Padgett Powell - Edisto Revisited - A Novel

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Indian.”

“Indian?”

“This is a reservation.”

“A reservation?”

“Yes.”

We went on. And on and on. We got into something that looked untagged, finally, much thicker, and it filtered out much of the rain, which produced a lightness of sorts in the new denser woods — it felt suddenly rather cheery, like springtime. I thought of Johnny Weissmuller swinging through transplanted monkeys. I thought of white women. I thought of many things inexplicable in their timing when the truly inexplicable arose before me: a castle, or something. My second impression was a hospital, my third was that it was a mansion for the so impossibly rich (a Vanderbilt house, say) that they’d abjured location, location, location. I could not picture the substructure necessary to hold it up in this swamp.

It — the building — looked to be about five hundred feet across its brown stone face and to have been built by Mussolini. This was the kind of thing you’d be taken to in South Carolina and it would have a hallowed, understated name like Brick House and would have been owned by a haunted family like Seabrook, but now Ted Turner would own it and there’d be actresses, Jane or no, naked on the roof beside the (new) pool. But it wouldn’t be the size of a hospital. It would be human-scaled, if large — entertainable, that is — and therefore all the more prepossessing. This monstrosity was industrial. It was unlit. I supposed it, somehow, connected to “Indians,” whatever that meant.

In anticipating Indians, I was close. The thing was full of what you’d call hippies, for want of a better term. There was every stripe of lost person under fifty, and some older, in the joint, and a couple of Charlie Manson leaders and a couple of Dennis Hopper loons and a couple of Mama Cass sandwich eaters, and in one room I believe I saw a ring of praying pygmies.

“We are looking for game violations and we won’t find any,” Taurus told me. “I wanted you to see this.” We went all through the house, which I’d estimate at a hundred rooms. It was three stories and had big hallways as if it had been intended for industrial use of some kind. In the basement there was a swimming pool with water in it the color and consistency of sugarcane juice and two small alligators in that green porridge.

“There’s your game violation,” I said.

“No, that’s not a game violation. They can’t keep them out. Let’s go smoke a peace pipe.”

We went upstairs and met with a redheaded guy who seemed equivalent to a Secretary of State. I had the immediate feeling he represented in his hale, bluff cheer some darker and more ornery political figure — one of the Mansons skittering around, perhaps. This guy was coming on like a Kiwanis man. He got us some beer from a chest freezer in a hall, the only appliance I saw in the place, and I don’t know what powered it, if anything — the beer was hot. Women passed us in tie-dyed outfits, looking bucolically purposeful — they’d just meet your eye before looking away, slowly, at the baseboards, as they walked, hips swaying, on. A newsletter of sorts was on the chest freezer, which was serving as a bar. It had a headline that read US: 111, AMERIKA: O.

I couldn’t figure who Us was. I listened. Us, it would seem, was every bedraggled fool between California and Italy who’d got a real nose for the real thing in counterculture. This was a prototype failed orphanage, sort of, or summer camp, sort of, built by Huey Long for the children of workers and never inaugurated or celebrated or even decorated. And it sat in the vast Atchafalaya Basin without the highway and the bridge that would have connected it to the capitalist world from which it was to have offered socialist children refuge. It was all Rastas and nutria now. It was appalling and delightful.

Suddenly the Secretary of State was putting himself between me and a new arrival, a man yelling at me. Taurus took the moment to get another beer from the chest freezer on which we’d been leaning. The yeller was saying, “That’s exactly our problem! That fucker is the problem!”

I sized him up. Not too big but crazed, and not crazed enough to be ineffective. The Secretary of State turned him and ushered him out of the room, a big sunroom facing the bayou we’d come in on.

“I apologize. Sometimes …”

“I’m sure,” I said. And I was. I was sure that this kind of sumping was the left-wing equivalent of a Klan rally or a dogfight. It was a teeming boil of maladjusts who were, failing everything else, going to be heroes to the people. They hadn’t a goddamned clue as to who “the people” was, beyond their deprived, righteous selves. I was not unsympathetic to them, at least not given the predictable responses of my father and his cronies to a scene like this, but personally and privately and without fanfare I would have enjoyed biting the yeller’s nose off. Taurus handed me a beer and steered me out of there and told the Secretary of State he would regard all hogs in the area as feral, huntable.

At first I thought he was referring somehow to their women, that he was mad, too. Then I saw he wasn’t.

“These hippies eat meat?” I asked.

“They do.”

“They grow rice?”

“They grow pot. Got pot plants in here bigger than Christmas trees.”

We rode out, suddenly in sun. There were red-eared sliders on logs and bright green astroturfy bogs of duckweed, and sacalait were snapping bugs under the duckweed like.22 shorts. I could have fished. I could have fished and looked each crappie in his red-rimmed eye and been thankful I was, whatever I was, not a hippie in Huey Long’s orphanage. I thought of frying up a mess of fish out in this gone place and eating them, and then thought of the Ameses coming over to eat with us. I could do without that. I was not disappointed to see that Taurus was taking me to my car.

We got there and tied up, and it was apparent that, not unlike during his earlier tutelage of me, he had most deliberately and most subtly shown me precisely something he wanted me to see. Was it what lies at the absolute end of the road of dalliance? A Land’s End of softheadedness? Was it the monsters of sexuality that await you if you can’t recognize a good thing and glom onto it? There were those good women of mine, and at least that good-legged mother o’ mine of his … I would never figure the fellow out, and that itself was part of the lesson he still provided. There is enigma. There is enigma.

I thanked him and he was on his way. I knew as much as I am to know about my mother’s ex-lover game warden bayou stud to nurses and protector of hippies felling pot plants the size of Christmas trees. I could imagine them out there sawing at the trees with butter knives they found in the orphanage. I went to New Orleans.

IN NEW ORLEANS I stayed at the Flamingo Bar & Grill & Hotel — a place I began to gather was famous. It was removed from the Quarter just a bit in space, but in spirit it was miles away: it was the final resting place for boozists, remove all pretense to Catholic this, voodoo that, and Creole this and that. It was three stories that wound away from the street, not one floor level, with a grill & bar in which you could eat and drink twenty-four hours a day. Beside the pay phone a hand-lettered sign read, “Imaginary conversations prohibited.” I spent some time in this grill, which was Norman Rockwell meets William Burroughs, if Burroughs was, as we say, the dominant partner in such a twain. It was so creepy it was most agreeable. You mostly wanted to drink your beer, which they did not begrudge you at any hour, without anyone talking to you lest you might have to smell him. I spent time there in lieu of forced march to the known touring nodes, and looked at my gently bubbling yellow beer in a good heavy water glass that had fine scars on it from years of use, and thought of my mother, mostly. It has come to this, I thought. I was drinking, but not drunk — I was in Hotel Step 13 and looking like a long-term registered guest (one day I got my shoes on the wrong feet and discovered the unlevel floors more manageable that way).