Mrs Hollingsworth's Men - Padgett Powell (3 page)

He claims his room for his rest.

The bed is as loose in its springs as a hammock. The
sheet is a coarse, clean muslin that is very agreeable, as is his
near engulfment into the slung posture of the mattress. He hears a
noise, probably under the floor, probably a rat.

What he would like it to be is a woman. He thinks:
tunneling her way to me. Let her emerge from this clean, hard floor,
splintering it with her desire for me, and let me bathe her and place
her on a pallet on the floor and behold her. Let us eat. Let us have
each other in a fresh way in a fresh start and keep it fresh, keep it
starting. To have a woman in perpetual start!
 
 

Woman

Emerging from the floor, she is gauzy, dark, as if
seen through frosted glass, full red lips prominent. At this moment,
before the ruination can begin, the man is happy. He has been a Gila
monster and is now a puppy The woman has strong hands and does not
fidget with them. This, the man says, let us keep it to this. His
lips are numb.
——
Wait until you get a
load of Forrest.
The woman posts herself on
the chair by the window, and p the man watches her watch for Forrest.
Her red lips are blued with the pressure of her determination.
——
Were you Lonnie?
——
Were
you Sally?
——
Shh.
 
 

Mother of Father; Flat of Knife

Fist, skull, stomp, gouge, ride! Forrest says, when
you are the fustest with the mostest until you are the leastest with
the lastest. (Mrs. Hollingsworth thought Forrest actually said some
of this.) He is through the gentlemen of ebony tribal regalness and
elegant white shirts in an unseen unfelt blast of oilcloth and horse
lather and unsmelt tang of silver spur, the flat of his saber in
abeyance.

The man who can see him recalls that the mother of
his father would slap his father with the flat of her carving knife.
She was a great proud carver, which women seldom are, of ham and
tongue, and she did not like pickers picking at her work. Her knife
was red-handled and pitted, a blackened steel that showed a shiny
edge. She slapped the hands of children regularly with it. She could
tell a child a lie.

Forrest is a ghostly trail of dust and sweat and
malice, a struck chord of straining tack and sheathed weapon and
purpose. His lips are set in a line not unlike the new woman’s, but
they do not show the blue of the pressure of determination, as hers
do. Forrest’s lips are easy, deliberate without deliberation,
exactly like a horse’s lips. He is an animal, all right, the man
says. Did you see him?
——
I saw him. I
thought him wizened. I read that he declined.
——
Declined
what?
——
No, declined. Fell off some.
Withered. At the end.
——
If he declined,
Lord let him not incline.
——
No.
 
 

First Breast Not of One’s Mother

When his grandmother, who could tell a child a lie,
with pleasure, pursing her lips after it in a satisfied way, as if
savoring a chocolate, died, Lonnie Sipple cried. The look on his
grandmother’s face when she told him a lie was the same as the look
on her face when she played poker.

When he met Sally Palmer and with his lips lifted her
breast by a gentle pursing of the flesh just below her nipple, and
felt the orangelike weight of her breast, it was the last clear
moment of sanity and purpose on earth he would know. It was possibly
the first such moment, but he cannot remember anything before the
moment, and cannot precisely recall the moment it self, and all since
has been a sloppiness in his head and his heart.

He did not die of a pitchfork tine to the heart. That
was romantic palaver of the burning-mule stripe, and far too easy. He
did in fact once find a tine, isolated and alone, in a field, but it
did not touch his heart. It had about it a roughened, pitted quality
not unlike his grandmothers carving knife. All steel, he thinks, was
more or less alike in those days.
 
 

Ride, Slide

“
Most times Forrest rides,” Mrs. Hollingsworth
began her list one day, thinking of the way the teenagers in the
neighborhood talk and slink around, or slump around. Most time Mist
Forrest ride but sometime he slide.

Sometime he take off his butternut duster look like
Peterman catalogue, and his Victoria Secret garter belt and all, and
grease hisself up naked as a jaybird and say, Okay, I fight all you,
black white blue gray I don’t care. Y’all come on. And people
being dumb as shit, they come on, and they get they ass whup.

He so good he go to a wrassling tournament in Turkey
once, during a time when he spose be recovering from a ball to the
hip, which is how you say he got shot in them days. Never heard that
about no Vietnam: my buddy he took dis ball to the hip, but he rode
on! Shit. Em all saying, Found my buddy wid his balls in his mouf!
Everybody drunk and all, going to the VA get pills. But back in
Forrest time, it was ball to the hip, like soccer, and you went on,
and went back later and kilt mo Yankee. One time I say to this honky
on his bicycle, Clean up America, kill a redneck today! and it kind
of surprise him. I guess since I
look
white and all. I’own know why he surprise, actually. Near
everything surprise the white boy, that why he so white. He surprise
all the time.

But Forrest he go to Turkey one time on hip-ball
furlough and get in a wrassling tournament to hep speed his recovery
and he line up and grap holt em boys all grease up and naked and he a
natural. He just as good as thern what done this all they life, and
then they seeit gerng be more to it than that. He git worked up and
start slobbering on they ass. He slobber so much he win; they think
he sick or got rabies or something. They start call him Deve, mean
camel, he slobber so much like a camel slobber when it wrestle a
camel. Deve win entire damn show. The Camel is very good, they say,
Deve cok iyi Then Forrest take his trophy and have a beer with them
and come home and don’t win the rest of the war cause Prez Davis
homo for Genel Bragg, who don’t like Forrest and won’t give him
no guns and shit. Which it is maybe good for us on skateboards and in
these humongoid pants and all today, because Forrest they say hard on
the nigga, so he ain’t gone cut no wigga no slack either, and we be
in it too if he’d a won, but I don’t know if he so hard on the
black man as all that, cause one time a man say to Forrest, Hey
Genel, how come you so hard on the Negro`?

I ain’t hard on the
Negro, Genel Forrest say.
Jesus
hard on the Negro, buddyro.

* * *

Mrs. Hollingsworth was pretty pleased with that, and
she knew that no raphead dufus rebel on a skateboard could come up
with it (and she wondered how she knew of Braxton Bragg’s vendetta
for Forrest), or sound like that if he did. It was her grocery list.
She was no longer shopping for the mundane.

She sat her days at her kitchen table with a pot of
something cooking slowly on the stove, a small blue flame and a small
gurgle in the room with her. Anyone who saw her making this
prodigious, preposterous list saw nothing awry. Her indistinct
husband remained indistinct. She was beginning to enjoy a new kind of
freedom, one that she hadn't suspected existed. She was shopping in
heaven, and hell.
 
 

Eternity, Epiphany

Sally and Lonnie, after this weighing of her left
orange by Lonnie’s lips, locked up their eyebeams, intertwixt and
gratifying, for about a tenth of a second, which is all people can
stand when there is the real intertwixtment and which seems like, or
more like, about a eternity, which is the time required, or about the
time allotted, for a epiphany.

They would neither of them again enjoy the
intertwixtment, the crackle of iris to iris, the hope of pupil
pooling pupil. Fried marbles and deep holes of loneliness suddenly
alive, and answered prayers they had not known they were praying—not
again. They would fancy it again, of course; they would have to, or
they would die of despair. But it would never happen, the true
spoiling of the film of their hearts, again.
 
 

Blues

The woman sits at the window, her vanilla flesh smart
on the black-lacquered straight chair. Her breast catches an odd
orange light glaring from the sill of the window. She sees Forrest
blow through the square, his duster like a robe behind him, the
jangle of tack and weapon like a badly reproduced music of some sort,
or heard from far away Like, she thinks, country blues played over a
plywood floor, amplified in weird imbalance balancing well with the
congruently weird acoustics of the cheap tired joint the music is
played in, heard from outside in the swamp near the roadhouse. A
thumping is prominent, not unsexual, and a tinny kind of sweet but
wounded melody plays over it, from strings that are stretched by
callused fingers that picked cotton in ancestoryear—
——
Do
you always think elaborate hoohah like that? the man says.
——
You can read my mind?
——
I
might as well. It’l1 save blather, don’t you think?
——
Don’t look me in the eye like that. Look at
my body. It is what I give you.
——
I can
accept that. Give it to me, then.
——
Because
if I was Sally, I am not now.
——
Shh.
——
We are skeletons with meat on them.
——
You have godly meat.
——
Thank
you.
——
Your godly meated skeleton can
think Forrest a music heard in a swamp, though. A music that will not
quit, or a thinking of it that can’t quit, even when the skeleton
and the meat have quit.
——
Do you always
think hoohah like that?
——
Only under
force of circumstances.
——
Such as?
——
These. Don’t look me in the eye either.
 
 

Love, Self

If Mrs. Hollingsworth were to go to the store with
this list, she was aware, it would not feed anyone in whatever
combination she assembled the ingredients on it. There was not a
satisfying meal to be made of it. There was in some rarefied sense a
meal to the second or third power, perhaps what you could call a meal
prime, which would satisfy only a hungry fool. That, she decided, was
who, other than herself, she was shopping for. There was a hungry
fool in the world with whom she had some’ thing in common, and
maybe for whom she had something.

On her lawn outside were some boys cheering the 0.J.
Simpson verdict, skateboards aloft like swords.

She wrote herself a note, as one does sometimes on a
shopping list, a kind of rider reminder to the main reminder that is
the list itself:

Dear Love,
How have
you come to be a black-hearted woman with your come-and-go eyes? You
is a storm of bad ideas. You will never be allowed to speak on
National Public Radio.

You enjoyed Flaubert when you were a girl,
that is true. How have you become Celine? I love you anyway
Love,
Self

Prevaricating & Procrastinating,
Shuckin & Jivin

——
Man don’t know what state he in!
——
Say his map bad.
——
Worses
map I ever hoid of.
——
In
trouble
you don’t know what state you in.
——
I
saw boy one time, cuhn put this six-pack beer in paper sack. I say,
Boy, you fumble widda piece a pussy like you fumblin widdat sack, you
in trouble!
——
What he say?
——
He
ain say shit. Turn red as a baby, a crab moreso. Bout to cry right in
that sto.
——
You talks funny, Erasmus. Say
“widdat” and “sto,” and I bet you say “ho,” what hell
else you gone say, but even you is not gerng say “Ise gwyne down to
duh ribber,” or maybe, if the lady here will cooperate, you is. She
ain know what she doin. She done put you and all us on her grocery
list.
——
I believe, Satch, that the
departures in my diction from the true path are justified given the
trail of travail our tongue has trippingly took to be at dis point.
They is, as I know you know, and it bruise me to point this out to
you, procrastinating and prevaricating on the one hand, which would
be the white hand, since I am being so crystal clear this morning,
and shuckin and jivin on the other hand, and we all know out here on
the courthouse lawn whose hand that is. Speaking of which, I feel a
bad breeze blowing somewhere, do you?
——
I
smell a horse. I am askeert of a horse.
——
Something
like ammonia blow through here.
——
What
state
he in!
——
I been loss, but never like dat!
——
Amenhotep to that.
——
Who?
——
Jesus, another name for Jesus.
——
Is?
——
Might as well be. Jesus
hard
.
——
That he is. That he is for sho.

The Land

Forrest could never talk this way, so Mrs.
Hollingsworth made him: