Edisto

by Padgett Powell

  A New Kind of Custody Junket Dawns

  ABOUT THIS TIME BEGAN a run of events. The first one was so weird that I remember what shirt I was wearing. It was Friday, and I came home on the bus (Taurus was out serving, I guess) and had run up the steps before I saw both the Doctor’s and the Progenitor’s cars, his a little crooked in the driveway. It was one of those deals where you become an eavesdropper accidentally and have to pick your moment to declare yourself so they won’t know what you heard, or at least will think you didn’t hear the worst of it. Through the screen I could make out their silhouettes like in a TV interview of double agents or criminals or state witnesses where they backlight and underexpose to protect the identity of the guilty and sometimes they even woof out voices so they sound like speech-therapy patients or retards or robots.

  “The hell I can’t,” I heard him say.

  “Everson. I still don’t see what you’re so worked—”

  “What’s so difficult? Every veterinarian with an autopsy license is one thing, but I can go a lot further with—with your bounty hunter.”

  “You’re a son of a bitch.” She snapped it hard.

  “I will take him.”

  “No, you won’t. You can’t.”

  “The hell I can’t.”

  I figured I had the beat, so I stepped three steps down from where my lips had been pressing on the rusty, fly-smelling screen and stomped back up and sashayed in with a perfect whine-bang door slam and was on them so fast they never knew or suspected. Looked like big doings: she didn’t have a drink, he did.

  “Hi, Daddy.” We did the hug. “Am I late or you early?”

  “I’m early,” he said, and looked at the Doctor. “And late.”

  “We still going?” I asked.

  “Sure—why not?”

  “Don’t know,” I said, going to my room for my tote bag. It was highly unusual for him to come inside the house like this to get me. The shirt I had on was my red Rugby.

  That weekend was the second event. We usually did everything as if it was the state fair. It was like he took me out to show me a good time and I could play games or ride rides if I wanted to, except it was movies and restaurants we went to. But this time we went over to a woman’s house I only later put together was his secretary but then instead got the idea a lawyer herself. She had this kid about two years older than me, and they put us together to entertain ourselves while they sat and talked. She lived in a carriage house and they had the whole yard of the big house, which looked empty.

  Sometimes kids just hit it off despite the artificial confinement, which is strange. Fully aware of the difficulty of liking each other, like in an arranged marriage, we just put all that aside and had a blast. I don’t know how it started but Mike, her kid, said that we could ride his go-cart if we put on the new wheel and didn’t go in the street. The new wheel was wrapped in brown paper and was in a closet full of his mother’s shoes and when he went in to get it he had to walk on the shoes and he fell over. Well, the wheel was heavy and he couldn’t pick it up lying there, so he tried to get up and the shoes kept buckling and sliding and turning his ankles and we started laughing.

  “Here. Roll it to me.”

  We rolled it out over the crumbly terrain—all these Italian high-heeled shoes and boots as soft as puppies—and we couldn’t stop laughing. Anyway, we got the wheel out and put it on the go-cart, reusing the cotter pin, and fired the engine up. Mike called it the cocker pin. He had this track charted out through little places where you could hardly make it, and every time one of us hit a banana tree it was funnier than the shoes. You just get laughing and can’t stop.

  We ran the course until white roots were showing in the mud at the turns and the engine smoked and ticked out a blue vapor. Then we went in and Mike, who had got the idea I was smart because I said we could use a nail if straightening out that cotter pin was too hard, showed me this kind of altar in his room. It was his books, about ten books and some magazines like National Geographic. He told me he was through with comics. Over the books on a small banner he had written:

  MY GOAL IN LIFE: NOT TO BE A IGNORAMUS

  THATS MY MOTO

  He showed me this shrine very proudly.

  “That’s a good motto,” I said. I didn’t know what to do about the spelling, so I didn’t do anything.

  The important thing, I suppose, is that this weekend was the first one we spent that wasn’t entirely at the state fair or big-brother Disneyland. It was the first time Daddy sort of ignored me like the Doctor, and I must confess that I had a better time than ever before on these custody junkets. It’s heavy pressure, you know, to find your role four days out of the month, a little two-day run every two weeks with no rehearsal. I suppose it was no fun for him, either, being the director as well as actor and still not getting it right. But that weekend he seemed a lot more regular in a way it’s hard to describe. I think that woman (Mike’s mother) looked sexy, for one thing, but that is strictly my unhaired opinion. At school the word is, you don’t know what girls really are until you have hair, kind of a Samson thing, I guess. I regularly enjoy unveiling mythic structure in Bluffton Elementary education. Taurus knows, I am pretty sure, from this exchange I witnessed between him and a girl who served us in a restaurant, but I am still sorting that out and finishing it.

  On Monday morning early, when I got back, there was fog in the palmettos and the tree edges looked blue. Taurus’s car was parked and spiffing out white balls of smoke into the fog, like smoke rings. Daddy stopped the car with the shift stick and it clicked to a stop like the ratchet stands I got to help set up for the drums one night at the Baby Grand for this old drummer with a band that had been everywhere. It was the saxophone player that was famous, and the rest of the band was nobody, so they had to do all the work. The drummer let me open out these chrome stands that had silver feet and arms you stood up and set the right-size drum in. He did that part. The stands clicked until they were open and then wouldn’t close. The drum heads were worn clean in the centers but had this crud all around the edge you could scrape off with your fingernail, like a crayon deal where you color all the colors on the paper and then black all over that and then etch a design by scraping off the black, leaving a rainbow-y picture. On the drum this left a pure-white scratch mark.

  Anyway, he stopped the car like a ratchet stand and was up the stairs before I had the tote bag out of the back seat, and I thought he was going in, but he stopped. He turned and waited for me on the landing and said goodbye and left. That was very strange—getting out, for one thing, and then going up there and not going in but turning and seeing me up like a guest, and then our doing the hug and him leaving. They were waiting inside as I crossed the unswept floor. I noticed all the windows were open and the drapes standing out like air-conditioner sales strips. You couldn’t see it but you could feel the damp clam of fog on everything. The Doctor was in her wicker pose and the settee was cricking crisply in the cool air and they both had these steaming black coffees and were looking patiently at each other.

  “Hi, Ducks,” she said.

  “Hi.”

  “Everything okay?”

  “Just fine.”

  “Ready for school?”

  I was in my room and stopped. “Ready as ever,” I said. Apparently it was another shirt day, so I got a black Western rig with bat-wing shoulders, makes me look like Wyatt Earp.

  When I came out Taurus was saying, “It sounds queer to me.”

  “Well,” she said, sipping coffee to punctuate as for a lecture point. “What have you seen out here that wasn’t?”

  “Well,” he said, doing the same coffee thing, “aren’t you divorced?”

  “We can still be friends, then?” She hurried on, ignoring him.

  He tipped his cup at her. “Why not?”

  “I mean …”

  “Sport,” he said to me, “let’s go.” We were off, me to school to drive fat pencils into newsprint, him to Charleston to catch crooks too cheap
for the government to bother.

  The End of Inquiry by Direct Methods

  IT LOOKED ABOUT TIME I did some investigation of girls. Diane Parker was still a quarter, so I got in on one of these field trips. It was very subtle.

  Diane got her quarters from five of us, and we all left the bus-stop zone together at a trot and went into the woods. School woods always have a greasy worn-out feel from regular and undeviating use by kids. You always see a rubber or a rubber package, but more distinctive is this special compound of sand and pine straw which makes pine straw look dirty for the only time in its life, packed around the edges of deep trails like base-running paths on the playground.

  Well, on this gunky straw Diane pulled her pants down and we looked for about five seconds. Then she was headed back up the trail fast, leaving us with the mystery. Before we could begin to work on it, we saw the bus and started running too—again very subtle, all of us running after Diane Parker out of the woods. She made $1.25. I had this feeling sort of like I needed to pee when I saw her naked. This was aggravated during the run to the bus, but subsided. I could find out what this was if I pored over the literature, but I frankly don’t care to. I am sure that Diane met her contractual obligations, showing us what she did, but I knew when I saw it that there was more to it than this little cleft-chin thing you marvel at how smooth it looks. I thought at least it would move. Which speaks my case: all the hollering about this soft little nose you can see for a quarter is about something else. What, I don’t know.

  Well, from here you have two paths of inquiry. It’s like you’ve seen the text and now you can consult the critics or the artist. The Doctor showed me this stuff. We have all these critical editions with your essays and writer interviews right in them. I had seen the text for five seconds, so I got an eighth-grade critic. “Of course you get inside it, fotch,” says one celebrated pundit for my barbecued Fritos. “Well, what’s it like?” I say, not even sure I mean to ask what it feels like. “It’s not like anything,” he says. “You just have to do it yourself.” I suspect he hasn’t “done it.”

  At this point benevolence steps up, and for no more of my lunch I am awarded this news by Roland, the patrol boy who jumped out of the bus, they said, the time I fell out, and was the first one to the tree where I stopped rolling. “It’s like in your mouth. Feel in your cheek,” he says, distending his cheek with his finger inside his mouth. I do this. “Yeah,” says the first guy with my Fritos. “It’s sorta like that.”

  Well, swell. I now know a whole hell of a lot more than I did. So I will have to go back to the source. To hell with the critics.

  Now, your artists are somewhat famous, I gather, for playing around with people who ask them what it all means, which is why one interview spawns more critical essays than the book ever did. So I had to be careful. But then how careful can you be, asking a girl under fifteen something like this? So I shoot the moon, as it were, because there’s this girl who disappeared last year—some said to have a baby and some said to go to reform school and some said both—but anyway, she looked very adult coming back, always had a purse with her and a sweater on her shoulders like a cape. And she got a lot of attention from back-of-the-room types, which she largely ignored, except it made her hold her head and walk different going away from them.

  Well, it’s bold because against her league I look like Spanky McFarland trying to have a word with Marlene Dietrich. In fact, I chicken out altogether. I can’t even phrase anything for a foot in the door. But fortune of fortunes, she gets on our bus one day, heads right to the back, and holds court. Now this is entirely another class of thing than a Diane Parker selling peeks. You get the idea she would think that kind of thing cheap or childish.

  When I get back there to sidle in, the guys are saying she should get off at their stops or come home to play cards or something, saying it very smoothly.

  “I’m not playing no strip poker with you guys,” she says. The you creates an image of other guys.

  How did she know they meant strip poker? That’s what they’re all trying to figure out, I think, when she seizes their indecision and delivers a wallop worthy of a woman who has had a baby out of wedlock in a state reform school.

  “Do you guys know what it’s like to eat a woman?”

  They don’t. They all get these strong, silent looks on their faces except one, who smiles. He figures, I think, that this is so far beyond the pale, so far beyond, say, getting a long look at things in a poker game that they don’t even have to pretend to know. So he says very candidly and calmly, “No, we don’t.” And then, “So tell us what it’s like.”

  She thinks a minute, purse on her shoulder, and says like Miss Kitty on Gunsmoke would say to a table of ruffians before Matt got back: “It’s like sucking mayonnaise through a Brillo pad.”

  This had quite an effect on the ruffians. On me, too. My investigations had gone far enough for the time being. I stopped this kind of questioning forever, and had a strange kind of respect for that girl, and still do.

  A Time Like Sweet Potatoes

  THERE’S BEEN ONE POSITIVE positive about all this going-to-be-a-writer bull-hockey, and that is what our most famous playwright helped me get away with. Researching Habits and Methods for me the Doctor discovers that he gets up at three o’clock and makes coffee and plays rock and roll and writes, still writes plays. Well, a master sets a precedent and it is available for all the trials of posterity. And I am posterity.

  It gets outlawed on school nights is the only thing. And I modify two ingredients at least. Three a.m. is perfect—he got that right. The house is kind of horror-movie still, settling itself for the night yet, and the wicker furniture is silently crisp; the Doctor is retired from the labors of lion’s Kool-Aid and snoring on her side when I pull her door shut. Wind is whistling the sand, and surf chomping like a roaring crowd, but it is somehow very quiet all the same.

  Coffee I change to this recipe: I put just enough instant coffee in to give an adult look to milk and drink that. I think it’s the smell of coffee people like anyway, which you get, this way.

  And rock and roll. A big thing has happened there. The dramatist meant something like Elvis Presley or Jerry Lee Lewis on those Tennessee Sun records when it was really black music in white hands or something—he can’t mean The Strawberry Alarm Clock. Old Presley the truck jockey in his leather jacket and natural sneer violating teenage girls within range of his voice—something like that helps him write. Not “Time” poems by a spoken voice in a group called The Moody Blues. Maybe the closest thing going to what he meant was this Jim Morrison cat, who a very correct know-it-all at school with all these appointments to play his clarinet at ladies’ parties told us was arrested in Miami for “masticating” on stage.

  “Tobacco?” I said.

  “No-o. Masticating,” he said, like I was a dunce. Well, I was and I wasn’t, because if you look it up, “chewing” is about as close to meaning something as “manipulating.” And when you’ve had one of these mayonnaise questionnaires backfire on you, masticating will suffice. So I have no real idea what Morrison did, even though I know the word, but anyway, he’s dead.

  So I skip it, the rock and roll, and tune in one of these weather-farm-fishing shows where the guy sounds like a very young grandfather, and in two hours you know whether to cut tobacco or go fishing or stay in bed, and you have this cozy feeling because a grandfather like that is free, and useful to all of us. He talks about Russians and crime and rain, and his voice never changes. Someone calls in that 139 Soviet spies are registered in D.C. and the F.B.I, does nothing about it, and someone else calls and says 139 channel bass were landed at Botany Bay, and it’s still 5:35 a.m. in WQUE country, and Pop’s very charming and full-sounding. It’s probably some skinny guy with a big Adam’s apple and bad skin, but he sure sounds like a green-and-black mackinaw and a pipe.

  My other modification is a hamburger. I don’t know what it is, but I make a hamburger all the way, and down it and get wired. Y
ou have to fry it hard to get this chewy black crust on it, and singe the bread in the pan too, and heavy onions and mustard, and this at three-thirty in the morning is different than at any other time—it really gets me. All this, the farm news and the burger and the fake coffee, isolates you, but it ratifies you too, so that for a while I am lord of the manor, looking up and down the coast as if I were proprietor of the Atlantic herself or governor of all rumrunners. This is also when I write stuff. (Or used to. I’ve about quit all the other crap except this assignment.)

  The 3 a.m. time is kind of like potatoes for corns on your feet—not for everybody. You can imagine who could do it and who couldn’t conceive it. Now the Doctor couldn’t personally, but it has its writerly vocational recommendations, so she lets me, but even she doesn’t realize the regimen it’s got to, the ritual of it. And if Daddy were here, I am sure it would be sufficient cause for another round at the pedi-shrink, where they took me because they thought I was retarded.

  They did this little number with my knees and a hammer to make me think it was a regular visit and pumped up that armband job, which I thought was to test my muscle. Well, I bought it. So when the doctor says, “Simons,” very slowly, “I want you to tell me what a few things are,” I said okay.