A Woman Named Drown - Padgett Powell

by Padgett Powell

  In Naples I got heroic. I paid for Sears' top-of-the-line johnboat and had it delivered. And I got it in my head to go home.

  How so nutty a notion took hold of me I can only guess. Throwing darts through Pine-Sol fumes or reading amateur playscripts for a living sets you up for a broadsiding by any crack-brained thing that comes along remotely redolent of the practical or normal or responsible, I suppose. And so I decided to go home, and I also decided to impress the bus driver by writing as we flew up the backside of Florida. I acquired another notebook from a newsstand in a bus station, and I carried it past the driver with a processional gravity, as if I were a priest. I am still in a kind of cold war with the bus driver.

  I have written on a wire table, in a Mercury, at an ammoniac fish camp, and now on a Big Red bus out of Naples, Florida, barreling up the murky coast of Florida, going to see my old man. He and my mother live in Lafayette in a mansion. There will be liquor, and insults regarding my not taking over the oil-field-supply business.

  It is impossible to believe that whatever Mary trained me for, or whatever I sought the day I broke rank, is coming to a visit with my old man. Nothing is less agreeable.

  I'd better rethink this whole business. I'm now in the position, after all, of missing connections. It is easy to stop in Tallahassee, take too long walking to see the capitol dome, miss the bus for Mobile, and take the one for Quitman.

  Show up in Quitman and start from there. Nothing is easier, or harder, than that.

  * * *

  My second day a-bus. Certain things are becoming clear. At 10:30 this morning in Chipley, Florida, I entered a Suwannee Swifty and bought a red T-shirt, a large Big Red soda water, and resumed my seat directly over the bus-side exhortation to GO BIG RED. This theater made me the envy of two children who got on the bus, to whom I gave the soft drink. It worked; I "became someone" through a maneuver of artificial staging. I need more funky shirts, more improbable women, more nerve. We head south, to the Gulf, non-express. Carrabelle flies by in a town-sized convection current.

  The red shirt stinks of cheap dye.

  The bus glides.

  The girl who got on at Niceville I tell I'm a songwriter, and my new song, "I'm Happy to Be the One That's Mostly on Top of You," I'm going to dedicate to her.

  "Say whut?"

  The bus has taken an unexpected stop--for a flat, being attended to now by a Montgomery Ward truck--in Panacea. I enter Eastside Beverage. A white man is saying to a black named Augusta (from his work-shirt embroidery), "He is a nice snake." Augusta says, "Don't start on me that shit." "I'll show you," the proprietor says, heading for the back. Augusta gets off his stool, ready to run, full of mock fear and a little true fear.

  The proprietor returns with a cigar box, opens it: a boxful of snapshots.

  "Oh," Augusta says. "All right."

  In a photo the white man holds a large diamondback in one smooth loop between its head and tail. The mouth is open, slack. "We enjoyed each other," the proprietor says. Augusta looks at him with quick, hard, mock disapproval and some real disapproval. Apparently the proprietor is seeking to have Augusta believe the snake was alive and his pet.

  "That's a dead snake," I say.

  "Yeah, he died."

  "No, he's dead right there."

  The proprietor does some sizing up of me. I get two quarts of beer I do not want, to remain casual and fluid.

  "That snake was dead before you ever got near it."

  Augusta studies the picture.

  "These two quarts of beer are for Augusta, a man who knows bullshit."

  Augusta says, "That I do." He looks at the proprietor in a way designed, however, to let him know he thinks I'm crazy.

  I'm on the bus. I've hit on something. I may be nuts, feebleminded, but I've run agreeably aground on something.

  When my degree at Tennessee is conferred or not, when James has forgotten my room of stuff, the carp my symbolic lock, Ebert his basketball, Camel Tent the collegiate new girl, Mary our quaint ride, Wallace my kiss-ass leave, I will be remembered along here as the guy who said Floyd Drowdy's alleged pet rattlesnake was a dead fake, and Augusta will take less shit and do less jiving around that rotten-tooth white simp than before, and every day he walks in there and says, Let me have a look at that pet, the role I played will continue to be remembered.

  * * *

  We get back up out of this coast-run hernia and head true west--on the same road Mary and I took, I think, U.S. 90--we stop at a gas station. I'm amazed; it's the one where Mary and I stopped, behind which Bobby Cherry and the geezers talked of owls. I look behind it. Everybody's there. I wave. They look at me. Then a look of recognition. Cherry is the first to disacknowledge this, by looking down at his own beer, so I sit at his table, where I sat before.

  "Bobby."

  "Sport."

  After a beer, in utter silence, I lean over to him.

  "Are you the kind of guy does what he says he's going to do?"

  "What?"

  "You heard me."

  "Get him a beer." Bobby Cherry points to me. A geezer in an apron goes to the cooler.

  "I take it that's important, still. The word."

  "Damn straight."

  "And you're that kind."

  "Damn straight."

  "Good."

  Bobby Cherry's getting concerned. "Why is it good?" he says.

  "I want you to be the kind of guy you say you are."

  "You don't think I am?"

  "Didn't say that."

  "I better get in my truck before I do something I regret."

  "Get in your truck."

  He does. Easy as that.

  In a dime store in Milton, Florida, I tell the clerk, "I don't think I'm a Communist."

  She passes my items past her: a balsa glider in a flat pack, tube socks, a tin box of split shot. "I know you're not a Communist," she says. "I wish it would rain."

  "Yes, ma'am. I know you do. It's a shame we undid the Indians," I say. "They had those rain dances. Marched about a million of them right by here on the way to Oklahoma, too."

  "Nope," she says, sacking my airplane, socks, shot.

  "No?"

  "Trucked 'em. Wouldn't let 'em touch the ground."

  "Shame."

  "Pity."

  "We are bad."

  She looks at me. I am testing her now.

  "We are bad," I say again. "You have hundreds of rubber buffalo and Indians in here for sale." Perhaps she will think I'm a Communist, after all.

  It is the old kind of dime store: brass nails are worn up through the pine floors, large white opaque global lights hang from the ceiling. Nothing of any value can be seen on the shelves, in the bins. Yet several poorlooking women feel things, load them, buy them--orange plastic toys, nylon hose, clothes pins, perfume. The soda fountain is intact, closed. No public-address voice will ever exhort shoppers to pay attention to anything in here. No yellow light will be wheeled around to sale zones. As a consequence, everyone pays attention to everything, regards everything as a sale item. I have narrowly avoided purchasing a menagerie of small rubber monsters, after feeling them for minutes, watching for the bus driver, who I think has started nipping. He is clever. He disappears for a few minutes at these endless country stops, where there is rarely a formal bus station. I believe he would leave me if he could. Our cold war is strong.

  I have begun distributing gifts to children on the bus, for which he doubtless thinks me a pederast. I get back on and whisper to the driver, "I'm an existentialist, pure and simple." He says nothing.

  In Fairhope I follow him, catch him in the men's room pulling on a half pint of Seagram's. "You're an existentialist, too," I say, washing up.

  "I'm a drunk, kid." He says this with no emphasis, no confession, no self-pity. I offer to shake hands. We have a good, firm, countryman's shake.

  "When the hell is this ride over?"

  "Mobile."

  "Not New Orleans?"

  "Not me."

  "It's b
een a good one."

  He is taking another tight-lipped shot, which he sucks in with a teeth-baring grimace. He cants the bottle to me. I roll a long slug in, open-throated, careful not to lip his bottle. We exit together, I get the door and he touches my shoulder in return.

  * * *

  It has been a good bus ride. Now the driver and I are on even terms: I am above the common passenger, he is lower than ship's captain. In Mobile, end of the line, we run into each other at the same run-down hotel where he stays regularly. "Lot of Greek in this town," he says in the lobby. He is out of uniform. In a flowered shirt, he suddenly looks seedy, dangerous.

  "Are you Greek?" I ask.

  "Hell no." He laughs. "I eat Greek. Plenty Greek to eat here."

  We wind up in the Athens Bar & Grill, where a woman in green chiffon is trying to smother seated gentlemen with her breasts while undulating her fatty navel at them. After a couple of bottles of retsina, we eat something. The dancing gets wilder. Fatima--Helen retires and middle-aged Greek men take over. They make mime breasts, sculpt them out of air, and tease one another with them. They hunch one another. One falls on his knees, miming sucking his partner.

  "Shall we have more turpentine?" I ask.

  "I've had enough."

  "You must not be Greek."

  "I'm normal. I drive that bus twelve years. My wife has cancer. My son works for the highway department. My wife will die."

  "I'm sorry."

  "They're burning her now. They're in that stage. This is not a joke. She stays hot."

  "I'm sorry."

  "Don't mention it."

  We watch the show, the men dancing, their own wives watching them perform these suggestions. I suddenly know I am going back to Knoxville.

  "These Greeks are sports, aren't they?" I say.

  He--the driver, we have not exchanged names--shakes his head, agreeably, sadly, gets up to go. In the hotel corridor the next morning I pass two black women eating bagels. They are in custodial blues, sitting heavily in a supply room, watching a fire-alarm light blinking on the wall.

  "Is the building afire?" I ask.

  One of the women says, "The buzzer ain't gone off."

  We look at the light, blinking regularly, fast. "I thought it smelled like fire in here last night," I say. "It stank."

  "Yes, it did," the second woman says. She is farther into the janitor's closet, not eating. She has a bagel with a neatly applied quarter inch of butter troweled onto it. It is as if she will not begin eating until the message carried by the blinking light is understood.

  "Well," I say, "I'm checking out."

  They laugh, nodding.

  "I love you," I say to them.

  The second one, with the ready bagel, says, "You say that."

  "I say that."

  The first woman looks at me, looks away. It seems to me that people are ready to hear things never heard before so long as they are not frightened for their physical safety or worried that listening may cost them money. This is an untestable hypothesis, and I don't know that I want to test it now that I have formed the hypothesis so neatly. But I believe I gave it a fair test for a few days, and proved it sufficiently well for a failed scientist. People are hungry for new utterance. Does the reaction series of life include new utterance in its function?

  Can Mary be said to have shown me this by assuming roles and living them? Was Bonaparte receiving and sending wavelengths so novel no one in his right mind could pick up on them?

  In the cafeteria of the bus station I saw my driver again, dressed for the road, looking invisible and harmless, in his blue regulation suit. He poured a saucerful of coffee back into his cup, the saucer shaking at a frequency so high and an amplitude so low that anyone unconscious of wave theory would not have seen it shake. His whole attitude suggested a man holding his breath. I joined him.

  "Back to Florida?" I asked him.

  "Shoot. A run north. Little-town run. From Decatur over to Jackson."

  "From where?"

  "Decatur."

  "I know someone there."

  I got up to get us more coffee and to check behind the counter for Rod Serling: crackerjack nuke-whiz Tom lived in Decatur, Alabama. The plottable slope of fate defining my errant life was running straight to Tom.

  "I know someone there I'd like to see."

  "Well, come on. I'll take you there." He said this as if he meant in his own car, at his own expense, and he sort of did. He told me to meet him in seventeen minutes three blocks down the street and he'd pick me up.

  "Sync up," he said, exposing his wristwatch in a flourish of his uniformed arm. We matched our watches like spies. All of this was to save me a six-dollar ticket.

  "I fucked some turkeys there when I was a kid," he said.

  "You what?"

  "Fucked turkeys."

  "Fucked turkeys?"

  "Yeah. I was staying with my cousin and he asked if I wanted to fuck something, so I said sure, and he showed me these turkeys he said his father didn't want, and we fucked them."

  "What do you mean, didn't want?"

  "Well, it kills 'em, you know."

  "Kills 'em."

  "Kills hell out of 'em, actually." He grinned a not altogether ashamed grin.

  "Only my uncle did want them. Beat the hell out of us."

  In our remaining time he gave me a short course in bestiality. Cows one does barefoot, holding the Achilles tendon with the big toe. Sheep with their hind legs in your Wellies.

  "Dogs?"

  "Never fucked a dog."

  This seemed an oversight to me.

  "Did fuck some bass once."

  I looked at him. Was he on to the theory of new utterance himself? Was he just doing some Sweetlips pygmy on me? I thought maybe he was not. He was too somber at some level to be kidding.

  "Bass," I said. "How in hell do you fuck bass?"

  "In the-he pointed down his throat--"the little muscle thing there." He meant the fluted, sphincter-like throat, and it had an aptness so thorough I did not doubt him. I was talking to a sad, alcoholic bus driver who had fucked bass as a kid. I was talking to a natural in the world of folk who can celebrate their liabilities, carry their failures.

  "I've got a friend up in Decatur who hunts armadillos for radiation exposure," I said. "Maybe you can--"

  "Radiation's a sore point with me, bud."

  On the way to Decatur he told me of his wife's travail, a not atypical one, I presume. Her life had been prolonged by radiation, he supposed, but watching her suffer, he did not see the point of it. She was hairless, incontinent, and, as he put it, hot. At night he held her hand. He did not mind being on the road now. He applied, in fact, for long, errant tours of duty taking him anywhere but home.

  He drove me to Tom's very door, where I debarked in a great hydraulic hiss onto a neatly trimmed yard in a new suburb. Tom came out grinning like an idiot, appreciating the joke of my being delivered, a lone passenger, by so large a vehicle, to his otherwise undistinguished residence. The driver and I shook hands. He declined to come in. He eased the giant machine around the corner and slowly out of sight.

  The drop-in is not all it was once in the South, and my timing in coming to see Tom was not good. Tom and his wife, Elaine, were expecting guests for the weekend--the twin girls of Elaine's sister. At first I thought that crowding alone was to be the principal hitch, but things got complex.

  When the girls arrived, Elaine fawned over them in a demonstrative way I suspect was calculated to show Tom something, and I came to think the something was that they needed girls, or children, just like these. Tom entertained them with nervous cartoonisms, affecting a kind of Dr. Seuss character. Elaine acted happily dazed, serving as a kind of buffer between Tom and the somber girls, who, as if in opposition, were mature and smiled only when obligated.

  After dinner the girls were put to bed and we sat talking. Tom got a brilliant light in his eyes and said to me, "Do you know what Elaine does?"

  "I do not," I reported
.

  Elaine gravely started to peel her blouse over her head. I wondered if I had badly misjudged them. Beneath her blouse was a T-shirt proclaiming Slingshot champ of 1249 Bowick.

  Tom leaped from the table, returning with a cardboard box, in the bottom of which was a carpet sample. It was one of our targets before we got the tents and the rats. Elaine was flexing the surgical tubing of a slingshot, inspecting for fissures. "Tom had this made at the shop at work. Aircraft aluminum? I had my first look at a nuclear-reactor slingshot.

  For an hour we shot into the box Tom's array of suburban grapeshot; marbles, slugs, rocks, fishing weights, ball bearings, a wild thing that looked like a lead pecan cluster.

  "This should be in the Olympics," Tom said.

  "Are there any rats?" I asked.

  "Rats?" Tom asked, as if he had forgotten our previous time with the slingshot. "No. No rats. None in town." There was a momentary drop in Tom's goofy mirth, a kind of amnesiac stare I was not familiar with. "Tom," Elaine said.

  It was not clear what had happened, what Elaine meant, what Tom had provoked. Tom put the box containing all the grapeshot away. Elaine showed me a guest room, appointed in all details, towels to alarm clock, and retired. I got the entirely unsupportable impression that she was wondering what Tom had ever seen in me and felt, so accused, that I couldn't blame her.

  Tom and I stayed up in the kitchen. I had given no explanation for my arrival and had expected to have to. Tom was usually downright nosy about school and how well or badly folk were doing. Flunked out was a phrase he liked to repeat until it was ludicrous. Telling him I quit Friedeman would ordinarily produce his largest ear-to-ear, incredulous smile. But he was not curious. We sat and listened to Elaine closing doors.

  Tom looked down the hall. I thought of our once having wadded up my tent out on the fire escape and firing the slingshot down the long reach of the apartment hall past the Orphan's and Veteran's doors, prepared to tell anyone who challenged us we were humoring the Veteran with a dead fucking nigger cannon. I thought Tom was just possibly calculating for a long-hall setup. He remained still.