Edisto Revisited

by Padgett Powell

  In anticipating Indians, I was close. The thing was full of what you’d call hippies, for want of a better term. There was every stripe of lost person under fifty, and some older, in the joint, and a couple of Charlie Manson leaders and a couple of Dennis Hopper loons and a couple of Mama Cass sandwich eaters, and in one room I believe I saw a ring of praying pygmies.

  “We are looking for game violations and we won’t find any,” Taurus told me. “I wanted you to see this.” We went all through the house, which I’d estimate at a hundred rooms. It was three stories and had big hallways as if it had been intended for industrial use of some kind. In the basement there was a swimming pool with water in it the color and consistency of sugarcane juice and two small alligators in that green porridge.

  “There’s your game violation,” I said.

  “No, that’s not a game violation. They can’t keep them out. Let’s go smoke a peace pipe.”

  We went upstairs and met with a redheaded guy who seemed equivalent to a Secretary of State. I had the immediate feeling he represented in his hale, bluff cheer some darker and more ornery political figure—one of the Mansons skittering around, perhaps. This guy was coming on like a Kiwanis man. He got us some beer from a chest freezer in a hall, the only appliance I saw in the place, and I don’t know what powered it, if anything—the beer was hot. Women passed us in tie-dyed outfits, looking bucolically purposeful—they’d just meet your eye before looking away, slowly, at the baseboards, as they walked, hips swaying, on. A newsletter of sorts was on the chest freezer, which was serving as a bar. It had a headline that read US: 111, AMERIKA: O.

  I couldn’t figure who Us was. I listened. Us, it would seem, was every bedraggled fool between California and Italy who’d got a real nose for the real thing in counterculture. This was a prototype failed orphanage, sort of, or summer camp, sort of, built by Huey Long for the children of workers and never inaugurated or celebrated or even decorated. And it sat in the vast Atchafalaya Basin without the highway and the bridge that would have connected it to the capitalist world from which it was to have offered socialist children refuge. It was all Rastas and nutria now. It was appalling and delightful.

  Suddenly the Secretary of State was putting himself between me and a new arrival, a man yelling at me. Taurus took the moment to get another beer from the chest freezer on which we’d been leaning. The yeller was saying, “That’s exactly our problem! That fucker is the problem!”

  I sized him up. Not too big but crazed, and not crazed enough to be ineffective. The Secretary of State turned him and ushered him out of the room, a big sunroom facing the bayou we’d come in on.

  “I apologize. Sometimes …”

  “I’m sure,” I said. And I was. I was sure that this kind of sumping was the left-wing equivalent of a Klan rally or a dogfight. It was a teeming boil of maladjusts who were, failing everything else, going to be heroes to the people. They hadn’t a goddamned clue as to who “the people” was, beyond their deprived, righteous selves. I was not unsympathetic to them, at least not given the predictable responses of my father and his cronies to a scene like this, but personally and privately and without fanfare I would have enjoyed biting the yeller’s nose off. Taurus handed me a beer and steered me out of there and told the Secretary of State he would regard all hogs in the area as feral, huntable.

  At first I thought he was referring somehow to their women, that he was mad, too. Then I saw he wasn’t.

  “These hippies eat meat?” I asked.

  “They do.”

  “They grow rice?”

  “They grow pot. Got pot plants in here bigger than Christmas trees.”

  We rode out, suddenly in sun. There were red-eared sliders on logs and bright green astroturfy bogs of duckweed, and sacalait were snapping bugs under the duckweed like .22 shorts. I could have fished. I could have fished and looked each crappie in his red-rimmed eye and been thankful I was, whatever I was, not a hippie in Huey Long’s orphanage. I thought of frying up a mess of fish out in this gone place and eating them, and then thought of the Ameses coming over to eat with us. I could do without that. I was not disappointed to see that Taurus was taking me to my car.

  We got there and tied up, and it was apparent that, not unlike during his earlier tutelage of me, he had most deliberately and most subtly shown me precisely something he wanted me to see. Was it what lies at the absolute end of the road of dalliance? A Land’s End of softheadedness? Was it the monsters of sexuality that await you if you can’t recognize a good thing and glom onto it? There were those good women of mine, and at least that good-legged mother o’ mine of his … I would never figure the fellow out, and that itself was part of the lesson he still provided. There is enigma. There is enigma.

  I thanked him and he was on his way. I knew as much as I am to know about my mother’s ex-lover game warden bayou stud to nurses and protector of hippies felling pot plants the size of Christmas trees. I could imagine them out there sawing at the trees with butter knives they found in the orphanage. I went to New Orleans.

  22

  IN NEW ORLEANS I stayed at the Flamingo Bar & Grill & Hotel—a place I began to gather was famous. It was removed from the Quarter just a bit in space, but in spirit it was miles away: it was the final resting place for boozists, remove all pretense to Catholic this, voodoo that, and Creole this and that. It was three stories that wound away from the street, not one floor level, with a grill & bar in which you could eat and drink twenty-four hours a day. Beside the pay phone a hand-lettered sign read, “Imaginary conversations prohibited.” I spent some time in this grill, which was Norman Rockwell meets William Burroughs, if Burroughs was, as we say, the dominant partner in such a twain. It was so creepy it was most agreeable. You mostly wanted to drink your beer, which they did not begrudge you at any hour, without anyone talking to you lest you might have to smell him. I spent time there in lieu of forced march to the known touring nodes, and looked at my gently bubbling yellow beer in a good heavy water glass that had fine scars on it from years of use, and thought of my mother, mostly. It has come to this, I thought. I was drinking, but not drunk—I was in Hotel Step 13 and looking like a long-term registered guest (one day I got my shoes on the wrong feet and discovered the unlevel floors more manageable that way).

  I found in my coat pocket—I have noted that the true secrets of the universe are discovered in sport- and suit-coat pockets either during or after drunkenness—a note from Patricia Hod. We were in the habit of giving each other love letters, I guess you’d call them, little scraps of mostly excess sentiment we’d have been too embarrassed to say aloud, things we could at once safely laugh at and believe. She had given it to me a day or two before the walkout, and I had looked at it, glanced at it, during the emergency soup-tureen foster-homing and rearguard retreat and tangled minutiae of fleeing women you don’t want to know you are fleeing—so I had only glanced at it. It was written before she knew there was anything wrong—I thought. But in New Orleans’s Hotel Step 13 beneath a sign prohibiting imaginary conversations, with my shoes on the opposite feet, and getting profoundly homesick for something nice—I kept thinking about Southern Living modern-bathroom ads with toilet bibs matching the bathmats—this note leapt out of my pocket and uncreased itself stiffly and resonated plainly in the hand like a lost biblical tract. “I see,” Patricia Hod had written me two days before I unfairly left her (wanting her, too), “your mother’s face in yours sometimes. Not always. But sometimes. It’s disturbing when you see that in a man’s face.”

  That it was. It disturbed me there and then. That she saw that, that she said that, that she had seen it in other men, that it disturbed her in the cases of these other men, that it disturbed her in my case, that my case was not different from that of other men, or was it? (It would be if she saw the face she should have seen in mine: her mother’s, sister to my father.) Was this disturbing mom’s face in one’s man merely the latest case, or was it disturbing for reasons other, maybe better and real re
asons: maybe Patricia Hod loved me. This idea winged too near me like a bat in the dark in the fluorescent glare of the Flamingo Bar & Grill. Maybe she was not crazy—I was crazy. This is a notion we all articulate on a daily basis, inspired by a thousand daily things, and I was leery of it, half-drunk on skid row in a town I did not and did not want to understand.

  Patricia Hod. Would Patricia Hod have me back? She shouldn’t, that we knew. She possibly couldn’t—gone, etc. But she was crazy! There was hope. I got a beer and eyed the pay phone and deigned not: the prospect of such a call—and to where? Her mother’s house, where her mother drank so much her father shipped her out to sleep with her cousin? To my own house, where I’d left her and where my own mother drank so much she put her up, for me?—the prospect of such a call was too imaginary. Under the circumstances I thought the sign prohibiting imaginary conversations had been conceived just for me. Beer. Beer was going to have to go, and I was going to have to put my shoes on the right feet, shortly. I got another beer and stretched out my splayed feet and thought about that. Norman Rockwell was going to get up and say, Mr. Burroughs, I’m not taking it anymore. I find finally untenable your acquiescence to the disgusting in human endeavor. Put your pants on, Mr. Burroughs, I am through with you. This was amusing, and a bit sad, but I’d reached the point where I had to concede Mr. Rockwell right.

  So I resolved to go home, passing the Jax Beer Brewery and discovering it converted to the Jackson Brewery Mall and selling, among other things, fiberglass pirogues and faux Izod shirts with the alligator replaced by tiny crayfish, and to collect my cousin Patricia.

  Oh, Patricia Hod. You are thirty and firm and dazed of head, but you are all of that. You lay with me for a month under the scrutiny of my mother and did not run or whimper or rail or fret. You lay there like a man. I ran like a boy, but we are going to overlook all of that. That is to be overlooked. Overlook that. Overlook me. Look me over. Look at me, Patricia Hod. I come to you ruined and smiling and smart. You can do much much much worse than this, Patricia Hod. I can put my chinos on one leg at a time, like everybody else (though I cannot work for certain boys in Atlanta wearing them like everybody else), or I can jump into them like a fireman, or I can jump out of my chinos like a man on fire. I and my chinos are changeable, Patricia Hod.

  Outside the Flamingo Bar & Grill it began to rain. The marquee was lit by ordinary incandescent lightbulbs, which stuck nakedly out of individual porcelain sockets. I wondered how many of them lit when the switch was thrown. It was a simple matter to replace the blown bulbs. A step-ladder, some bulbs, a gentleman sober enough to stand and deliver. The world was mine. The world is anybody’s if you will square off and hit it.

  This is something I have learned, and I think I have learned it in time. I have learned it, I think, and continue to learn it, I think, from women.

  23

  I THOUGHT OF THE ways you approach the abandoned. It is not unlike the rabid: will they hide from you or charge? I thought the least advisable strategy would be weeping for forgiveness. At the other end of the spectrum of the untenable would be promising the abandoned forgiveness. Somewhere in the resonant middle ground was a posture of defiant culpability that offered restitution of the way it was before. I was not looking forward to this articulation before a woman who had drowned cats and set fires before subsiding into lost-love catatonia in London. On the other hand, and this was partly why Patricia Hod was looming so attractive, you could not imagine approaching an ingénue under these terms. She’d see the matter too clearly: you left. The End. You wanted a woman who saw your leaving as a matter of necessary and sophisticated contradiction: rose mole stipple upon a trout; oh, brindled cow. Oh, fall down. Then get up. You needed a Calamity Jane for these affairs, or Annie Oakley. Dale Evans was out. Dale would wait for Roy, and Roy, bless his heart, would never be short, late, wrong, impotent, drunk, or out of key. I will woo but I will not croon.

  I seized the pay phone and called Patricia Hod’s house in Columbia. Her mother, my aunt who goes on such vicious toots that the attending alcoholics seek medical counsel for her, answered. “Well, well, Marster Simons.” This is an upcountry slur of the low country. “How do you do?”

  “I do fine, Aunt Sasa. Is Patricia there?”

  “I thought that might be what you’d ask. Have you ever seen Pat Boone? I can’t stand him.”

  I heard a loud, shouted voice in the background: “DON’T SAY THAT! YOU JUST DON’T KNOW HIM WELL ENOUGH!”

  My aunt, apparently responding to this, said, “What?”

  And the voice said, somewhat less loud: “You just don’t know him well enough.”

  “Who?” my aunt asked.

  “Whoever you said you can’t stand,” the voice said.

  “I said,” my aunt said, “I can’t stand Pat Boone.”

  “Oh,” said the voice, which I’d now identified as my uncle’s. “I thought you meant someone you knew.”

  “Jesus Christ Almighty,” my aunt said, returning her attention to the phone. “Patricia’s not here. She’s on a date.” My aunt zinged this in like an Amazon sharpshooter. It was her way of saying she had the whole story, the whole score, and had taken a position in it, apparently, not surprisingly on Patricia’s side. But this was complex: Patricia and I together was likely to be something she would, against the rest of the family excepting my mother, side with, so she would probably not render Patricia altogether unavailable to me. She would just tender some difficulty. “She’s out with a fellow named Johnny Ham,” she said, and I heard her take a drink. Then she whispered, “I can’t stand him.”

  I started laughing and she did, too.

  “Aunt Sasa,” I said. “Tell you what. Would you, ah, tell Patricia to meet me in Edisto?”

  “In Edisto,” she said, with several kinds of false shock in her tone. What for? After you left her there? Why should she? Etc. I could only assume she knew the circumstances, but it was the kind of thing, also, where she might just be gratuitously saying “In Edisto?” In Africa? In Ohio? In the yard? Outside?

  “At the house,” I said. “There is a key in the A/C compressor. I will be there in three days.”

  My aunt said then, gravely, “I have never gotten a thing I wanted from this family.”

  “I can’t stand it, either, Aunt Sasa.”

  “I hope,” she said, taking another ice-clunking gulp of something, “you get what you want. Bye.”

  I held that ambiguous phone in the air in the Flamingo Bar & Grill for a moment, wondering if it meant she’d tell Patricia or would not tell Patricia, and put it down finally, worried suddenly about the imaginary-conversation prohibition. I’d had a most real conversation, but no one would believe it.

  24

  JAKE’S LOOKED CLOSED, SO I did not stop. It would have been nice to lay in a trunkful of provisions against Patricia’s absence or presence—this was going to be a trek either way. The joint (Jake’s) looked abandoned in the way that only the truly bereft business can: the only difference between its countenance when closed and when doing business hand over fist is a padlock on the door. With his bank-vault door he didn’t need a padlock. Somewhere behind it Jake lived, either in the room behind and above the bar or in the house out back where his mother had lived. It was a shack covered in rolled linoleum brick siding, or possibly the stuff was composition asphalt; it had never occurred to me to feel it once I understood it wasn’t brick. Was there, or should there be, anything particularly telling about a people who would have wood houses look like brick and Cadillacs that look like giant June bugs? I trusted, prowling by Jake’s and easing into our road, that I weren’t going into racial mope. I had done enough of that as a child.

  I had other fish to fry. At best I had a house with a madwoman with Thoroughbred legs who could swim the English Channel in it whom I thought I wanted. In this time I had formed a specific portrait of Patricia Hod, for which I longed: a quiet woman with troubles aplenty at home and abroad that you found in your bed accepting not simply yo
u but your mother’s steerage of you into that bed (and your mother’s face in yours) and the new set of problems you brought with you. A woman who took it as it came, with (I had come to appreciate) no lip-biting apprehensiveness. She breathed, as it were, through her mouth. What was Patricia Hod? Patricia Hod was a girl from God. That’s what, or who, Patricia Hod was. It is true that I felt a little bogused by my recent endeavors, in which there had been enough booze alone to account for my feeling like a fish on its side, flaring its gills and with its one fixed eye looking at the world and its grim chances. Suffice it to say I entered the tunnel of palmetto leading to my mother’s quaint and now vintage, once splendid and now modest beach house feeling perhaps not dissimilar to that fish. I was also feeling poetic. It felt—things—as if it was about to rain. It was a Monday, as near as I could make out, a rural Monday of the sort that you could tell it wasn’t Sunday by the absence of church traffic but you could not be sure if it was Monday because of the absence of work traffic. It was a stillborn Monday giving you the post-church, agreeable creeps. All I could ever think of on these kinds of mornings was that if I had to make a living, which inexplicably presented at these moments the idea of driving to a factory-line position in Pittsburgh, I’d know it was Monday morning, and it was infinitely better to be simply driving by neutron-bombed Jake’s Baby Grand and the whole gassed low country and guessing it was Monday. The palmettos had a stilled, expectant edge to them, too, and the house sat plainly where it was supposed to. No car.