Edisto - Padgett Powell (9 page)

"Like a sock?"

"Yessir,” he said, nodding, and very satisfied
about something. "Anything else you want to know?" Else?

"No, sir.”

"Sure?"

"Yes, sir." He left out the juice part, the
good part, left me imagining your tallywhacker (the Doctor’s
favorite word for it) is some kind of electric eel or polyp stinger
you have to insulate with rubber. Nothing about it stopping the paste
of life. I have to learn about that at the back of the bus, where you
can learn all you need to know on earth. Brylcreem, they said, and
feels good. So. A sock stops hairdressing. One of the big
disappointments of my childhood, I tell you.

But I had this talk with Taurus in the early days,
just to check him out further with the Boy Act.

"I’m worried."

He was carefully matching the thread lines of the
bottle to the lip of a drinking jar, and he poured a thin sheet of
whiskey into the jar, just covering the bottom. It was snifter
drinking without crystal or brandy. He swirled it more than he drank
it. In Theenie’s cabin it still smelled like a washed dog
sometimes. His nose hovered over the amber film in the glass.

"Okay," he said. He was not the target that
Theenie was.

"I’m worried about puberty."

He smiled. "Don’t."

"Why not?"

"It’s too big."

"What do you mean?"

"Like nuclear war. Nothing to worry about."

"It comes or it doesn’t?"

"Yes. Except here, it’s coming. So there’s
less to worry about than nuclear war.”

"There’s a lot of bad information floating
around," I said.

"You’ll get through."

"My father told me a rubber was like a sock."

He pushed his lips together over the jar. "Well,
what’s wrong with that?"

I stopped. He was scudgin’ me. "Well—because
it’s more like a balloon, if anything," I said, hoping I was
right.

"Sock, balloon," he said, in that kind of
Jewish resigning whine they do on TV. "When the time comes, you
won’t blow it up, you won’t put it on your foot." He looked
at me. "I hope."

"So there’s nothing to worry about?"

He got up and prepared me one of these poverty
snifters and pushed it over the enamel table and sat back down.

"Worry about this. You will need a girl. The
sooner it hits, the better."

"It hits?"

""Well, no. It creeps up.”

"Your sac gets ruddy like a bum’s nose,"
I said.

"Where’d you hear that?"

"I saw it. We got this guy down at the Y who
wouldn’t take off his bathing suit because he said he was older and
it took about three hundred of us, heads walloping banging lockers,
but we didit."

"And his equipment looked like a bum’s nose?"

"Well, no. But it was—I understand it gets
bigger—but it was dark and more wrinkly. Like whiskey drinkers’
faces if they’re really gone."

"I see." He snifted. "Well, after your
bum’s nose comes in, you will need a girl. This is the only thing
to worry about. They will tell you you don’t need one and they will
tell the girls the same thing, so it can take longer to find one than
it should."

He fixed me another volume-less drink, and him too.

"So do this. There’s a kind of girl who won’t
listen to them, and you need to study them. How old are you?"

"Twelve."

He smiled. "Are there any special girls you
know?"

"Diane Parker takes her clothes off for a
quarter. But I never went with them to see it. And a girl named
Andrea gave us the lowdown on the girls’ movie last year, and a
pamphlet they gave them about beginning to bleed. God, that’s
creepy—"

"Okay. Not these girls themselves necessarily,
but see if you can get a line on their character traits and what
they’re like generally. Get to know them. Find one with some brains
when the time comes and use a balloon or use her ideas if she has
any."

I considered this. We must have looked like a real
couple of cards, an ace and a joker maybe, sitting there in a
haint-painted shack on a whistling bluff on the nowhere coast of
Edisto, itself a speck on the Atlantic seaboard.

"At the Grand," I said, "one of the
rubber machines says
Sold for prevention of —ease only
. What
does the scratchedout —
ease
mean?"

"You’ll get the joke in time," he said.
"It was disease originally. Don’t worry about that either. It
comes or it doesn’t. Probably does. Don’t get anybody pregnant is
the other thing. When the time comes, if you don’t know what that
means, find out."

"Gir1s get boys in trouble, you mean?"

He said yes and smiled, and I don’t think knew
whether I was joking or not, but didn’t need to know. That’s the
thing I learned from him during those days: you can wait to know
something like waiting for a dream to surface in the morning, which
if you jump up and wonder hard you will never remember, but if you
just lie there and listen to the suck-pump chop of the surf and the
peppering and the palm thrashing and feel the rising glare of
Atlantic heat, you can remember all the things of the night. But if
you go around beating the world with questions like a reporter or
federal oral history junior sociologist number-two pencil electronic
keyout asshole, all the answers will go back into mystery like
fiddlers into pluff mud. You just sit down in the marsh and watch
mystery peek out and begin to nibble the air and saw and sing and run
from hole to hole with itself. Lie down and the fiddlers will come as
close to you as trained squirrels in a park. And how did he teach me
that? I don't know, but you don’t need a package of peanuts or
anything.
 

A New Kind of Custody Junket Dawns

About this time began a run of events. The first one
was so weird that I remember what shirt I was wearing. It was Friday,
and I came home on the bus (Taurus was out serving, I guess) and had
run up the steps before I saw both the Doctor’s and the
Progenitor’s cars, his a little crooked in the driveway. It was one
of those deals where you become an eavesdropper accidentally and have
to pick your moment to declare yourself so they won’t know what you
heard, or at least will think you didn’t hear the worst of it.
Through the screen I could make out their silhouettes like in a TV
interview of double agents or criminals or state witnesses where they
backlight and underexpose to protect the identity of the guilty and
sometimes they even woof out voices so they sound like speech-therapy
patients or retards or robots.

"The hell I can’t," I heard him say.

"Everson. I still don’t see what you’re so
worked—"

"What’s so difficult? Every veterinarian with
an autopsy license is one thing, but I can go a lot further with—with
your bounty hunter."

"You’re a son of a bitch." She snapped it
hard.

"I will take him."

"No, you won’t. You can’t."

"The hell I can’t."

I figured I had the beat, so I stepped three steps
down from where my lips had been pressing on the rusty, fly-smelling
screen and stomped back up and sashayed in with a perfect whine-bang
door slam and was on them so fast they never knew or suspected.
Looked like big doings: she didn’t have a drink, he did.

"Hi, Daddy." We did the hug. "Am I
late or you early?"

"I’m early,” he said, and looked at the
Doctor. "And late."

"We still going?" I asked.

“
Sure—why not?"

"Don’t know," I said, going to my room
for my tote bag. It was highly unusual for him to come inside the
house like this to get me. The shirt I had on was my red Rugby.

That weekend was the second event. We usually did
everything as if it was the state fair. It was like he took me out to
show me a good time and I could play games or ride rides if I wanted
to, except it was movies and restaurants we went to. But this time we
went over to a woman’s house I only later put together was his
secretary but then instead got the idea a lawyer herself. She had
this kid about two years older than me, and they put us together to
entertain ourselves while they sat and talked. She lived in a
carriage house and they had the whole yard of the big house, which
looked empty.

Sometimes kids just hit it off despite the artificial
confinement, which is strange. Fully aware of the difficulty of
liking each other, like in an arranged marriage, we just put all that
aside and had a blast. I don’t know how it started but Mike, her
kid, said that we could ride his go-cart if we put on the new wheel
and didn’t go in the street. The new wheel was wrapped in brown
paper and was in a closet full of his mother’s shoes and when he
went in to get it he had to walk on the shoes and he fell over. Well,
the wheel was heavy and he couldn’t pick it up lying there, so he
tried to get up and the shoes kept buckling and sliding and turning
his ankles and we started laughing.

"Here. Roll it to me."

We rolled it out over the crumbly terrain—all these
Italian high-heeled shoes and boots as soft as puppies—and we
couldn’t stop laughing. Anyway, we got the wheel out and put it on
the go-Cart, reusing the cotter pin, and fired the engine up. Mike
called it the cooker pin. He had this track charted out through
little places where you could hardly make it, and every time one of
us hit a banana tree it was funnier than the shoes. You just get
laughing and can’t stop.

We ran the course until white roots were showing in
the mud at the turns and the engine smoked and ticked out a blue
vapor. Then we went in and Mike, who had got the idea I was smart
because I said we could use a nail if straightening out that cotter
pin was too hard, showed me this kind of altar in his room. It was
his books, about ten books and some magazines like National
Geographic. He told me he was through with comics. Over the books on
a small banner he had written:

MY GOAL IN LIFE: NOT T0 BE A IGNORAMUS THATS MY MOTO

He showed me this shrine very proudly.

"That’s a good motto," I said. I didn’t
know what to do about the spelling, so I didn’t do anything.

The important thing, I suppose, is that this weekend
was the first one we spent that wasn’t entirely at the state fair
or big-brother Disneyland. It was the first time Daddy sort of
ignored me like the Doctor, and I must confess that I had a better
time than ever before on these custody junkets. It’s heavy
pressure, you know, to find your role four days out of the month, a
little two-day run every two weeks with no rehearsal. I suppose it
was no fun for him, either, being the director as well as actor and
still not getting it right. But that weekend he seemed a lot more
regular in a way it’s hard to describe. I think that woman (Mike’s
mother) looked sexy, for one thing, but that is strictly my unhaired
opinion. At school the word is, you don’t know what girls really
are until you have hair, kind of a Samson thing, I guess. I regularly
enjoy unveiling mythic structure in Bluffton Elementary education.
Taurus knows, I am pretty sure, from this exchange I witnessed
between him and a girl who served us in a restaurant, but I am still
sorting that out and finishing it.

On Monday morning early, when I got back, there was
fog in the palmettos and the tree edges looked blue. Taurus’s car
was parked and spiffing out white balls of smoke into the fog, like
smoke rings. Daddy stopped the car with the shift stick and it
clicked to a stop like the ratchet stands I got to help set up for
the drums one night at the Baby Grand for this old drummer with a
band that had been everywhere. It was the saxophone player that was
famous, and the rest of the band was nobody, so they had to do all
the work. The drummer let me open out these chrome stands that had
silver feet and arms you stood up and set the right-size drum in. He
did that part. The stands clicked until they were open and then
wouldn’t close. The drum heads were worn clean in the centers but
had this crud all around the edge you could scrape off with your
fingernail, like a crayon deal where you color all the colors on the
paper and then black all over that and then etch a design by scraping
off the black, leaving a rainbow-y picture. On the drum this left a
pure-white scratch mark.

Anyway, he stopped the car like a ratchet stand and
was up the stairs before I had the tote bag out of the back seat, and
I thought he was going in, but he stopped. He turned and waited for
me on the landing and said goodbye and left. That was very
strange—getting out, for one thing, and then going up there and not
going in but turning and seeing me up like a guest, and then our
doing the hug and him leaving. They were waiting inside as I crossed
the unswept floor. I noticed all the windows were open and the drapes
standing out like air-conditioner sales strips. You couldn’t see it
but you could feel the damp clam of fog on everything. The Doctor was
in her wicker pose and the settee was cricking crisply in the cool
air and they both had these steaming black coffees and were looking
patiently at each other.