Padgett Powell - Edisto Revisited - A Novel

I pointed out that, despite his prowess as a West Virginian hick mountain man, he knew nothing about fishing beyond earthworms on a bream hook and trout spinning — they didn’t even fly fish in his rude neck of the woods — and was it going to rain or not. There was more to fishing where I was from, I ignorant or not, than rain. He readily agreed to equivalent ignorances when it came down to locating grouper six miles out, or whatever we would locate wherever, and he liked finally the idea of besting a feeble egghead who could do not much more in life than draw it or talk about it, and I rather liked the cheer he gave off in all his bluff impatience and superiority: You can do anything if you’ll do it, his stubborn groping method said (and he had gotten through college without proper preparatory schooling, or measurable intelligence). So we agreed over the phone to fish for a year and see what happened. We had no money, no boat, no license, no sense. We were perfectly set up for commercial fishing.

“Where we going catch all these fish?” Jim Ball asked.

“Corpus Christi, Texas.”

“Why there?”

“Never been there,” I said.

“Me either. Perfect.” Jim Ball had other qualities to recommend him, or derecommend him, as you prefer. He had been to Vietnam, for one thing, and interpreted others’ whims as “perfect”—deliberation or planning or reasonableness was, that is, in the post-’Nam view, dumbfuck. We agreed to meet in a week, no plans, just find each other. We’d have been happy never finding each other, so the lack of plan was agreeable.

LEAVING PATRICIA HOD AND her orange rage at the Cabana, I stopped at the Grand. I needed a kind of deep-breath, pants-hitching moment before going on. This leaving-women thing was getting out of hand. For their own good, I kept saying to myself, and half believing it, or more than half, but having trouble not seeing the matter from the point of view of the inexplicably abandoned. You’re some kind of cowardly lout was the competing notion, a notion that will have you pull into a place like Jake’s not a quarter mile from the abandoned woman.

So I pushed into Jake’s, backwards, carrying a soup tureen found on the backseat of my car, which was no doubt put there by my mother and which I was to have put in the house but which I was not going to now, nor was I going to take a Spode soup tureen to Corpus Christi, Texas. Backing through the door, turning around into Jake’s, I nearly collided with a huge white man, the only one I’d ever seen other than my old man in Jake’s, who was wearing leather-topped pull-on gumshoes and khaki pants with plough mud all over them and who said, loudly and conspiratorially and very close to me and the tureen, “Indicted for murder!”

“Who?” I said.

“ Me .”

I eased around him, moving the tureen away from him as you would a woman from a drunk on a dance floor. I went to the bar.

Jake was watching things very closely, sideways — his blue-jay style of close witness.

“Jake.”

He took his leg down from the beer box and came toward me. I pushed the tureen to him and he took it without question and went into the back with it.

When he returned I said I wanted a cold beer made in either St. Louis or Milwaukee, not Olde English anything or Magnum anything, and two quarts of motor oil.

“Motor oil,” he repeated, and again went in the back.

He presented me with a cold beer and two quarts of motor oil. “You didn’t want this oil in that casserole, did you?”

“No.”

The khakied drunk shouted “Call my broker!” from the front and rested his head and arms on the pinball machine by the door.

“Who’d he kill?” I asked.

“A fiddler crab,” Jake said. We laughed.

“That casserole is the Doctor’s. Save it for her. I’ve got to go. There’s a crazy woman at the house.”

“Know. You been shack up a month.”

“Who says?”

“Lines of communication .”

“My great-grandfather’s island!” the drunk declared, with his head on the pinball glass and his feet now securely hung up in the rungs of the stool before the machine. He would be there for a while, it looked.

“Ain’t that t.s.,” Jake said.

“You want me to get him out?”

“No. We gone laugh at his ass all night .”

“Don’t hurt him.”

“He hurt .”

We laughed again. Hurt he was.

Murdering a fiddler crab was colloquial shorthand for wetlands abuse as so deemed by the various competing regulatory agencies in the low country. Red-tape fouling was so common that when an overfed man in L. L. Bean gumshoes and khaki said “Indicted for murder” and had a little mud on him and was drunk and out of place, we could put it together. On the island that his family had held since cotton and rice and indigo, the island which he now sought to make attractive at once to condominium dweller and duck hunter, the weeping man had proceeded without Coastal Council or EPA permits and, say, restored the hundred-year-old dikes which had held water for rice fields and which would now hold it for the ducks he needed to get those duck hunters to buy those condominiums, and the EPA or Coastal Council had come round and written him the equivalent of the world’s largest parking ticket, say $25,000 per day per dike. He had about 2,500 feet of dike to restore to the original unrestored condition, or else, and the else meter was already running so that if he undid his dikes tomorrow he was already out $50,000, on top of the $50,000 he had spent restoring the dikes by dumping 5,000 yards of fill on them, which had inadvertently killed a fiddler crab. In his current condition, drunk in what he regarded a nigger roadhouse, he was worried that his Wild Turkey days were over; he was going to face pouring Kentucky Bourbon Deluxe into Wild Turkey bottles, to fool his friends, all the other faux landed gentry in the low country, and the sacred family island was going to continue being a tax liability, if the fines did not force him to have to sell it outright. He was a portrait that gave someone like Jake, whose enslaved great-grandfather had likely worked the rice paddies within the sacrosanct dikes, extreme pleasure to behold.

“Jake, were we not so close to a woman spurned, I’d like to stay and talk to you.”

“About what?”

“About that fat fuck on the pinball machine.”

Jake regarded this with more gravity than I would have anticipated. Then he said: “Can’t live with ’em, Mr. Manigault, and we can’t live with out .”

I didn’t want to get any deeper than that — the Mister Manigault was some barbedness or sarcasm too complex to have unravel in your presence. And I couldn’t tell if he was referring to women or to land scions weeping in road-houses they didn’t belong in.

“I keep quitting all my girlfriends, Jake,” I said. “Just up and leave.”

“Can’t live with them, either,” he said, and laughed. “You shoot quail?”

“What?”

“Hunt birds?”

“Not regularly.”

“I see.”

What he saw I’ve no idea, but it all made sense in the kind of charged, tacit wrestling that goes on when a black man and a white man, if I qualify, talk civilly together. You reach this kind of détente in the minuet, and when he’s on your turf, he leaves, and when you’re on his, you leave. I left.

The road out of Edisto is the best one I know to drive with nothing, or a lot, on your mind. Whether you have two quarts of oil on the seat and your arm on the window and no clear picture of a town in Texas named the Body of Christ, or you have a very clear picture of a saddened woman you’ve left without adequate provocation, or you have standing job interviews in Atlanta to build reflective-skin monsters or in Litchfield to build atria and wraparounds and Southern Living photo sets with shabbily arrogant exteriors, or you have a parent standing around foot-tapping about your failure to apply yourself as you head not to Atlanta but past it to Corpus Christi, or you have another parent in a deeper consternation about your not proving precisely rich in things literary to say, or you have a fat rich white man weeping about an island he owns, on a laughing black man’s leased pinball machine — a tableau which involves you, too — the road out of Edisto has blasts of closeness and pastures of far-off easy silence, and smells of salt and change, or of funk and rot, and curves and straights, houses empty and black or occupied and lit, shack or brick, and you do not finally care what is on your mind or not, with all that flying by. The road out of Edisto is enough.