Edisto - Padgett Powell (14 page)

"What’s happening?"

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

"Ho1y 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 1ife’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 changes."

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

We sat there.

"Wel1, 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.

"Are you satisfied?" Daddy says to the
Doctor.

"It’s still alive," she says. Then to me:
"Get back, Simons Everson!”

I take a step or two back.

"There was no need to kill it," Daddy says,
and walks off.

Then I saw what I thought was guts on the sand start
moving. The snake was twisting like a spring and I thought the guts
were attached and that explained it. But the guts got two feet away,
over unstained sand, and kept going. It was babies!

"You might have killed it," I called to
them, "but you missed these here," and I was going to pick
them up, they were very cute, when it really broke loose, the Doctor
snatching at me hysterically and the old man kept walking, laughing,
down to the beach. There’s no photograph of that, of any of that.
 

A Revelation of Foolery

Well. You knew he was a rake before you saw him
courting women bosom-loosed in the swelling green sea, because, if
for no better reason, he had learned that trick of keeping his mouth
shut for the most part around women, like the varsity ninth-graders
around cheerleaders. Except in their case it’s a practiced move and
in his it’s genuine.