Edisto Revisited

by Padgett Powell

  Outside, the mud and gloom had changed to something radically more Hallmark: it was all bright bayou and butterflies. At my car I had a shock: I did have a dog. There was a robust, gnashing Dalmatian in my car. There was a glimmer of history about this dog, which I sought to mollify with some Easy, boy, which he was having none of. St. Tammany Parish Animal Control Center. Had stopped thereat. Why? Because had stopped at Tulane Primate Research Center. Why? To see monkeys with wires coming out of their heads. Was not allowed to. Why? Probably because they had monkeys with monkeys coming out of their heads, which is why primate research centers are in swamps. This had pissed me off, so I stopped at dog pound down road to see what abuse they were up to. Not an animal nut, but even the name Primate Research Center gives me willies. So whip in dog pound, and first dog run has Dalmatian nearly breaks through chain-link to get me. This I remember vividly, standing now at my car wondering how to get in it: this very dog hitting the fence with force enough to bulge it in rhomboids of fur and bounce back, squinting very meanly and sideways at me, growl almost inaudible, saliva on galvanized wire.

  “That ain’t no fire-station dog out there,” I said inside the place with some old-boy gusto and sawmill conviction, and a fellow chuckled, No, it ain’t, it was the pound guard dog, though, and I said I wanted it, and evidently I got it. I had got bad drunk and got a bad dog and called my bad mother and made a date to meet one of her bad lovers. I had torn a page, I believe the locution goes. All I could do now was buy some meat across the street and throw it in the backseat and drive and hope the dog did not bite me in the back of the head. I had gotten him in the car; it looked marginally tenable he’d let me in it now.

  He did and we drove off. I named him My Inner Life. At the first pee stop My Inner Life ran off down a logging canal on a bayou named, as near as I can tell, Tennessee Williams. If it was not Tennessee Williams it was Joe Bourgeois, my map was considerably out of register. Up this same canal down which My Inner Life had disappeared shortly came loping toward me a giant nutria, bounding part beaver, part rat, with yellow incisors visible like a nine ball in its mouth. I could not get Louisiana. Huey Long and open-skulled monkeys and logging canals and South American rodents gamboling the land, and that land a weird admixture of ordinary South—landscaped colonial brick Farmers & Merchants Banks at crossroads where there appears no need for a bank, or for a crossroads, or for roads, and no farms are about—and unordinary South. The unordinary obtained when you found a canal named for a man named Joe Bourgeois or Tennessee Williams, take your pick. This canal here, in this swamp we ruined pulling oil out of it, and pulling logs out of it before that, let’s name it for John Doe—no, for that guy (queer, I think) who made that streetcar of ours, which no longer runs, I think, famous. Yes. Need him a canal. Somewhere out in the vast swamp before me could be an intersection of forgotten waterways called Dealey Plaza and Garrison Slough. I ran, a little ahead of the nutria, back to my car. There I found a receipt that indicated My Inner Life had had all his shots and was worm free and had cost forty-five dollars.

  19

  AT A JOINT CALLED the O.K. Bar No. 2 outside Mamou, I waited for my mother’s old lover, I think. I think it was the No. 2—perhaps I was in one of a chain of rough Cajun roadhouses (there was a great iron pan of crayfish for everyone, and I had some and was a stranger to no one’s discomfort)—and I think I waited for him, though it is possible he had been waiting for me, so smoothly and unceremoniously did he slide into the chair opposite me at some point. I had the feeling he’d been watching me.

  There was immediately none of the big-brother directness, frontal elderliness, that I recall from our time before, but instead a kind of diffidence. He did not look so much at me as at the table between us, a little landscape of the lost lousy life: crayfish heads and beer in puddles. He put a crayfish head on his finger and moved it slightly, puppetlike.

  “You’ve changed, but not much,” he said, and we both watched the crayfish on his finger as if it were the speaker. It was fine with me if it were. I had the sudden conviction there were plenty of things I did not want to know about this man. They were things that would disappoint me in my heroic memory of him as suitor to my mother, superior to Odysseus, as mentor to me, superior to Mentor.

  He was smaller than I’d thought, but it was the knotted-down, dangerous-looking smallness of frame that you do not fuck with. And this looking-at-the-table business did not seem to indicate shyness so much as don’t fuck with me. I couldn’t think of a damned thing to say.

  So we sat there. I thought we were like a couple of guys who’d get on better in the presence of women, but that meant one of them would be, in the likely neighborhood of our short history, my mother, and that didn’t seem to be the kind of thing I had in mind. I couldn’t get a fix on his age. He was in a flannel shirt. His hands were worked, thumbs suggesting small lobster claws. My hands were, and are, women’s hands, approximately.

  “Come on,” he said.

  He stopped at a glass cooler by the bar and removed two six-packs of beer from it and did not wait for acknowledgment from anyone, just left. I looked around to ratify this purchase, if it was one, and no one paid me any mind. His truck was moving when I got in it. “Better get your car,” he said, and I did that and followed him.

  We went somewhere and somewhere else and somewhere and somewhere else, as if I were being kidnapped blindfolded. I had no idea where we were when we stopped and parked in a limestone cul-de-sac, the graded stone road looking phosphorescent in the moonlight, and got in a pirogue. It had a small forward deck on which was a dead nutria. As we motored the canal of some sort, I mezzed out on this nutria. Its tail was the size of a giant carrot and it had a dusky finely wrinkled skin like the callus on an old dog’s elbow, but it had hair coming out of it like fine stiff black wire. Or like the fiber inside moss, the dried core they used to stuff furniture with that you virtually cannot break. We went a long way on this canal, or these canals, or whatever they were, with the same you-might-as-well-be-blindfolded sense obtaining. I thought I might as well relax.

  Life itself was, as I had been leading it, a blindfolded—volitionally in my case—affair. Were I not seeking the blindfold I’d have been already working in Atlanta or having a brotherly man-to-man with my father over some fine point in the management of my Republican portfolio. I was in a plywood boat with a giant dead rodent leading the darkly way. In the old days you got by Cerberus, the three-headed dog. Today you got by Nutria, the one-headed rat. Charon was a man who didn’t speak, didn’t look at you, slept with your mother, you thought, you hoped, once, but now you wondered what kind of queer desire it was to hope a man, any man other than your father—no, including your father—had slept with your mother. Who should sleep with your mother? Should anyone? The answer, in a bayou with barred owl accompanying us head-high in the tupelo gums and a hint of goner funk coming off the just-stiff nutria bowsprit, seemed to be no. No one should sleep with your mother. Ever. This would eliminate you and your problems.

  I got a beer and enjoyed the ride. I saw a moccasin the size of a fat Schwinn tire, his white eye band bright off the water like a big smile. And I’m sure he was smiling: we were all out there in a moon-bright bayou, lost souls smiling in our lostness, the dead nutria the most content, but all of us having a very good time. This is what bayou and beer and lovers of your mother will have you believe, at night. In the daytime, of course, yanh yanh yanh …

  20

  WE GOT TO A HOUSE on stilts in a row of houses on stilts, a Main Street, of sorts, of black water. Access to this little town was decidedly by boat, or helicopter, if that wouldn’t blow the houses down, and it looked as if it would. Ours was two stories high, but the first story was stilts and the building itself was only seven feet floor to ceiling and, like the pirogue, seemed made entirely of plywood. Then I noticed parts of it were cardboard and other parts rusted-out screen. It fairly thundered when we walked in, and bent and gave, trampoline-like. It had a refrigerator that l
ooked about fifty years old, with thick round ivory shoulders, about the size and bulk of a safe. A yellow bug light came on inside it when opened, and I noticed all the lights in the house, and, later, in the town itself, were yellow.

  Taurus, if that was to be his name again, let me take it in and said, “Some nurses are coming by in a bit.”

  “What?”

  “Nurses.”

  “Nurses?”

  “Yes.” He went into a small room and left me with this prospect. Did he mean nurses in a figurative sense, in which case they could be outright whores as long as they cured you, and in which case he was joking as well as my father and his clan might joke, or did he mean it literally? You could only hope he meant nurses. I was in the epicenter of a time and place where no questions should be asked, or thought I was, not unreminiscent of the times I’d had with this man before, when things were so obscure and adult around me and him that I chose to be a kind of passive radio receiver of the signals of enigma swirling around. He came back through to the yellow-blaring refrigerator, and I toyed with the radio philosophy a bit: “What for?”

  “What what for?”

  “The nurses.”

  “Health.”

  There you go. Answers to questions in these radio-silence zones of human endeavor constitute diminishing returns. Do not ask. Prepare for nurses. How to prepare for nurses? Get a beer. Get sick. Lie down. Look feeble.

  I did all this, feeling fine on a kind of bamboo sofa overlooking the bayou, or whatever we’d come in on, the town’s twenty or so pirogues sticking out into it like teeth from a comb, I with no idea if this town was for fishing or receiving nurses or pursuing nutria or what. But this was “out there,” and it felt good, not unlike I used to feel as a child in our house on the Atlantic, which by now was altogether suburban. There were some flies on their backs on the windowsill, quaintly dead. A pirogue motored along and paused, and a man took the nutria off the bow of ours and put it on the bow of his and motored on with the same want of circumspection Taurus had used taking the beer in the bar. It was dark, but the man appeared to be made of rust.

  “Small problem,” Taurus called from the room he’d gone into again. “Yours is large. But young.”

  “Young?”

  “Under thirty.”

  “Large?”

  “Under three hundred.”

  Oh, Patricia. I had had Patricia Hod, who might have been crazy but who was a marvelous woman otherwise, and now I had … what? I had trouble, I had waste, I had misery a-comin’ and I did not look forward to it. I lay there like Cleopatra on my divan, waiting for a date on this little tannin-colored Nile. I got ravenous. Three hundred pounds would not be enough. This entire place and setting and setup was so squalid it began to blossom with bright, false possibility: we were flowers, us humans, of infinite variety and stripe and hope, each of us perfumed with our unique potential.

  Then I saw two women tromping down the shore, both in white, both nurses indubitably, and the one following the first was indeed as broad and squat as the little Philco refrigerator.

  Taurus was over and behind me, looking. “You can call her Sweetie or Catfish,” he said. Just as they came up the stairs he added, “Be careful.”

  “Why?”

  “She’s the daughter.”

  In the brief time we all spent together that followed, I saw that what he meant was he had to be careful. The mother, whom he called Mrs. Ames, watched the daughter with a kind of indifferent scrutiny that suggested at once a father watching a son, hoping he’d get laid, and a mother watching a daughter to see that she did not. By “Be careful” Taurus had instructed me to slip between the zones of this paternal-maternal coverage. I had to be interested in Sweetie but not aggressive; I had to let her come on to me when she did, and prompt her to when she did not. This was difficult with a large, strange woman you did not want.

  We all had some beer together, during which time Mrs. Ames talked about work, its headaches, and Sweetie confirmed her sentiments. Mrs. Ames suggested that Sweetie and I go down to the water. There I screwed my courage into one sweet ball and kissed her, as her silent, vaguely impatient, moon-gazing planting of herself on a small dock suggested she wanted, or expected. She had bumpy skin, some kind of unexpressed acne, not unlike the shaving bumps on black guys. She was inert, but still seemed impatient, so I touched one of her breasts, which could not have fit into a bucket. She remained inert, or impatient, I was distracted by her size at this point, and I pressed and lifted the breast up, which required subtly getting under it with a little shoulder. At this she pushed me back and said, with great practiced authority one might use on a horse, “Hold on, Junior.”

  “What?”

  “I said Hold on, Junior.”

  “No problem.” I held her lamely a minute more about the waist and then politely disengaged—sensing she expected me to continue my assault—and had no more to do with her. I looked at the stars and she looked at the water and I hoped Taurus knew he had about three minutes to effect his exchange with Mrs. Ames, mother of Catfish, before I left Catfish on the bayou and got on that divan thing and went to sleep.

  I woke up cold, with the feeling the house was resettling itself, as if Mrs. Ames and Catfish had just tromped out of it, adjusting their purses on their shoulders, and were to be seen in parade going back up the foggy bayou whence they’d come, and I was about to look when Taurus, sitting at a table in the center of the room, said, “Your mother wanted you to be great. But she really wanted to be great herself.”

  “I know that.”

  “Women do this. Men don’t give a damn.”

  “What stopped her?”

  “From being great?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You.”

  “Right.”

  “In her heart, she thinks that, probably. Not bitterly and not often.”

  “I believe you.”

  This conversation did not strike me as odd at the time. I did not ponder how he knew or presumed to know these things, or why he was uncharacteristically, according to my memory of him, spouting like this. It all seemed rather natural, if not necessary, in the Hiroshima wake of the Ames sex bombing and I guess in the entire business of my presuming and managing to find him. Who was he for me to find, who was I to find him, who was my mother to be his lover? In all the not knowing, it seemed a little speculation was called for, not simply excusable.

  “She has the passion to believe that,” he said, “and to believe in something like being great, whatever it means. Men don’t give a shit, more and more. If they ever did.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “In olden days when there was … opportunity, you could be Caesar. Now …”

  “Now we are at best amateurs at seizing opportunity. These are my very words.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “She thought you were great, I take it. You seized something. Albeit my own mother—”

  “She mistook me for you, for a minute, and for your old man, for a minute longer, and then saw I was neither and let me go. She saw I was nothing.”

  “What are you?”

  “I’ll tell you what I should have been. I should have been a wild-haired Hungarian that made the atomic bomb or one rough buck nigger. I’m a game warden. I don’t hunt. I hunt men who hunt. I hunt them inexactly.”

  “Guy came by got that nutria.”

  “I see.”

  “He supposed to?”

  “He supposed to.”

  This moment evoked completely and perfectly what I remembered of my earlier time with this man. He left, into his little room.

  21

  IN THE MORNING WE had some meat I was convinced was breakfast nutria and got two umbrellas that had Notre Dame printed on them and motored away in the pirogue. I was utterly turned around, if I’d ever been oriented. It was raining, hard, yet with promise of doing it all day, and you soon wondered what sense
it made being in a boat as opposed to just wading or swimming. We went through miles of stumped swamp and duckweed and tortured stands of tupelo gums with their skirts up, showing their roots. I saw no animals. Then I saw what looked like a Mexican in a small clearing. He had a pirogue—as regular as a Chevrolet out here—and watched us, casually, pass.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Indian.”

  “Indian?”

  “This is a reservation.”

  “A reservation?”

  “Yes.”

  We went on. And on and on. We got into something that looked untagged, finally, much thicker, and it filtered out much of the rain, which produced a lightness of sorts in the new denser woods—it felt suddenly rather cheery, like springtime. I thought of Johnny Weissmuller swinging through transplanted monkeys. I thought of white women. I thought of many things inexplicable in their timing when the truly inexplicable arose before me: a castle, or something. My second impression was a hospital, my third was that it was a mansion for the so impossibly rich (a Vanderbilt house, say) that they’d abjured location, location, location. I could not picture the substructure necessary to hold it up in this swamp.

  It—the building—looked to be about five hundred feet across its brown stone face and to have been built by Mussolini. This was the kind of thing you’d be taken to in South Carolina and it would have a hallowed, understated name like Brick House and would have been owned by a haunted family like Seabrook, but now Ted Turner would own it and there’d be actresses, Jane or no, naked on the roof beside the (new) pool. But it wouldn’t be the size of a hospital. It would be human-scaled, if large—entertainable, that is—and therefore all the more prepossessing. This monstrosity was industrial. It was unlit. I supposed it, somehow, connected to “Indians,” whatever that meant.