Typical

by Padgett Powell

  “I just try ’em on, homeboy. You all right.”

  “Might I kick a few clods in those brogans?”

  “Righteous. You bit crazy.”

  The two of them exchanged footwear, and the black walked awkwardly around, stopping with the boots under the prostrate, grieving face of the oiler.

  “How these look on me, Taint?”

  “Leave him alone, Rooster,” the driver said. “Pick him up.” He was smoking, leaning against the truck studying his calloused hands.

  “How they look, Taint?” Rooster repeated.

  “Lumpy daddy died.”

  Rooster leaned over, off balance, and with one arm picked the oiler up, setting him down on his feet hard, giving him the slightest steadying shake. “Get hole on yourself, man.” The oiler suddenly reminded me of a creature I saw once in an aquarium that I thought merely remained still for a very long time and that I later discovered to have been all along dead, hollowed out.

  The driver flicked his cigarette into the woods and got in the truck. “That fag magazine don’t pay us shit for this shit. You boys get on.”

  Mr. Irony, who had been speaking with Rooster, unhooked the boom cable and Rooster released the winch. Mr. Irony pulled ten feet of cable out and got aboard with it. “Homeboy want him a seat belt,” Rooster said, to no one. He stuffed the oiler in the rider’s door. “Homeboy I think may be hisself part nigger. Here. Peench like motherfuck anyway.” Mr. Irony’s Luccheses came through the rear window, and Rooster’s brogans, loaded with beer, went in.

  Mr. Irony put two half hitches of cable around his waist and looked to me with a gesture offering some cable, which I declined. He took another half hitch for himself and we settled in, looking backwards, for the ride to Dillon.

  Once we had a head of steam and the dust trail behind us well up, Rooster’s arm came through the window and touched the winch control. Mr. Irony put two beers in his jacket, felt his waist, took a deep breath, gave Rooster a thumbs-up, and Rooster winched him free of the bed. He swung out and back, spinning, and settled bed-high beneath the log boom, blowing, turning, already taking on the color of clay, assuming the orientations of a sky diver, the expression on his face rapt.

  Just before he disappeared for good into the thick clay air, Mr. Irony managed to face forward, horizontal, with arms out front, and shout, “Superman at His Best!”

  “Life insurance is the best investment money can buy. You are investing in your life—and what could be a better investment than that? What?”

  “Don’t you have to die to cash in?”

  “Alack! No, ladies. That’s a thing I read in a Shakespeare story. Nooo, ladies, you do not have to die to enjoy the extreme uncomparable benefits of cash-value life insurance. You may borrow against your policy, and it may mature and pay before you die, and—”

  “What’s this?”

  “What?”

  “It says, ODOR KILLER—CITRUS. AN ENTIRE ORANGE GROVE IN A BOTTLE.”

  “Hey! Don’t squirt too much of that!”

  “Open the windows, for God’s sake.”

  “Entire orange grove in an entire goddamn car.”

  “Well, I told you—”

  “What’s this? It stinks.” Pampa sniffs a cardboard coaster suspended from the rearview mirror; on the coaster is a painting of a largemouth bass.

  “Air freshener,” the life insurance salesman says.

  “Fish air freshener?”

  “Well, no. It’s—”

  “Here’s some Eau de Paris—NOIR.”

  “That’s expensive.”

  “Oh!”

  “Windows! Stop that shit, Borger,” Pampa says.

  “What is all this crap?” Borger asks.

  “Yeah. Are we in the presence of a complex here?”

  “No, I just like to keep my car spotless. I live in this car—work in this car fifteen-sixteen hours a day.”

  “Well, it doesn’t have to smell like a whorehouse.”

  “Well—you know how sometimes a car just gets an odor in it that … doesn’t go away?”

  “No,” Pampa says.

  “No,” Borger says.

  “You know, kind of under things?”

  “No.”

  “No. God. Did he fart?”

  “Heysoos. I get the picture. Spot of ORANGE GROVE up here, Borger.”

  A stop is made for urination all around. Mr. Irony, whose clay-caked face resembles a terra-cotta mask, declines to unwinch and pees from the Superman position.

  “Look, Mom, no hands,” he says.

  Rooster says to me, “That is one trazy white man.”

  The oiler heads for the ditch in a mincing wobble and appears to start to wilt when Rooster suspends him by the back of the shirt. “And he still dead, Taint,” Rooster whispers to him, shoving him back toward the truck. “Pitiful. Pitt-ee-full.”

  “Load my bomb bays, kind sirs,” Mr. Irony calls.

  Responding as to a regular call for workaday lubrication, the oiler pulls himself to with a big sniff and hurries to Mr. Irony with two more cold beers, which Mr. Irony instructs him to slip into the pockets of his jacket.

  “You will surmount your troubles, son,” Mr. Irony says to him. “Your wife’s father died and he will remain dead, as Mr. Rooster has so sagely informed you. The world means you no harm. Be brave, be brave, and be strong.” Mr. Irony makes a gesture in the air that suggests a blessing and that throws him out of the Superman orientation, and we fire up and are off in a scratch of rock and rubber and clay, Mr. Irony in a spinning circle-within-a-circle boomerang motion.

  “Well, thing is, see, she’s a young girl—big girl, you girls would like her, being as you’re from Texas and all, fine state, did my time out there yessiree on rigs outside Odessa, nice folk, hospitality-wise—she’s young, Debbie, and absolutely in love w’me, see—she’s never been that before so she’s, like, skeptical.”

  “We trust you encourage her in that skepticism,” Borger says.

  “Hey, what’s that supposed to mean?”

  “There they are,” Pampa says.

  In the parking lot of a boarded-up convenience store in the center of Dillon, S.C., is the log truck, and drinking beer are the blue-Rebel-capped driver, the crumbling oiler laughing with his head thrown back, Rooster, the student of low-affect living edged with self-deprecating irony, and, suspended yet from the boom, orange as a kapok life jacket head-to-toe, Mr. Irony himself.

  “Is that your not-husband?” Pampa asks Borger.

  “Goose by any other name,” Borger says.

  “Hey. What’s the deal? That’s a dude?” the insurance salesman asks.

  “That’s a dude, mister.”

  “Hey. All right. He looks like I could sell him some life insurance, you think? What you think? Worth a try or not or what!”

  The life insurance salesman gets out of the smoked-glass Blazer and shakes down his pants legs over his Italian ankle boots and walks in a confident stride for Mr. Irony. Before he reaches him, Borger rushes to the orange horizontal figure with the hurried pumping vigor of a sailor’s wife greeting her sailor after six months at sea, and she kisses the unbooted end of it fully upon its clay-caked crusty terra-cotta lips and says, “Oh, honey, you smell good!” and the life insurance salesman turns on his heel and retreats, his face a configuration of pure confusion.

  Swatting handfuls of the thick, nearly leavened clay dust from himself in a three-quarter beat, Mr. Irony said, to the beat, in time, “Dark, dark candy; light, light pain; green, green fruit; trying, trying times.”

  “Is that a quote?” the driver asked.

  “Yeah, I’ve heard that somewhere,” the insurance salesman said. “Maybe Shakespeare.”

  “Do I detect shower stalls across the boulevard?” Across the street was a coin-operated car wash, to which Mr. Irony made a straight path, removing his boots as he went. He held the long water gun by its barrel, aiming it down at the top of his head, and with the insertion of a quarter engaged the work
s, disappearing into a vaporous high-pressure cone of suds and steam.

  The rest of us stood about somewhat ill at ease. The oiler shortly had the presence of mind to offer Pampa and Borger a beer, and we adjusted into as comfortable a group as we could standing around a log truck drinking beer in a shut-down convenience-store parking lot watching Mr. Irony shower in a car wash. I personally felt negligible, and had for some time, and thought to remove myself from the affair, at least as a dramatis persona, it being arguable whether I was contributing much toward my narrative end of the stick; further arguable whether I would ever be able to demonstrate in telling fashion that I had in fact picked up self-deprecating ironic ways from Mr. Irony, whose student I allegedly was, and who (Mr. Irony) was, having finished his shower, walking sopping wet into Bill’s Dollar Store next to the car wash. I could serve the tale best, I thought, and finally not without considerable self-deprecation and irony, by removing myself from it, and decided thereupon to do so, and hereby pronounce myself expunged from this affair as teller—Pampa I intend to continue to have relations with, but that coupling is a private matter and is not to be hereafter mentioned. In point of fact, I had felt for two hundred butt-pounding rough miles that the oiler was the proper student of Mr. Irony, a figure of such unironic beginnings that something like true biblical salvation and conversion, if not a bona fide saintly transformation, was available to him if Mr. Irony attempted to bless him with the vision which would let him stop seeing as important his dead father-in-law and his life as minister of lubricant. Mr. Irony emerged from Bill’s Dollar Store bearing gifts for the crew and for the Available Traveling Women and none for me—confirming me in my resolve to defect. A fair fare-thee-well to you all.

  The presentation of gifts began with a stir—Mr. Irony presented Pampa and Borger with panty hose—“Apologies, ladies: not designer pants”—and persuaded them to don them in the cab of the log truck. When the women emerged, glossy-legged and matted, the crew and the insurance salesman all adopted a deliberately calmed-down demeanor like that of men in a bar before the storm of a bar fight.

  Mr. Irony presented the driver with a case of Skoal, a particolored welder’s cap made of dungaree cloth, and a Buck knife, which, as the driver reached for it, Mr. Irony threw into the adjacent wooded lot. “The knife is guaranteed for life, even against loss, sir.” The driver donned his new cap, backwards, took a big pinch of Skoal, pocketed the fresh tin of snuff on his butt, looked sidelong at the panty-hosed women, and walked jauntily and juicy-lipped into the woods.

  “A good man,” Mr. Irony remarked. He pulled from a carton a model 44 Husqvarna chain saw, started it, cut the air after the fashion of a Shriner with a big sequined sword, and motioned to the oiler to come relieve him of the saw.

  “I don’t cut,” the oiler shouted over the saw.

  “You cut,” Mr. Irony bellowed back. “Cut that billboard down.” Mr. Irony allowed the saw to idle.

  “Taint gone fuck hisself all up,” Rooster said.

  “Mr. Rooster,” Mr. Irony said, “shut the fuck up. Taint ain’t.”

  The oiler, carrying the saw somewhat apprehensively, at arm’s length, addressed the billboard on which a candidate for sheriff promised to restore law and order to Dillon County, and cut through the first creosote pole with a clean, flexed, low turn of his body, one with the saw, and stepped to the next pole in the same crouch, and to the next and the next, and the candidate for sheriff fell on his face into the parking lot, blowing full beers off the log truck and crushing the insurance salesman’s Blazer.

  “Oh shit,” the salesman said. The parking lot began to smell of perfume. “Oh God.”

  “Oh boy,” Borger said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Pampa said.

  “No event is unplanned for the intelligent purveyor of insurance, is it, sir?” Mr. Irony said to the insurance salesman.

  “What?”

  “The readiness, I believe, is all, sir?”

  “Not—not cars. I sell life insurance.”

  “Receive your gratuity, sir.” Mr. Irony handed the salesman a boxed leisure suit the color of green mint dinner candies and a gun-style hair dryer. The suit had contrasting yellow stitching and the blower a barrel the size and shape of a grenade mortar, the opening of which the salesman was measuring with his spread hand. “Damn! I can get another car!” he suddenly said. “No problem! Hey!” He passed his fist into the hair dryer.

  The oiler dropped the chain saw on the truck bed and opened two beers, taking a sip from each. He sat on the truck bed beside the saw and crossed his legs with an odd, pensive, pursed-lip expression on his face. Mr. Irony addressed him.

  “You do cut, sir, and with élan.”

  “My knee start to give out on me.”

  “Understandable. You were configured as low and sturdy as Johnny Bench.”

  “Down there, wudden I?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Got to fish sometime, right?”

  “Right on.”

  “Can’t cut bait all your life.”

  “No sir.”

  “Can’t cut bait all your life, right?”

  “You are right.”

  “Taint gone mess up,” Rooster said.

  “I ain’t teether,” Taint said.

  “Mr. Rooster,” Mr. Irony said, “Mr. Taint is in a rehabilitative power drive that needs no gainsaying.”

  “That his saw?”

  “’Tis.”

  “Gone give me them boots, homeboy?”

  “Gone give you a boom box, mother.”

  From Bill’s Dollar Store, a credenza-style home entertainment center is wheeled out on a four-wheel furniture dolly by two men who struggle over curbing to keep the dolly under it.

  “That thing is seven foot long,” Rooster said.

  “Big enough for a boog like you,” Taint said.

  “You put that affair on your shoulder and it is yours. I have had it converted to 12 volts. Batteries included.”

  “Batteries?”

  “Two Die Hards in the TV compartment, wired in parallel.”

  “You trazee.”

  “Hoist it up, Mr. Rooster.”

  “This some kind of race joke.”

  “Might be.”

  “Hey, Rooster. So what?” the oiler said to Rooster. “So fucking what?”

  “You done mess that boy up,” Rooster said to Mr. Irony.

  Mr. Irony and the two Bill’s Dollar employees and the oiler got under one end of the home entertainment center and, like the Marines on the flagpole at Iwo Jima, shouldered it up to a 60-degree angle. The oiler waved impatiently at Rooster to get under the giant radio.

  Rooster obliged, shaking his head, and lifted the machine without noticeable strain. He took a step backwards, kicking the dolly free, and hefted the home entertainment center an inch or two forwards and backwards for balance. He swung it, like a sail boom, through an arc, looking for the others.

  “I’ll say this to his face,” the oiler said to Mr. Irony. “You are one buck nigger, Rooster.”

  “You right, Daddydied. Turn this thing on.”

  From the truck bed, the oiler leaned over and reached inside the long box, and suddenly the lot was overwhelmed with a booming radio broadcast. Rooster started to jive. He got clear of the truck, clear of the billboard, everyone backed off to give him room, and he began a blaster walk, a walk of total indifference to the world, a series of steps and half steps and backsteps, around the parking lot of the closed convenience store in Dillon, S.C.

  He circled back by the group, now holding its ears. “Don’t want your boots now, homeboy. This all right,” he shouted. To the oiler: “Okay, Taint. Don’t call me a nigger ever again. You earn that first one.”

  “Ladies,” he said, bowing slightly to the Available Traveling Women, the entertainment center tipping as slowly and heavily as a ship on a swell. “I’m going to go see some of the brothers.” He left the lot in the gliding, halting, butt-clenching locomotion required of a proper dude b
eneath a seven-foot-long, 200-pound, 80-watt-per-channel, fake-walnut-veneer, credenza-style home entertainment center.

  Grease and oil—and that’s not all, I do hydraulic and seals and packing leathers—grease and oil is very important. It is not just, as far as a lubricant. I believe it is like the blood of machines. Not the energy—that’s your gas—but the blood, as far as life. Machine life. Saw life. Splitter life. Truck life. Backhoe life. And tools make men’s life easier. Oil is the blood of the dirt. We buried Lumpy’s Daddy Saddy. I’m okay now.

  I was not for a spot there. Then we carried a fellow on the log boom thew might all Georgia that said shape up and Rooster fucked with me and I just, I don’t know, got right over it. He was, special to me, as far as almost being my own father, I thought sometimes.

  My real daddy a preacher. But Lumpy daddy, before we even got married, one day he explained to me what viscosity means. That is a word I deal with. One day he give me a beer and a bowl of hot chili and he say, That—pointing to the beer—is not viscosity, and that—pointing to the chili—is viscosity. That might sound obvious to me now, but it was not obvious to me then. It was a hot chili, too. Lumpy daddy make a good chili.

  I’m okay now.

  Mr. Irony came to see me later that afternoon in Pampa’s and my suite—Pepe’s El Presidente Suite at South of the Border, where Duke recommends Men at Their Best recuperate from log-truck carriage—came to me and asked that I not make myself so scarce, explaining that “things” need me. I asked him what that was intended to mean. He said again: “Well, things need you, son.

  I pondered this a moment, and it occurred to me that he somehow knew of my decision to remove myself from this account of our world tour—I had not informed him of that decision; nor, for that matter, was he, I thought at the time, aware that there was an account. A character in a sombrero and serape jingled on spurs into the room where we sat and announced, “The senõritas expect youse for margaritas at the Acapulco Pulquería Número Three-a.” We said okay. Mr. Irony handed him a fifty-dollar bill and he left with a flourish of his serape and a jingle of spurs.