Mrs Hollingsworth's Men - Padgett Powell (13 page)

Her husband was now carrying on almost like the man
in the tub, but with consummate articulation and elocution,
benchgrade. Strangely, she could understand what he was saying much
less well than she had understood the man in the tub with her, but
she could hear that it was the same kind of song, if it was not the
same song. The particulars were now daily and daylight ones, for the
daughters benefit. Life was too short to be afraid of it all your
life, he was saying, but like this: “There is no dignity in the
Volvo. Would you like one?” Ho! He said that! Even odder noises
were coming out of the daughter. “No, no, honey Not give it to you,
but Blue Book value,” and some huffing purse-sweeping outrage and
the door closed and the daughter was gone.

A silence caught the house. It was the ticking of the
middling day of the settling suburban house that drove her mad. But
there was this new presence in it with her. It sat back at the table.
It sighed and, she could see it well, folded its hands in calm
regard. It brushed its good haircut back from its temples and looked
modestly unkempt and drowsily wild. It was tired. It was retired. It
was going to get up in a minute or two and come get in the tub with
her. This development was positively luminescent in its
improbability, in its corniness, in its fairy-tale dynamic and
melodrama. She had written her husband back into her life, her life
back into itself; they maybe had one where before they had not. That
this had happened was not, she thought —adjusting some heat into
the tub via a hose that would make no sound, so that she could hear
her husband move toward her —to be looked hard in the mouth. It was
to be ridden. If anything happened, they were to fight or run,
according to whether it was time to fight or run. Mrs. Hollingsworth
knew all about it. Her husbands cologne came through the door before
him.

It was of course the same cologne Forrest had worn
and that she had dabbed on many times herself. He got in the tub in
the same position as the wounded man. He did not say a word. His legs
were out in front of them, like something on exhibit, straight and
narrow and suit—pa]e. He shimmied them, setting up a small standing
wave of ripples in the tub, and stopped and held his legs still. “I
wonder if I can still run,” he said.

Mrs. Hollingsworth put her whole tongue in his ear,
like a teenager. “If I can still do that,” she said, “you can
still run. Did you really retire?”

“
I am as retired as a dog ready for another dog to
lie on top of him.”

Startled, Mrs. Hollingsworth said, “Hey! General
Forrest said that!"

Her husband said, “I know General Forrest said
that. Anybody went to Nathan Bedford Forrest High School knows that.”

“
Anybody went” was Ray Oswald. Dogs under dogs
was Forrest. The whole thing had been her husband, her apprehensions
of fifty or a hundred too-familiar years with her husband, whom she
had found again by making him a list, a list of her husband, a meal
at last for him. And the man she had taken out of powder-blue oxford
cloth and put in red plaid was her husband, wounded and tired on pin
legs in her tub.

The best things in the universe are the out-of-mind
and the invisible, those sunny caves of ice you forget when you wake
up —as Coleridge put it before his hybridity was adjudicated. Mrs.
Hollingsworth distrusted the fairy-taleness of all this, but not
enough to not believe it. She and her husband had emerged from
stupefaction, and she was not going to gainsay it. They were going to
get on the horse of this new life, real or not, and ride. They were
going to tear the very air with determination to win. They were not
going to inspect the cause or weigh their slim chances. “Come in
the bedroom, love,” she said to her retired skinny-legged husband.
“You be canvas and I’ll be silk. I’ll be a thimble, you be
silver. I’ll melt you into the ground. There is no operators manual
for my gizmo.”

Her husband stood up and got himself a towel and
headed for the bedroom. He had nothing on but that impish look, and
he said not a word, a retired judge.