Padgett Powell - Edisto Revisited - A Novel

I wanted to be black and named Slidell Washington. I had whiskey. I passed Mandeville, which I knew somehow was the premier state nuthouse, and stepped on it hard. I came to in a bar.

There, relatively calm, I realized Mandeville was maybe where they shanghaied Earl Long, but I was too near it yet and scared by being Slidell Washington to ask anyone. If I were black and asked about Mandeville and Earl Long they would just put me in Mandeville. I had a drink before me on the bar, and there was a very attractive unattractive lifer barmaid smoking down the way who had served me the drink, apparently. I went to the bathroom to see if I was black, and was not. I washed my face anyway, convinced I was. I didn’t mind that actually — the idea of being secretly black was agreeable. But I didn’t want anyone finding out, or finding out suddenly and scaring everyone and me, too. This is where a drink works like an oar on a boat in a moving current. You have one, you need another to row, to control, because shit is happening.

I went out to the bar, sat down to address my drink, and a very loud noise occurred. And apparently only I heard it. When I got up out of the crouch I was in beside my stool, the bartender was looking at me.

“You okay?” she said.

I knew immediately she had not heard the noise. She could not possibly have heard it and still be upright, smoking. But I had to say, anyway, “You didn’t hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“That, ah, explosion?”

She just looked at me. I had enough instinct still to know if I said one more word I’d not get one more drink from her.

“Sorry, ma’am. Flashback city.”

She was not reassured by this, because I do not look flashback qualified, unless we are talking drug flashback, but I averted crossing the cutoff line, and I drank the drink before me and got another as quickly as I could and tipped her well right then, with more money visible on the bar — that wordless, grave tipping you do by pushing the money solemnly at them, interrupting their retreat, even touching her hand if you’re really up to something other than ensuring service during your first serious drunk. I was swimming in ordure. I was having promiscuous thoughts — not ribald thoughts, but thoughts that were changing among themselves in a blurred and indiscriminate fashion. I was drunk and it felt good in a way I knew was not good. I had the wit to keep all this to myself and keep getting drinks and never figured out the huge noise. From matchbooks I figured out I was in Covington, probably.

I had a scratch on my arm and didn’t know how I’d scratched it. The noise I’d heard seemed to be coming from it, a little at a time. I looked to the woman to see if she heard that. She mistook my glance for a ready sign and made me a drink. Whatever she was making me had changed color. My arm was now speaking.

It said, “Shut up.”

“Okay,” I said to it.

“You’re welcome,” the bartender said.

“Your mother,” my arm said.

I waited for more. “My mother what?”

“I don’t know,” it said.

I looked at the scratch closely. I wanted to see its lips move if I could. I put my head on my arm, level with the forest of hairs, the wild terrain of follicle and freckle and fleshy soil, waiting for this fresh fault in the land to speak. I bit myself, at first rather affectionately, then shook my arm like a bulldog a rag and made noises. “Your mother’s on the phone,” it said. I dropped my arm.

“What?”

The bartender was over us. “Your mother — she says — is on the phone.”

“My mother is on the phone?”

“That’s what she says. It’s a woman. You called her, I think. Before.”

That is as close to a summary position on the evils of drink as I can imagine: Don’t drink, because if you do and it gets off the road with you, you can be invited to speak to your mother in a bar you do not know the location of on a phone it is alleged, but you do not remember, you have used. It is like a call to armed combat when you are unaware you’re in the service. Flat feet understates the matter; 4-F will not at this hour suffice. You trudge, you limp, you lollygag to the phone, and, with a look and high sign for a drink to the bartender, who’s rather your commanding officer at the moment, you pick up the phone.

“I did it,” she says.

“Did what?”

“Called him.”

“Who?”

“What’s with you, Son?”

“Nothing’s with me.”

“Something’s with you.”

“Ty-D-Bol.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“O.K. Bar Number Two, Mamou.”

“Tokyo tumbler egg foo, to you.”

“Son, you asked me to find him, I did.”

I had no idea — well, some idea, but wasn’t happy about my disadvantages. The best thing to do was bluff, so I got her to repeat the information and got off the phone. It was a wall phone and somehow I nearly fell down hanging up, and would have had I missed the cradle. I straightened up and did not feel as drunk as I had, and I had a reasonable guess that this information regarded the man-myth Taurus, and that I’d called my mother during the deep passion storm of the early rising part of the drunk. I was in the late used-rag part now, where passion is an old fond friend you wish well. You trust he’s well but would be content never to see him again. But here I’d gone and made a date during the friskies. Mamou.

I sat back down and the bartender came over with a drink and swept the money out of the way and leaned over the bar with both arms — as if to straighten my tie, which I was not wearing — her hands coming in tenderly and slowly at my throat and sliding around my neck and lacing behind it, and she pulled me to her, hard, and kissed me, hard, full on the mouth, and turned her head forty-five degrees, serious. It was done with such energy I gave her energy back, and tried to give back what seemed the spirit of the thing. It’s just a kiss, do it well, she seemed to be saying. She let me go and I rocked back down on the four legs of the stool.

“Not bad,” she said.

“No,” I said.

She went back to her station and didn’t regard me much after that; some regulars came in and I knew we were over. It was an agreeable affair. Her hair — I grabbed her neck, too — was like bleached hemp, almost as coarse and stiff as shredded wheat, and felt very sturdy and good to the hands but nothing like hair. People were calling her Dotty.

By way of saying goodbye, I told her, over some of the regulars, which made me look nuttier than anything I’d done in there yet, I think, “Hey, Dotty, I’ve got to go. I’ve got a dog to feed.” It was as if I were Admiral Byrd saying, “Hey, I’ve got to go. I’ve got a pole to claim.” I said this to a group of explorers who had not yet begun their journeys. The entire bar paused and did a very discreet but palpable eye roll, except Dotty, who managed, unseen by anyone, to wink at me. It was the wink of one-kiss lovers, a salutation across all time between two people forever in love who had strained to do something mystifying to each other across a countertop. “Well,” I said when the eye roll had completed itself and I felt they were all embarrassed to have presumed Dotty would join them, and I wanted to say Hi-yo, Silver! as well, but did not, and left.

Outside, the mud and gloom had changed to something radically more Hallmark: it was all bright bayou and butterflies. At my car I had a shock: I did have a dog. There was a robust, gnashing Dalmatian in my car. There was a glimmer of history about this dog, which I sought to mollify with some Easy, boy, which he was having none of. St. Tammany Parish Animal Control Center. Had stopped thereat. Why? Because had stopped at Tulane Primate Research Center. Why? To see monkeys with wires coming out of their heads. Was not allowed to. Why? Probably because they had monkeys with monkeys coming out of their heads, which is why primate research centers are in swamps. This had pissed me off, so I stopped at dog pound down road to see what abuse they were up to. Not an animal nut, but even the name Primate Research Center gives me willies. So whip in dog pound, and first dog run has Dalmatian nearly breaks through chain-link to get me. This I remember vividly, standing now at my car wondering how to get in it: this very dog hitting the fence with force enough to bulge it in rhomboids of fur and bounce back, squinting very meanly and sideways at me, growl almost inaudible, saliva on galvanized wire.