Edisto - Padgett Powell (15 page)

One day about a month before the Saturday we took
Dietrich and the Princess sailing, I went up to the shack very early
and before I knocked someone stepped from behind a palm holding a
whiskey bottle, quiet and sure as a Pinkerton man on stakeout. It was
Taurus.

It scared me so bad, this electric thing went off in
my sac, which they call pissing in your pants, but it’s different.

“
Hey, fucker," I gasped, white.

"You’re mighty early."

"Early bird gets the worm" was all I could
say, since my heart had caught the electric jolt too. You always have
these hook-man convict stories on your brain out here, and what with
the constant wind, you can’t hear people move, so it’s worse, and
I’m holding my heart.

Well, I didn’t think much of it. But then when I
went up to go sailing, his car was idling and warm, he was all set,
practically closing those shutters before I got there, like he had
seen me coming, and I learned something about the early-bird morning.
I knew he had not waited to scare me. He had chased me. He chased me
and designed a calm steady stepping into view from behind a tree to
disguise the pursuit. He followed me. From the Cabana. Then it all
started to fall in place.

It’s funny how one minute you don’t know a thing
and then something happens which in itself is not telling but which
serves nonetheless as a thump on a long line of dominoes. And his
closing that shutter on the sailing day was the thump and they began
to fall. It was as early as the time before, if not earlier, yet he
was well ahead of me, not closing from behind with whiskey in hand
like a smoking pistol. The whiskey was in a sack.

One night some time before, the Doctor had run out of
liquor and I told her Jake didn’t carry her stuff anymore, and
besides, they had a saxophone player in from a faraway place and of
old local fame and it would be packed. She hesitated a bit and then
went up on her toes over the refrigerator and opened a small cabinet
and drew out a bottle in a sack. I even remember thinking how young
her calves looked flexed up, and not particularly about the liquor
being up there, which was the novel thing.

Nor did anything really dawn when I saw Taurus that
morning with a sack just like it. But when we got back from sailing I
went home, got on a chair, got to it, skinned the sack back, and Old
Setter—his liquor-trembled in my hand. Penelope!

I cloistered the evidence and jumped down, knees
buckling with confusion. No, actually I was sprightly. I had some of
that electric hook-man thing in my nuts, but it was different from
the fear electricity. This tickled a little.

I didn’t know what to think. I holed up in my room,
bassinet bound by books provided by my sweet mother. The entire
Modern Library among other things, original glossy jackets on them.
Trilogies, juvenilia, oeuvres! The works. I opened the window and
unhooked the screen and dropped it off into the sand. Leaned back in
a straight chair with my feet in the window, looked at the coquina
beach, surf chomping, and took a steady gale of sand in the teeth
while I sorted it out.

I had been consummately stupid! The whiskey was a
lighthouse light over an entire reef of secrets. At night when I had
thought myself asleep-now suddenly I could recall gentle sounds,
innocent door knocks and paddings thereto and slipping bolts and
whining hinges and paddings, softer and heavier, coming back.
Whiskeys and ices tinkling and low, steady voices, twelve bells and
all’s well, and I must have been rolling over and off into turns of
deeper, dreamless watch. Because now I knew there had been the bower
sounds then too, the deep moaning of oracle rocks in the Carrier
vents, sounds like blankets settling on cold patients, fluffed up in
the air with a snap of woolen breath by healthy nurses and floating
down on ailing folk to make them better, much better by morning. And
how comfortable I felt, thinking it just the fun I was having with
him, when it was more. It was fun she was having, and that mattered,
I had to admit, and it mattered also when the Progenitor had come
home and I consciously heard the Carrier moan, because then I did not
want to call them the Progenitor and the Doctor but my mother and
father, the way Jake would call his mother Momma when he went back to
see her every afternoon before opening up, after he had cleaned up
the joint, and they just sat on her porch.

So who was I going to blame? At first I thought him,
for not telling me, but then he couldn’t very well have advertised
it or I’d have had him on the coroner list before long probably,
and then I realized he did tell me, the same way he told me
everything else, with one ounce of suggestion and pounds of patience.
He didn’t have to step out from behind a tree, he could have gone
anywhere. He could have left that bottle at the Cabana, or thrown it
away. And God knows he’s a sport—I’d seen him release to warm
Atlantic bay water the boundless bosom of my very own first
girlfriend, though I hadn’t managed more than three words to her
and with any more would have come off like the fat dude, though on
the flip side, seething with green innocence. He’s a sport, he’s
game, and even I admit she’s a goodlooking broad even for your
mother. And lonely, and all that. So I can’t blame her—Taurus is
a sight (and a damn sight) better than ten coroners boiled into one
human being if you could do that.

So what was my complaint? My teeth were full of sand,
mainly. I went down and got the screen and put it back in and tried
to shake it off. Made a hamburger and a Coke, I was still full of
salt from the sailing. The only thing was, I thought the
Progenitor—Daddy—had been negotiating a return since that night
he got me at the Grand. Was that true? When had I heard the "we’l1
be friends" conversation between Taurus and my mother? Was it
over and done with before I caught on? Is that why he had to take my
girlfriend from me? He was giving me my mother? And my father? Could
he do that? I didn’t know. I half wished he had given me my
girlfriend instead. But I couldn’t help any of it, that was sure,
since I seemed to be snapping-to about one or two months late. I was
a reader turning pages written some time ago, discovering what
happened next.
 

We Take Communion

About 3 a.m., Habits and Methods time Sunday morning,
I realized that actually I did not know if they—Taurus and my
mother—had called it quits or not. Maybe the same naiveté which
first had me ignore the alien whiskey and the comforting extra weight
in the house at night would now have me believe that, because
negotiations for nuptial resurrection seemed to be under way, they
(she and Taurus) would cease paramarital twinings. Hell, there was
still the old man drinking a Bloody Mary with Mike’s mother, one
leg over the other, bouncing his Florsheim above the coffee table,
and me and Mike outside checking out all right as prospective
stepbrothers. And maybe they’d put on that conversation about
remaining "friends"—even I knew that ruse. It’s a
diplomatic stunt. Bound allies suffer a falling-out and become
political friends. Then they won’t fight for each other anymore,
but the treaties get a lot more delicate and worrisome, and somehow
their close ties are more important than when there were good
military commitments between them. But maybe they faked it—never
had the falling-out.

Anyway, I figured who was I kidding about them—my
ersatz Big Brother, whose one certifiable ID card was scaring Theenie
eighty-five miles in two hours, and my pedagogic, sot mother, who
was, I have to admit, sharp for all that. What business was it of
mine anyway, and how was it better if they had quit? It was precisely
the stuff Taurus had taught me to keep an eye out for, to know by
indifferent acute attention. So I would.

I had been all excited when I figured it out,
throwing that screen in the dirt and breathing hard. But for what?
What was the trouble, exactly? That she did it? That he did it? That
it was done to me? No, I don’t think so.

I think it was like at the Grand. There are some
dudes there who come out of the woods and woodwork with razor scars
down their faces, across foreheads, through ears cloven into baby
fists, from the corners of eyes like scalding tear tracks. Even Jake
has a little one—it dents his nostril. And my information, which I
got from watching the bug-tussles they get in before Jake halts them
with the shortest shotgun in the world, is that two out of a hundred
of those scars had to do with gambling and the remaining ninety-eight
faces cut deep to bone, blood flying like hogs stuck, are about
pussy. And even the two gambling fights are about not the money lost
but the pride lost in losing. And that’s close to the ninety-eight
reasons for the other.

So pussy is the big nightclub reaper. It beats
liquor, dancing, music, hemp, pills, rapping, racing cars, money,
friends, and good times. And that’s why, even at my youthful point
of promise, my hair not even cropped in yet, I vibrate on the edge of
the deep end over some bottle of liquor in a sack in a cabinet. What
the hell can that stuff be, for God’s sake? More than your finger
inside your cheek, you rest assured. But what? I even think now,
given this new disturbance I have had, that I am not going to know
what it is even if old Altalondine dropped trou and said, "Get
some of this cooter, stud, and if you can’t kiss me you can pull my
hair," and I, say, did—jumped on it like a woodpecker
alighting on a sapling and did what you do—if this happened
tomorrow, I would have no better idea why finding Taurus in
Penelope’s bower was so big a deal, and why you will cut somebody’s
nose off when under different circumstances it’s enough to punch it
in.

Well, I’m in these ugly meditations when the Doctor
gets up and announces we’re going to church. We do that about twice
a year; once if it rains on Easter. I’m 3 a.m. fugued out anyway,
so I sport up and we head out.

It’s the usual. We go to Savannah, the closest
place you can find an Episcopal layout. Right down in the slums,
people already holding tallboys and blinking at the rising glare, we
hit this pocket of new cars and a cathedral. All the dirt and smoke
butts and dead banana trees changes to the soft, stained panes of
biblical wonderment, and fresh acolytes with red-and-white robes and
white faces and red lips carry gold candles; and the priest puts on
twenty sashes and linen underthings and gold-braid overthings until
he sweeps when he walks; and gold emerald-studded pikes get carried
around, with three prongs for the Trinity; and the people kneel and
stand and sing and kneel and pray on red velvet cushions that swing
down for your knees like footrests under Greyhound bus seats, but of
the finest, heaviest, wood-pegged oak, not bent pot metal; and the
sermon intones with catch phrases like "more and more"; and
the creeds, Apostle’s and somebody’s, get done; and then we pray,
and then we line up for Communion. The Father wipes the silver
chalice with a beautiful linen rag large as a small tablecloth, turns
the cup two inches each time to keep you from having to drink where
the last worshipper lipped it, as if that takes care of the germs.
But I don’t care, I always reach out very piously—that’s to
say, in slow motion, the way you move for some reason to take and Bat
the body of Our Savior-reach out and lay my hand over the Father’s
in somber reverence to the moment and then press down as the silver
rim clears my upper lip and suck a slug of wine that should have fed
six communers. I have to, because the bread of His body is stuck to
the roof of my mouth like a rubber tire patch, and if I can’t wash
it loose by swishing His blood around, I’m going to have to dig it
off with a finger, in slow motion, and possibly gag.

When the service is over we go to a Howard Johnson’s
for the business at hand. She wants to talk. I should have known. She
orders a grilled cheese and takes one bite, as usual. She never eats.
It’s the liquor. I get this ice-cream thing that looks like Mt.
Pisgah. She has cup after cup of coffee, lights a cigarette.

"Well. I want to tell you something very
important.”

"Shoot." I don’t like to be flip, but
something about parents draws that out.

"Your father and I"—she takes a long
drag—"have decided to get back together? She taps out that new
cigarette and lights another.

"Okay," I say.

"Contain yourself." I do, by destroying one
of Pisgah’s promontories. "I thought you might be excited by
the news."

"The news is fine. But what’s going to
happen'?"

"Well, a lot." Tap-out. Waitress, more
coffee. "We will move to Hilton Head."

"Oh, God. Have the Arabs got him?"

"Stop being a smart ass. He has a wonderful
opportunity to join a good firm. And he is. We will move there. You
will go to Cooper Boyd."

"What about the house?"

"We don’t know. We may sell it if it works
out. Or keep it for vacations."

“
What about . . . Theenie?"

"She’l1 come to Hilton Head."

I’d heard enough. The good old days were on a
respirator. A boarding school and landed gentry snot-nose
college-prep buggers for Simons Manigault.

"I don’t know how to put this," she said,
"but in the past what became of you was more or less my
bailiwick. That’s shifted in the deal."

"Baseball."

She laughed. "I don’t think that bad. But you
will go to a good school, as your father wants. And what you read is
up to you and them. You’re a bright boy, son. Maybe I overdid
things. Forgive me if I did."