog

  The last item
on her list sat Mrs. Hollingsworth down for a good hard look at what she was doing. It occurred to her that a woman who entertained herself with a fifty-foot hologram of Nathan Bedford Forrest and a man named Rape abusing himself on a sidewalk was demented. It had come to a point beyond her contemplating setting a plumber on fire, which if she recalled correctly had been the initial engine for all of this. That looked comparatively sane now. What was dementia, she wondered, really? She had always regarded it as a bourgeois slur, a handy putdown of one’s mental inferiors that allowed one momentarily to pretend to comprehend mental diseases while doing the putdown. Now, looking at her list, realizing that this is what she had been about, for days now, or weeks, it was tenable that something real was meant by the term—which was Greek, she assumed, after all, so it had to have some root in reality, somewhere, sometime—dementia. The Greeks had been solid thinkers, hadn’t they? People were or had been demented, and maybe she was one of them. She was now fully fond of Oswald and company, Forrest five stories tall, sweeping the land with his boys.

  One of her daughters was home, precisely why she could not recall. It was not irregular. One or the other came for a bit and spent most of her time on the phone to the other reporting the deterioration of the home scene. This one, this time, already had phoned the other and said, within impudent earshot, as if she were convinced her mother was deaf or altogether unaware of her surroundings, “She’s in some kind of surreal log." And then, “No, not Lawnboy, she just sits there, writing" "Lawnboy" was a code reference to a scandal involving Mrs. Hollingsworth and the boy who cut the lawn.

  This condemnation had nothing to do, Mrs. Hollingsworth knew, with what was actually on this list. That whatever she was doing was not a real list—which was clear to anyone who looked at it from across the room, and given the time she spent on it was sufficient grounds for the surreal-fog charge. She was not making a grocery list, she was not putting on her red ERA coat and selling a house, she was not watching soap operas (real log? real not-fog? surreal clarity?), she was not housecleaning, she was not dolling up for Dad (whom the daughters despised but felt nonetheless she should seek to please), so she was, ergo, in a surreal fog.