Padgett Powell - Edisto Revisited - A Novel

Jinx was gone, his flashy distraction was gone, I was going somewhere myself. Patricia and Jake were talking, which was what I’d brought her for — if Jake could talk to you, he could give you credit. She could handle herself. I thought of her as an attractive Margaret Thatcher, perverse as that may be. Jinx dead. Of a specifically black menace. There was a day in which I would have been inclined to see that as somehow my fault. I am less inclined to see it that way today. Something I couldn’t (or wouldn’t) prevent got Jinx, and something he couldn’t (or wouldn’t) prevent would get me. I had been a pure accommodation of race and racial difference when I sat under a pinball machine and watched Jinx’s unsocked feet in their plainness. Now it was as if I were a (self-appointed) representative of the very lowest arm of the State Department trying to head off the very largest war it would ever have, and the last one it wanted to have. I was a chump. Jake knew that and put up with me anyway. I was a paying customer.

Patricia Hod went to the bathroom and Jake interrupted me in these my stately ruminations by settling a new can of Cobra at my place. He shook his head and gave a long whistle in the direction Patricia Hod had gone.

“Shoe fly,” he said.

“Amen,” I said. I had no idea what “shoe fly” meant. It seemed to be plenty positive.

“The new Duchess,” he said.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. I recalled the high-heeled shoes and dildo and wondered if I ought be saying something like that, so I said it again. “Yes, ma’am, Jake. I am in some cotton now.”

“You in some cotton.”

“I am in cotton like … like a pistol in a Crown Royal bag.” This was how Jake kept — and operated — his bar pistol.

“You got cheetah on your side,” he said.

“What?”

“Say you got cheetah, man.”

“Okay.” I had no idea what this meant, either, and Jake knew that, but that was partly his point. It was a compliment that was better for my not entirely getting it. In my current intellectualizing mode, I was ironically less a chump if I let it go and did not dig for it, white topical anthropologist. I tried one out myself: “All the snow in the world won’t change the color of the pine needles.”

“Heard that.”

Cheetah came back from the bathroom and we had no more time for our racial minuet. Patricia Hod looked better to me than any single person or thing or idea or place or car or horse or church or God or sandbox or sentry or sentiment or — I kissed her full on the mouth right there, and she liked it, looking even as she had to at Jake to apologize, and Jake walked, chuckling, lightly, away.

PATRICIA HOD AND I are dancing on the beach. It has rained and there is a steady, firm inshore wind, about twenty knots, and with it regular waves marching in like redcoats. It looks very much like a hurricane, but I have not bothered to check a radio or anything else. Should there be one, and bad, Jake’s is far enough inland to not drown and there is always a serious hurricane party there and I can use it to introduce Patricia to the island. Patricia Hod is, as Jake notes, heiress to the Duchess, my mother. I will withhold that she is my cousin. It is the kind of thing I expect will be known, somehow, and tolerated, in fact will have a happy life on the drums. This culture here — it is being called “the culture of indigenous peoples” by the preservationists who have arrived more often than not from Washington, D.C. (inexplicably, because they are not with the government, in fact oppose government), to help preserve it — this culture, whatever it is, is a very patient, modest, let-others-alone thing that changes, I think, from day to day in its levels of violence, but beyond that is steady. It steadily gets tired is the other thing I’ve noticed.

The indigenous are tired, the non-indigenous not. The white, here before the tired black but seen as non-indigenous because they would develop what has not been developed before, are not tired. In fiduciary straits since Sherman scared the pee wine out of them, they now have the condo dollar to revive, in a manner of speaking, the rice and indigo and cotton dollar and raise their heads above the erstwhile worthless ancestral marsh.

Patricia and I go to all manner of Southern Living tableaux — to jobs (I make the post-and-beam; Patricia can sell them); to families (we are a bedrock of dire breath-holding for the normal folk in our clan: some look to see that she is not pregnant, some to confirm, I-told-you-so, the slouching toward them of our purblind issue); and to the ordinary nexuses on this our bourgeois earth, offices and lobbies and malls. We inhabit the marauding, vigorous, non-indigenous mainland world by day.

By island night it is another matter. I am feeling very good, dancing with my illicit bride (for which I understand African shades would hound us to the grave and beyond). Patricia Hod and I do well in our tribal tabooey, and my mother I think of as the shaman who cast the spell that guarantees the tabooey will go unremarked and unmolested. I worry about my mother’s health — the absence of baking potato portends worse — but that is what you do with parents after they’ve quit worrying about yours. Life seems unpractically practical in the calm, medium view.

I am dancing with firm, cool Patricia Hod on the firm, cool beach. The sand is packed hard as an infield and breaks when you turn a foot in it with a clean squeak. A damp low wedge of sand marks the turn. The wind is full of salt.

There is the delicious contrast between Patricia Hod’s cotton blouse and her smooth, swelling chest, and soon we’ve marked up the entire beach with this our clumsy waltz, to no music but our own. We will go inside and shower in the slightly rusty water, redolent of iron and sulfur, and emerge smelling as good as a boiled egg (Patricia Hod does to me), and fall on each other like … breakfast. I bloom into some kind of monster of happiness in her arms, in her neck, not knowing my name. Beached up on Patricia Hod like this these days, if I were asked for ID I could only pat my pockets, shrug, and go to sleep.

Then start awake — hounded by the old fear: the big picture. I have no idea what the big picture is. Life is a giant proposition put you in terms so elusive and slick and fast that you can but stand before the barker and chuckle, Here’s my dollar, I’ll play, I must, and I will lose. Some days, some nights, you childishly want to see the rigging, the magnets or the strings, behind the board, under the table, on the wheel. Life is missing things, not getting them.

But I hold Patricia Hod. Her neck is a quarter inch from my nose, which seems to be the instrument with which I record all this wisdom and distribute it to my brain. Her neck is a hollow of tasty hope.

Patricia Hod has a way of stepping out of her bath and confronting you, in her white robe, smelling of soap, with her arms at her sides and standing there as if to say, What are you going to do about this ? She’ll stand there until you do something about it, which for me is to put my mouth into a little spot above her collarbone like a bee going in for pollen. Contact is enough; I don’t need to do anything, and Patricia doesn’t seem to want anything done, particularly. We stand there in this attitude of carnal handshake. This moment does not want lips, which by contrast are messy and have their agenda and force you both into business that gets complicated, and it does not want breast, which gets things accelerated and infantile and motherly and hysterical. This moment wants a quiet hollow in dark, taut flesh, just my lips, closed, on it, breathing deeply, and looking over her shoulder if the robe falls off I can see down the valley of her back to the rising mountain of serious flesh down there, and things will be serious soon enough. But for the moment, no. Just this succor in this shoulder. Just this kiss, this meat, this pulse beside bone, this cool lonely wind, this me and this you. I am not supposed to even taste.