At first she regretted the winnowing, but then she did not: she had had a mind, but nothing had properly got in its way. That happens. The same for bodies: there were good athletes in this world who had never had the right field or the right ball get in their way. It was particle physics when you got down to it, and the numbers of people in the world today and the numbers of things to occupy them made the mechanics of successful collision difficult. So she’d burn her swamp, pat her good trees, cook her egg. She had one old clock radio, a GE in a vanilla plastic cabinet with a round dial for a tuner, which she played at night. If there were storms, she listened to the static of lightning.
When the swamp had returned in its briary vitriolic vengeance, reminding her of a beard coming out of a face that was too close to hers, she set it afire a fourth time. The fire went taller than before, so she walked around to the front of the house to see if you could see it from there, and, if you could, if it looked like the house was on fire, and there was the sheriff, parking his car.
He rolled down the window and said, “I’ve got you two puppies.” She looked in at the front seat and saw that he did. All puppies are cute, but these seemed abnormally cute. She discarded, immediately, protest. She was not going to be the sort, no matter how holed up and eccentric, to refuse a dog because of the responsibility and other nonsense.
“What kind are they?”
“The kind dogfighters give me just before they have themselves a convention.” The sheriff opened the door and let the puppies out and got out himself. They all walked back to the fire. At one point the sheriff misjudged the ground and veered sharply into Mrs. Schuping and nearly knocked her down. He was so big and tight that he felt like the oak walls of the ships that flung cannon-balls back, which Mrs. Schuping did not know had made her trees, under which they now walked, attractive to a shipbuilder two hundred years before.
The fire was a good one. There was a screaming out of human register as oxygen and carbon clawed each other to pieces, going through peat and leaf and the dirt that somehow stayed up in the leaves, even when it rained, giving the swamp its dusty look that would never be right for National Geographic. The dirt in the trees presumably turned to glass, and maybe that was why, Mrs. Schuping thought, the fire always sounded like things breaking. Tiny things breaking, a big fiery bull in the shop.
Without an inkling of premeditation, she turned to the sheriff, who was breathing and creaking there in standard fashion, and balled her fist, and very slowly brought it to his stomach and ground it mock-menacingly into him as far as it would go, which was about an inch. At this the sheriff put his hand on the back of her neck and did not look from the fire. They regarded the fire in that attitude, and the puppies romped, and in the strange orange light they looked posed for a family portrait at a discount department store.
Before going into the house, the sheriff knocked the mud off his boots, then decided that would not do and took his boots off and left them outside the back door on the porch. Mrs. Schuping put two eggs on to boil. The sheriff, who she thought might go three hundred pounds, should not eat an egg, she knew, but it was what you ate after a swamp fire—boiled hard, halved, heavy salt and pepper, and tasting somehow of smoke—and it was all she had, anyway.
They peeled the eggs at the metal table and put the shells in the aluminum pot the eggs had cooked in. Mrs. Schuping peeled hers neatly, no more than four pieces of shell, but the sheriff rolled his on the table under his palm until it was a fine mosaic. He rubbed the tiny bits of shell off with his thumb.
When the sheriff came out of the bathroom and stood by the bed, Mrs. Schuping became frightened beyond the normal, understandable apprehensions a woman can have before going to bed with a new man, especially the largest one it is conceivable to go to bed with. She also had a concern for the bed itself, and even for the structural capacity of the house—but that was hysterical; the sheriff was safely upstairs, and no matter what he did he would not get any heavier. Something else frightened her. It was as if a third party were in the room, a kind of silent presence, and then she realized what it was. The sheriff, naked, without his creaking leather, was quiet for the first time, a soundless man. It gave her goose bumps.
“Get in.”
Mrs. Schuping decided it was best to trust a man this large in the execution of his own desire and let him near-smother her. He made a way for air for her over one of his shoulders and began what he was about, which seemed to be an altogether private program at first but then got better, until she could tell the sheriff was not simply a locomotive on his own track, and things got evenly communal, traces of smoky fire in the room, but enough air. Mrs. Schuping thought of winnowing and sailing records and her mother and of how long a gizzard has to cook to be tender, how much longer than a liver, and she lost track until she heard the sheriff breathing, about to die like a catfish on a hot sidewalk, and stop.
“Mizz Shoop,” the sheriff said, when he could talk, “this is my philosophy of life and it proves it. Almost everything can happen. Yingyang.”
“What would be an example, Sheriff?”
“Well—this,” he said, his arms arcing in the space over them and reballasting the bed. “And did you hear about them boys killed that girl for p——Excuse me. For sex?”
The sheriff then related the details of a rape case he had worked on. It was not the sort of talk she expected to follow a First Time, but she let him go on and found that she did not mind it. The sheriff had set in motion the pattern of rude and somewhat random speech that would follow their lovemaking in the high springy bed under the ripped ceiling. You would be allowed to say whatever was on your mind without regard to etiquette or setting. Once, it embarrassed her to recall, she declaimed apropos of nothing while they were still breathless, “Listen. I have a father and a mother. I’m a real person.”
To this the sheriff firmly rejoined, “I think the whole goddamn country has lost its fucking mind.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Mrs. Schuping said.
They could talk like this for hours, their meanings rarely intersecting. The last thing the sheriff said before leaving that first night was “Fifty pounds in the morning. They’ll be all right under the porch.” Mrs. Schuping slept well, wondering fifty pounds of what under the house before she drifted off.
The sheriff had initiated a pattern with this remark, too, but she did not know it. She would find that the sheriff was given to talking about things that he did not bother to preface or explain, and that she preferred not asking what the hell he was talking about. Whatever the hell he was talking about would become apparent, and so far the sheriff had delivered no unwanted surprises. She saw just about what she was getting.
In the river of life’s winnowing, the sheriff represented a big boulder in the bed of the dwindling stream. It eventually would be eroded from underneath and would settle and maybe sink altogether. Mrs. Schuping, therefore, did not find the facts of her aggressively winnowing life and the solid, vigorous mass of her new man to be in conflict at all.
She had never known a man so naturally unrefined. Despite his bulk, the sheriff gave her a good feeling. That was as specific as she could be about it. He gives me a good feeling, she thought, marveling at the suspicious simplicity of the sentiment.
She had a dream of going into the swamp and finding her opera records, unharmed, and retrieving them and playing them for the sheriff, who as his appreciation of them increased began to dance with her in a ballroom that somehow appeared in her house, the operas having become waltzes, and who began to lose weight, becoming as slender as a bullfighter; then, in the swamp again, she found the records hung in the trees and melted into long, twisted shapes that suggested, of all things, the severely herniated intestines of a chimpanzee she had once seen in a cheap roadside wild-animal attraction. She woke up glad to wake up. She would look for no records and wish no diet upon the sheriff. “Have my head examined,” she muttered, getting out of bed.
In a very vague way Mrs. Schuping had
decided—before the decisions and lack of decisions that set her life on its course of winnowing—that having one’s head examined was going to be the certain price if she did not begin to clear a few, or many, things out of it. She saw at the end of theories of consciousness and lay physics and broad familiarity with things topical and popular a wreck of the mind, her mind, on the rocks of pointless business and information. None of that knowledge, good or bad, simple or sophisticated, was ever going to allow her to do anything except more of it: drive another eighty miles to another touring concert or exhibition, read another article on the mating dynamics of the American anole.
She decided that a green lizard doing pushups with his little red sailboard coming out of his throat was one thing, but if she read about it anymore, saw any more stylized drawings of “distensible throat flaps” on vectors heading for each other like units in a war game, she was going to be in trouble. This was a petty, flighty kind of fed-upness to reach, and not carefully thought out, she knew, but she did not care. If you looked carefully at bee No. W-128, which was vibrating at such and such a frequency, wagging its butt at 42 degrees on the compass … God. Of all her pre-winnowing interests, this arcane science was her favorite, yet, oddly enough, it was the first to go. It had looked insupportable in a way that, say, Time magazine had not. Yet over the years she had decided, once Time etc. had also been abandoned, that the lizards and bees and flow mechanics were supportable in the extreme by comparison—as were the weirdly eclectic opera records more justified than the morning classical-music shows on public radio—but once she had opted for winnowing there was no pulling back. “I’m going beyond Walden,” she told herself, and soon thereafter began eyeing the cluttered swamp, which was not simple enough.
So she winnowed on pain of having her head examined. If it were to be, she wanted them to find nothing in it. She knew enough about the process. Her mother had had her head examined, many times. Mrs. Schuping did not like her mother, so that was all she needed to know about having her head examined. Not for her.
She looked out the window that morning and saw a man with a white stripe down each pant leg walk away from the house and get in a yellow truck, which then drove off. When she investigated she found a fifty-pound sack of dog food on the porch and the two puppies scratching at it very fast, as if they would dig in spoonfuls to China.
After their first night together, the sheriff arrived without Mrs. Schuping’s having to set the swamp on fire. The sheriff had established the two things he would do for or to Mrs. Schuping. One was talk trash in bed and the other was supply her with goods and services that came through his connections as sheriff. After the dog food, which had belonged to the county police dogs until her puppies got it, a crew of prisoners showed up one morning and painted the entire porch, which surrounded her house, with yellow road paint, giving the house the look of a cornball flying saucer about to take off. The sheriff appeared that night—the fluorescent paint job more than ever inspectable then—beaming with pride. He did not remark upon it directly or ask Mrs. Schuping how she liked it, but from his face, which in its pride nearly partook of the same yellow glow, it was obvious that he was sure she liked her hideous new paint job. She could not deny it.
She had watched the crew from a lawn chair, drinking coffee while they changed her haunted-looking, unpainted, unannounced house into something like ballpark mustard with mica in it, and never had asked them what they thought they were doing. Nor had she asked the man with the shotgun what he was doing. And now it did not seem proper to ask the sheriff. The dog food was done, the porch under which the puppies were to live was done, and something else would be done, and it was in the spirit of winnowing to let it be done.
But in bed that night, before they got to the sheriff’s spontaneous trash talking, she did let out one question.
“Listen,” she said. “Isn’t this, prisoners and—” She made a kind of scalloping motion with her hand in the air, where he could see it. “I appreciate it, but isn’t it … graft or something?”
The sheriff took a deep breath as if impatient, but she already knew he would not, if he were impatient, show it; he was a man who could talk about rape in bed, but in other important ways he was a gentleman. He was breathing to compose.
“If you see something I have,” he said, “there is something behind it I have given.” He breathed for a while.
“Law is a series of deals,” he said next, “and so is law enforcement.” More breathing. “Nobody in law enforcement, unlike law, makes money near what the time goes into it.”
They looked at the ceiling.
“If you don’t do Wall Street, this is how you do it.” A deep sigh.
“That dogfighter I got your puppies from made fifteen thousand dollars the next week in one hour, and I let him do it, and I did not take a dime. You have two good dogs he would have knocked in the head. He is a homosexual to boot.”
Mrs. Schuping was sorry she had asked, and never did again. But if she saw the sheriff studying something about the place she might attempt to steer him off. He seemed to look askance at her mixed and beat-up pots and pans one night, and, fearful that he would strip the county-prison kitchen of its commercial cookware—perhaps inspired by the odd presence of her commercial toaster—and stuff it all into hers, she informed him casually that broken-in pots were a joy to handle.
She missed his siting for the deck and the boardwalk into the swamp, however, and the one clue, mumbled in his sleep, “Ground Wolmanized, that’ll be hard,” she did not know how to interpret until the ground-contact-rated, pressure-treated posts were being put in the yard behind her house and on back into the swamp by black fellows with posthole diggers and the largest, shiniest, knottiest, most gruesome and handsome arms she had ever seen.
She watched them, as she had watched the housepainters, this time putting brandy in her coffee—something she had tried once before and not liked the taste of. Sitting there drinking spiked coffee, she felt herself becoming a character in the gravitational pull of the sheriff despite, she realized, efforts nearly all her life not to become a character—except for calling herself Mrs. Schuping.
The boardwalk through the thinned swamp looked miraculous, as if the burning had been a plan of architectural landscaping. The handsome, lean swamp, the walk suggesting a miniature railroad trestle going out into it, resembled a park. If you winnowed and got down pretty clean and were normal, she thought, and something happened—like a big-bubba sheriff and thousands of dollars of windfall contracting and a completely different kind of life than you had had—and you started becoming a character, and you paid nothing for it and did not scheme for it, and it reversed your winnowing, and you liked brandy suddenly, at least in coffee, while watching men who put classical sculpture to shame, was it your fault?
About the Author
Padgett Powell is the author of six novels, including The Interrogative Mood and You & Me. His novel Edisto was a finalist for the National Book Award. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Little Star, and the Paris Review, and he is the recipient of the Rome Fellowship in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the Whiting Writers’ Award. He lives in Gainesville, Florida, where he teaches writing at MFA@FLA, the writing program of the University of Florida.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1991 by Padgett Powell
Cover design by Jason Gabbert
978-1-4804-4158-3
This edition published in 2013 by Open R
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