Edisto

by Padgett Powell

“God, Iv,” I heard come from their room.

  “God what?”

  “Chemistry.”

  “Chemistry what?”

  “Chemistry never changes.”

  And then a set of rock groans no oracle ever bettered. And I’m drunk, which probably made it worse. And if chemistry never changes, why’d they split up? I guess somebody could wonder that, but it’s probably only me, drunk. Everyone who knows them says they split up because the Doctor’s a bitch, if they are on his side, and because the Progenitor’s an asshole, if they’re on hers, and some people say both. That leaves me to wonder. I don’t. I know.

  The Doctor is a Democrat and the Progenitor is a Republican. I don’t mean registered voters now, I mean their whole attitude. They both voted for Nixon, so it’s not that simple. They both vote for Nixon but she thinks it’s a land where you decide your boy is a novelist and feed him books and he is one, and he thinks in these supply-demand curves and says book reading’s fine but there will have to be baseball for balance and law school in order that I be a producer and not a ward of the state, and bam—they are in it, fighting in a corner.

  “He’s bright enough. Let him read if he wants to.”

  “He has to work on it, Iv.”

  “He’s a boy, for God’s sake.”

  “Not any boy. My boy.”

  Crack!

  “If you hit me again, it’ll be the last time.”

  I wondered about that one for years. How did he do it? A short, deft blow that broke her nose? A high-handed Cagney slap? Or a schooled punch, like a hook? We boxed, twice. He got me these gloves the size of plums and put them on me and placed my guard and said keep your guard up and come on. I did, with whirring weightless arms, concentrating on his T-shirt near his armpits, enveloping him in a storm of bad ideas until he reached out and thumped my mouth and I quit.

  So what he did to her I don’t know. I did not see any mark the next day. But I knew that in a universe alleged to contain only men who beat their wives and men who don’t, he was a doer. At least he was in principle, because I’m not sure one shot is a true beating. It wouldn’t be if she had cracked him one, which for all I know she was trying to do, like me, swinging away, when he produced the audible whap.

  They could have this same kind of talk about business or money or careers or jobs, which is why I say their differences fall under the loose heading of political.

  “I sold the Market Street property,” he’d say.

  “You what?”

  “I sold it.”

  “Without consulting me?”

  Silence. Then she orates: “If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t—we wouldn’t—have two quarters to rub together. I’m through with you.” A sweeping noise of drink and napkin, a cabinet door slams, she heads for the bedroom, door locks. He must sit there with a solid look on his face. He mixes another drink.

  Once, though, they worked up to the ignition point, and she said, “It’s over. Get out.”

  “Hell, it’s my house. You get out.” And beat her to the bedroom. That one tickled me.

  But it’s still kind of hard to lie there hearing all this, even though some of it’s funny. Too much of it’s about you, in the third person, when they could just get you in there for your opinion instead of relegating you to misfit. Hell, I would have told them all they needed to know. They’d have both been jaked up if they had asked me. I don’t know how they ever managed to dream that they had an object, like a commodity on a market they had to invest this way or that. And finally, there was a feeling I had that they had quit being themselves in favor of my becoming themselves, as if they were sacrificed to me. They assumed this sacrifice willingly together and only later discovered there were two lives being gambled on one.

  So imagine the impact of my falling out of a bus, suspected of smoking modern hemp with Negro kids, and my taking up with a process server nobody knows a thing about but Theenie, who swears he’s the evil incarnation of her lost heroin grandbaby out of her bad-jazz-singer crazyass daughter. Imagine that. And I think all that carrying on on my part necessitated some immediate investment consultations, changed the curve of custody junkets, invigorated faculty parties, sweetened my last hours at Jake’s Baby Grand, for I knew a chapter was closing, and imperiled, of course, my friendship with the process server I got to even name like he was a character in those novels I was supposed to write.

  A Saturday without Cartoons

  THE NEXT MORNING DADDY was still there and I was sort of glad, but more certainly embarrassed, and in a way entirely different from coroner embarrassment. I’d got used to that. I could dismiss them with a marshaling of my lips into what I considered a pucker of disgust. But now the Progenitor was with Penelope. Great Olympic siren squeals had issued forth from the rocks of their bed. A coroner I hated was one thing, but now it was a guy I had a relationship with, like a very good friend in there—a guy who told me a rubber is like a sock. It hypered me out. About 6 a.m. I tried the hamburger and fishing broadcast and then hit the beach to get out of there.

  Taurus wasn’t at the shack, but I saw some smoke up at the abandoned Boy Scout camp and kept walking. It was Taurus, with a fire lit up under a triangle-shaped coffeepot, like in a cowboy movie. It was just like the open range. He was stoking dead palmetto fronds in. You could smell the coffee. It almost had a scorchy smell.

  I was going to go up like a drifter and ask for some grub and do a movie parody, but didn’t. He just handed me a cup. I was drinking it before I realized I hate coffee and then realized I didn’t hate it anymore, and that those first three true cold ones had probably produced my first true hangover and had changed coffee, like liquor, into something to drink, not to fake-drink with milk. Did he know about this, my blowout?

  The fire was down quickly, because the fronds burn so fast, and I got up to pull a Sabal branch. I had to about swing on it to get it loose, and when I did I fell with it, and on the ground beside me was a sparrow, dead. He was still able to move his head if you did it for him. I couldn’t figure out where he came from—under the branch, in the shelter they make against the tree? Was he in there and I somehow killed him? Or was he already on the ground and I didn’t see him?

  “You seen this bird before?”

  “No,” he said.

  “I think I killed him.”

  “I wasn’t really looking, though.”

  “He … you can still move him. I must have.”

  He didn’t say anything more, so we drank coffee.

  “The oracle at the heating system spoke of great new formations in my fate,” I said. “There are what you might have to call propitious portents.”

  “What would they be?”

  “It looks like Daddy’s back.”

  “That’s good.”

  “It’s good?”

  “Sure it’s good.”

  “You know him?”

  “Heard his name around. Serving.”

  “Never met him?”

  “No.”

  “I seem to know this means you’ll be going.”

  “Could.”

  “How is that?”

  “What?”

  “That you’ll have to go.”

  He looked at me. I was blabbering. It was one of those times where you’re supposed to act indifferent, or knowing, to what you don’t know. I saw these ninth-graders pull it off by keeping their traps shut one night on a school-bus field trip and kissing the cheerleaders instead of yapping like younger kids with no one to kiss. All you had to do was shut up and the girls got very adult about you.

  “Well, like Frank Zappa said.”

  “What’d he say?” It worked. I turned him into the curious one.

  “That’s where it’s at, baby.”

  He said nothing—turned the table again.

  “Yessiree-bob,” I appended. “Yessireebob.”

  There was the funny pot and the sparrow.

  “Look,” I said, “I don’t want to get lugubrious but I have to say it�
�I’ll miss you, we’ve had my most fun in my life, so thanks.”

  “Me too, Sim.”

  “Annh … let’s gedattaheah,” I said.

  “Let’s bury this vulture you slew.”

  We did.

  Mullet

  “BEFORE YOU GO OFF to the middle of nowhere we better go fishing, to ratify our experience together,” I said.

  So I stopped off at the Cabana and got two mullet specials all fixed up. You need a long pole in case they’re deep. Not too small a hook. The idea that mullet have small mouths is specious. It’s actually part of a racist wives’-tale scheme of lies which relegates mullet as fish to a similar position known by Negroes as people, but we don’t have time for all that. Their mouths are plenty large is all. But delicate, so you have to pull them in a firm but not exuberant fashion. (Also part of this bogus press on mullet is they don’t even bite hooks, which is already a bit obvious in its error, or I wouldn’t be under the house untangling cane poles and rusty hooks.) And a cork—not too big there. You want a good, subtle cork, preferably a thin one capable of doing things other than simply going under, because most mullet will not take a cork under. The cork should be able to shiver.

  We took off to get worms. The best place is behind the Grand, by Jake’s old house, where you’re supposed to believe there was a still, and I suppose there was. There’s plenty of worms, I know that. You have to go in through the Grand, where Jake will be cleaning up, and tell him, and he’ll never say a word of greeting. You just tell him and he calls his mother, who still lives there, and she’ll chain up that pit bulldog which I said had mice in his ears the day I began becoming famous. Mice in his ears or not, it is a very crazy dog that tightens out this chain from a log truck.

  “The story is they dumped the mash in this pit,” I told Taurus. “All the corn and potatoes and vegetables they couldn’t eat went in the mash. Here they use anything. Or did. I don’t think anybody runs one now. They just get the bootleg stuff without tax stamps. It’s the modern world.”

  “Where’s a shovel?” he said.

  “You can’t shovel worms,” I said. “It’s too gross.”

  So I showed him how you have to use your fingers if you care about the worms or you’ll have half a mash pit of halved worms.

  “Another thing, you can’t profane this mash pit, because of Jake’s boy.”

  “Who’s Jake’s boy?”

  “He’s Jake’s boy, but it’s on the q.t. because he’s in Bull Street in the retard section. I’ve never seen him. The story is, they fed him the wood chips for coloring the shine and he ate them like potato chips and that did it. All they meant to do was kind of slow him down so they didn’t have to mind him so close, but it slowed him down further than they figured.”

  Taurus was combing worms out of the leaves like a pro. Big ones fighting all over the leaves between his knees, and he was picking them up without even taking any detritus, so I put a dirt wad in the can for their shade.

  “I think it was red oak,” I said. This is a guess, because I never could learn what kind of wood they really used. “Red oak because not too much sap but a nice reddish color, like real whiskey, and then they’d pull the chips out and suck on them like a martini olive, only Jake’s boy was undersized, so he sort of O.D.’d. Nobody talks about him much.”

  We got over to Horry Slough, where I thought the mullet would be, and they weren’t. It’s a good place usually. When the tide’s out all you see is pluff mud slick and olive-green and drilled full of fiddler holes. It has a nice salt stink, and the mud actually ticks—you can hear it—in the sun. When the tide’s full you’d never know the place: blue water brimming up to green saw grass like a postcard, and a million mullet jumping like tiny tarpon. But all Taurus and I saw was two Negro ladies sitting hopelessly in the sun on their buckets. I watched them not get any bites.

  “When they sposed to start biting?” I said.

  “They might not be sposed to,” one of them said, laughing.

  “Did they bite yesterday?”

  “Might did.”

  I was trying to find out if they were operating on information or on faith. It looked like faith.

  “Have ya’ll seen anybody fishing anywhere else?” I said.

  “A bunch of ’um at the pier,” she said.

  “Wheat and Lilly ovadeah,” the other one said.

  “Wheat? He out the hospital?” the first said.

  “Shomuss be.”

  The thing you can’t do with Negro ladies fishing is expect them to care very much about immediate success, theirs or yours. There could be a hundred people hauling them in tuna style at that pier and they wouldn’t pick up and ride over there like most people would. It violates something. I’ve never figured it out. They will sit there and sweat and their worms will cook in the can and get too pink-soft and stinky to stay on the hook and they won’t catch a fish and later will hear about all the fish Wheat and Lilly caught and will not despair. It’s magic, that kind of control, maybe like Theenie’s live-till-you-die program. Or they will catch some fish, three bream that wouldn’t crowd a coffee cup, and keep them and fry them hard as toast and still not despair, eating them in five bites of exploding greasy cornmeal and bones and salt.

  But we couldn’t stay there without despair setting in, so I adjourned us to the action at the county pier, out where the river is wider. Pulling up, we saw a heavy woman at the corner of the pier set her hook and haul a mullet over the silver guardrail. And a man was riding down the pier on a three-wheeled bicycle. He passed us. In his baskets he had sacks and boxes and empty pop bottles and an open bucket full of mullet in pink slime.

  “Mornin’,” he said, and kept pedaling.

  “Wheat!” the heavy woman shouted, without turning but yelling at the river. “Hurry up!”

  He jammed the front wheel sideways like a trailer jackknifing and had to get off to straighten it out. He doddered around the bike like Charlie Chaplin in slow motion. He could hardly walk.

  Meanwhile, the woman had corralled the mullet flipping all over the pier and sat on it. “Hurry wid dat bucket!” She was laughing and all the others—about three—were, too, but quietly, all still watching their corks.

  There was another guy on the pier, a white guy. He was off at a remove from the ladies, who were sitting with their arms through the guardrail—they have to haul the fish over their heads without getting up. The guy was standing, his line far out on the bottom. He was not fishing for mullet. Of course. They chap my ass. It’s one thing to niggerize a fish and think little of it but here’s an asshole who goes out into a mullet run and turns up his nose at them in public. He was red-colored and knotty-looking. Mr. James has his famous line about a kind of guy would have been a redhead? Well, this kind of guy would have been a stepchild named Psoriasis. Except somebody named him Billy. Or Billy Ray. Or Billy Ray Bob. Billy Ray Bob Wally Pickett.

  Next he starts mumbling real chummy about “Lilly, I bleve you gone catch all the fish in the river!”

  “Shih, I hope so,” she says back, obligated.

  What he’s really saying is, “I hope you catch all the stinking mullet while I catch a good fish,” it’s clear. Or he’d reel in and bait up short and start catching mullet himself. There is something to do to this kind of guy but I don’t yet know what it is. But this Lilly seems to know.

  Right in the middle of this happy talk with Psoriasis, she picks up an Old Milwaukee beer by her hip and tilts it up on her face and gags.

  “This beer kissy hot!” She looks for Wheat, who’s still doddering. “Kissy hot! Buckwheat!”

  Wheat’s almost remounted and he makes the several pedals necessary to pull up behind Lilly.

  “You so slow, no wonder your wife left you,” she shouts at the river.

  “She din’ leave me,” Wheat says. “She died.”

  “The ultimate leff,” Lilly says, and they howled, all the ladies. Even Wheat giggled.

  “Well, where is it?” Lilly says.
<
br />   “Wheah whah?”

  “The cold beer!”

  “Hold your horse.” Wheat digs into the bicycle basket. Past fried chicken in a shoebox with wax paper, and some stray mullet all mixed in with the chicken, old paper sacks, and cardboard, through fishing tackle too, corks and tangled lines and hooks, empty beer cans, finally he pulls out a six-pack of Old Milwaukee. Paper is stuck to it because it’s sweating.

  “Goddamn, Buckwheat!” Lilly yells.

  “Goddamn whah!” Wheat yells back.

  “It’s gone be kissy hot, too. Where’s the ice?”

  “The ice?”

  “You forgot the ice!”

  “No, I din’. I must overlooked it.”

  Another howl.

  “Well, gimme the bucket.”

  Wheat starts to lift out the bucket of mullet and she sees him struggling with it. “Well, that fits. You spose to put them at the house.”

  “I cuhn,” he says.

  “Why you cuhn?”

  “Iss lock. You din’ give me no key.” There is a victorious thrust in his voice.

  “Well, give me a beer, you old fool.”

  Wheat tears loose a beer.

  Lilly hands him the key and the mullet she’s sat on.

  He puts the mullet in the bucket and mounts up and starts to go and then stops. “Say, Needa,” he says. Another lady answers. “You gone to the church Friday?”

  “Friday. For what?”

  “For the wedd’n.”

  “Wedd’n? Who gettin’ marrit?”

  “Me.” There’s a titter from the ladies.

  “You? Who gone marry you?”

  “I thought choo was.” A big howl. Buckwheat pedals off.

  So we finally got to see some mullet action. It turned out Lilly was a pro. She had the timing down. Mullet fishing is timing—more timing I’d say than sheephead fishing, though it’s close. When the mullet comes up to the ball of worms—a big gob, I prefer—he must do something to the worms like a duck does to silt and algae. First a gentle mouthing and then a fierce gumming and sucking. Which makes the cork just shiver. If it moves it’s because it accidentally gets hung up and moves off with the mullet. Usually it just shivers. That’s when you have to hit him, and firmly, but not horse-rough. It’s an art to nail a fish and then relax without letting the authority escape. Especially a mullet, which is a thinking fish—you have to let him know you know how delicate his mouth is but that he’s creelbound all the same and no funny stuff. I’m good at it, but that Lilly was a pro.