Mrs Hollingsworth's Men - Padgett Powell (7 page)

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 Jacksonville.

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.

She wondered how these things, her children, had come
out of her. How had she borne into the world the Tupperware sisters?
And square canisters at that. Her daughters were with the world, with
the program. They had gotten aboard the wagon with the rest of the
NPR Rockettes. There was a great crowd of folk out there who had
assigned themselves the task of watching out for the surreal fog.
These were the same folk who thought you were a better person if you
could hum along to Mozart. Who elected themselves to all the
proprietary boards, local, state, national, and now global, that they
could. They were an army of presumers who presumed to legislate what
everyone did, thought, felt, should do, should think, should feel.
They were the three-headed dog guarding the boat of the sane. They
called it, moreover, being human. She could see that this was what
Forrest was riding against with his boys, who, unable to articulate
the evil, could nonetheless dress up against it and slouch against it
and ride their insolent sleighs in their insolent pants, showing
their asses, over the hills and through the woods to grandmothers
house we go. Her daughters looked like the Doublemint twins in this
cartoon. They had on matching lime-green sunsuits and cat’s-eye
glasses and chewed confidently.