Mrs Hollingsworth's Men - Padgett Powell by Padgett Powell Read Free Book Online

put hair all over the human body like
this. Nor should a man, or a woman, be slick like a hairless dog, but
there should have been better thinking going into this rampant
hirsuteness, in his tired view, with his hairy arm across his eyes
against the nice hurtful glare.
 
 
    Flood
    Looking at the back of his eyelids, the man saw not
the colors he had read were called phosgenes and that some famous
artist had said looking at was all he wanted to do; he saw a fast
vivid replay of scenes with his father. These were both scenes he had
witnessed and those he had only heard about. Once his famous father
slept under wet sheets in a bathtub in Yulee Florida it was so hot.
His father punched a relative of the states attorney general in the
mouth at a country club in Tallahassee Florida once, and the attorney
general, under whom his mother worked, and under whom she was afraid
she would not work when it got out that her husband was punching his
relatives at the country club, sent word by her to thank his father
for punching the man. Once his father had his mother row them under a
live oak while his father fished and they looked up and saw so many
water moccasins that it scared not only his mother but his father
too. His father said, “One or two, all right, but ..., " and
laughed. “He laughs now ,
” his mother said.
    His father told him of how his own father had not let
him quit high school football after three weeks just because he was
getting hurt. You finish what you start. So his father said he
decided to hurt somebody back, and did not quit, and became locally
famous once he reversed the hurt ratio. Yet when Lonnie Sipple went
out for high school football, his father took him off the field and
informed the coach he would not be back. His father had been in the
Pacific but would not say anything about the war, except late in life
to tell him how comically bad a soldier he had been, playing poker
and drinking beer and being put on unscheduled picket duty and
falling asleep in a bamboo tower. Once when Lonnie was in college his
father visited him, and when he saw that his father was carrying a
pistol for the road, he remarked that it looked paranoid, and his
father was gone, home, when he came out of the bathroom. And then his
father died, more or less. In a box that cost $5000 and looked like
NASA could do something with it, and in fact had had to be cranked
open with a stainless steel tool and sounded like a refrigerator
opening when he had them open it in the desert, his father was
turning to slime. His arm across his eyelids felt comparatively
acceptable now. The room was filled with the golden light, and the
woman was alive. He was too. But he was tired.
 
 
    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