Edisto

by Padgett Powell

  One time I remember she raised up out of the dark trench and squeezed off a round right in the open. It was at the party where Margaret Pinckney told the joke, and Bill called Taurus a thesis, and Margaret said some people had regular hopes still, and the Doctor told Jim to shut up. Well, I left the next part out because of the assignment. But I’m in a clear censor mode now so I’ll add it on. After Margaret said the girls still had regular hopes, I saw the Doctor do the most amazing thing.

  She kissed Margaret Pinckney full on the lips, like a man, lipstick and everything. Well, Margaret started crying and hugging her like they were long-lost relatives, one of whom had been missing in action and given up for dead, which was not amazing, not for Margaret, still holding her tumbler of bourbon plumb over the Doctor’s shoulder and calling for Kleenex with her free hand. Bill of course turns beet-red and runs for the bathroom and comes back recomposed but trailing unbroken toilet paper because he forgot to break it off. “That’ll do fine right there, Bill,” the Doctor says, and there’s a laugh all around, and the women separate, and immediately the regular party hum-drum cranks up again—a gentle, assuring din that says everything’s fine. Except the Doctor has a hard, clear pair of eyes deliberately looking nowhere, which she does to conceal purpose. That’s what got me, that look. And that smooching was a doozie. That, as they’d say in the Grand, was most definitely jam up.

  And I know this, too—soldiering once got her a purple heart. Because once upon a time she was a regular polite heroine in the small-town world of young virgins, as described by the most famous playwright. She went to a small college and was engaged to a handsome dude with papers and everything was set. Here the playwright always turns the screws with something like the girl catching her dude in another man’s arms. Well, our soldier doesn’t catch the fiancé in bed with a man, he just comes out and announces it, and the wedding is off, of course, and the rest of the play proceeds. She doesn’t blame herself for the next two acts because the gent shoots himself, or screw an entire army base, but she does set-to on the nearest law school. She doesn’t get crazier, she gets saner, with a vengeance. Lawyers, she figures, can’t be that duplicitous, at least not with their bound commitment to uphold the law and all these unnatural-act statutes staring them in the face, so it’s a much safer bet, getting one of these guys. The other guy was a poet, whose job, by comparison, was to challenge laws like that, anyway. So she wised up. That’s why I’m half Republican and in Cooper Boyd instead of altogether socialist and taking dancing or piano lessons. It’s like an outcross in dogs or horses. If she’d got that first dude, it would have been severe ideological inbreeding, and I might be shy or vicious or something. This way, the way Vergil tells it anyway (he breeds bird dogs), I can be a “good athlete,” which means not baseball but just a solid individual partaking of two separate strengths and not two compounded weaknesses, I hope.

  I realize now I sort of trusted her as the commander all along, the man in charge, like at Parris Island, where they say that even though what they do to you and ask you to do looks bad, if not insane, you won’t get hurt if you do what they tell you. If you trust the man in charge. And on top of that, you’ll thank them for making you let sand fleas burrow a quarter inch into your hide and for breaking your nose if you scratch at one. So I sort of knew or trusted, in this way at least, the principle of the man in charge, and she was him, and I believe it did not hurt, and I’ll do that thanking in the end.

  Taurus in a Spot of Trouble

  THIS ONE’S TRUE. THE one about Theenie’s lost grandbaby might have been put together, fiction-mode. But this one happened.

  Right before we went to that photo parlor—in fact, we went in there to rest after the trouble—Taurus got in a fight with a bum. We were in a little restaurant by the bus station in Charleston. A jukebox was playing and this little girl had learned to kick it and make the needle skip back to the beginning. She replayed the song about five times and was giggling when the bum called her over to the counter by saying, “Tell me what’s on your Santy Claus list.” It wasn’t near Christmas, but she went for it. Well, it worked. The song ended. She ran back over and kicked the box, but too late. She got mad and the bum drank his beer.

  Taurus gives her a dime.

  The bum says, “Why ’ont you mine your own bizzness, buddy?”

  Taurus says, “Why ’ont you mine yern?”

  “Shih. Your kind chaps my ass.”

  The song came back in, the little girl beaming. “Care to dance, mister?” Taurus said. I was scared, but it was worth it.

  “What are you—a hippie?”

  Taurus looked at me. He was solid as a Marine. “Yes, sir. I’m a pacifist. Don’t believe in violence of any kind.”

  “You don’t believe … ’at’s what ruint Veetnam. You step outside, son. I’mone teach you something.”

  “I’d rather listen to this rock and roll, sir.”

  “You’re a punk.”

  That did it. I saw Taurus change. His nose flared. He put money on the table and walked out. They had a side alley. He went in there. Taurus suggested I go back inside and dance with the girl or something but I wasn’t budging. It didn’t matter because before anything Mr. Psoriasis II came rolling down the alley at a tilt after Taurus.

  Taurus handled him like a bull, I swear. He never moved his feet much and every time the bum charged, headfirst, Taurus just caught him in the chest with short little punches that more than anything kept the guy from falling down. The guy didn’t stop, so Taurus opened his hand and slapped him very hard on the face.

  The man stood back, amazed.

  “Why don’t you quit?” Taurus said.

  The man was congested and green-looking, with pink-and-red splotches on his face. He charged and tripped and fell at Taurus’s feet and skinned half his nose off, and it bled from the inside, too. Taurus put a five-dollar bill by his head and said this speech in the tightest voice I ever heard him use: “Take a taxi to the county clinic. You broke your fucking nose.”

  We left. We tried to walk it off, I think. Just before we went into that photo parlor, Taurus said, “The only doctor that bastard’s going to is M.D. 20/20.” He was cool, but that deal had his nerves out. He was taking deep breaths every few minutes. I had the idea he had been very correct in all that crap, but he still didn’t like it one bit. One thing was sure: Psoriasis II had a brand-new idea about hippies.

  I cannot imagine my father doing anything like this. He would talk too much or call the heat or something. Then explicate it. But you could imagine Taurus directing a holdup with his hand in a paper bag suggesting a gun. I saw Jake stop a fight like that with his hand in a blue velvet Crown Royal bag. Taurus could do it, too. I’m rambling off the page. I’ll miss him, is all.

  But it was little things like this that will stand out. Not the fight—of course that’s special. I was scared. But how smart he was gets me. All this crap off Psoriasis II and he never really gets riled out of shape. Just handles the situation without more or less than it demands—like being named “Taurus” and (apparently) deciding it will do. And never telling me his real name. Now, here’s where he leaves this world. Someone else, would correct you. Someone else would threaten the bum with the police or kill him in the alley. Well, I hatched a theory about it.

  You can explain some of it with the heroin-baby rumor. Say he did have a heroin birth and had half his time sense, like memory, blown out. Then he could have to accept someone naming him. But I doubt that story.

  Going into the photo parlor, I caught the essence of it. It was that he did not know what his life held and so studied it very closely. And I was different: mine held all the plans the Doctor and Daddy would negotiate, a cross-hatching of professional ambitions. I was not going to get to be a two-cylinder syntax dude at the Grand. I was, I am—I have to admit, that because my life is cloyed by practical plans and attainable hopes—I am white. Best thing to do, I figure, is to get on with it. So I said let’s go in that joint for commemora
tive photos, my heart really beating then. I had one of these white hearts that lub-dub this way: then—next; and Taurus had one of these that go now—next; and the guys at the Grand went now—now. And you can’t change that with decisions to be cool. You can’t get to that now—now without a congenital blessing or disease, whichever applies.

  So we went in, as I said, and took those shots, and I looked, apropos of all this horseshit, like a grub, and Taurus like a dusky man in jail.

  The Official Hiatus of Simons Manigault Begins

  WELL, HERE I AM in old brand-new Hilton Head, which I thought was the first solid Arab bastion and a pure squat of Hell, but now it seems a scalawag of our own sold it out. He went all down the coast doing it. Got to Cumberland Island and he met the old Carnegie Steel people, who stopped him, sold their whole joint cheap to the feds. Yankee steel people preserving the South, Arabs the new Yankees, scalawags persisting as usual, and the place is consequently as confused as during Reconstruction.

  But it’s somehow pleasant enough here. The oaks are all pruned like I said, so they look like perfect trees in cement zoo cages. Small creosoted timbers are driven into the ground, forming borders for everything—plants, people, golf carts, restaurant parking. Condominia are all over, roads deliberately curve everywhere when they could go straight, the tinkling postcard marina, lobbies, lounges, links, limousines.

  All the Negroes are in green landscape clothes, or white service jackets, or Volvos with their kids in tennis togs. It’s something. Already their shacks and the bus riding with them smoking dope and the Grand scenes are dimming into the remembered vividness of a private gallery in my mind. I have to be on guard about it, about it all becoming photographs in a drawer, like Daddy remembering Jake’s daddy’s joint as a class operation, but Jake’s is just a juke joint. That’s not right. There’s something fake in that. And what I worry is, I’ll go back and do the same thing, or never go back, which will have the same effect. I’ll just watch the photographs yellow.

  We never talked about it or anything, but Taurus had a plan about this. He’d never be so eager to frame and crop the past, because that poses the present—you have to pose it to photograph it. And that means you can’t take the future in its full array of possibility, because you’re fixing to have to compose it for the present snapshot. It’s all square, very square. Nobody in the Grand would ever do that. Nobody could. What presumption. There’s not enough of an image to work with, to crop. So they don’t shoot up the present with instant past, with warm immediate memories of how great it was, because it wasn’t great.

  Except the new Negroes in the Volvos, I guess they will try, they have enough to compose with, and you can’t blame them. But at the Grand I couldn’t go around that night and say goodbye. I would be freezing that night by anticipating Hilton Head, with a put-on spirit of lament, which would be phony to them, an insult, for if they were so lucky as to go, to get a Volvo run at things and dress their kids in new clothes, they wouldn’t be bitching about it or even hanging around to talk about it. If someone did, he would come in with all his cash and buy the house for the night. And when he got there, and if his life became as comfortable and wonderful as the white lives already there, would he start snapping up the present with instant past? It’s like when you watch TV sports with instant replays. You don’t even get caught up in the live play, because if you miss something you just run back in and see the great action you missed—the scenes already past which make the game you never saw so memorable. Hell, maybe there’s nothing so wrong with that. Maybe Jake and those guys deserve better times at any cost. But I think they could make a mistake of a large kind if they ever come to Hilton Head and act white. I can’t express it. But I know you can spend an evening with Preston and Jinx, and you can’t spend one with Jim and Bill and the coroners. That’s a fact.

  I think of Jake with his foot up on the beer box, elbows crossed on his knee, in his apron, smoking, looking off, calling his mother if something goes the dog’s way. He knows he has only a few pieces of the puzzle it takes to put together a life leaving for a place like Hilton Head. And Taurus gone—hell he’d just about handed me back Penelope and Ulysses like he sort of did by setting me up with Londie, his girl’s prim cousin, instead of the looser model I wanted, which would have made it all different for me. And now I am a good gentry tyke in Cooper Boyd, headed shortly for St. Cecilia Society balls with a million Altalondine Jenkinses instead of talking trash with true Diane Parkers in roadhouses. He knew what he was doing. But the point is, he just cut out, didn’t hang around for a photo session to preserve anything.

  He’ll walk into a Cajun bar down in Louisiana and be on the inside in two minutes with some trick of astute casual attention like calling that Slitz a little Joe, some new profession, name maybe, no regrets, no losses, no cumbersome ideas of what he is or is to be, no freight train of future bearing down on him, no comet of good old days burning him to a cinder of constantly failing memory.

  When Taurus was gone I had a dream. You know how sometimes you think you’ve dreamed something before, or part of something before? And you dream again to develop it? I had that feeling. It was one of those dreams where nobody looks like anyone you know but they are people you know. And nothing follows or fits, but it all means stuff anyway.

  It opens on a prison visitation room with a wire screen. An Elizabeth Taylorish woman, made up with red red lips and purple cheeks, plays the Doctor, and a Paul Newmany dude plays Taurus. He comes in under guard. Her eyes are rheumy, old rubbed-on peepers from a crying jag. “Take another cell, just for the night,” she says.

  “For God’s sake,” he says.

  “He’s a man’s man. I have warned you.”

  “Be sure about dis ding, baby,” he says, gangster-style.

  Sniffling, tear-racked, she ekes out: “Chemistry never changes.” She pouts like a minnow.

  He rips up his side of the room. Guard doesn’t even stop him. Just comes in and says, “Okay, buddy, it ain’t the end of the world.”

  Then I think I dreamed of the morning after the night I learned that chemistry never changes, when I found Taurus making coffee at the Boy Scout camp, life on the open range. My sense is all messed up on it, when these dreams were. In fact, how much of the groaning rocks and chemistry talk was a dream, how much might have been the same thing as thinking I felt the comfort of Taurus coming in the house without knowing I knew it, I don’t know. I do know when I got up I felt as dumbly wise as a fiddler crab. I looked at my mother and father very closely. They were jake.

  So that’s me. This is my motto. Never to forget that, dull as things get, old as it is, something is happening, happening all the time, and to watch it.

  Living in a joint where the oaks are robbed of their moss and amputated of their little limbs is like living in an architect’s model, and sleeping in redwood boxes is fakey, like being a cigar, and we now have furniture that will not make noise, and all those sailboats tinkling halyards against masts day and night, never been out of the harbor, is evil, or something, at least screwball as hell, but now I wonder: Who’s to say all that stuff I left—the Grand, Taurus, the Georgia-Pacific pagoda and plantation of weeds—what if all that’s the museum?

  I got to heave to, hard-to-lee, or I’ll get in the same trap I was in. Just because this place looks like a layout on a ping-pong table don’t mean it ain’t happening right here too. Whatever’s happening. Hell, Taurus would become a bartender and watch the tennis ladies and seduce a share of them. And Theenie hauls in here, finds the vacuum, falls to in a minute. And the Doctor and the Progenitor get married and my custody junkets are over. It’s the modern world. I have to accept it. I’m a pioneer.

  Still, I haven’t seen any mullet or mullet people. It’s swordfish steaks from Boston now. That’s where we’re at, now. And the Hilton Lounge, cocktails, and red carpet, and I’m done with the Baby Grand. Even if Jake’s still smoking while he studies the wall.

  I’m done with the Baby Grand.
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  I’m done with the Baby Grand.

  There.

  I will say one thing: I’ve had some luck. There’s not a baseball diamond on the island. I take a tennis lesson on Tuesday, a golf lesson on Thursday, and my new bar is a joint called the 19th Hole. I chat regular with the pro golfer, a real PGA dude. They serve me lemonade. The lessons, the fees, club sandwiches, everything goes on little register tabs I sign and Daddy picks up. We will be in father-son tournaments before long. “You never heard of Sam Snead?” the golf pro says, already looking around to tell somebody I haven’t.

  “This young fella never heard of Slammin’ Sammy Snead,” he tells them, and I’m a curiosity all over again, Then they tell me about the beautiful, glorious, gone past of golfing greats who were not kids off scholarship college golf teams but gentlemen who honed themselves on the grindstone of caddying for two bits a round. You never see these guys fold their arms and smoke and look for hours at a wall, knowing they don’t know the whole alphabet of success, have all the pieces. They know the whole alphabet of worldly maneuver.