Mrs Hollingsworth's Men - Padgett Powell Read online

  Forrest returned, his hair on fire. He was saying something indistinguishable. It sounded like “Someone get the phone,” but Ray thought what he was saying was cleverly designed to sound like indistinguishable talk. That is to say you could decide what he was saying for yourself and be no more inaccurate than your neighbor, because Forrest was not saying anything ai all. They had cleverly effected this phenomenon. It sounded like talk but wasn’t. It was like some poetry.

  Ray closed his eyes. He wanted to see Forrest ride. He almost wanted to run the machine that projected him again himself because Forrest was not doing interesting things here in this professional film or whatever it was. Forrest could ride, list, skull, stomp, gouge, pistol ball in hip, mercury pouring from his feet where his thimble spurs melted back onto the fingers of the fair ladies who hoped for him and loved him

  and loved then, still, too, themselves

  and the woman was on him again, the fog of flesh that was her and that was him was on them again, and she was saying “Are you hungry?” and he was saying “Yes, ma’am, I am hungry," and she smiled at him, a sweet smile that took a long time and made him feel like ... what? . .. as if she were laughing at something, at him, but she was not, and she said “And are you a fool?” and he said “Oh, yes, ma’am, I am a fool," and she said "Then you are a hungry fool?” and he said nothing because it was obvious that he was, and the woman smiled again the long smile that made you think she was finding something funny about you but she was not.

  Real Fog

  When Mrs. Hollingsworth returned from her dinner with the Moguls and Ray and the irrepressible unredoubtable Forrest, as fine as an immortal graying hound, she felt marvelously refreshed and simplified. She felt she had traveled to a wonderful place, a sentiment that was suspiciously brochure-sounding but that she had no trouble holding anyway. I went to a place and I enjoyed it very much, she said to herself. Now that she was “back"—— and she had some reservations about that terminology too, because she sensed you did not come all the way back and you did not ever really leave—she kept smacking her lips for some of that place again.

  Here she was again in what her daughters would call, she supposed, the real fog—no, they wouldn’t, they were not that bright—and it looked immeasurably worse. The newspaper contained an item, among all the murders and barricadings and shooting sprees, about the curvature of the president’s member. He had a peyroni that did not, she read, get fully erect. The president of the United States. This was real. Tell her this was not also then a fog, and a worse one than the one she had learned to take lodgment in.

  She had got to see a media mogul cry—where else might you see that? And he had wept so ambiguously, so endearingly, so unselfpityingly: She was already ready to go back. A phrase was toying with her head. She had had more of the phrase than she had now, and it had been better, meant more than the fragment of it she now possessed. She had lost part of the phrase in the collision with the real fog. The presidents limber peyroni had whapped it out of her head. Everyone could be Coleridge, she supposed. This was why They had taken laudiuium away from us, wasn’t it? They did not like us all being Coleridge. If she were caught selling laudanum from the back of a Volvo, she would do more time than if she shot someone.

  What remained of the toying phrase was only this; "in the ghost of her lies.” Something something in the ghost of her lies. Maybe In the ghost of her; lies something something. No: the original meaning was along the lines of the phantom of her prevarications. The phantom of her prevarications, the ghost of her lies—she was in love with the ghost of her lies, her ghostly lies, and she would return to him, and to them, when she could. There was nothing quite like the clarity of the surreal fog when you came out of the muddy real.

  For the rest of her life she would shop, for herself and for whatever hungry fools came by to partake of her improbable food. This resolve filled her with so much cheer that she hatted up and headed out to the real store for some probable food. Waked up, part of her vision intact, the ghost of her lies in her purse, she was not altogether in despond. She Volvoed forth into the real fog.

  Blueberries

  At the grocery store Mrs. Hollingsworth found herself stopped at a long chest freezer containing packaged vegetables and fruits, The handsome simulations of the vegetables and the fruits on the packages drew the eye agreeably to their gay colors through the calming fog of frozen air hovering over them. She stood there, absently handling this and that. She rarely bought any frozen food of this sort, precisely because the packaging was so nice she felt it had to conceal something fraudulent. She was aware that frozen food had passed out of middle—class favor and was now a food of the lower classes. But there was a brand of bulk vegetables from Georgia of the country-people sort—cut green beans and okra and field peas —sold in two-pound undecorated clear plastic bags that she would buy. These vegetables were good, and they interested her because all it said on the bag, virtually, was “Moultrie, Georgia,” as if that would, or should, be enough to sell the food in the bag. And it was. All the other frozen produce, in full-tilt packaging, which she thought of as emanating actually from Hollywood, turned out to be from a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a subsidiary of Coca-Cola or General Motors, in Battle Creek or Stamford or who knew where.

  She imagined Forrest riding in here and laying in a plain bag of cut okra for each saddlebag, to pop in his mouth like popcorn all day through a long fight. She actually looked around for him, realizing as she did that she looked exactly like the man on the bed’s grandmother, who would slap childrens hands to protect her pickled tongue, the time she escaped from her nursing home and petered out in the sunny foyer of an apartment building two blocks away saying to passing strangers whom she mistook to be her rescuers, “What took you so long?" The old children-knife-slapping poker queen mistook each passerby to be a saber-slapping Forrest. Mrs. Hollingsworth had that same desperate lost hopeful look standing there with a bag of okra in her hand. She put it down. Forrest could do a lot, but rescuing her in here was not one of the things he could do.

  She beheld, next to the okra she had put down, a box of` blueberries. She knew that the box itself was plain, gray, thin cardboard folded together none too sturdily; what shored the affair up was a perdurable waxed paper well sealed around the box, a light unwettable paper as nice as good wrapping paper, and this delicate slippery material held the coarse, loose box of berries together, a kind of intimacy she found sexy. The wrapper was pure white, and on it was printed a prospect of blueberries that looked like no blueberries on earth, or none that anyone on earth had ever seen, at any rate. They were cold-looking and “garden-moist,” the wrapper proclaimed, a remarkable effect given that the blueberries she’d seen had looked like hot purple peppercorns. These Hollywood berries were princely, each with its dainty spiked crown. The photograph did what Van Camps or General Motors or AT&T or whoever asked of it: made the human being want to eat blue food, an improbable thing in his general habit.

  In the portrait of these surreal blueberries, Mrs. Hollingsworth saw the man on the bed get up from it and look around and see that the impossibly beautiful woman was gone. This perception on his part put a waft of momentary desperation through him, followed hard by a waft of determination to endure the loss of the woman. Sexual deprivation quickens the step, Mrs. Hollingsworth thought, seeing the sentiment penciled over the scene as if it were one in a comic strip. It was a comic strip, she thought then. She had no trouble with that. She herself was comic.

  She saw the man put on a crisp new shirt of a plaid fabric so thin it could be seen through. He dropped the tissue and the straight pins from the shirt packaging onto the hard golden floor of the room. It was the first time anything—even Helen of Troy’s clawing through it—had detracted from the stunning perfection of the floor. The momentary carp flowing over it had no more marred it than fish mar water. The pins and the tissue fell to the floor and stayed where they fell, the shiny glints of the pins random and vaguely dangerous, the
crumpling of the paper humanly messy. They were harbingers of something, Mrs. Hollingsworth thought. She loved that word. They were harbingers.

  The man stepped lively onto the street. He had complemented the hick shirt with a pair of pants too short to conceal his brogans and white socks. He looked a perfect clodhopper. She liked him very much. She had not liked him much lately. Now that he was out of his moony phase he was looking okay. He had determined to get himself a job, any job, that day, right there in Holly Springs Mississippi. That was pluck. He wasn’t going to get a job that day, or probably any other day, in Holly Springs Mississippi, where he knew no one, and even he knew it, but that did not stop him or Mrs. Hollingsworth from seeing the possibility of it. What mattered was that he was taking himself in hand—this resolve was fairly pinned on him, like a blue ribbon he’d been conferred at 4-H. He’d won the prize for Taking Himself in Hand.

  The impossible job he would not get that he would somehow get would be on the order of the lowest hand at the feedstore. He would carry fifty-pound bags of feed and fertilizer and seed to pickup trucks while his superiors at the store, some of them much younger than himself, handled the transactions at the counter. These would involve a total figure that was rarely particularized, a check that was never questioned, and some talk about cutworms, or bots, rust, whatever the hell the new rot-thing or bug was; the county agent might know, might not, would pretend to until it was too late. Was it true sixteen-gauge shells was going to disappear? No, not that we heard, anyway. What is this shit about not being able to vaccinate your own dog for rabies? I don’t know, that’s what they say. Well, they ain’t worth the powder it’d take to blow them.

  The man lately from the bed would grunt all day beneath l his loads in paper and burlap sacks, some of which smelled good enough to eat. A thick-necked, thick-shouldered high school football player, traditional holder of his position at the feedstore, would one day beat him up behind the feedstore. Or, more precisely, two other football players, on behalf of the jobless football player, themselves without feedstore aspirations, would beat him up. Whoever did it, they would not realize that the wild and lucky moves the man came up with in the hopeless defense of himself were inspired by fear. They would see only that he had the balls and the surprising skill to somehow nick them and so would not extinct him altogether but would leave him there and say, “Go on in there and tote your bags, old man,” and the man would notice that, wing them or not, he had not disturbed even the Skoal tucked in their lips. No one after this would ever bother the man again.

  He crossed the street now in his red-plaid highwater nattiness and approached the council of elders in their herringbone and suspenders. They regarded him without cheer. He said to them, “Wondering where I might find work.”

  They appeared not to have heard him. Finally one of them—the man could not tell which one—said, "Woik. Heah?"

  “Yes."

  The elders looked off with far and indifferent gazes, each in a different direction away from the man, as if they expected something more interesting to appear over the horizon.

  Mrs. Hollingsworth put the blueberries back down into the surreal fog of the freezer and left the store without buying the blueberries or the okra or anything at all. It was acceptable, leaving the grocery store empty-handed, the odd time.

  Home

  When she got home purchaseless from the store, nosing the Volvo through some boys on her street whom she had difficulty regarding as the backbone of Forrest’s final command, particularly given the horrendous postures of the boys, Mrs. Hollingsworth retook her kitchen, headquarters for her recent lovely campaign. The house had a thick and palpable quiet to it that was almost frightening; it allowed you to smell its emptiness. This stillness and smell of emptiness and quiet ticking space had in fact frightened her before her visit to the wonderful place of the list, before her list—making ride with Forrest. Now there was something thrilling about it, a challenge to defy it.

  Something final had occurred as she held the blueberries just above the cool fog of the freezer. “I guess I had a goddamn epiphany,” she said to her egg pot, and put an egg on to boil. She understood that she had come to use this little gesture, boiling an egg, as a signal that she could, at will, cook a real meal. There had been nothing like cooking that other one, though. Ray Oswald had saved her life—she tried that out in her mind, observed the hysterical stripe down it, like the line of white down a skunk, and thought the little skunky idea was fine. She had gone to a marvelous, improbable, at times profane and silly place, and it had been just what she needed. There was not a lot to be said for replacing your uncorrupted dull daily waste of living with a corrupted vital imaginary escape from it, perhaps, but it was a fact that she and others around her were living in stilled and stilted timid toadspawn conformity, afraid of something they could not identify except in particulars—their burglar bars, their life insurance policies, their options—weighing at every moment of their lives. This was a fearful fetid nothingness she could do nothing about. She had at least not escaped into the talk shows, or into part—time commercial self—actualizing (a 6 percent commission on a house made you whole), or into swooning at the disorders of environment management. She thought it funny how the poor environment had been raped just fine until there was a sufficient excess of the people who had effected the raping to produce sufficient numbers of themselves who were sufficiently idle that they might begin to protest the raping of the environment, which was irretrievably lost to the raping by that point. And this would be the great soothing cathedral music, the stopping of the chainsaws amid the patter of acid rain, that all good citizens would listen to for the quarter-century it took them all to wire up into cyberspace and forget about the lost hopeless runover gang-ridden land, reproducing madly still all the while, inside their bunkers listening to NPR. She wondered what Forrest might make of these tree and owl rebels. Forrest was the only man on earth who could ride against the forces of the NPR, stop the music of antidoom, tell them the music wasn’t going to cut it, they were doomed before the first idler picked up the first fiddle. jesus been hard on all you, she could hear him say.

  But she knew he wasn’t interested in that, because she wasn’t interested in that. The root cause of no trees left was no people to say too many people. And that was because, by hysterical reasoning, the Civil War had been lost, the Union perfected, and the perfect Union meant the most populous one you could make. Once the one population got on everyones nerves, as it had, it was a simple logical matter to assert the good of other populations; hence the loud, swiveling, clarion call extolling the endless virtues these days of what had come to be called, in exquisite euphemism, in the speech of the realm, diversity. Forrest had not meant to stop this nonsense, because he had not—no one had—had the sense to see nonsense like it coming, or even to conceive it, way back then when people were still sane shooting each other over Sir Walter Scott.

  She got her egg, cooled it in a stream of tapwater, and sat down to eat it. The man now up off the bed who had lost the most beautiful woman in the world and not got a job carrying grain and seed to be beaten by high school boys and ignored by old men was the man for her, after all. He was wounded, and none too custodial of his wounds, but who was any better? Her head was no clearer than his, his no more fogged than hers. In the surreal fog she could see him ask a plain woman to a real dance in Holly Springs Mississippi and begin again.

  She drew a hot bath. She had found this was a tonic thing to do in the middle of the day, especially if you ran the water too hot and allowed yourself plenty of time to waste in it. She traipsed around naked, ostensibly collecting little bath necessities, a little Clinique this in a bottle the color of a stinkbug, the eau de that in cut glass, a German boar-bristle brush with a nice waxed wood handle that felt much better to your hand than the bristle did to your skin. She did not need or want these things.

  She wanted only the good heat and the water and her calmed mind. She got in the bath.

&
nbsp; The water was hot enough to make her wonder if she should let it cool—perhaps she was herself a giant human egg set to boil—but stepping out of a tub once in it is a hassle greater than burning yourself, so she slipped on in. The determination was good. She was level with steam coming off the water. It went over the surface of the water like miniature clouds, which is what it was. She moved these small clouds about gently with her hands. The clear, unbroken water under them was perfect and beautiful.

  She suddenly wanted a lemon beagle. The prospect of this yellow-and-white dog was vivid—a washed-out-looking gentle thing that hunted rabbits with great passion and even greater skill but meant no harm to rabbits. She was not sure if you called it a lemon beagle or a lemon-and-white. To lie in a scalding tub of water in the middle of the day in a transport of steam and want a dog she had not thought of or seen in maybe thirty years, and have this be the dominant want in her heart at this moment—was she trivial? Was she merely idle?

  She entertained this thought: she was losing her way. Was she losing her way? The question presumed she had once not been losing her way. Had she once not been losing her way? She thought it obvious that all people, or virtually all, must for a time be convinced they know their way. It has not yet occurred to them that they do not know their way, to be more precise. Then at some point it does occur to them. They may suddenly, or gradually, feel that they do not know their way, and they may then be able to doubt that they ever actually did know it. Given the condition they suddenly find themselves in, they wonder what species of hoodwink convinced them they ever thought they knew what was going on. They had merely trotted along, confident and doglike, as people do, full of pride and certainty and ambition and their little educations, as people are supposed to. And some of them, like Mrs. Hollingsworth, come to a halt. In a tub, in a store, in a kitchen, in making a list of real things, in making a list of surreal things, in cooking for a sane man or cooking for a fool.