Edisto - Padgett Powell (10 page)

"Hi, Ducks," she said.
 
"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. You 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.

“
What’s an envelope?" he asked.

"It’s a thing you eat for breakfast," I
popped.

This queer color went through everybody’s face like
heat lightning, and I knew something was wrong. So I thought, in the
way you can if you’re three years old and they’re scudgin’ you,
very hard about my answer and the question, and it didn’t fit
right, not quite, even though I thought they should have given me
some points for speed. Very sharply I slapped my forehead and said,
"What am I doing, failing!" And that reversed the heat
lightning, calmed the waters of worry. No kid, master of the Boy Act
at three, could, they figure, be retarded. So I was off. But it left
an imprint. They didn’t trust me. I knew. Nor I them.

I found out later it was the Doctor took me there,
not the Progenitor. He thought I was regular for three, but she had
to see if I could ever learn to read. Well, it’s true I couldn’t
tie a shoe or stop wetting the bed, but those Golden Books never gave
me a problem. And then it was on to all these award children’s
books about contemplative rabbits, and llamas that talk and go both
ways, which I didn’t know at the time was preparing me for faculty
parties.

And then it was on to the Library itself, my
bookwalled bassinet, and the great stuff. Now, some of it’s pretty
good, but I spent a lot of misdirected energy being disappointed by
titles, like I told you, things like The Screwtape Letters, which I
thought was a transcript of tapes about you-know-whatting. Anyway,
smelling the coast in that gently howling pagoda at 3 a.m. got me to
thinking about things that were going on. In a way, the house would
tell me how to study things. The surf said more at a distance than up
close. I was governor of the rum-runners inside the house, at a
remove from the action, but outside I was a kid getting wet from the
spray of the waves. Still, it seemed that things were happening, but
when I looked squarely at them, I wasn’t sure.

Like I get to tear up the yard of a big house and
notice this kid’s mother’s bazongas and suddenly my father is a
new beast for it—that’s no event. And the faculty party is not
exactly headlines—not even with me crouching under the sideboard to
listen to the lushes and all of a sudden wondering about Taurus and
the questions on the lushes’ minds—that is not finally an event
either, but it seemed so. Well, things like this piled up on me,
little nothings that seemed like somethings. `

One night in the playwright’s patented ozone,
watching the wind lift the curtains, I got very progressive and
wondered almost aloud why I had the feeling something finally was
happening. I couldn’t have told Theenie nothing was happening then,
because it was, something was. Then I knew that what I couldn’t
tease Theenie about was Taurus, and not because she wasn’t there to
tease, but because somehow he was much larger or worse or more
significant than TV and the gubmen, and it wouldn’t have been
teasing but something clearly unchildlike for me to bring him up. And
I thought it would kind of profane him too, and somehow also the
Doctor, who was going without her maid and holy folded linen and
vacuumed floors to have him in the shack when she didn’t, I think,
even see him two times for five minutes in a week. And somehow it
would profane Daddy too—and the Doctor and Daddy, even though by
public decree they had done that one up brown already—if I said two
words to her about this alleged grandbaby. Seeing Daddy’s car
parked a little crooked in the driveway and knowing not to hear what
I heard was important too in this new kind of event which presents or
contains no action. And even somehow Preston and Jinx and Jake and
all the Negroes who ran up to me when I rolled into the oak tree like
the low country’s own gold-medal gymnast, and looked at me in a way
that was uneventful but magic, like I was not just a traffic casualty
but a special thing to them, connected to this series. Somehow they
would all be insulted if I went about trying to sift action out of
what I considered actionless events. If I pursued this racial
question on him any more than anyone else was, or insisted on knowing
more than I knew, it would have been like charging into the marsh
with a coffee can to catch the iiddlers, and they would have defended
their secrets, waving their tiny ivory swords and backing into their
holes, and you’d be sucking through the pluff mud like a fart
machine. And you’d come out green with mud and oyster cut, and with
an empty can.