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

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,