Aliens of Affection

by Padgett Powell

  “You ought to have me in before they spot me.” She swung open the door and swept her arm into the foyer, into which the lawn boy strode, hitching the pants of his too large suit and looking, she thought, for a place to throw the hat. She had a momentary loss of composure as Andy Hardy crossed her mind, and she might have lost her nerve altogether had the child hung the hat on anything. But he did, instead, something rather redeeming: he went directly to the kitchen, opened the sink cabinet, and put the hat, and then the suit, which he removed, revealing the same white shirt and surrey-frilled pants as before, into the trash compactor.

  “That’s the old man’s and that’s the old brother’s,” he said, hitting the compactor switch. “They’re dumb. All I knew, they’d have the joint staked out.”

  Mrs. Hollingsworth started laughing, aware that it might suggest again to the boy that she was laughing at him. But the boy sat at the kitchen table, apparently not bothered by her laughing, and drummed his fingernails. With a short glass of whiskey and some smoke in the room and a little hair on his face he’d have looked a seasoned drinker in a bar.

  She got to the table and sat, trying to behave herself, wiping tears from her eyes. “God, I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  For what indeed. “Do you steal much?”

  “Whenever,” he said. He looked around, finally at the calendar on which she recorded family doings: lessons, parties, drudge.

  “Have you ever been arrested?”

  “You talk a lot, lady,” he said, and laughed himself. “I’m kidding.”

  She looked at him: he was playing a part. He was a card.

  “It’s a strange thing,” he said. “You’d never get caught taking a whole lawn mower, for some reason. I got caught once. You know what for?”

  “What for?”

  “Do you know what a WD-40 straw is?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a straw…a red plastic straw too skinny to even stir coffee or something. It, it sprays WD-40. It costs about nothing. It comes with the WD-40, for free. I got caught stealing one. It’s six inches long. It’s red.”

  “What’s your name, son?”

  He looked at her, rather sharply she thought, and she also thought, Not acting now. She said, before she knew why, but immediately knew why, “I mean, what’s your name?”

  “Jimmy.” His attitude said, That’s better.

  “Jimmy what?”

  “Well…I thought this would be a, ah, first names only, like a hot line.”

  “No, it won’t.”

  “Teeth.”

  “What?”

  “My name.”

  “Your name what?”

  “Jimmy Teeth.”

  “Jimmy Teeth.”

  “Yes’m.” He said this squarely, defiantly.

  “Jimmy Teeth,” she said, “I’m Janice Halsey,” and extended her hand to him. He shook it, firmly.

  “You ain’t no Mrs. Halsey.”

  “No, I’m not no Mrs. Halsey.”

  She couldn’t tell if he got this, nor could she expect him to know it was not a lie but her maiden name. It seemed time to use her maiden name again with a twelve-year-old suitor, or whatever he was.

  “Okay,” he said, “Janice Halsey.”

  “Okay, Jimmy Teeth.” She wondered if he was lying but didn’t think he was. He’d have said Jimmy Diamond if he was lying.

  A silence followed which could have been, as Mrs. Hollingsworth’s laughing earlier could have been, misinterpreted, caused in this case by the awkwardness of Jimmy Teeth’s name or Mrs. Hollingsworth’s apparent lying about hers, or both, but it seemed finally just a silence, an odd, agreeable calm between two people in a situation that would presumably not make for agreeable calm. A boy who had stolen lawn mowers and clothes to present, apparently, a boundless need, who had to be no matter how savvy on some levels completely innocent on others, who had in disguise matriculated in the kitchen of a woman whose reactions to his proposition he could not possibly predict, who had to be therefore in part terrified, sat before that random, unknown woman twenty-five years his senior as placid as a gangster; the woman who entertained him, entertained his lunatic hope, who had borne children before another woman had borne this one, who had certain fears of the sexual abuse of children, who had once allowed death-do-us-part vows be read before her as she smiled and cried in an expensive white dress and believed, who had packed lunches and packed the issue of that marriage off to school and that husband off to work, who had had soap-opera days and ironing and long adult afternoons, who had had Sunday brunch and vacations on tropical islands and new station wagons and could read Bovary in the French and whose parents were dead, looked calmly at the boy who had stolen a lawn mower and clothes and calmly looked back at her.

  She let the moment continue—suspire, as she was wont to put it.

  “Well,” Jimmy Teeth said, “do you like it?”

  “Like what?”

  “The South.”

  “Oh. Sure.”

  “Me too.”

  He has no idea what he’s talking about, she thought. He’s making talk. Her job, as superior here, was to rescue him from babbling. He’d shown that under ordinary circumstances he was not prone to babble or to other loose business. But still, the non-awkwardness of the definitively awkward minuet they were in continued to please her.

  “The thing about the South,” she said, getting up with the sudden perfect idea that she have a drink—a very sweet Manhattan struck her in the cortex, and she got Jimmy Teeth the lemonade the law had earlier cost him—“the thing about the South is that it’s a vale of tears that were shed a long time ago. Its a vale of dry tears.” She looked at Jimmy Teeth.

  “Yes’m,” he said. “Good ade.” He thought that this woman was likely too square for him. She had probably not gotten any further in the video age than, say, Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, if that. She had on some kind of sweater without buttons.

  “Do you understand?” she was saying. “A vale of dry tears stands in relation to true weeping as dry cleaning stands to true washing and cleaning.”

  “Yes’m, I got that.”

  They sipped their drinks, and Jimmy Teeth feared that the thing had gone this far and yet might not work—how could it do that? Where would he begin anew, with whom? Talk about a vale of dry tears—when Mrs. Hollingsworth again extended her hand to him, only this time it was flat on the table, palm up. The only thing he could figure to do was cover it with his, noting his dirty fingernails and thinking his mother was right in her constant failing fingernail vigilance. Mrs. Hollingsworth covered his hand with her other one and pressed their hands together and Jimmy Teeth felt something he had not yet felt in all the considerable feeling of himself he had done to date. He felt a surge of something like liquid that came up warmly into his shoulders and head and almost made him cry.

  Mrs. Hollingsworth looked down at the table between her arms, and Jimmy Teeth thought she was going to cry. But she did not. He sat there for what seemed a very long time, knowing he could not move his hand but not knowing what else he could or couldn’t do. He thought for the first time, What if someone comes in? He didn’t have a lawn mower and his suit was in the garbage. Explain that. Jimmy Teeth could explain a few things, but he couldn’t explain that. Mrs. Hollingsworth was, like, praying still, and he had time to think how he might try to explain his presence. My lawn mower’s impounded and my suit’s compacted. It was funny if you said it like that, and he laughed. The laugh was like the other inappropriate moments they had already shared: it wasn’t inappropriate. They had a little territory here that was, apparently, unique: nothing was inappropriate. Jimmy Teeth saw that. Mrs. Hollingsworth saw that, too, though in an ironic light.

  She was not praying. She was thinking. She was thinking that in this bog of impropriety she was preparing to take Jimmy Teeth and herself into there was only one truly immoral mire, and that was to act older than he was. She could be older, she could be more experienced, she could
take him in ten minutes where he’d take ten years to get on the streets of sex, and that would be that, but if she pulled rank, if she mothered him or protected him or even counseled him, she would be as wrong as the book on this sort of thing said she was. Jimmy Teeth’s presumed maturity, the young manliness that dared him into her life with his speaking pumpkin head on a fence and his trembling string-sized legs pushing stolen internal combustion all over her expensively landscaped, highly mortgaged family estate, would be the terra firma for their slouching into a swamp as potentially messy as this one.

  “Jimmy,” she said, looking him in the eye and despite herself feeling a tenderness for another human being she had not felt in a long time, “Jimmy, I’m going to show you something.”

  “Yes!” Jimmy Teeth said, making them both laugh.

  “Jimmy, first, if I raise you from five dollars to, say, eight, for the lawn, you won’t tell Mr. Hollingsworth, will you?”

  “That would be a private matter between you and me,” Jimmy Teeth said.

  “And, Jimmy?”

  “Yes’m?”

  “Do you go trick or treating?”

  “No’m, I quit that.”

  That was the right answer. Mrs. Hollingsworth made herself another drink. Jimmy was free to pour himself another lemonade if he wanted one. From there on, Jimmy Teeth was on his own. Mrs. Hollingsworth was not on her own, but to the extent she became Janice Halsey again, which was a journey that partook of Orpheus’ ascent from the underworld with instructions to not look back, with some comical but not ungratifying sex mixed in, she was on her own, too.

  Scarliotti and the Sinkhole

  IN THE PIC N’ SAVE Green Room, grits were free. Scarliotti, as he liked to call himself, though his real name was Rod, Scarliotti ate free grits in the Green Room. To Rod, grits were virtually sacramental; to Scarliotti they were a joke, and if he could not eat them for free in a crummy joint so down in the world it had to use free grits as a promotional gimmick, he wouldn’t eat them. Scarliotti had learned that when he was Rod, treating grits as good food, he had been a joke, so he became Scarliotti. He wanted his other new name, his new given name, to come from the province of martial arts. Numchuks Scarliotti was strong but a little obvious. He was looking for something more refined, a name that would not start a fight but would prevent one from starting. He also thought a name from the emergency room might do: Triage Scarliotti, maybe. But he had to be careful there. Not many people knew what terms in the emergency room meant. Suture Scarliotti, maybe. Edema Scarliotti. Lavage Scarliotti. No, he liked the martial-arts idea better. With his new name he would be a new man, one who would never eat grits with a straight face again.

  There were many things he never intended to do with a straight face again. One of them was ride Tomos, a Yugoslavian moped that would go about twenty miles per hour flat out, and get clipped in the head by a mirror on a truck pulling a horse trailer and wake up with a head wound with horseshit in it in the hospital. Another was to be grateful that at least Tomos had not been hurt. Now, his collection of a quarter million dollars in damages imminent, he didn’t give a shit about a motorized bicycle. He wasn’t riding that and he wasn’t seriously eating grits anymore. He was going to take a cab the rest of his life and eat grits only if they were free. He would never again be on the side of the road and never pay for grits, and it might just be Mister Scarliotti. Deal with that.

  The horse Yankees who clipped him were in a world of hurt and he wanted them to be. They were the kind of yahoos who leave Ohio and find a tract of land that was orange groves until 1985 and now is plowed out and called a horse farm and buy it and fence it and call themselves horse breeders. And somehow they breed Arabian horses, and somehow it is Arabs behind it all. Somehow Minute Maid, which is really Coca-Cola, leaves, and Kuwait and Ohio are here. And the Yankees are joking and laughing about grits at first, and then they wise up and try to fit in and start eating them every morning after learning how to cook them, which it takes them about a year to do it. And driving all over the state in diesel doolies with mirrors coming off them about as long as airplane wings, and knocking people who live here in the ditch.

  Scarliotti is in his motorized bed in his trailer in Hague, Florida. It is only ten o’clock but the trailer is already ticking in the heat. Scarliotti swears it—the trailer—moves, kind of bends, on its own, when he is lying still in the bed, and not even moving the bed, which has an up for your head and an up for your feet and both together kind of make a sandwich out of you; hard to see the TV that way, which is on an arm just like at the hospital and controlled by a remote just like at the hospital, a remote on a thick white cord, which he doesn’t understand why it isn’t like a remote everybody else has at their house. When the trailer moves, Scarliotti thinks that a sinkhole might be opening up. Before his accident that would have been fine. But not now. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars would be left topside if he went down a sinkhole today, and even if he lived down there, which he thought was possible, he knew he couldn’t spend that kind of money down there. He thought about maybe asking Higgins, whom he worked for before the accident, if they could put outriggers or something on the trailer to keep it from going down. They could cable it to the big oak, but the big oak might go itself. He didn’t know. He didn’t know if outriggers would work or not. A trailer wasn’t a canoe, and the dirt was not water.

  There were about a hundred pills on a tray next to him he was supposed to take but he hadn’t been, and now they were piled up and he had started throwing them out the back window and he hoped they didn’t grow or something and give him away. You could get busted for anything these days. It was not like the old days.

  Tomos was beside the trailer, and Scarliotti had asked his daddy to get it running, and if his daddy had, he could get to the Lil’ Champ for some beer before the nurse came by. The bandages and the bald side of his head scared the clerk at the Lil’ Champ, and once she undercharged him, she was so scared. He let that go, but he didn’t like having done it because he liked her and she’d have to pay for it. But right now he couldn’t afford to correct an error in his favor. Any day now, he’d be able to afford to correct all the errors in his favor in the world. He was going to walk in the Lil’ Champ and buy the entire glass beer cooler, so he might as well buy the whole store and the girl with it. See how scared she got then.

  He accidentally hit both buttons on the bed thing and squeezed himself into a sandwich and it made him pee in his pants before he could get it down, but he did not care. It didn’t matter now if you peed in your pants in your bed. It did not matter now.

  He tried to start Tomos by push-starting it, and by the time he gave up he was several hundred yards from the trailer. It was too far to walk it back and he couldn’t leave it where it was so he pushed Tomos with him to the Lil’ Champ. He had done this before. The girl watched him push the dead moped up and lean it against the front of the store near the paper racks and the doors so he could keep a eye on it.

  Scarliotti did not greet her but veered to the cooler and got a twelve-pack of Old Mil and presented it at the counter and began digging for his money. It had gotten in his left pocket again, which was a bitch because he had to get it out with his right hand because his left couldn’t since the accident. Crossing his body this way and pronating his arm to dig into his pocket threw him into a bent slumped contortion.

  The girl chewed gum fast to keep from laughing at Scarliotti. She couldn’t help it. Then she got a repulsive idea, but she was bored so she went ahead with it.

  “Can I help you?” she asked.

  Scarliotti continued to wrestle with himself, looking like a horror-movie hunchback to her. His contorting put the wounded part of his head just above the countertop between them. It was all dirty hair and scar and Formica and his grunting. She came from behind the counter and put one hand on Scarliotti’s little back and pulled his twisted hand out of his pocket and slipped hers in. Scarliotti froze. She held her breath and looked at his poor
forlorn moped leaning against the brick outside and hoped she could get the money without touching anything else.

  Scarliotti braced his two arms on the counter and held still and then suddenly stuck his butt out into her and made a noise and she felt, as she hoped she wouldn’t, a hardening the size of one of those small purple bananas they don’t sell in the store but are very good, Mexicans and people eat them. She jerked her hand out with a ten-dollar bill in it.

  Scarliotti put his head down on the counter and began taking deep breaths.

  “Do you want to go on a date?” he asked her, his head still down as if he were weeping.

  “No.” She rang up the beer.

  “Any day now I will be pert a millionaire.”

  “Good.”

  “Good? Good? Shit. A millionaire.”

  She started chewing rapidly again. “Go ahead and be one,” she said.

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “You going be Arnold Schwarzenegger, too?”

  This stopped Scarliotti. It was a direction he didn’t understand. He made a guess. “What? You don’t think I’m strong?” Before the girl could answer, he ran over to the copy machine and picked up a corner of it and would have turned it over but it started to roll and got away and hit the magazine rack. Suddenly, inexplicably, he was sad. He did not do sad. Sad was bullshit.

  “Don’t think I came,” he said to the girl.

  “What?”

  “I didn’t come. That’s pee!” He left the store with dignity and pushed Tomos with the beer strapped to the little luggage rack over the rear wheel to the trailer and did not look back at approaching traffic. Hit him again, for all he cared.

  In the trailer there wasn’t shit on the TV, people in costumes he couldn’t tell what they were, screaming Come on down! or something. He put the beer in the freezer. He sat against the refrigerator feeling the trailer tick and bend. Shit like that wouldn’t happen if his daddy would fix damn Tomos. His daddy was letting him down. He was—he had an idea something like he was letting himself down. This was preposterous. How did one do, or not do, that? Do you extend outriggers from yourself? Can a canoe in high water just grow its own outriggers? No, it can’t.