I tried bravely to cooperate. “Why is that so important to you?”
She looked at me with a certain, quiet horror. “I don’t know who I am.”
“You’re you,” I offered brightly, and got more of the look.
“No. What if my parents were—coal miners or something?”
“Oh. I see.”
I didn’t see, of course, but the Veteran, yet stomping around in his enraged search, put the notion in my head that she was in pursuit—and for all I knew, it was literally something like this bothering her—she was after, in a way, her own set of dead niggers. I sat there looking at her, the only body in the place not after a dead nigger. She was extremely good-looking, extremely good-looking.
“So. You. What about you?”
She was extremely good-looking. “What if we skip that?” I said. “What if you don’t know anything about me except the as is?”
“Nooo,” she said. “That’s weird.” She took another gargantuan sigh. “There’s been just too much weirdness in my life.”
I wondered if it would be too much weirdness to cross the room and lie down on top of her, as every gesture of hers for the last twenty minutes suggested one should, and decided it would be.
“Thanks for the beer.”
“You bet.”
She did not get up as I let myself out. She lay there like Theda Bara, looking at the ceiling, pondering her lost parents.
I WAS CHARGED UP. I wanted to go to a revival across the river for reasons then and still not altogether clear, yet now I can detect some order in all the disorder. I am not certain that life itself is not some complex series reducible to its hundred thousand discrete reactions between reactant A and B yielding product C and D with this or that energy consumed or released to yield E and F from C and D, and so forth. I left the Veteran in pursuit of his dead nigger and visited the Orphan, a silent-screen actress in pursuit of hers, and in three weeks would be living with a true actress. In between, I went to a revival, ostensibly to get a look at the inside of a tent—Tom and I had never erected our monstrous units, each larger than the rooms they were wadded into—and what I saw was a conglomeration of folk all as desperate for phantoms as the Veteran and the Orphan, and all arguably after a dead man who might never exist for them. There were not a few actresses present as well, the real kind that central casting never gets. They were rolling on the ground, for the most part, being held gently at their crotches and breasts by a man with a copperhead.
After my day, I was not in a state to be further amazed, but I was further amazed. A smallish man—I took him to be about the size of Polanski—in a blue double-knit suit was screaming at near the pain threshold into a whizzing, hissing, scratchy public address system. How many years will you be in hell? he asked the congregation. The congregation was uncertain. He offered to tell them. “Pitcher to yourself a 1,” he yelled, “and foller it with all the zeroes in the world, and that’s how many years you’ll be in hell.”
The congregation held its breath. All the while the preacher was drawing zeroes in the air with one hand and holding in his other, calmly aloft, the copperhead. I neglected to follow the sermon, but it soon had its effect. Suddenly the man was on his heels discreetly feeling women rolling on the ground, touching the snake to them. One woman got up, brushed herself off, returned to her seat, located her purse, lit up a cigarette, sat back in her chair, and told her companion, “Go on, honey, get called. Nothing like it in the world.”
“I don’t know,” the second woman said. “Them things—”
“He’ll hold that thing, honey. It ain’t nothing but Satan’s failed little messenger boy.”
I looked at the docile copperhead, sanest fellow in the room, proving by not biting anyone how the truly damned are saved. I was starting to get high—high, I suppose, on the number of improbables that seemed to be appearing before me. I liked the feeling. Dreaming through more polyester loudness, I pictured to myself a 1, with all the zeroes in the world representing an endless chain of unconnected, connected events—my new theory of the human life reaction series. It seemed that I had been wasting my time by not acknowledging this necessary connectedness of the unnecessary things one can do in a life. I could do all the things in the world I wanted to do, ungoverned by imposed criteria for serious living, and they would connect, evolve, according to unalterable laws that were operating as surely as the one that popped Newton on the head with the apple, that made Mr. Millikan’s oil drops swerve, that made Herr Kekule’s snakes bite their tails and roll overnight into the benzene ring.
All I had to do was get loose in the limbec of life. A voice from this local, queer providence came to me from a row behind: “Did you know Camel Tent hiring, Jimmy?” I turned to look. Jimmy said he didn’t know and didn’t want to know, because Penny Baker sewed four of his fingers together and his (Jimmy’s) wife now had a good enough job for the both of them. “So why fix it if it works, right?” Jimmy said, and his friend nodded Amen.
I stopped at a snack joint on the way back over the river and watched the movie of just too much weirdness continue to play before me. A guy stood at a picnic table punching one of those fist-held cutters into a box top of onions. He was crying from the onions. From inside the joint came a voice: “Just because your dog died, it’s no reason to cry.” Some laughter.
The guy threw his cutter into the onions and wheeled on me. “I caint take it!” he said.
He came nearer. “I can do the job they want, but I caint take a joke!”
It was possible to believe, looking at the tears streaming down, that they were not all onion-induced. He was breathing hard, truly worked up.
“You just got to grow up,” the kitchen voice came. “Dogs die.” Howling in the kitchen.
The onion chopper ran to the serving window and raised it and yelled inside, “I caint take it!” He tore off his apron and threw it in the dirt. He looked furiously at me. “I just caint take a joke,” he said again, somewhat calmer.
“I don’t blame you,” I said. “I can’t either.”
“You don’t understand.” He was the Veteran stateside.
“You’re right, I don’t.”
That satisfied him.
I slipped home, got in without spooking anyone. I had nothing in my life not to take, but liked the attitude. I’m not taking it either, I thought, when it comes, and maybe it has come and I have been taking it—maybe dilettante chemistry and bright girlfriends in Europe and inheritances hovering overhead are taking a lot of it. Tom’s hunting armadillo shit. Crackerjack nuke-whiz Tom, Fenster Ludge in tow, is taking it, and I’m not.
I wanted the Orphan badly, but not enough to take it.
THE NEXT MORNING I set out into old Knoxville for Camel Tent and passed on the way the woman I had passed for years who watered her garden every morning. She looked at me, surprised, I imagine, to see me walking in the opposite direction from that she expected of me. She waved. I waved back. I could not have known we had begun a correspondence. I did notice her, however, a bit more closely than ever before. She was got up in a brilliant turquoise robe and wore sufficient bright makeup to herself resemble a giant flower, and around her were a thousand smaller blooms of carmine azalea and purple iris and katydid-green leaves. Upon this dazzling garden she held a spray of nickel-colored water in a long arc from a fat red hose. I could see that she managed the spray by using her index finger over the hose mouth—I had an aunt who did that, the only other person I’ve ever seen do it that way. It was a bit of a riveting detail, and perhaps I looked at her too long. She waved again, and I waved back again.
I could not know, as I said, that we had begun a program of overland communications, and I didn’t know I was waving to Knoxville’s star actress, and I quite didn’t expect to be moving in and setting up a base for recording these my lab notes of life. I was hell-bent on getting down to Camel Tent and securing some form of income to replace my paltry but regular stipend.
Once there, I argued for an h
our about my surfeit of overqualifications to sew tents until I had a job sewing tents. When I sat down and hit the foot pedal and saw a hundred inches of cord shoot through cotton duck as heavy as a duffel bag out of a needle as big as an ice pick, I had no trouble recalling Penny Baker sewing his four fingers together. Near me a man was announcing how we were to distinguish male from female rattlesnakes. “You all better listen to this,” he said, concentrating on his stitching. “It’s valuable.”
“Shut up, Sweetlips,” a second man said from a nearby machine.
“O.K., fine,” Sweetlips said. “Don’t find out. I could care less. But the fact of the matter is females don’t have any poison and if you know that, you’re safe.” He bent to his stitching.
“Tell it to the new girl.”
“Do you know how to tell a female rattler?” Sweetlips said to me.
“No. How?”
“They don’t have any rattlers.” With that he placed a large paper cup on the floor under his machine and pissed in it from his sitting position. “They don’t pay me to lollygag half the day in the head,” he said. “So I don’t.” He reminded me of the Veteran—I’ll turn it off, then.
I sat amazed at the synchronicity of these things—pissing on floors, nuts, snakes everywhere, tents—and amazed at how correct they seemed, fitted together in a matter of hours with an overwhelming sense of orchestration that seemed to satisfy whatever urge bade me walk out of the laboratory. I felt fine, a fine idiot doing a fine idiot job, listening to fine idiot patter.
“The new girl’s O.K.,” Sweetlips said, after a while, to the other man. “I been watching him. Don’t fuck with him or I’ll kill you.”
The other guy said, “Right, Killer.”
When the shift ended, Sweetlips and the other guy took me to a place called Bilbo’s Bar, Gym & Grill. Inside, we sat at a lunch counter on stools facing a boxing ring. We ordered beer. Sweetlips said, “We come here to watch the niggers beat the ever-living shit out of each other.” He winked. He winked with an exaggeration reminiscent of a cartoon wink, signifying what irony I could not guess, because I took him at his word.
Presently the other guy, whom Sweetlips called Roach, said to me, “So tell us about the new girl.”
“The new girl doesn’t know her ass from a hole in the ground,” I said.
“That’s exactly what I said the minute I saw you,” Sweetlips said. “Didn’t I, Roach?”
“No, you were talking about rattlesnake pussy.”
“You think that’s a lie? Anybody’ll tell you that. The female has no rattlers. New girl, isn’t that a fact?”
I looked at Roach. He was indifferent to all of this.
Sweetlips leaned over me to Roach. “The new girl’s all right. I repeat: Don’t fuck with him or I’ll kill you.”
Two blacks started sparring. Roach said, “Shut up. This does me good.”
We watched the boxers work. One of the guys was as solid as a live oak, and after a couple of rounds he came over to our side of the ring and said to Roach, provoked by nothing I saw, “Fuck you, too.”
“You going to take that?” Sweetlips said. “I wouldn’t.”
“Kill him, then.”
“I would.”
By my reckoning it would have taken an army of Sweetlipses and Roaches to even pin the dude.
“I’m as strong as that nigger,” Sweetlips said.
“Jump him, then.”
“It wouldn’t be fair.”
I came to understand, during my brief tenure at Camel, that Sweetlips did two things, at all times tried to do two things: he proffered preposterous lies, making everyone present appear to believe them, and he boasted of his strength, which was perhaps a subset enterprise of the lying. One morning he announced that a pygmy rattlesnake had the dimensions of a short link of country sausage, showing us how long and how big around with his thumb and forefinger. On another occasion he claimed to have spotted a pygmy deer. “A full-ant ten-point buck no higher than a beagle!” No one challenged him on either pygmy, and he went on sewing, visibly more content.
On the issue of his strength he was even more hyperbolic. One morning he came in greasy, telling us he had on the way to work stopped and pulled a woman’s Ford engine out of her car. “It saved her a garage charge.”
Roach responded to this one. “Bledsoe,” he said, “there’s a string hanging out of your sleeve.”
Sweetlips looked at his T-shirt sleeves, finding no string.
“Oh,” Roach said. “I’m sorry. It’s your arm.”
Sweetlips jumped up, knocking over a tumbler of piss. “What! You don’t think I’m strong!” He ran to Roach’s machine and grabbed it and tilted the entire affair—Roach with it, the chair is connected—up about a foot off the ground, until Roach said, “O.K.” It was not an idle feat—the machine must have weighed three, four hundred pounds. Sweetlips’s back, under his tight T-shirt, clenched up into a set of knots that looked like a bag of rocks and sticks.
I could have kept going at Camel. All I had to do was listen to Sweetlips and Roach do their camp and worry about Penny Baker fingers. I set up an interesting routine. I went back to Bilbo’s and found a dude who wouldn’t kill me and learned a little boxing in the mornings. The watering woman and I, you might say, fell in love waving. I flirted at a hundred paces, got beat up for three rounds, listened to pygmy hysteria for eight hours. It was not a bad time. My previous life, of soft-metal bonding mechanics, seemed no less preposterous than Sweetlips’s life of pygmy sightings and giant strength. I was completely comfortable being completely out of control.
I WAS IN FACT beginning to feel like I was drunk but free of motor impairment. Whatever presented itself to me as partaking of the continuum of nuttiness was the thing for me. I would not act my age or observe my station.
Back at Bilbo’s Bar, Gym & Grill the next morning I had coffee. The same massive dude was sparring, this time with a slighter opponent, who was having a bad time of it. The lighter guy looked ready to quit, ready to cry, for that matter, but did neither. At every break the oak tree called him a punk.
I looked around. The counterman appeared to have scoliosis. He bent to hear a customer and jerked back up, staring wild-eyed at the customer. “No!” he shouted. “No more bacon!” The customer smiled and went back to reading his menu. The counterman retreated in a huff through double doors, out of sight.
The boxers had quit. I did not see the smaller guy, but the oak tree was putting Royal Crown dressing on his head and then a lady’s stocking over that. He picked up a load of gear equivalent in bulk to a rodeo cowboy’s tack and left.
The counterman returned and I got a refill. “Who is that guy just left?” I asked him.
“StebbinsStebbinsStebbins what—you fall off the truck? You want me to tell you history all day or you want to be somewhere else? No b.l.t.’s, in case that’s your next move.”
That was Harold, the counterman. What he had told me—in two weeks I managed to decode—was that everybody who was anybody knew Frank Stebbins, who had a middleweight match in France coming up, and who was going to be history when it was over, and that he (Harold) did not cook bacon anymore. Ever.
The slighter boxer reappeared at the counter near me, began looking suspiciously all around the place, and said quietly to Harold, “A Curs.”
More happily than I’d seen him all morning, Harold virtually ran a Coors over to him. “Shifty’ll chew your black ass when he sees this.”
“He ain’t gone see shit. Stebbins most kill me.” He took the Coors and poured it into a Coke can that he’d held under the counter.
“I’m looking for someone to spar with,” I said.
The boxer looked at me. “You botts,” he said. “I seen you before.”
“You’ve seen me drink beer in here, maybe.”
“I recall it. Wid honks.”
“Yes,” I said, nodding solemnly, as if to deepen the confession.
He looked to the ring as if we had not been speaki
ng.
After a while I said, “I guess you have to go with Stebbins, anyway.”
“What you mean?”
“Nothing. Just that you spar with—”
“Okayden.”
“Okay what?”
“Tamarr.”
“When?”
“Sikserty.”
“You can call me Al.”
“Egret.”
We tried to shake and got fouled up accommodating each other’s racial handshake, and wound up fumbling our fingers together awhile. We were involved in this little charade when a small, gray-haired squat of a man came up and grabbed Egret’s Coke can and threw it at Harold.
Neither Egret nor Harold said anything. The man stood his ground, rasping breath, the gray hair coming out of his ears and nostrils, his mouth stained olive by chewing tobacco. He looked at Egret.
“You conspiring to sign wid him now, or what?” He meant me.
“Haw, naw, Shif,” Egret said. “He a bottser himself.”
Shif—Shifty of Shifty’s Stable, as I came to know—regarded me with a long squint. The hair was coming out of him in tufts, in whorls—he looked like a tobacco-stained owl. He took a deep breath. “You wear glasses!” he said.
I heard Egret do a little thing like a hiss under his breath.
A Woman Named Drown Page 2