Edisto - Padgett Powell (13 page)

"
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, sol 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.

"Wheah whah?"

"The cold beer l"

"Ho1d 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. T'hat’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.

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 ourse1ves—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 I 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-vvise. (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.