Mrs Hollingsworth's Men - Padgett Powell (6 page)

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,
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?