Edisto Revisited

by Padgett Powell

  “Who?” I said.

  “Me.”

  I eased around him, moving the tureen away from him as you would a woman from a drunk on a dance floor. I went to the bar.

  Jake was watching things very closely, sideways—his blue-jay style of close witness.

  “Jake.”

  He took his leg down from the beer box and came toward me. I pushed the tureen to him and he took it without question and went into the back with it.

  When he returned I said I wanted a cold beer made in either St. Louis or Milwaukee, not Olde English anything or Magnum anything, and two quarts of motor oil.

  “Motor oil,” he repeated, and again went in the back.

  He presented me with a cold beer and two quarts of motor oil. “You didn’t want this oil in that casserole, did you?”

  “No.”

  The khakied drunk shouted “Call my broker!” from the front and rested his head and arms on the pinball machine by the door.

  “Who’d he kill?” I asked.

  “A fiddler crab,” Jake said. We laughed.

  “That casserole is the Doctor’s. Save it for her. I’ve got to go. There’s a crazy woman at the house.”

  “Know. You been shack up a month.”

  “Who says?”

  “Lines of communication.”

  “My great-grandfather’s island!” the drunk declared, with his head on the pinball glass and his feet now securely hung up in the rungs of the stool before the machine. He would be there for a while, it looked.

  “Ain’t that t.s.,” Jake said.

  “You want me to get him out?”

  “No. We gone laugh at his ass all night.”

  “Don’t hurt him.”

  “He hurt.”

  We laughed again. Hurt he was.

  Murdering a fiddler crab was colloquial shorthand for wetlands abuse as so deemed by the various competing regulatory agencies in the low country. Red-tape fouling was so common that when an overfed man in L. L. Bean gumshoes and khaki said “Indicted for murder” and had a little mud on him and was drunk and out of place, we could put it together. On the island that his family had held since cotton and rice and indigo, the island which he now sought to make attractive at once to condominium dweller and duck hunter, the weeping man had proceeded without Coastal Council or EPA permits and, say, restored the hundred-year-old dikes which had held water for rice fields and which would now hold it for the ducks he needed to get those duck hunters to buy those condominiums, and the EPA or Coastal Council had come round and written him the equivalent of the world’s largest parking ticket, say $25,000 per day per dike. He had about 2,500 feet of dike to restore to the original unrestored condition, or else, and the else meter was already running so that if he undid his dikes tomorrow he was already out $50,000, on top of the $50,000 he had spent restoring the dikes by dumping 5,000 yards of fill on them, which had inadvertently killed a fiddler crab. In his current condition, drunk in what he regarded a nigger roadhouse, he was worried that his Wild Turkey days were over; he was going to face pouring Kentucky Bourbon Deluxe into Wild Turkey bottles, to fool his friends, all the other faux landed gentry in the low country, and the sacred family island was going to continue being a tax liability, if the fines did not force him to have to sell it outright. He was a portrait that gave someone like Jake, whose enslaved great-grandfather had likely worked the rice paddies within the sacrosanct dikes, extreme pleasure to behold.

  “Jake, were we not so close to a woman spurned, I’d like to stay and talk to you.”

  “About what?”

  “About that fat fuck on the pinball machine.”

  Jake regarded this with more gravity than I would have anticipated. Then he said: “Can’t live with ’em, Mr. Manigault, and we can’t live without.”

  I didn’t want to get any deeper than that—the Mister Manigault was some barbedness or sarcasm too complex to have unravel in your presence. And I couldn’t tell if he was referring to women or to land scions weeping in road-houses they didn’t belong in.

  “I keep quitting all my girlfriends, Jake,” I said. “Just up and leave.”

  “Can’t live with them, either,” he said, and laughed. “You shoot quail?”

  “What?”

  “Hunt birds?”

  “Not regularly.”

  “I see.”

  What he saw I’ve no idea, but it all made sense in the kind of charged, tacit wrestling that goes on when a black man and a white man, if I qualify, talk civilly together. You reach this kind of détente in the minuet, and when he’s on your turf, he leaves, and when you’re on his, you leave. I left.

  The road out of Edisto is the best one I know to drive with nothing, or a lot, on your mind. Whether you have two quarts of oil on the seat and your arm on the window and no clear picture of a town in Texas named the Body of Christ, or you have a very clear picture of a saddened woman you’ve left without adequate provocation, or you have standing job interviews in Atlanta to build reflective-skin monsters or in Litchfield to build atria and wraparounds and Southern Living photo sets with shabbily arrogant exteriors, or you have a parent standing around foot-tapping about your failure to apply yourself as you head not to Atlanta but past it to Corpus Christi, or you have another parent in a deeper consternation about your not proving precisely rich in things literary to say, or you have a fat rich white man weeping about an island he owns, on a laughing black man’s leased pinball machine—a tableau which involves you, too—the road out of Edisto has blasts of closeness and pastures of far-off easy silence, and smells of salt and change, or of funk and rot, and curves and straights, houses empty and black or occupied and lit, shack or brick, and you do not finally care what is on your mind or not, with all that flying by. The road out of Edisto is enough.

  14

  MY FRIEND FROM COLLEGE arrived in Corpus Christi on the same day I did. We did not know this for two days, during which we each formed opinions about the unreliability of the other and about how we should go about becoming fishermen. When we met, finally, by accident, each was convinced the other was worthless and so were his ideas. My idea was to buy a big boat. Jim’s idea was to buy the saltwater equivalent of a canoe, a big license, and a big truck. My idea was to fish, his was to sell fish. In this he was of course prudent. I let him have his way.

  We got licenses to trade fish, and trade we did. A lot of it was standard fish wholesaling, some of it not. We got a load of shad from a game-commission netting study of some freshwater lakes and thought we could sell them. We could not sell them even to hog farmers, who told us if a hog ate a shad he would smell like a shad, not a hog, on the table. We wound up paying more money to dump the shad than we’d paid to acquire the shad.

  On the whole, though, we were not unsuccessful. And that is why we did not last long. With the failures of actual fishing, I suspect we’d have been better and longer at it. But that—weather, seas, mechanical failures, monsters of the deep, charts, lights, currents—came under the heading of Romance for West Virginia Jim. “Do you think it’s a story out there?” he’d say. “It’s not a story out there. We sit right here on level asphalt that’s not moving with a half ton of ice and wait for the fish to come to us.” And that we would do, talking dully until we got the fish and hauled them to someone else becalmed on asphalt, waiting prudently for the fish, a little more expensively, to come to him. After eight months of it we divested and quit—even.

  But while I was asphalt fishing in Corpus Christi something relevant occurred. My mother phoned me one night at the Cactus Motel, where for sixty dollars a week we had our corporate and private headquarters in a room with two big beds, two big windows, two big doors (front and back, the quick-exit design, though I’d stand and accept my front-door accuser before I’d have tried the gauntlet of broken glass and condoms and seagulls, dead and alive, and fan belts, and even what I think was, judging from the decomposed plastic flesh, a Judy Love Doll splayed out in that glass, etc., as if awaiting your
fall into her arms, her ruby rubbery O-shaped mouth suggesting surprise until you realized what it really suggested and gingerly stepped back into your sixty-dollar room, the evening constitutional over)—she phoned and the office manager came down and got me and I went to the office and as I began speaking with her, just as I began realizing she might be drinking, the office manager said to me, “Would you please get off the pone.”

  I looked at him quizzically.

  “It’s a business pone,” he said, with great conviction and certainty. That I could not deny. Figuring the logic of his giving me the business pone not two minutes before taking it back was beyond me, beyond anybody; what occupied me, besides trying to hear my mother, was whether the office manager had any teeth. You never saw them, yet his face was not collapsed either. I said to him, inspired: “Go get the tequila from my room, limes in the sink. I know goddamn well this is a goddamn business pone.”

  “Who’s that?” my mother was saying, I imagine—I was watching my man petulantly, but not altogether reluctantly, leave the little office.

  “I’m back,” I said to her, when I could, and she was in mid-sentence carrying on, and I had to start trotting along with her to get up to speed. A locating word was “Father.” Then “not too upset,” which I at first took to apply to Patricia Hod but then took to refer to the old man, logical in all ways. Patricia Hod would be either not upset or, if upset, would have burnt the house down, and my father was perpetually not too upset. One more hard locator item and I’d have her, my mother, triangulated without having to slow her down. The manager came back in, solemnly carrying the bottle and the limes, put them down defiantly on the desk, and glared at me. I held up two fingers and made a little circular motion, and he raised his eyebrows, to which I circled some more and gave the two fingers again, and he bent slightly and pulled up, from behind the desk as if it were a miniature bar, two glasses. With one hand I unscrewed the tequila and poured the glasses full and set the bottle down hard. “I know goddamn well this is a goddamn business pone,” I said again.

  “Am I saying anything?” he shouted, picking up his drink.

  “—because you haven’t contact—” my mother was saying—“contacted those …”

  “Mother, you mean the jobs?”

  “The positions.” She was drunk, furious. What was bubbling up here in these emphases was her unending disappointment that I was, apparently, even in not contacting my positions, an architect—that my father had prevailed. For this she was not angry at me, as she should have been, but at him, which was easier and which preserved hope: it was not me who had not become the William Wordsworth of Wadmalaw, it was he, my old man, who had stopped me. I could yet be salvaged. I was not altogether manqué, simply not yet found. She was seething. I chuckled, toasting, as I did, the manager, who solemnly returned the gesture, with a shooing of his free hand telling me to go ahead, keep talking, using the business pone.

  “What’s so funny?” my mother asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “You’d better …”

  “I’d better what?”

  “Stop that.”

  “Stop what?”

  “Stop … everything.”

  At this, despite myself, I laughed again. It was not a prudent move, but it could not be helped. Before I could repair the damage, sure enough, she hung up. I looked, as one will, at the mouthpiece of the phone and held it in the air regarding it long enough for the manager to understand I’d been hung up on.

  He shrugged. “Your girl?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t like Saturdays worth a damn. Everybody don’t like Monday, but I do. Saturday is a bunch of hooey.”

  I poured us some more tequila, had him get us some salt, and we drank a few little shots, looking out at traffic and not saying much. I could not figure out, drink in and drink out, watching him at all furtive angle and even watching him bite limes, if he had teeth or not.

  In the little office, with its pine paneling and bad carpet and out-of-date calendars on the wall, the business pone idle, all the cars going by, I thought to think the moment one of contentment, a kind of contentment likely not to be enjoyed forever. That is an odd emotion, drinking with a geezer and with a Judy Love Doll out the back door of your room, but it is an emotion that is true.

  “You know what else is not all it’s cracked up to be?” I asked the manager.

  “What?”

  “Fishing.”

  “That shit,” he said, “is for the birds.”

  We both laughed, fine fast friends if there ever were fine fast friends in this world. I think I saw a tooth.

  “Fishing on a Saturday about the worst idea in the world,” he said.

  15

  THE WAY WE HAD worked it, fishing any day was, to my mind, the worst idea in the world. We didn’t spot a school of fish and lower lines or nets, we spotted a good price on a case of thirty-weight and pulled into AutoZone and debated whether we needed fan belts and oil or just oil. I got thoroughly impatient with the enterprise, though we were making money. Not a lot, but enough to be surprised when we looked at the checkbook.

  We pulled into a wholesaler’s one day and saw some Vietnamese standing about the lot in positions of consternation, itself a sign that something wasn’t right. You saw Vietnamese working or you did not see them. If they were talking, moreover standing around and talking, there was an obstacle in their path. I didn’t want any part of it.

  “This looks like Vietnam,” I said to Jim, driving. “Westmoreland’s inside, weighing three hundred pounds, tahkin like iss, refusing to sell them something or buy something from them, playing with his hairy gut through the side ports of his overalls, wondering why in hail we din’t bomb them into the Stone Age, why? Theron, I ast you, why?” I was, as I say, impatient with the entire affair.

  “What you know about Vietnam wouldn’t form a good dingleberry in your BVDs,” Jim said, as expected. I was in for the harangue: HE HAD BEEN. I had not.

  “Let me see if I can get it right, Jim. We know who went, but we don’t know who came back. Is that it? Do I have it right?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Fine with me.”

  This was fishing on asphalt. I got out of the van to go in to find Haystacks Calhoun Westmoreland and buy something, but as I neared the Vietnamese I heard them speaking English first and switch to French, and that did it. That did it. I went up to the van window and said to Jim, “They doing French, mon cher, to elude me. When I let them know I speak it, they’ll switch to something else.”

  “Gook. Gook’s hard.” He laughed.

  I waved agreeably at the Vietnamese and said across the lot, “Laisse le bon temps roulé,” which confused them, understandably, but they knew it meant to be French, and when I went back by them, sure enough, they were speaking something that sounded like Hungarian.

  I went in and found the proprietor. I took one look at him and left. He was in overalls, and white Red Ball boots, slopping around—ahhch, I’d had it.

  “Take me to the suite,” I told Jim. “I quit.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “No. I’m not talking to one more Klansman in rubber boots, ever. Won’t do it.”

  “I’ll do it.”

  “You do it.”

  I got to the Cactus Motel and walked a good long hot walk down to the liquor store and got a generous stock of stuff I felt appropriate to celebrating the end of my post-college dalliance. On the way back I threw away a beer can in an oil drum and saw on top of the trash in the can a large, colorful, lifelike dildo. It had a tube running from it to a squeeze bulb of the sort you see on certain pneumatic toys. I stood there regarding it agreeably for a long time, amazed by its veins and knurls and hues, and thought to myself that if I were an artist, I was having an epiphany. I’ve had an epiphany, I said to myself walking back to the Cactus, kicking smashed beer cans and marveling at the proximity of the dildo to the Judy Love Doll out the back door. So close, so far. If wedded, what beautiful
music they might make. I was a man of uncertain future afraid to pick up an abandoned dildo and give it to an abandoned deflated woman. I think I saw a small snake in the grass of the road shoulder, and if I did, it looked considerably less real, or less probable, or more outlandish than did the dildo in the garbage. Everybody in the world, granting a certain statistical exception, knows what he’s doing, except me, was my next thought. This was at once of course ludicrously untrue and vigorously sound, and I liked it. It gave comfort, especially if I could eliminate the statistical exceptions and have it really be true. If the plastic woman through her scarlet O-ring mouth were calling siren-fashion the lost dildo to her, it made no less sense than did my life. I had once been rational, as a child. That time looked as far away and as probable as Jules Verne’s Lost Island.

  16

  AND SO I QUIT TEXAS, where I had gone, I confess, for imprudent reasons. The Doctor had had me read, of course, all Faulkner, and if you take nothing else from him, which is prudent, you may remember that he designates Texas as where you go and change your name when your schemes don’t work out. These are the kind of schemes which when they do work out everybody says you’re smart and you remain in Mississippi or Virginia or South Carolina or even Oglethorpian Georgia—honorable (the Wawer, the Wawer) next to Texas, a place too low for the Snopeses! I had had to see it for myself, albeit in an homogenized latter-day state, its dastardly modern equivalent to horse thieves represented by million-dollar attorneys so removed from horses they nickname themselves Racehorse. Lyndon Johnson was conceivably the model prototypical outlaw by the time I got to old change-your-name Texas. I suppose at the other end of the spectrum it was the Klansmen in rubber boots who schemed for a while to have commercial fishing all to themselves, whose scheme was not working out precisely because the scheme—and was this not Mr. Johnson’s scheme finally?—to bomb Vietnam into the Stone Age had not worked out. In a way Texas was a great epicenter of the not-working-out, and I should have loved it, but I did not.