The fair ladies of Memphis have done made me a pair of silver spurs and now caint sew. When they get what men back they gone get back from this fight, it aint gone matter. The woman is gone pay for this for the rest of her everliving life. She gone put up with shanks and heroes what wasn’t there and the luckiest of fools what was. It aint gone make for no high cotton.
Operator’s Manual
— Reason she seen fish in the room, Rape, and em boys smelt em, and that dude saw a pompano in the lake, is you aint know how to run that thang. A yellertail in the lake! We lucky Forrest aint come over here and kilt us.
— Hod, excuse me, Hod, excuse me, but did you see a operator’s manual? No, Hod, you did not. You did not see a operator’s manual with this ray gun, Hod. That woman is perfectly right in calling it that, because this is what it is. And ray guns just appear without no manuals, like in the movies, people just knowing how to run them. If you have a quarrel, take it up with It Mr. Mogul. I suppose he knows how to run it.
— If it’s really his, he might. Maybe he found it.
— Christ Almighty, Hod, you are not rational. Mr. Mogul does not find shit. He makes it or he buys it. The last thing he found was himself in a position to make millions of dollars I acause his daddy—
— Rape, he found us, didn’t he?
— Point well taken. We don’t count. What counts is him up there in that room, and we found him, and that does count.
— Read me them orders again.
— I caint.
— Why not?
— Lost em.
— Well, how we know we found what Roopit wants, then?
— I committed the orders to memory, like General Longstreet.
— Re1nember them to me, then.
— I caint.
— Why not`?
— I forgot what they said. Before you say anything stupid, let me inform you that no, committing something to memory is not the same thing as remembering what it said. Horse of a entirely nother color.
Hair
The man has his arm across his eyes because the glare from the floor, while comforting in its warm gold clarity and cleanness, is bright. He is tired. The woman has told him the room was full of fish, a matter he remembers now as one remembers sweet improbable lunatic moments from childhood when things did not depend on verisimilitude for their ratification. He is tired. He cannot remember not remembering Sally at the funeral of his father. He cannot remember that there is any connection between Sally and the woman in the room, or if he thought there was. He can remember only, and only sometimes, the citrusy heavy feel of her breast in his mouth, that last moment he fancied he knew who he was, well before he thought he knew who he really was, either then or now thinking of the way he must have thought then he is tired. Sally? he says to the woman on the chair.
— I told you, shh.
The hair on his arm he can feel on his eyelids. It is a well-and manly-haired arm, and women have liked his hair and his arm, including the woman on the chair, of whom he can’t remember why she reminds him of anyone at all, let alone Sally, and he doesn’t think it was a good idea to 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 she had seen that it was a joke, but in her impulse to speak the answer and to be first with the answer, she had not been aware of the egregious error that was coming with it. She in fact still wanted to read French articles as pronouns. Her whole life, it seemed, had been this way: meaning no harm, she could say someone shat black. It got to be a force of habit, finally. She was the sort of person who did not say the cat is black if there was a chance, accidental or deliberate, not to. And it seemed a little late to put in for a character change. She was going to make her list for her meal for the largest fools starving on earth. “Come and get it, boys,” she said aloud to the egg rumbling on the stove. “Call me Mama.”