Edisto

by Padgett Powell

  Well, it’s one of these when Taurus drops in and hurls the talk backward through sexual indiscretion and the faults of the president and the failure of mind in America to a real problem: How to accommodate a nonprofessional guest who is not a servant or a child or an old friend of the hostess? Play it by ear, play it by ear.

  Well, he knows his moves, I see. Goes to the sideboard and’s got a decanter top off and decanter on tilt when he sees no glass, only the Doctor’s metal Depression tumblers, which make stuff taste like water squeezed out of electrical cord. He turns and gives me a high sign (I’m in the kitchen see-through) to bring him a glass. I carry it out like I was just going that way anyway, and he pours into it, still in my hand, sets the decanter back, and turns and takes the drink after he’s surveyed the whole room. They are studying other things, in other directions than his, to a man. So I know and he knows, I see him smiling. It’s the first time since Theenie took off like all get-out that I’ve really considered the large public questions about him and the situation. Like who is he? What’s he doing here?

  Before I even get out of the way, a woman of whom it’s rumored her husband was found in a motel room with another man on the faculty comes up and puts her hand on his arm and says, “We’ve heard quite a bit about you, young man.” That’s a title I get a lot during these parties, but tonight it’s his and it’s different. It sounds more suspicious on him because he is one. I guess about twenty-five. Maybe thirty.

  “I’m Margaret Pinckney,” she says to him, adjusting her arm on his. “I’d introduce you to my husband, Jim, but he’s not here.” Jim’s the one they said was in the motel. She’s dressed up more than any other woman there.

  “Well, Mahhgret, I see you’ve met him.” It’s the Bill they howled about in the president story, fluttering his eyelids and blushing—won’t look at either Margaret or Taurus, but holds out his hand, without saying his name, to Taurus, who shakes it. Then, I guess before they could regroup, Taurus cruises off toward the Doctor, who is entertaining.

  “Bill, isn’t Jim enough?” says Margaret.

  “Enough whaat, Mahhgret?”

  “Enough you know what.”

  Bill blushed. “Mahhgret, you don’t understayan—”

  “Yes, I do,” she says, turning from the sideboard with a whole tumbler of bourbon. “I understand perfectly that you people can’t just be pernicious. You’ve got to be promiscuous on top of that.” I hide, more or less, under the sideboard.

  “Mahhgret, now who is we? And anyway, we didn’t do anything to Jim, honey. Why that tendency’s been quite around, quite some—”

  “Schmendency! It’s cannibalism, human larceny! And you’ve got to come over here just now when I’m talking to Dr. Manny’s new—”

  “New what, Mahhgret?”

  “Her new friend.”

  “Free-yend. Look at that bohunk. I heard he’s her second thesis, honey.”

  This one confused me at the time, made me suddenly self-conscious, crouching like a halfback, in full view under the sideboard, so I trotted off to the kitchen, kind of burning somewhere, almost wishing I had for cover a broom horse between my legs. But I saw Margaret Pinckney leaving the area, too—at an angle, but holding her tall tumbler at plumb, letting it lead her. I think she took all the attention.

  You can’t retreat to your room during one of these deals, because browsers stroll in and look at the book titles and try to talk to you, and the telescope trick I worked on the coroner won’t hold up all night—in fact, it will draw more of these professional people in. So I went down to Theenie’s to read W.P.A. stories.

  For a long time I thought that the Negro who papered those walls just did it random from a pile of newspapers on his worktable in the center of the room, and there were so many W.P.A. stories in the papers of 1937 that he just slapped up story after story or page after page and they were all accidentally on the W.P.A. Right next to a full feature on the Fair Park they built in Dallas, with all that heavy extra stone, was an account of how many new ditches were dug in Montgomery, which was going to be bad news for mosquitoes, and next to that how many writers had been assigned to make new plays for the stone-heavy theater that was going up, etc. And one day it came to me: the paperhanger had to select the stories out. There had to be bread-line stories before there were W.P.A. stories, and stock-market stories before that. So a Negro with scissors in that shack so new it had good fresh black tar paper on the outside goes through a ton of newspapers and pulls out the stories he likes, a man with no job clipping out all these manufactured jobs he couldn’t even get to or probably land if he did get to, with a bucket of flour and water and a stick to stir with and his hand to wipe it on and lay in the wonderful stories. They were good enough stories on their own, but when I figured out this new aspect, they got better. Somehow, standing on Theenie’s bed or on a chair reading them, I was closer to what really happened, if not to how it was to hold a made-up job, then how it was to hold in reverence their making up. It was a swell, poor time, I know. There was always a new story to read, it seems, or even if you thought you had read one before, a new way to imagine the Negro reading it first, and so it became a new kind of story. Or maybe he couldn’t even read. Maybe he could just detect W.P.A. and cut out the connected columns, knowing or trusting it was the good stuff. Maybe he was even not in gloried awe of the Project, didn’t even know what it was. He could have thought W.P.A. was for “White People’s Advantages” or something. Maybe he was bitter and political in that shack in 1937. Who knows?

  But anyway, you could always read and reread, changing your opinion about the Negro and so changing the stories and their effect now. I read them that night until Taurus showed back up.

  “Is it over?”

  “Near enough.”

  “You want to do something tomorrow?”

  “Yeah. Come get me—after cartoons.”

  Cartoons. Consummate comedian he was. I went back to the house and slipped in and it wasn’t over. It was blumberville. Infamous motel Jim Pinckney had just got there.

  “Well, what’s this guy like?” he said.

  “Her second thesis?” Bill giggled.

  “Or her second honeym—” Margaret was slurry and too slow.

  “I don’t believe a word of it,” Bill said. “Not a word. A Neeegrow. He’s as much black as I am.”

  Everybody looked at Bill, who blushed.

  “A Nee-growl” Jim said. “Jesus Christ.” Jim was Old Guard.

  “So she sayez,” Bill put in. “Moreover, sired by a famous writer.”

  “Of the school—the Famous Writers School? ‘Sired by Famous Writer out of Negress—’”

  “Shut up, Jim,” said the Doctor, who on her folded-up legs was weaving slightly in the wicker settee.

  “Yesss, honey. Do,” said Margaret, who was patting the Doctor. “Some of us still have regular hopes in this world.”

  Peals and knee-bouncing by Bill and Jim, Bill looking at the ceiling finally, with tears in his eyes.

  I slipped outside and went up the front stairs and climbed in the window to my room and didn’t hear any more of it. But this is where I learned all the crap on him they had, and, I thought, the main reason she was hyped up on him. If she even thought his father was a writer, then he was supposed to influence, any way it might happen, me.

  On the Prevention of —ease Only

  FOR A WHILE THERE I guess he was still serving papers out of Charleston, because I would ride the bus home like always, except of course for the rear-door positioning. He dropped me off in the morning and went on up and got some blue folders with the criminal activities alleged therein and fell to on the people while I was in school. He said it was kind of hard, doing it, not being the law but just a kind of citizen-scab, a bounty hunter for gunslingers so small that they didn’t spend tax money on the sheriff to go get them with. They weren’t gunslingers, though—bad-check slingers, bad-language slingers. Mostly the baddest thing they committed, he said, was bad judgment.
He didn’t like it and said sometimes he let the people go. All that does is delay things. The paper reverts to the attorney’s office and doesn’t look too good on his service record, and he said his attorneys knew from the cases he had found that there was something fishy when he gave up and turned one back in.

  So he’s out being Matt Dillon, chasing down rotten-teeth van people and gold-teeth Negroes descendent of Oglethorpe convicts and slaves, and I’m in the front seat of the bus like a bus rider emeritus. For a while there were jokes. “Hey, Sim! Comone back heah. The air better.” At home the sun would be swung around and low, about ten feet up in the air. Its angle was perfect for about two hours to fill up the house with mirror light glaring up off the ocean, blinding upward through the sliding doors onto the ceiling so that any shadows thrown were thrown out the windows and you never saw them. It made it like a dollhouse or a perfectly lit stage set. The wind kept whistling that peppery noise against the house, little sand grains working their way through somehow, tumbling in their little glassy bounce across the floors like an eminent-domain march to the other side of the room, and piling up on false Edens such as a throw rug or under the TV. So I’m in there looking at the flash of ocean, moved by the heat in the direction of the sand, shadowless and hot, quiet except for the peppering which you quit hearing, wondering about things, touching the wicker to make it squeak, the glass decanters and their little tin bibs on chains telling you what kind of poison they hold, feeling the drapes, which lift off the floor like old big rats are behind every one of them, listening for a clue about something I can’t even figure out what it’s about.

  And nothing happens. At a time like this you expect some news, an event, maybe just some excitement. But it doesn’t come. The sun swings on around and throws the set into the cool, dusky after-time of the studio or stage where everything had been ready, lights and camera and player and no one to clap together two striped barricades and simply yell, Action. Instead, the lights quit and quiet and cool; dim dusk dawns on the regular old house, the plain land sales office pagoda.

  “Sim!” Theenie would say if she caught me in one of these conditions. “What ails you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Somethin’ ailin’ you.”

  “Nothing.”

  “Hmmp!” she would say, going about her business.

  Or I could take the talkative route: “Nothing ever happens, Theenie.”

  “Say whah?” Very high.

  “I said, Nothing ever happens.”

  “Hmmp!” she would say, going about her business.

  One time I said: “I’m worried, Theenie.”

  “What choo worrit about.” Not a question, a denial of my right or cause to worry, against the larger monopoly of adult rights.

  “Puberty.” I looked at her to see if it worked. She looked like a horse in a stall wondering whether to kick a careless stable boy, eyes orbiting in quick white slices like quarter moons.

  “I’m worried about this thing they call puberty.”

  “You scudgin’ me. Why you wont to grind me, Sim?” and she flopped all the ironing together, which would have otherwise taken a half hour to fold up, and left, silent until tomorrow, until a short trial during which I could not refer to the question would secure my reprieve, and we could be jake again. If I did it like that, a puberty question was just a souvenir in the memory of her raising me up, but if I asked again, I was closer to a hellion. She could tell people how sweet I was to have asked, but not that she had to answer. It’s part race relations and part family relations, there.

  So there in the upward glare of clinical Atlantic radiation I remain—before the Doctor comes in with a batch of papers to grade, new bottle in a skintight paper sack twisted around the neck. The breaking seal will suck a little air out of the kitchen, like the hiccup of a baby, air that slips into the bottle and hits the liquor and changes it like film or blood: blood, film, liquor are never seen before their innocence is lost. Also in this air-innocence class is rubbers, which didn’t get into the class for a while because I didn’t know what they were. In the top drawer of the Progenitor’s chest I found these gold-coin-like deals almost like candy mints except, thank God, light enough to tip me off before I tried to eat one. Then I thought they were amusement-park tokens or pirate doubloons you buy drinks with in a resort-town bar or something. Then I figured they were gambling chips from the Bahamas, where they’d been on a trip. Gambling chips—I was close.

  Anyway, the matter came up at school and somehow I learned what they were for, if not exactly what they were, so in one of our first Big Brother reunions after the Progenitor left, I advanced the line of inquiry about rubbers. “They stop babies, okay, I got that much, but how?”

  “Well,” he said, “you put them on.”

  “How?”

  “Well—” He fumbled in the air in front of the steering wheel; we were in his car, engine running. He tucked the fingers on one hand into the palm of the other. Suddenly he rested his hands. “Like a sock.”

  “Like a sock?”

  “Yessir,” he said, nodding, and very satisfied about something. “Anything else you want to know?” Else?

  “No, sir.”

  “Sure?”

  “Yes, sir.” He left out the juice part, the good part, left me imagining your tallywhacker (the Doctor’s favorite word for it) is some kind of electric eel or polyp stinger you have to insulate with rubber. Nothing about it stopping the paste of life. I have to learn about that at the back of the bus, where you can learn all you need to know on earth. Brylcreem, they said, and feels good. So. A sock stops hairdressing. One of the big disappointments of my childhood, I tell you.

  But I had this talk with Taurus in the early days, just to check him out further with the Boy Act.

  “I’m worried.”

  He was carefully matching the thread lines of the bottle to the lip of a drinking jar, and he poured a thin sheet of whiskey into the jar, just covering the bottom. It was snifter drinking without crystal or brandy. He swirled it more than he drank it. In Theenie’s cabin it still smelled like a washed dog sometimes. His nose hovered over the amber film in the glass.

  “Okay,” he said. He was not the target that Theenie was.

  “I’m worried about puberty.”

  He smiled. “Don’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s too big.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like nuclear war. Nothing to worry about.”

  “It comes or it doesn’t?”

  “Yes. Except here, it’s coming. So there’s less to worry about than nuclear war.”

  “There’s a lot of bad information floating around,” I said.

  “You’ll get through.”

  “My father told me a rubber was like a sock.”

  He pushed his lips together over the jar. “Well, what’s wrong with that?”

  I stopped. He was scudgin’ me. “Well—because it’s more like a balloon, if anything,” I said, hoping I was right.

  “Sock, balloon,” he said, in that kind of Jewish resigning whine they do on TV. “When the time comes, you won’t blow it up, you won’t put it on your foot.” He looked at me. “I hope.”

  “So there’s nothing to worry about?”

  He got up and prepared me one of these poverty snifters and pushed it over the enamel table and sat back down.

  “Worry about this. You will need a girl. The sooner it hits, the better.”

  “It hits?”

  “Well, no. It creeps up.”

  “Your sac gets ruddy like a bum’s nose,” I said.

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “I saw it. We got this guy down at the Y who wouldn’t take off his bathing suit because he said he was older and it took about three hundred of us, heads walloping banging lockers, but we did it.”

  “And his equipment looked like a bum’s nose?”

  “Well, no. But it was—I understand it gets bigger—but it was dark and more
wrinkly. Like whiskey drinkers’ faces if they’re really gone.”

  “I see.” He snifted. “Well, after your bum’s nose comes in, you will need a girl. This is the only thing to worry about. They will tell you you don’t need one and they will tell the girls the same thing, so it can take longer to find one than it should.”

  He fixed me another volume-less drink, and him too.

  “So do this. There’s a kind of girl who won’t listen to them, and you need to study them. How old are you?”

  “Twelve.”

  He smiled. “Are there any special girls you know?”

  “Diane Parker takes her clothes off for a quarter. But I never went with them to see it. And a girl named Andrea gave us the lowdown on the girls’ movie last year, and a pamphlet they gave them about beginning to bleed. God, that’s creepy—”

  “Okay. Not these girls themselves necessarily, but see if you can get a line on their character traits and what they’re like generally. Get to know them. Find one with some brains when the time comes and use a balloon or use her ideas if she has any.”

  I considered this. We must have looked like a real couple of cards, an ace and a joker maybe, sitting there in a haint-painted shack on a whistling bluff on the nowhere coast of Edisto, itself a speck on the Atlantic seaboard.

  “At the Grand,” I said, “one of the rubber machines says Sold for prevention of —ease only. What does the scratched-out —ease mean?”

  “You’ll get the joke in time,” he said. “It was disease originally. Don’t worry about that either. It comes or it doesn’t. Probably does. Don’t get anybody pregnant is the other thing. When the time comes, if you don’t know what that means, find out.”

  “Girls get boys in trouble, you mean?”

  He said yes and smiled, and I don’t think knew whether I was joking or not, but didn’t need to know. That’s the thing I learned from him during those days: you can wait to know something like waiting for a dream to surface in the morning, which if you jump up and wonder hard you will never remember, but if you just lie there and listen to the suck-pump chop of the surf and the peppering and the palm thrashing and feel the rising glare of Atlantic heat, you can remember all the things of the night. But if you go around beating the world with questions like a reporter or federal oral history junior sociologist number-two pencil electronic keyout asshole, all the answers will go back into mystery like fiddlers into pluff mud. You just sit down in the marsh and watch mystery peek out and begin to nibble the air and saw and sing and run from hole to hole with itself. Lie down and the fiddlers will come as close to you as trained squirrels in a park. And how did he teach me that? I don’t know, but you don’t need a package of peanuts or anything.