Edisto Revisited

by Padgett Powell

  “And in the middle, dweebs. You’re not sexist.”

  “I thought if you openly pursued women for sex you were sexist.”

  “You are. But you’re not.”

  “I don’t see how not.”

  “Trust me.”

  Trust her I did: I kissed her, and we were done with this little minuet. Why I relate it now I’m not sure. Patricia Hod is a very accomplished kisser.

  I sweep the house. I turn up furniture on other furniture and throw out the throw rugs and locate a good, new-looking broom. There is something eminently pleasing about coaxing sand over hardwood floors, a fine whispering pumicing, while the women sleep. The place will look, and feel, new when they get up. I am son, cousin, lover, innkeeper. Is this life’s wasting or not wasting? The women will emerge in their safari khaki with their tired but expectant, hopeful safari faces on, tightening their belts. Camp coffee will be ready for them. Take pride in yourself, their bearings will instruct anyone who looks at them. We may not ever see a single lion, but we take pride in ourselves. Do not let your dogs get fat.

  I oil the griddle—my mother had the wit to pick up a used commercial stove—and put bacon on it. Cholesterol to go with alcohol; all the bad things in English-speaking life end in -ol. Let’s take this pistol and have us a little folderol. And eat this Demerol.

  “Son?” It’s an odd sound coming through the still house full of upended chairs. I go to her room.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Beer. Miller. Bottle.”

  “Tall order, Mother.”

  “It’s a deathbed request. It must be in the bottle.”

  Were she less absurd, it would be an annoyance. Procuring a Miller in the bottle at eight in the morning is not an annoyance. It is a necessary detail in the correct safari that the women know more about than you do. I drive to Jake’s.

  Jake now has a door on the Grand that would look like a bank-vault door were it not made of wood. I knock, hoping not to have to go back to his house. Things have changed since I hiked to his house to dig fishing worms—women and dogs and racial climate and I have changed. It would be better to be a front-door customer now. A door within the door opens, a small deep trapezoidal passage like something on an old ice-cream truck. Jake’s face is where you would see the Fudgsicles.

  “Yeah?”

  “Need beer.”

  “Closed.”

  “Jake. Miller in the bottle.”

  “She back.”

  “You know it.”

  “She a pain in the ass.”

  He’s infected with it, too. Were she less a pain, were I just a drunk wanting something to drink, were there not in this picture a reclined woman commanding the bottled version of a white man’s beer, one arm over her eyes and the other extended in space for the drink, Jake would say to hell with it. Were she not a pain in the ass, it would be no go. It is a go.

  “Don’t even carry this shit no more,” he says, letting me in. The club is a ruin.

  “What happened here?”

  “Where?”

  “This.”

  “What?”

  “These people kill each other in here?”

  “Nobody kill nobody.”

  My act needs a little pointing up, I detect. I know that, but the place did look … really gone.

  While sacking the beer, Jake says, “Somebody fell down.”

  “I thought so,” I say, with an intentionally self-righteous thrust which, I hope, will be comic.

  Jake chuckles—he gets it. I am white boy playing white boy—not just white boy. It is a relief to be back in the groove. But I can see it will be a shallower groove than it was for me as a child. Get too cute now and I will be a clown like anyone else.

  “She down for a while?”

  “It looks like it. I don’t know.”

  “You want three?” He means another six-pack, which he is ready to add to the two he’s sacked.

  “No. I’ll come back. I don’t even have money for those two. Jake.”

  “What?”

  I can’t contain myself. “I have a new girlfriend.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Brand-new. Last night.”

  It is absurd for me to say this to him or to anyone else, but it comes out, and the absurdity helps in here, as usual, rather than hinders.

  Jake smiles. “Last night?”

  “Yes.”

  “Somebody you know?”

  “Somebody I don’t know,”

  “Man,” he says. “Accidental sugar.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Accident the best.”

  “It must be.”

  “It is, son. Accident save your life. Even a young life like you, accident help.”

  “It does help, Jake.”

  “Happy for you.”

  I’m gone with the Miller in the bottle, feeling like some kind of traveling salesman with the punch line coming around the corner. The joke will be at my expense, but I do not care. I have suffered an accident of the gravest kind.

  10

  COMING AROUND THE CORNER of our road onto the hard road, in her infamous fashion, is my mother in her rock-blasting Cadillac, a thirty-year-old model that would be valuable were there any body whatsoever left on it.

  We ease up window-to-window.

  “I have the beer,” I say,

  “You took too long.” She extends her arm. I hand her one bottle of beer. She laughs.

  “That’s all I’m giving you.”

  “Listen, I’ve got to go up. I was just bringing Patricia down here. She—we are sheltering her.”

  “From what?”

  “Sasa is drinking badly and Winn called and asked if we would.”

  “Grown girl can’t bear a toot?”

  “Bit more to it. She was going to be home for the summer, and now is not. That’s the short of it. Did your father buy you that car?”

  “No.”

  “Good.”

  “He fixes it, though.”

  “Good. Perfect. You helpless scion. Your cousin is also helpless. It’s a match made in helplessness.”

  “Is this official?”

  “No. She’s with me. If anyone calls, I’m with her. I’m just out.”

  “How long you out for?”

  “Forever.”

  I swear to God my mother at this point attempts a high five between the windows of our cars. We don’t quite pull it off, and laugh. I give her the six-pack she’s broken. “Jake thinks fondly of you still.”

  “Jake. That’s a good man, Jake.”

  “He speaks of accidental sugar.”

  “Damned poet in a jook.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well. Congratulations. On graduating. Now learn something.”

  With that she floors it out of our lane onto the hard road and catches rubber on the asphalt. I’m helpless, got helpless woman at the house, aim to learn something, ease on down the palmetto gauntlet to get with it.

  Patricia Hod is on the back steps with a cup of coffee. Her legs look better even than I imagined they’d look. She does not appear altogether happy.

  I sat next to her and proffered the beer. She declined. “We’re supposed to learn something. Dr. Manigault’s instructions.”

  “God help us.”

  I touched her leg.

  “Don’t ever touch me in the morning.”

  “Couldn’t help it. How’d you get those?”

  “What?”

  “Legs.”

  “These?” She looked at them, leaning over sideways, as if inspecting a pair of shoes she was considering. I decided to drop it. There were less dumb things to talk about, surely.

  “Where’d you get that mouth?” she asked.

  “All right.” I didn’t know if she meant how it looked, what I did with it, or what came out of it, but she’d made her point. We were coming together as Jesus flang us. We were as-is items on a yard-sale table. Affection was gratuitous. Captivity was assumed.

  “Your mothe
r’s on a toot, I hear.”

  “My mother’s an ass,” she said with some force.

  “She doesn’t touch you in the morning.”

  “Brief miracle.”

  “Where were you?”

  “When?”

  “Before going home.”

  “London.”

  “And?”

  “Some trouble.”

  “Ah.” I said this as if I understood.

  “I swam the English Channel, if you want to know where I got these legs.”

  “I read Moby-Dick when I was nine years old.”

  “Any rip currents out there?” She indicated the surf.

  “Current out there suck you into Parris Island, put you in the lesbian brig.”

  “Funny. Excuse me.”

  She went in the house. When she emerged she was in a Speedo and cap-and-goggle headdress and she walked down the steps, looked at the wrecked Carrier compressor, raised her brows at me as if to say, Shouldn’t that thing be in working order if we’re to cohabit without a serious outbreak of cabin fever?, walked smoothly into the surf, swam north once the breakers left her alone, and was out of sight relatively quickly because I refused to turn my head to follow, acknowledge the elegance and horselike power with which she pulled all this off. I set to making club sandwiches and thinking about what I was going to do with myself, seriously, now that I apparently had a woman who knew what to do with herself. That changes things a bit.

  11

  THE WOMAN WHO KNEW what to do with herself came in an hour later with a man-of-war sting on her calf, claiming she nearly drowned because there were so many washed ashore up the beach, she had to swim back.

  “You get that,” I said. “The purple and red, stringy tide.”

  “What makes you … so superior?” she said, very casually, and accenting the word—“superior”—in such a way that it didn’t sound altogether like an accusation.

  “I sound superior?”

  “You don’t try to. But you do.”

  “It’s because, madame, I’m inferior.”

  “Too easy.”

  “Shall I modify behavior to suit my cousin on the lam from unspecified trouble abroad and at home?”

  “There you go.”

  By this at first I thought she meant There you go, being superior, but she took a big bite of sandwich, looked up at the ceiling to contain an errant dollopette of mayonnaise at one corner of her mouth, and pushed it in with her little finger. She said no more, so that I decided “There you go” meant That’s the solution, do modify behavior, for me.

  “Okay,” I said, fully intending any modification she felt in order, and knowing none would obtain. People do not change behavior, though they do, of course, popularly label a lot of their behavior changed, when some of it has been deemed in need of such a label. A person is as capable of a true change of behavior in equal degree to a planet’s capacity to change its orbit.

  “Patricia Hod,” I say, “forgive me this, but I want your—” I couldn’t say it.

  “My bod?”

  “Dante made me configure that trope.”

  “Understandable. There was a girl at school named Trott the boys just had to call Twat.”

  She leaned over the expert lay of smart club sandwiches and kissed me: mayonnaise, bacon, and salty girl. Or: tongue tomato tart and salty lip of girl. Or: tart tomato, salty lip, and woman.

  12

  PATRICIA HOD AND I did not go the distance, or anything like the distance, whatever the distance means these days. But we had what might be called a good preliminary, of about four rounds. Round one was even carnal scrapping (bliss); two was revelation on her part that the lesbian experimenting was related to bad weather with all her men; three was my supplying evidence that bad weather was in me; four was her confiding that one of her busted affairs had left her briefly catatonic with grief (vide supra staring at ceiling) until she came out of it and painted her appliances, and the sidewalk outside, orange, and drowned the cat before setting the apartment containing the orange toaster and popcorn popper and smoothie blender on fire. This last business engendered in me the opinion—I’ve heard boxing strategies called “opinions”—that the safest thing for me, dash honor, was not to answer the bell for any more rounds. I got nervous, and that was it. A lover scared of you is less useful than one altogether impotent or unfaithful or uninterested. The orange toaster and dead cat put a perhaps outsized fear in me: I saw butcher knives late one night for trifling transgressions somewhere down the road. For a month we were as in love as people can be who are not altogether green, and then I was ready to go, simple as that.

  Patricia understood this when I announced my unease, but she could not just accept it, so she sweetly laced her hands behind my neck and kissed me goodbye before dropping her weight and me to the floor and trying to kangaroo me. I left the Cabana to her. The Doctor would go down and rescue her with some solid girl talk and bourbon and approve of the entire affair, beginning and end. Patricia will do all right, I trust. I will see her when I see her.

  The loose cannon in this, despite demonstrable psychological stolidity, is me, the fugitive from justice, or from cat-killing women who are your cousin, if the two are different. I would yet check into Parris Island if the forms were shorter. I swear it makes more sense than checking into Vecchio, Vecchio, and Cupola and making more buildings on our hallowed talked-to-death old ground. It would be better to fight Arabs on it, possibly better, morally, to fight Arabs on theirs, but that I honestly doubt, and do not see our letting them get here, so I will probably be an architect of some kind before a Marine of any. I regret this not joining as much as having to leave my cat-drowning, sidewalk-painting cousin, but see the pedestrian necessity in both, and see that I am finally a pedestrian, not much more. I am in something like life, and it is, I am afraid, not four or six or fifteen rounds once or twice or forty times, but something like a hundred thousand forgettable rounds unpunctuated by bells, unrewarded by belts, prize of contest not glory or money or domination but death. How did I get to this bright plateau so early, or at all—I once some species of child poet? Some cuddly seer of the verities, precocious prevailer? Upon all precocious prevailer the chickens of dailiness come home to roost.

  Would I not be the architect born to design the fairway homes of the South? And the twenty-first century’s nineteenth holes? Is that job not, by birthright, mine? At the moment this idea swelled up solid in my brain, I decided to become a commercial fisherman, sort of. And it was not fish or commerce that got me: it was paint, marine paint, how it fails virtually by definition but hangs on, gets renewed, endlessly, with an eye to some hope, some faith that it, the new coat, will hold long enough for you to take the boat out and get it back a sufficient number of times to call the endeavor, overall, successful, and for you to call yourself whatever you choose to, in this case a commercial fisherman. I had a friend from college who could build, fish, shoot, drink, womanize, fraternize, skin turtles, and thought me an egghead. He was the ideal partner for a venture predicated on a fondness for brave paint.

  Jim Ball (“Do not call me Jim Balls; if my brother is with me, you may call us Balls”) hesitated to venture into fishing, or anything else, with me, when I called him. His grounds, solid enough, were that I could not do anything. It was conceded I could do things inessential to the enterprise: keep books (there’d be no money), run the office (there’d be none), write letters (to whom?). I could not pull an oil seal at sea, pull a trotline, pull a full crab pot—he did not see how I could pull my weight.

  I pointed out that, despite his prowess as a West Virginian hick mountain man, he knew nothing about fishing beyond earthworms on a bream hook and trout spinning—they didn’t even fly fish in his rude neck of the woods—and was it going to rain or not. There was more to fishing where I was from, I ignorant or not, than rain. He readily agreed to equivalent ignorances when it came down to locating grouper six miles out, or whatever we would locate wherever, and he liked finall
y the idea of besting a feeble egghead who could do not much more in life than draw it or talk about it, and I rather liked the cheer he gave off in all his bluff impatience and superiority: You can do anything if you’ll do it, his stubborn groping method said (and he had gotten through college without proper preparatory schooling, or measurable intelligence). So we agreed over the phone to fish for a year and see what happened. We had no money, no boat, no license, no sense. We were perfectly set up for commercial fishing.

  “Where we going catch all these fish?” Jim Ball asked.

  “Corpus Christi, Texas.”

  “Why there?”

  “Never been there,” I said.

  “Me either. Perfect.” Jim Ball had other qualities to recommend him, or derecommend him, as you prefer. He had been to Vietnam, for one thing, and interpreted others’ whims as “perfect”—deliberation or planning or reasonableness was, that is, in the post-’Nam view, dumbfuck. We agreed to meet in a week, no plans, just find each other. We’d have been happy never finding each other, so the lack of plan was agreeable.

  13

  LEAVING PATRICIA HOD AND her orange rage at the Cabana, I stopped at the Grand. I needed a kind of deep-breath, pants-hitching moment before going on. This leaving-women thing was getting out of hand. For their own good, I kept saying to myself, and half believing it, or more than half, but having trouble not seeing the matter from the point of view of the inexplicably abandoned. You’re some kind of cowardly lout was the competing notion, a notion that will have you pull into a place like Jake’s not a quarter mile from the abandoned woman.

  So I pushed into Jake’s, backwards, carrying a soup tureen found on the backseat of my car, which was no doubt put there by my mother and which I was to have put in the house but which I was not going to now, nor was I going to take a Spode soup tureen to Corpus Christi, Texas. Backing through the door, turning around into Jake’s, I nearly collided with a huge white man, the only one I’d ever seen other than my old man in Jake’s, who was wearing leather-topped pull-on gumshoes and khaki pants with plough mud all over them and who said, loudly and conspiratorially and very close to me and the tureen, “Indicted for murder!”