Edisto

by Padgett Powell

  I was watching old Psoriasis down there when she set the hook and doubled her pole, and whatever she had hooked remained solidly deep and moved sideways at a good clip. Lilly strained up, making her pole whine. It still stayed down. Usually you have a mullet out in one smooth motion.

  Lilly yelled to the river, “Gahad damn!” and everybody watched the deepness move to her right. She pulled even harder, the pole tip itself in the water, a bamboo semicircle connecting Lilly on the pier to the river, quivering and ticking like a dowser. Then it came up. It was only a mullet foul-hooked in the belly. She thought she had the biggest mullet of all time. Psoriasis was down there sucking his teeth, his sorry excuse for a laugh. The other ladies all said what they had thought. Lilly said what she had thought.

  I baited Taurus up and my own and caught one during their analysis—not too big but big enough to offer the ladies, which would buy our way into the fishing hole without any resentment. I also thought we could pique old Psoriasis, but then I realized it would be better to be seen keeping some mullet for ourselves—that would fry his butt better.

  “We might keep a couple,” I said to Lilly, “just to eat tonight. But we won’t need the rest and ya’ll can have them.” Fine, fine. It’s a good way to get bait insurance, this, too. You’re giving somebody fish and run out of bait, and unless he’s a fool he will supply you with some.

  Taurus did very well for his first trip—caught three mullet and a red bass, which got everybody, even Psoriasis, excited. The first time I went for mullet I was skunked, because I waited for the cork to go under. “He won’t under it, child,” a woman finally said.

  “He won’t take it under?”

  “No. Watch it close. It’ll shiver like. Then pull hard.”

  “How hard?”

  “Not too hard.”

  I was confused, because they were laying back like tuna men for no apparent reason cork-wise. (I heard this local news guy say, “That’s the way it crumbles, cookie-wise.”)

  Anyway, I caught five or six, including two big ones, which I announced we would keep, and held up at Psoriasis, who looked away at his line, which hadn’t had a bump. “Ya’ll keep the rest, and this red bass,” I said, and dropped it loudly into their bucketful of sad-eyed slimy mullet.

  And so Taurus and I went home for the last supper, a meal of two old mullet with hemorrhages in their jaundiced eyes, pouting up at us like their dogs had died.

  A Vision of Snug Harbor

  THEN WE WENT TO town one last time, for no reason other than the good old days, which you could taste suddenly getting closer to their end and sweeter, like the last pieces of candy. We got up early on a Saturday I was not scheduled for a custody junket. Taurus had his car idling by the shack, mumbling little piffs of hot smoke into the cool cloud of fog which held everything still like a sharecropper photograph. We closed the green shutters on the sea window and one of them fell off, about breaking my foot. I said before they were sorry shutters anyway, which he got from Charleston, and they were sorry even though no dime-store stuff. Each weighed about a hundred pounds, which is why the one fell and why they never departed this world in the hurricanes which probably took a house or two out from under them. That’s why Taurus could come to find them out of service yet still for sale, shutters stouter than planters’ summer homes and stronger than a cotton economy. When that one fell in the sand, old and spent as it had to be, with scaling paint so thick it could cut your fingers like can lids, it looked like the top of a treasure chest to me. It was green and crooked, with sand already drifting into the louvers.

  “Theenie’s going to pitch a fit about cutting her wall open,” I said.

  “We’ll put it back later.”

  “It won’t matter,” I said. “When she gets back and sees that hole, she’ll put a mattress in it until we get a professional carpenter with tar paper and tin tabs and real lumber to shore it back up right.”

  “Hmmp,” he said, just like Theenie. He was a cool jake to the end. We took off.

  We had breakfast at an old hotel on the Citadel Square in Charleston. John Calhoun’s out there in bronze about forty feet tall, and it seems he’s doing something about the Confederacy by standing up there so very proudly, but I don’t know what, because I don’t know what he did, if he was a decent Reb or a bad one or anything. Looking out the cool dewy windows of the hotel, feeling the cold glass, I could still see that sad shutter in the sand.

  We order these country-gentleman breakfasts, and this other waitress than ours comes to the table. She just comes up very close to it, even presses it with her front, and just kind of turns her lips or bites the inside corner of her mouth, tucking her lips to one side.

  “Hey,” she says to Taurus, but then she looks quickly at me, too. It’s a funny way to show them, but I get the idea this girl has manners.

  Taurus stands up and takes her hand and bows to kiss it, and she snatches it away with a laugh and sort of slow-motion socks him in the arm. Then she wiggles around like a tail wagging a dog. Her uniform rear had some jelly on it, which she might have already had or got wiggling, I don’t know, but it was funny the way she moved sideways to him but watched him straight with large eyes. In fact, they were the largest eyes I had ever seen that weren’t in a calf, and very blue or gray. I think I had a romantic stirring.

  “Are we all set?” Taurus asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  He doesn’t say anything. She fiddles with the table a bit. “She’s never been on a date, T.”

  Who? T.? I was figuring a bunch of things at the time, like the eminent sensation I had that this female third party had a lot to do with me, so I missed for a time the significance of “T.” That’s what she called him for short, I guessed, and it became my only clue to his real name, because that’s all she called him and I never asked. But could he really have been named Taurus?

  “Well,” he says. “Simons here is just starting out himself.”

  “Oh, good.” Then she adds, “That’s romantic,” almost so quiet you can’t hear her.

  “You get off at eleven? We’ll be down there on the green.”

  We got those country-gentleman breakfasts with pork chops that had about an ounce of paprika and pepper on them, very tasty, and cut them up in white-sided chunks and pushed the rich broken egg yolks around, making the meat yellow. I was all of a sudden hungry as hell.

  “What’s happening?”

  “We’re going sailing,” he told me. “With a boatful of willing gentlewomen from the low country.”

  “Holy God.”

  “Holy God is right.”

  Suddenly great old patinaed John Calhoun and the green shutters all vanished before what I was sure was the dawning of the real, present South, a new land full not of ghosts but of willing gentlewomen.

  It didn’t turn out so marvelous. It’s like water-skiing, which is no fun until you know what you’re doing. Same with kissing, etc. We picked up this girl from a house on the Battery. She was cute all right, a regular button of a girl. She jumped down the steps in blue tennis shorts and a white cotton shirt with a tiny monogram, her hair pulled back, making her face shinier than it might have been without the tension, which was, I suspected, plenty shiny. She had on blue Keds that looked tight too and little pom-pom socks. She jumped in the car. For some reason, before I could look at her face all I saw was those cinched-up shoes, brand-new and looking as firm as shoe forms or hooves. I wondered if I was going to be a blockhead.

  The trouble was, Taurus’s girl was shabby where mine was shiny, loose where mine was tight, and I had already taken a heavy fall for her because of those jaw-breaker eyes. And she was developed out. Now, I didn’t hold that against mine, because my burning worm was nothing to call the bureau of standards and measures about either, but the whole effect of this big-eyed, wobbling, nervous girl with giant bazongas had got to me, and what I wanted was a little one just like her. What I had looked like something at a recital.

  “Oh,
wait!” she cried, clapping her hand to her mouth. “Hi” to me. “I forgot” to them. She dropped a pink orthodontic retainer from the roof of her mouth and was out of the car and up the steps and back, smiling, in one motion. “All set.”

  She and I got through names and grades before we reached the water. We were about even on names—she was a double Jenkins and I had my one-“m” Simons, plus the Manigault—but on schools she had the edge, being at Mrs. Oldfield’s famous institution for landed white girls, while I was in Bluffton Elementary with the people. I was going to display some Great Books stuntwork if she pressed about my not going to Cooper Boyd Academy. But she didn’t. She was nervous and smiling so hard about nothing at all that every time I looked at her, it sort of hurt my face. I hoped a little weather and salt on the boat would knock the shine off and we could be regular. Her name was Londie. Short for Altalondine Jenkins Jenkins.

  At the yacht club we met a gigantic fat dude who was breathing with difficulty. He outfitted us with his boat, an air of a favor he owed Taurus about the proceedings. He made sure to impress Taurus with how irregular lending his boat was without his going. And then Taurus’s girl came out of the yacht club changed into a purple swimsuit with plenty of everything very obvious and she a little self-conscious, which made her smile and do that dog-wobble ever so slightly. On the front of the suit was a brilliant whale dancing on its fluke and spouting white spume, the figure made of inlays of nylon stitched together in colors resembling a parrot. The fat guy stopped talking when he saw her.

  I watched him while Taurus rigged the boat. He had been blubbering about tightening this and battening that and rules of the road, but now he was mostly pointing and grunting, half at Taurus and half at his girl. His wheezing picked up.

  He stepped over to Taurus and said, “My health.”

  Taurus looked up.

  “I’m worried about my health.”

  “What about it?” Taurus said.

  He sucked in a big load of wind and said, “It’s deteriorating.”

  Taurus was holding a broken halyard and standing in three inches of stinking bilge water in the open ribs of the cockpit.

  “What isn’t?” he said.

  “Good point! Very good point! Ah, sir!” shouted the wheezer. He laughed and then charged Taurus’s girl, virtually shouting, “Young lady! There’s a whale on your stomach!”

  She bit her mouth sideways, stretched her suit outward a bit, and looked down at the colorful whale.

  “Are you a”—he almost choked—“a swimmer?” With reverence in that word.

  She looked at him and then at herself again, up and down, her legs, the whale, the bosom she could hardly see over. Now I was excited too, but the big guy was, I swear, fixing to collapse drooling, and she was getting red in the face. He was about two inches from her and standing like Santa Claus, rocked back on his heels with an enormous gut stuck out, which he rubbed absently with tiny hands, and he looked at her through eyes squinted shut with fat, seething, when Taurus said to her, “In the boat.” And to me, “Cast off.” She did, I did, Londie jumped in as light and precise as a fawn, and we motored out of the club.

  That was about the biggest adventure of the day. It got a little rough, but nobody puked. We kept our stomachs full with cold Coca-Cola and nice big chunks of ice. Coke can taste very good in salty conditions, I’ve noticed.

  We went to Fig Island, which is one island too small for the Arabs to bother to take. It was nice. We played in the water. Londie and I worked on our kissing nerve by trying to swim at each other underwater and embrace and then kiss, but each time one or both of us burst out laughing in embarrassment before we got our lips situated, big blasts of bubbles obliterating the target and the moment, and we’d have to surface for air and laugh and laugh more to conceal how scared we were to actually do it. And then I saw something that really took the wind out of my sails.

  There was Taurus and his girl about a hundred yards away in chest-deep water, and she had her arms at full length draped on his shoulders, and maybe it was a trick of light and water or something but I swear I saw large pale surfaces between them and I thought it was her tits floating. It destroyed our game, made it so silly. I don’t even know if it was her tits, if boobs even float like that, if it wasn’t a fish belly. But the idea was enough. Me and old A’londine was way down in the minors, so I suggested we walk the island.

  It had a shell ring. That’s a ring of oystershells piled about head-high in a circle about fifty yards across. Indians made them, they say for ceremonies and whatnot, and of course even live sacrifices get bandied about, but my information is that they don’t really know. The rock hounds and anthropods come out and remove chunks of the rings like bites out of a doughnut, but I don’t think they ever find anything but oystershells. The digs are all old-looking. My guess is it’s where the Indians had their oyster roasts, and a fine way to use the shells too, because it cuts out the wind for 360 degrees.

  Anyway, we thought about the ghosts of Indians and rumrunners and all those old things that took place on a coast, and we didn’t really square off for the kissing like we wanted to. Just became regular jake friends while Taurus, etc. I felt little.

  But at least he went to bat for me, and if I whiffed, it wasn’t his fault, maybe not my fault, certainly not button-nosed Altalondine Jenkins’s fault, and most certainly not that big wobbly blessing’s fault, for if ever there was a walking incitement to riot she was it. Call her my first love, fine with me.

  I think that was his plan, really, to show me not cutie-cakes but what you can find if you look for genteel Diane Parkers—big, wonderful, warm girls who are just a hint upset about things. A smudge of abandon. Maybe that’s my motto. Me and old Mike can team up. He can worry about being an ignoramus and I can worry about round, wonderful girls with their edges ruined by life’s little disasters, who remain solid and tough in their drive to feel good—to themselves and to you—and offer a vision of snug harbor.

  Photos for the Record

  WE GOT BACK FROM sailing, still ratified by mullet. I said let’s stop at this photo parlor. It was an ancient type, with medieval backdrops and little dull pictures of you about three for a dollar. We walked in and didn’t see anybody.

  “What fer ya?” comes from the rear of the hall. All we could see was amusement things, like punching bags with strength meters, pinball games, and the like, down both walls to darkness.

  “Some photographs,” I said. We had walked up on the speaker, who was sitting in a metal scallop lawn chair. Around him were a stove, refrigerator, TV, end tables, some fruit. We were in his living room.

  “Sit down,” he says. “It’s hot.”

  “Yessir,” Taurus says, “plenty hot.”

  There was his wife, too, in another scallop chair. She said, “Hmmp.”

  “You young Americans just sit down and give a account of y’self,” the old guy says.

  “This is sure one nice game hall,” Taurus says.

  “Hmmp.”

  “This, son?” The old man points around. “This a gyp joint, son.”

  We sat there.

  “Was nice, once. Had a bunch more in it. Our daughter sells it off next door.”

  The wife chuckled. He looked at her. “What?”

  “The bear,” she said.

  “Had this bear in here, she sold it, it would … you would squeeze it to show how strong you were on a dial thing. Only thing was, it squoze back.”

  She chuckled again.

  “So we had a bunch a’ navy come in here one day and a big boy got that bear and wouldn’t give up and it broke bofe his ribs.”

  “Both?” I said.

  “Bofe of ’em,” he said happily, then he sobered up. “Time was, a thing like that was funny. They all left laughing like hell.”

  “Today you’d get sued,” the wife said.

  “Evathing changes.” He looked around. “Boys, remember that. This ain’t nothin’ but a gyp joint. We just holding on. Evathang cha
nges.”

  Then he drew near and looked Taurus in the eye. “We’re from Georgia.”

  We sat there.

  “Well, about those pictures,” I said.

  “Sho. Come on, come right on up. Me and Opal wasn’t doing nothing but feeling sorry for ourself anyway.”

  We took snapshots in these Confederate scenes. I thought we’d come out looking like J.E.B. Stuart and Nathan Bedford Forrest. Taurus looked like a criminal and I looked like a mole. But we had them photographs.

  In this old real snapshot we have (you can tell it’s old by the beer can I use—it has rims visible on the end, and it’s bitten open by the turtle-beak shapes of a church key), I am pouring seawater on the Doctor, who is lying face down in the sand. The water is frozen glisteny, one inch from hitting her. And I have this smile and kind of nervous-looking feet and legs, like I know I’m going to have to run. Well, the old man is off about six feet, I guess, watching this—he took the picture. I don’t remember running. I don’t remember ever wearing the dumb bathing suit they have me in, either. It’s all crinkly and flimsy and baggy, like lettuce or something. But other than that, you can tell everything’s fine. Daddy didn’t shoot out of focus, or shake the camera, and didn’t cut half the Doctor or me out with a bad aim. And she looks very serene, very settled, maybe beautiful. You can tell even I know it because, though my legs are nervous and ready, I’m very pleased with what I’m doing. I’m happy about it.

  But later it’s not so clear, things. I have another beach memory. I’m out in the water and all of a sudden the Doctor is waving me in and calling me. So I head in and she starts waving even harder—I see then she’s not calling me in, but screaming me out. I wasn’t even coming in when she started. It’s most weird. There’s a stir up the beach, I see, by an old boat. Daddy is over there and their guests. Well, I can only get near enough to see Daddy shoot a pistol at the boat. Everything relaxes. I get past her then and up to the boat and he’s shot a snake.