Padgett Powell - Edisto Revisited - A Novel

We pulled into a wholesaler’s one day and saw some Vietnamese standing about the lot in positions of consternation, itself a sign that something wasn’t right. You saw Vietnamese working or you did not see them. If they were talking, moreover standing around and talking, there was an obstacle in their path. I didn’t want any part of it.

“This looks like Vietnam,” I said to Jim, driving. “Westmoreland’s inside, weighing three hundred pounds, tahkin like iss, refusing to sell them something or buy something from them, playing with his hairy gut through the side ports of his overalls, wondering why in hail we din’t bomb them into the Stone Age, why ? Theron, I ast you, why ?” I was, as I say, impatient with the entire affair.

“What you know about Vietnam wouldn’t form a good dingleberry in your BVDs,” Jim said, as expected. I was in for the harangue: HE HAD BEEN. I had not.

“Let me see if I can get it right, Jim. We know who went, but we don’t know who came back. Is that it? Do I have it right?”

“Fuck you.”

“Fine with me.”

This was fishing on asphalt. I got out of the van to go in to find Haystacks Calhoun Westmoreland and buy something, but as I neared the Vietnamese I heard them speaking English first and switch to French, and that did it. That did it. I went up to the van window and said to Jim, “They doing French, mon cher, to elude me. When I let them know I speak it, they’ll switch to something else.”

“Gook. Gook’s hard.” He laughed.

I waved agreeably at the Vietnamese and said across the lot, “Laisse le bon temps roulé,” which confused them, understandably, but they knew it meant to be French, and when I went back by them, sure enough, they were speaking something that sounded like Hungarian.

I went in and found the proprietor. I took one look at him and left. He was in overalls, and white Red Ball boots, slopping around — ahhch, I’d had it.

“Take me to the suite,” I told Jim. “I quit.”

“Bullshit.”

“No. I’m not talking to one more Klansman in rubber boots, ever. Won’t do it.”

“I’ll do it.”

“You do it.”

I got to the Cactus Motel and walked a good long hot walk down to the liquor store and got a generous stock of stuff I felt appropriate to celebrating the end of my post-college dalliance. On the way back I threw away a beer can in an oil drum and saw on top of the trash in the can a large, colorful, lifelike dildo. It had a tube running from it to a squeeze bulb of the sort you see on certain pneumatic toys. I stood there regarding it agreeably for a long time, amazed by its veins and knurls and hues, and thought to myself that if I were an artist, I was having an epiphany. I’ve had an epiphany, I said to myself walking back to the Cactus, kicking smashed beer cans and marveling at the proximity of the dildo to the Judy Love Doll out the back door. So close, so far. If wedded, what beautiful music they might make. I was a man of uncertain future afraid to pick up an abandoned dildo and give it to an abandoned deflated woman. I think I saw a small snake in the grass of the road shoulder, and if I did, it looked considerably less real, or less probable, or more outlandish than did the dildo in the garbage. Everybody in the world, granting a certain statistical exception, knows what he’s doing, except me, was my next thought. This was at once of course ludicrously untrue and vigorously sound, and I liked it. It gave comfort, especially if I could eliminate the statistical exceptions and have it really be true. If the plastic woman through her scarlet O-ring mouth were calling siren-fashion the lost dildo to her, it made no less sense than did my life. I had once been rational, as a child. That time looked as far away and as probable as Jules Verne’s Lost Island.

AND SO I QUIT TEXAS, where I had gone, I confess, for imprudent reasons. The Doctor had had me read, of course, all Faulkner, and if you take nothing else from him, which is prudent, you may remember that he designates Texas as where you go and change your name when your schemes don’t work out. These are the kind of schemes which when they do work out everybody says you’re smart and you remain in Mississippi or Virginia or South Carolina or even Oglethorpian Georgia — honorable (the Wawer, the Wawer) next to Texas, a place too low for the Snopeses! I had had to see it for myself, albeit in an homogenized latter-day state, its dastardly modern equivalent to horse thieves represented by million-dollar attorneys so removed from horses they nickname themselves Racehorse. Lyndon Johnson was conceivably the model prototypical outlaw by the time I got to old change-your-name Texas. I suppose at the other end of the spectrum it was the Klansmen in rubber boots who schemed for a while to have commercial fishing all to themselves, whose scheme was not working out precisely because the scheme — and was this not Mr. Johnson’s scheme finally? — to bomb Vietnam into the Stone Age had not worked out. In a way Texas was a great epicenter of the not-working-out, and I should have loved it, but I did not.

Their pride in pride is oppressive, cheerless, unlaughable. Something in you wants to film it, but something else wants a robot to run the camera for you while you … change your name and go somewhere else.

So Texas I abandoned, the prospect of being a historically in-tune, enviro-friendly, twill-clad, post-and-beam architect no longer troublesome. That’s what I thought to do, so in Atlanta I stopped to interview with the other guys, in order to decline the opportunity to join them and be a historically out-of-tune, enviro-blind, twill-clad, skin-and-skeleton architect. The interview was thorough. Four of the not senior fellows took me out, they could drink, we wound up after hours looking for an open club, we found one, it was gay, we ordered up, and I am greeted heartily by the General — the president of the small college in which my mother teaches.

He says, taking me by the shoulder as if to lead me somewhere and show me off, “Whoa! Whoa! I didn’t know !” He’s the picture of mirth — country-club camaraderie and thigh-slapping. What on earth do you make of this earth? A man who has hounded friends of my mother out of jobs for their alleged homosexuality — on the strength of seeing me, recognizing me from not much more than a few conversations with my mother, with me at her side, years ago — feeling me, kneading me, steering me through a hundred leering, winking guys who know a bit more than I do, it would seem, about him. I start laughing and find no way not to go along with the General’s presumptions and gumption. There are raised eyebrows at the bar where my interviewers are suspended, not yet tasting their drinks, wondering now how good an idea coming with hot young prospect Simons Manigault into a place called the Golden Flame was.

THERE, IN A GAY BAR, at one in the morning, being watched by my red-blooded interviewers with their eyebrows irrepressibly raised as the college president for whom my mother teaches paws me, I have a vision of sorts. It is of the lover of my mother whom I called Taurus, who was ostensibly not a white man altogether, who went apparently to Louisiana when he was done with my mother or when she was done with him. I have left enough women to know that the matter is never clear: even if one party drops off the key, Lee, and the other merely weeps, there has been some crossfire, however muted, and there has been some leveraging out on the part of the left. But at one in the morning in the Golden Flame, I see only my man Taurus, sitting in a bar, a different kind of bar, with knotty paneling and room for only ten or so serious fools, in Louisiana, with a bright yellow fizzing beer in a six-ounce straight glass and an expression on his face that is inscrutable. And I am going to Louisiana. Where I have no business, but I have no business with the General’s ham-sized paw kneading my shoulder and forcing me, eventually, to go back to my escorts and feign sheepishness and explain this. No. When I get this vision of Taurus, a man singular in the long unsingular run of suitors to my own mother, I have the courage to walk back to the T-square technicians who call themselves artists and ask, “Gentlemen, you fellows ever tried the true stuff?” They freeze — not able even to blush, let alone snort. “Until you do, it cannot be explained.”