A Woman Named Drown - Padgett Powell

by Padgett Powell

  Maurice and the Fucking Parrots are the worst band you could assemble with human musicians, or parrot musicians, for that matter, and we dance for hours. We rest in the car, watching the clear skies darken, the crushed-shell parking lot begin to whiten with a light of its own, peaceful as the moon. The night is ruined so aggressively, so eagerly, so thoroughly by Maurice's horrible music that it is somehow made perfect.

  We rescue ourselves FInally at two with the Mercury's powerful rumble and surge into the chilled highway air. Mary throws her head back and to the side, lips parted, silent actress awaiting a kiss. We stop on an undeveloped piece of A1A and walk into some low dunes with Stump's navy blankets.

  "Balance the books tomorrow," she says. It is an odd note.

  * * *

  We got up the next morning to a changed world--to a new act, I might should say. I do not know whether to blame--blame is not the word, let's say to hold accountable--Maurice and the Fucking Parrots or not. We got up, normal as you please, greasy-faced from a night of Atlantic sand and wind, ready for a day-rate room and some rest, and Mary took the stage.

  "Al, make a check for two thousand. To yourself."

  I am writing today, not in the Mercury, but beside a plywood stand selling key-lime pies. I have eaten two slices of pie to justify writing on a picnic table beside the pie stand, but am drawing suspicious looks all the same. The girl in the stand has a tape player. We have just heard Freddie Fender sing of "wasted days and wasted nights." Now Diana Ross of "no mountain high enough."

  We had taken the motel room, showered, and I sat down near the door. Mary sat on the bed, her arms on her knees, leaning toward me like a father. "There's nothing personal in this," she said.

  "In what?"

  "You can take the Merc or the two thousand."

  I looked at her, and the color TV, on a stand about eye level with me. I mulled this one over until I found myself playing with my lips and stopped.

  "I understand," I said. What was odd was that I believe I did understand. She was closing a very successful road show and meant for us, as actors, to move on. And she was clever enough to fold following a packed-house night rather than when the play was in trouble.

  "What about Stump's wardrobe?" I said.

  "I'll take it if you want a new one."

  I pictured myself in the clothes I would get from the nearest Stuckey's--monkey T-shirts treated with Tris, orange surfing trunks coming to my knees--and said I'd keep Stump's if it was all right. It was more unnatural, in her scheme of things, for her to reclaim her husband's tattered clothes than for me to simply wear them out.

  "Okay." She got up and signed a check and came over to me and bent at the waist and rolled her forehead across mine, back and forth, holding my neck, like inking a thumb for fingerprints, and walked out the door with a jangle of keys, a swift solid car door, a blast, a reverse, a small rock skid, gentle rubbery crushing of stone.

  The check for two thousand dollars was beside the ice bucket. I kept the door open, letting natural light in, while I showered again and watched TV and otherwise took advantage of the room until checkout. I expected to feel abandoned or lonely, but I did not, exactly. I felt I had observed the terms of our dramatic no-bio creed and was a fine performer and had no call to long for anything under the sun. And it still hurt, some.

  Adjacent to the motel was the key-lime pie stand, looking like four plywood Ping-Pong tables thrown into an A-frame, housing a pasty-faced girl you might see at a trailer park. I ate the two slices of pie at a picnic table and looked at the highway.

  A bus came along and let a load of tourists have at the key-lime pie stand, and I got on. Heading west, through what I think was once Everglades, we passed a HELP WANTED sign and I got off. I walked down a white graded road to a fish camp. The building was small and low, suggesting an I enclosed trailer. It had plywood floors and a plywood ceiling, about head high. Down the longest reach of the joint a woman was throwing darts. She was not throwing them at a dart board and she was not throwing . them with the deft, wristy, English toss. She was letting them go like Bob Feller, lead leg higher than her head. On the wall forty feet away was a target painted in crude circles. The bull's-eye alone was big as a bowling ball.

  When she finished up the set, I said, "Is there a job here?"

  "Ho!" she said, plucking the darts loose. She went behind the bar. She got a beer and slid it to me and took one herself. She broke her pop top without opening the beer, and holding a dart dagger-style, she neatly collapsed the tab with one punch.

  "These things changed my world," she said. She flicked the ring off the bar to the floor.

  I nodded. I looked out the door, to the water. There was a fallen dock, and tied to it some wooden rowboats sunk to gunwales. They looked like alligators.

  "So," she said. "Drink all you want, eat if you want to, don't give any customers a hard time."

  "That's it?"

  She didn't answer, except to wipe the bar with a ribbed towel which she flopped around like leavening bread. Certain parallels--equivalences were in a lab instead of a fish camp, in a true reaction series rather than life's--were stunning. Instead of a pool shark, before me stood some kind of major-league dart pitcher. Where there had been gin, there was beer. And it looked as though the same no-questions, no-lies ambience was going to operate.

  I suddenly saw that Mary had truly acted according to the constants and coefficients and activities and affinities of the whole series of reactions around me defining this odd interlude. She "left me" with no more wrongful or sorrowful moment than an atom leaves another, than blood becomes iron and oxygen. And I was the evolving product, now in a fish-camp retort with a new reagent not unlike--in fact, startlingly similar to--the last. Who governed these combinations? How could it all be a random walk?

  Down near the water was a large kid. He got in one of the sunken boats and started bailing with a cutout Clorox-bottle scoop tied to his wrist.

  "Do we rent those boats to customers?"

  She had arranged the darts into a neat parallel arsenal on the bar and lit a cigarette and sat up close on the other side on a stool. She put her beer on a cardboard coaster and passed me one.

  "If somebody ever wants a boat, mister, you take their money and drive to Sears and make the down payment on a johnboat. Then, if somebody else wants one, we'll rent a boat." She took a giant drag on her cigarette, blowing smoke to the ceiling, in a spreading roil.

  At the boats, the kid was bailing away.

  "Or let Bonaparte go to Sears," she said. "That kid can drive." She leaned a bit to one side and got a look of concentration on her face. I thought she was straining to see Bonaparte. I heard an odd, small, mewing noise. "Hope you don't mind gas," she said.

  "It's two things he does. Drive and bail. It would be Christmas if he got to drive and get a dry boat."

  Bonaparte was sitting almost chest deep, scooping the water near him and pouring it out at arm's length.

  "Bonaparte," I said.

  "That might be cruel," she said. "That might be cruel." She threw the ribbed rag at a big sink behind the bar.

  "They told me he had a bone apart in his head to explain his condition. That's how they said it, too. Well, we weren't too excited about it. We weren't too excited about it and got drunk, and next thing we're calling him Bonaparte. Is that cruel?"

  "I don't know," I said.

  "You ready?"

  Before I could gesture, another beer slid to within an inch of the one I was on. Bonaparte, steadily working, seemed to pause and listen to something between pours of his scoop. He was not more than a head and an arm bailing in a blinding disk of sun on water.

  "He gives me the vim to go on," she said. I noticed him again pause as if listening to distant signals. "So, where'd you leave your clubs, Arnie?" She laughed at herself.

  "Let's get you some khakis and tell all the customers you're the fish guide. Can you see the expression on their face when you wade into one of them wrecks with a Loranc
e under your arm?" She started wheezing with laughter. Recovering, she said, "That is some suit."

  We drank, looking at Bonaparte bail.

  "You wasn't . . . golfing, was you?"

  "No," I said.

  "You a darts man?"

  "Might be."

  She marched over, lined up, wound up, and delivered--the dart went a half inch into the wall with a gratifying thuuung. On my turn, I missed the whole target, but I hit the wall and I hit it very hard, and she watched me like a spring-training scout, arms folded.

  "You catch on fast," she said.

  We played a game. In the late going--innings, I guess--she'd actually paw the floor as if grooving the mound, and grunt when she released. I had never seen better form. Not a customer came.

  * * *

  The fish-camp position made my time at Mary's seem an apprenticeship. Or it may be that Mary had me so well trained that certain early mistakes were avoided at the camp. Her name was Wallace ("That's cruel, too. Don't call me Wa1ly"), she played no roles other than the main one, and I mistook her for none else. You don't see a woman like her in a Sunday supplement. I did see her frequently in the regional fishing weekly, The Glade Wader. She'd create accounts of boatloads of fish brought in at our nameless camp (in the paper she called us Bonaparte's) and phone this apocrypha in to the editor, when we had not even made the down payment on the johnboat and Bonaparte was flailing away harder than ever.

  We would clean the place--it never got messed up, really, but we soaked it down in Pine-Sol in the mornings anyway, because the cats carried crabs and fish under it and we were in effect disinfecting the ground as well as the floors. We poured gallons of pine-smelling ammonia out and swabbed ourselves into sweats by ten in the morning and split a six-pack and looked out of the easy gloom of the bar into the headachy light, and there, committed as a saint, full of belief, bailing the entire Gulf of Mexico, was Bonaparte. He took to blowing a whistle periodically, perhaps designating invisible progress.

  "Vim," Wallace would say, both of us squinting at Bonaparte, both of us nodding, happy to be inside, in the cool gloom, dizzy on fumes and cold carbonation. A man came in one afternoon, sized the place up, had a beer, listened to Bonaparte bail and whistle, said, "Sounds like a disco out there," and left.

  A couple came in one morning and watched him bail for a while before suddenly going into a disquisition on hippies. "We saw a van," the man said. "Purple."

  "With butterflies on it," the woman added.

  "All over it," the man said.

  Wallace served them. We were just finishing the Pine-Sol detail. The woman opened both their beers and poured them into glasses which she inspected in the light before filling, squinting her nose at the ammonia. We could hear Bonaparte working as steadily in the glare coming from outside as a pump in an oilfield.

  The light came in whole and hot and salty, and reflected off the damp board floor in broken, mirrory planes. The customers were shading their eyes.

  "I wish all I had to do was drive around in a dope van all day," the man said.

  "With butterflies on it," added the woman.

  "That would be the life." He motioned to Wallace for beer number two. It was 10:30.

  "Hippies," the woman said.

  "What's he doing out there?" the man asked, with an emphasis that somehow seemed to link Bonaparte with the hippies.

  "He's bailing, you sonofabitch," Wallace said, and she walked to the dart wall and planted a foot up on it and yanked out a dart. She wound up and fired one, and the sonofabitch and his wife left.

  "See what I mean about you not offending customers?" she asked me. "I can do it, and I can do enough of it."

  She fired three darts. "Sonofabitch thinks he can drink beer at ten o'clock and some kid can't drive a purple truck." A three-legged cat walked in with a large live crab in its mouth. "Get outside, honey," she said to it, and the cat backed easily out, the crab waving claws to us, as if for help.

  After the demonstration of Wallace's diplomacy with customers, I assumed a new demeanor around the few that straggled in. I was a kind of personal valet, the ambassador of good will at Bonaparte's. My job, as I saw it, was to prevent customers from talking, lest they draw Wallace's wrath. I usually took their beer orders with the gravity of a funeral-home operator, giving a long, soulful look directly at them, then the slightest, tenderest nod I could manage toward Bonaparte out at the docks, then another kind of nod toward Wallace. This Wallace nod was in the thumb-jerk category, but was very subdued, and I followed it with a shrug, as if to say, Given the kid out there, the lady is disturbed, and likely to go of, you understand. Most did--in fact, some customers, provided this one-two of tactful apprising, gave an exaggerated and solemn nod of their own, clammed up altogether, and would point to their brand of beer rather than call it. These folk I had where I wanted--I felt like a matador with the bull quieted and sword ready. Wallace would interrupt the moment of their reverential silence with a great, sudden thuuung of dart that would make them spill beer.

  Much of the beer consumed was consumed by Wallace and me. We got into a game of drinking certain kinds to correspond with brand deliveries, turning off all the beer clocks and signs except those representing the day's brand. We looked like seven individual low-budget beer commercials. I got inordinately fond of the first beers in the morning that we used to slake through the Pine-Sol, which felt like it was in our throats and was in our heads. The clear, cold bubbles of the beer washed in, stinging through the piney, gaggy, cottonlike ammoniac air of the freshly mopped bar, and after a good hard mopping that made you sweat and a couple of good cold cold ones to clear the eyes, we'd struggle to the wide, bright door and look out at pure air and heat and Bonaparte bailing and the headachy convection currents already coming off his toiling form and feel, somehow--I did, and I think Wallace did, too--as if the day was wonderful, the place fine, the weather clear, the salt tonic, the world good.

  Across this happy-face moment would then waft a small cloud of the real, and we'd step back abruptly A and get another beer and realize we were broke, Bonaparte was hopeless, and the sole rescue was hundreds of customers who wanted boats we did not have, fish no one could show them to, hospitality we were fundamentally opposed to granting. Then we'd have a fourth beer, and then it was, well before noon, altogether too bright to look at Bonaparte for any longer than you'd look directly at the sun itself if someone told you it was in lunar eclipse. I would prepare myself for the unlikely advent of customers by placing on my arm an imaginary green towel of the sort I'd worn when Mary and I worked at the beach club.

  It was in all a wonderful time that I knew even during the nose-pinching smallness of it I would remember as fondly as you remember certain mean periods of your life and come to love them for the meanness. Wallace I respected as a soldier--a person who would have gone to West Point and been a rogue general who, despite a career of insubordination, won; or a middling prizefighter who won on indomitability alone. Instead, she had a bone·apart child and a fishless fish camp and bottomless boats and won by strategic, stubborn refusal to accede to . . . to what? I did not know: I do not know. She refused to ask for any relief--it was as if what she wanted was not a break but one more trial: one more dart in the plywood of her ordeal. And that dart she wanted implanted, solidly, stuck into the heart of the whole losing proposition.

  I could not even figure, while I ate it, where the bologna we had for lunch came from. The meat may have been in the chest freezer that Bonaparte froze his crabs in. I never looked in it, because the one time I thought to, it was slept upon by a placid cat with one dusty eyeball goggling out, actually touching the rusty top of the freezer. I saw no cause to wake him. You don't disturb a cat like that to see bologna.

  Performing my silent duties as valet to the nearly hypothetical customer, I got to feeling that while Wallace might be set up for the next dart of oppression, I was not, and I hardly saw how my not scaring a couple of couples before they had two beers each could po
ssibly equal my consuming nearly as much bologna as Bonaparte--he was voracious--and I decided to get out before the next dark dart struck. In fact, it occurred to me that I had been it--the next dart--when I arrived. And now we all awaited the next profitless windfall. These were the events that Bonaparte tracked, perhaps, with his head cockings and whistlings and St. Vitusing out under the broken green-shaded light at the end of the dock.

  "Wallace, write me a check for fifteen hundred dollars and I'll give you one for two thousand and you can get him a boat. I'm going."

  She turned to me, sucking the finger she burned turning the rising mounds of bologna. Bonaparte did not like punctures. "What?"

  "Sambo rumbles."

  "Kiss my ass."

  She turned back to the stove. I got my grocery bag of Stump's duds and left, passing Bonaparte in the marsh checking his crab traps.

  At the end of the white, graded road where I'd gotten off the bus, nothing had changed, which somehow surprised me. I expected to see even the same bus come barreling down on me from the same direction I had ridden it. I was stunned to be standing where I had stood, and exactly as I had stood before, except for the passage of time at the camp, as if I were a boat sunk to my nose and bailing myself out with all the efficacy of Bonaparte up to his chin. You can feel odd standing in a sudden swarm of deerflies--having just thrown darts for a month with a woman you've left with her retarded kid--rippling sawgrass as far as the eye can see, razory salty wheat.

  Air brakes caught me dreaming. Before me was the same bus, the same driver. I got on. He smiled at me as if I were a traveling salesman returning from a joke. I offered a hundred-dollar bill for the fare and took the smirk off his face.

  "Napoleon musta got one dry," he said, expecting me to share with him the lunacy of my days at the camp. I did not. I heard a faint, shrill whistle from behind the bus as we were getting going. Wallace was nailing up the HELP WANTED sign and Bonaparte was whistling and listening vigorously. Then, from too far to tell for sure, I swear he dropped trou and mooned the bus. The driver was looking in his side mirror, but his expression gave no clue.