Edisto - Padgett Powell (8 page)

Well, he knows his moves,I see. Gees to the sideboard
and’s got a decanter top off and decanter on tilt when he sees no
glass, only the Doctor's metal Depression tumblers, which make stuff
taste like water squeezed out of electrical cord. He turns and gives
me a high sign (I’m in the kitchen see-through) to bring him a
glass. I carry it out like I was just going that way anyway, and he
pours into it, still in my hand, sets the decanter back, and turns
and takes the drink after he’s surveyed the whole room. They are
studying other things, in other directions than his, to a man. So I
know and he knows, I see him smiling. It’s the first time since
Theenie took off like all get-out that I’ve really considered the
large public questions about him and the situation. Like who is he?
What’s he doing here?

Before I even get out of the way, a woman of whom
it’s rumored her husband was found in a motel room with another man
on the faculty comes up and puts her hand on his arm and says, "We’ve
heard quite a bit about you, young man.” That’s a title I get a
lot during these parties, but tonight it’s his and it’s
different. It sounds more suspicious on him because he is one. I
guess about twenty-five. Maybe thirty.

"I’m Margaret Pinckney," she says to him,
adjusting her arm on his. "I’d introduce you to my husband,
Jim, but he’s not here.” Jim’s the one they said was in the
motel. She’s dressed up more than any other woman there.

"Wel1, Mahhgret, I see you’ve
met
him."
It’s the Bill they howled about in the president story, fluttering
his eyelids and blushing—won’t look at either Margaret or Taurus,
but holds out his hand, without saying his name, to Taurus, who
shakes it. Then, I guess before they could regroup, Taurus cruises
off toward the Doctor, who is entertaining.

"Bill, isn’t
Jim
enough?” says
Margaret.

"Enough whaat, Mahhgret?"

"Enough you
know
what."

Bill blushed. "Mahhgret, you d0n’t
understayan—"

"Yes, I do," she says, turning from the
sideboard with a whole tumbler of bourbon. “I understand perfectly
that you people can’t just be per
ni
cious. You’ve got to be
pro
mis
cuous on top of that." I hide, more or less, under
the sideboard.

"Mahhgret, now who is we? And anyway,
we
didn’t do anything to Jim, honey. Why that tendency’s been
quite
around, quite some—”

"Schmendency!
It’s cannibalism, human
larceny! And you’ve got to come over here just now when I’m
talking to Dr. Manny’s new—"

"New
what
, Mahhgret?"

"Her new friend.”

"Free-yend. Look at that bohunk. I heard he’s
her second
thesis
, honey."

This one confused me at the time, made me suddenly
self-conscious, crouching like a halfback, in full view under the
sideboard, so I trotted off to the kitchen, kind of burning
somewhere, almost wishing I had for cover a broom horse between my
legs. But I saw Margaret Pinckney leaving the area, too—at an
angle, but holding her tall tumbler at plumb, letting it lead her. I
think she took all the attention.

You can’t retreat to your room during one of these
deals, because browsers stroll in and look at the book titles and try
to talk to you, and the telescope trick I worked on the coroner won’t
hold up all night—in fact, it will draw more of these professional
people in. So I went down to Theenie’s to read W.P.A. stories.

For a long time I thought that the Negro who papered
those walls just did it random from a pile of newspapers on his
worktable in the center of the room, and there were so many W.P.A.
stories in the papers of 1937 that he just slapped up story after
story or page after page and they were all accidentally on the W.P.A.
Right next to a full feature on the Fair Park they built in Dallas,
with all that heavy extra stone, was an account of how many new
ditches were dug in Montgomery, which was going to be bad news for
mosquitoes, and next to that how many writers had been assigned to
make new plays for the stone-heavy theater that was going up, etc.
And one day it came to me: the paperhanger had to select the stories
out. There had to be breadline stories before there were W.P.A.
stories, and stock-market stories before that. So a Negro with
scissors in that shack so new it had good fresh black tar paper on
the outside goes through a ton of newspapers and pulls out the
stories he likes, a man with no job clipping out all these
manufactured jobs he couldn’t even get to or probably land if he
did get to, with a bucket of Hour and water and a stick to stir with
and his hand to wipe it on and lay in the wonderful stories. They
were good enough stories on their own, but when I figured out this
new aspect, they got better. Somehow, standing on Theenie’s bed or
on a chair reading them, I was closer to what really happened, if not
to how it was to hold a made—up job, then how it was to hold in
reverence their making up. It was a swell, poor time, I know.

There was always a new story to read, it seems, or
even if you thought you had read one before, a new way to imagine the
Negro reading it first, and so it became a new kind of story. Or
maybe he couldn’t even read. Maybe he could just detect W.P.A. and
cut out the connected columns, knowing or trusting it was the good
stuff. Maybe he was even not in gloried awe of the Project, didn’t
even know what it was. He could have thought W.P.A. was for "White
People’s Advantages" or something. Maybe he was bitter and
political in that shack in 1937. Who knows?

But anyway, you could always read and reread,
changing your opinion about the Negro and so changing the stories and
their effect now. I read them that night until Taurus showed back up.

"Is it over?"

"Near enough."

"You want to do something tomorrow?"

"Yeah. Come get me—after cartoons."

Cartoons. Consummate comedian he was. I went back to
the house and slipped in and it wasn’t over. It was blumberville.
Infamous motel Jim Pinckney had just got there.

"Well, what’s this guy like?” he said.

"Her second thesis?" Bill giggled.

"Or her second honeym—" Margaret was
slurry and too slow.

"I don’t believe a word of it," Bill
said. "Not a word. A Neeegrow. He’s as much black as I am."

Everybody looked at Bill, who blushed.

"A Nee-grow!” Jim said. "Jesus Christ.”
Jim was Old Guard.

“
So she sayez," Bill put in. "Moreover,
sired by a famous writer.”

“
Of the school—the Famous Writers School?"

‘
Sired by Famous Writer out of Negress—’ "

"Shut up, Jim," said the Doctor, who on her
foldedup legs was weaving slightly in the wicker settee.

"Yesss, honey. Do," said Margaret, who was
patting the Doctor. "Some of us still have regular hopes in this
wor1d."

Peals and knee-bouncing by Bill and Jim, Bill looking
at the ceiling finally, with tears in his eyes. I slipped outside and
went up the front stairs and climbed in the window to my room and
didn’t hear any more of it. But this is where I learned all the
crap on him they had, and, I thought, the main reason she was hyped
up on him. If she even thought his father was a writer, then he was
supposed to influence, any way it might happen, me.
 

On the Prevention of —ease Only

For a while there I guess he was still serving papers
out of Charleston, because I would ride the bus home like always,
except of course for the rear-door positioning. He dropped me off in
the morning and went on up and got some blue folders with the
criminal activities alleged therein and fell to on the people while I
was in school. He said it was kind of hard, doing it, not being the
law but just a kind of citizen-scab, a bounty hunter for gunslingers
so small that they didn’t spend tax money on the sheriff to go get
them with. They weren’t gunslingers, though—bad-check slingers,
bad-language slingers. Mostly the baddest thing they committed, he
said, was bad judgment. He didn’t like it and said sometimes he let
the people go. All that does is delay things. The paper reverts to
the attorney’s office and doesn’t look too good on his service
record, and he said his attorneys knew from the cases he had found
that there was something fishy when he gave up and turned one back
in.

So he’s out being Matt Dillon, chasing down
rottenteeth van people and gold-teeth Negroes descendent of
Oglethorpe convicts and slaves, and I’m in the front seat of the
bus like a bus rider emeritus. For a while there were jokes. "Hey,
Sim! Comone back heah. The
air
better." At home the sun
would be swung around and low, about ten feet up in the air. Its
angle was perfect for about two hours to fill up the house with
mirror light glaring up off the ocean, blinding upward through the
sliding doors onto the ceiling so that any shadows thrown were thrown
out the windows and you never saw them. It made it like a dollhouse
or a perfectly lit stage set. The wind kept whistling that peppery
noise against the house, little sand grains working their way through
somehow, tumbling in their little glassy bounce across the floors
like an eminent-domain march to the other side of the room, and
piling up on false Edens such as a throw rug or under the TV. So I’m
in there looking at the flash of ocean, moved by the heat in the
direction of the sand, shadowless and hot, quiet except for the
peppering which you quit hearing, wondering about things, touching
the wicker to make it squeak, the glass decanters and their little
tin bibs on chains telling you what kind of poison they hold, feeling
the drapes, which lift off the floor like old big rats are behind
every one of them, listening for a clue about something I can’t
even figure out what it’s about.

And nothing happens. At a time like this you expect
some news, an event, maybe just some excitement. But it doesn’t
come. The sun swings on around and throws the set into the cool,
dusky aftertime of the studio or stage where everything had been
ready, lights and camera and player and no one to clap together two
striped barricades and simply yell, Action. Instead, the lights quit
and quiet and cool; dim dusk dawns on the regular old house, the
plain land sales office pagoda.

"Sim!” Theenie would say if she caught me in
one of these conditions. "What ails you?"

"Nothing."

"Somethin’ ailin’ you."

"Nothing."

"Hmmp!” she would say, going about her
business. Or I could take the talkative route: "Nothing ever
happens, Theenie."

"Say whah?" Very high.

"I said,
Nothing ever happens."

"Hmmp!" she would say, going about her
business,

One time I said: "I’m worried, Theenie?

"What
choo
worrit about." Not a
question, a denial of my right or cause to worry, against the larger
monopoly of adult rights.

"Puberty.” I looked at her to see if it
worked. She looked like a horse in a stall wondering whether to kick
a careless stable boy, eyes orbiting in quick I white slices like
quarter moons.

"I’m worried about this thing they call
puberty."

"You
scudgin’
me. Why you wont to grind
me, Sim?" and she flopped all the ironing together, which would
have otherwise taken a half hour to fold up, and left, silent until
tomorrow, until a short trial during which I could not refer to the
question would secure my reprieve, and we could be jake again. If I
did it like that, a puberty question was just a souvenir in the
memory of her raising me up, but if I asked again, I was closer to a
hellion. She could tell people how sweet I was to have asked, but not
that she had to answer. It’s part race relations and part family
relations, there.

So there in the upward glare of clinical Atlantic
radiation I remain—before the Doctor comes in with a batch of
papers to grade, new bottle in a skin-tight paper sack twisted around
the neck. The breaking seal will suck a little air out of the
kitchen, like the hiccup of a baby, air that slips into the bottle
and hits the liquor and changes it like film or blood: blood, film,
liquor are never seen before their innocence is lost. Also in this
air-innocence class is rubbers, which didn’t get into the class for
a while because I didn’t know what they were. In the top drawer of
the Progenitor’s chest I found these gold-coin-like deals almost
like candy mints except, thank God, light enough to tip me off before
I tried to eat one. Then I thought they were amusement-park tokens or
pirate doubloons you buy drinks with in a resort-town bar or
something. Then I figured they were gambling chips from the Bahamas,
where they’d been on a trip. Gambling chips—I was close. Anyway,
the matter came up at school and somehow I learned what they were
for, if not exactly what they were, so in one of our first Big
Brother reunions after the Progenitor left, I advanced the line of
inquiry about rubbers. "They stop babies, okay, I got that much,
but how?"

"Well," he said, "you put them on."

"How?"

"Well—" He fumbled in the air in front of
the steering wheel; we were in his car, engine running. He tucked the
fingers on one hand into the palm of the other. Suddenly he rested
his hands. "Like a sock."