Padgett Powell - Edisto

Then down at the far end it’s no boutiques or even van people, but Negroes selling vegetables. I mean they sell them — running up and shouting down a neighbor's price and demanding you feel their tomatoes. That end of the market is like it was before the front end got boutique cuisine and turquoise. It is just heavy green paint, open rafters, dirty shale floor, tables, and vegetables. It was like that all the way, before: bats in the rafters and pigeons, paint heavy as metal falling loose, piss in the corners, bums, and very dark-except at one or two places there were these enclosures, like a barbershop or a hot-dog joint.

But those places weren’t boutique-y. No one went in them, and they were run by Negroes. Well, someone went in them, I guess. Daddy took me in one of them once, we were just walking around. I remember now. It was a place about as big as a car, a room behind swirled old glass in green wood framing, and up against the glass were pressed all these clothes. Inside, there were some on hangers and on a table, but a lot were just piled up against the windows. Daddy stopped and went in.

A Negro, invisible except for his white shirt, was in there.

"Yezza."

"Need suspenders."

Nothing.

"How much are your suspenders?"

" ’Pend which."

Daddy plunged his hand into the wall of clothes at the door, and I saw through the window this banded strip of material with a brass buckle disappear into the dark mountain like a snake into the ground. The strip snapped free inside.

"These," he said, holding up a brown-and-white set of suspenders.

The Negro felt them and said a dollar. Daddy got them.

"Those would cost you fifteen dollars on King Street," he said, when we left. And suddenly we were looking into a barbershop, built like the haberdasher’s, with another lone Negro very much like the first, but this one behind a barber chair with white porcelain armrests and a white porcelain headrest, looking twenty degrees away from us.

Then there was this food place where you stepped up to a half-open door and ordered.

"I’m hungry."

"All right, let’s go on up to Hen—" He stopped.

"What do you want to eat?"

"What do they have here?"

"Let’s see."

We did, and had two very reasonable hot dogs and Pepsis in Coke cups — they explained the difference before they sold them to us. They put ice cubes from an ice-cube tray in them out of a refrigerator like at a house.

The next time I went to the market it was all gone. Bats, rafters, shale, pee, lead paint, clothes wads, the stuck barber pole, chili in open pots, all went to dropped ceilings for energy saving, parquet, restrooms, pastel, jean shops, international flags waving in front of a deli store, and food described on a blackboard. It was something.

The only thing left intact was the vegetable end, where, besides the women shouting could they help us with something that day, Daddy and I saw this kid with a big dog on a kite string leash.

He was going from table to table piled high with vegetables, showing it off. "Lookit my new collie!” They couldn’t help but lookit: it was tall as his shoulders, and prancing ahead of him without straining the kite string, as if it had been trained. Its back was bowed up and it had a long, skinny bone-head, and the whole dog was about half a foot wide, like it was sick, and smiling.

"What’s wrong with that dog?"

"Probably nothing," Daddy said. "Except he’s lost."

"Lost from where?"

"From his owner."

"It’s not his Bonsai?"

"That’s a Borzoi."

That’s where I learned they weren’t Bonsais, but they still look as tortured as those little trees they plant in square china pots. Daddy made a call from the corner and a big car came around in a minute and Daddy told the man to go up the market.

"On a string ?" the man said, laughing. “They something else , aindee, Iv?" He sped off.

Daddy’s name is Everson Simons Manigault. You shorten names here to the least sound workable and then, if you can, change the sound. Iv. A regal name like Cambridge becomes Bridge, then Brudge, then Budge. And so forth. Girls, sometimes it’s lengthened. Mary can’t be plain Mary, but Mary C., stuck on. Anne won’t do, it becomes Annie, still something missing, so Annie-boo. People get more charming that way, more memorable and distinct.

"Who was that man?" I asked Daddy.

“Old friend of mine from Clemson," he said.

"What’s his name?"

"Bun."

We Entertain: A Faculty Raree

Something more than all get-out. That was the phrase at school one year. Sharp as all get-out. Fast as all get-out. Where did it come from? What could it mean? Well, the night the Doctor had her associates over to inspect her circus property, it was ludicrous as all get-out.

I had to get the party condiments out of the Cadillac. She’d got a bunch of things she never drank herself, like Wild Turkey and J&B Scotch, to impress the guests with. And a box of Coke and things for mixing it. It was quite a load, though at the time I didn’t notice, except for the insane trips with one bottle in each hand so I wou1dn’t break anything like I did once. "Please, honey, no more than two at a time. I don’t want you to strain." She was always referring to the time a blue crab scared me on the steps and I bailed out because I was still in my childhood mode. He was perfectly crushed and pickled by the best discount liquor money could buy when she got there, holding the door open, looking down truly aghast, the lame crab waving his last threats from a pile of glass and wet paper sacking and sharp whiskey stink. She replaced everything with one stop at the Grand bootleg door, the day I first heard her called the Duchess, and the day they first saw her little prince. Apparently I did something to impress them, like pet a bad dog or look in its ears and tell them it had mice, which I thought was plural for "mite" then. We went home and transferred the cheap stuff to her decanters and got ready for that party.

And ever since I have been a two-bottle lackey. Tonight was big if you considered the number of my trips. And on one of them I met her coming down with a coat on her shoulders, and she went up the beach toward Theenie’s. I thought she meant to get Theenie for a vacuum run, or even for maid work during the bash, until I remembered Theenie was gone. She was up there to talk to the star boarder. I was so dense, picturing him cracking ice for them or driving the soddy ones home. He was going to be it, guest of honor.

The party collects very quickly because it is so casual, twos and singles parking up the road in the palmettos, which they think of as the jungle, and they walk in like soldiers on leave from all their trench work teaching their ignorami , which great parts of their conversation dwell on in the early going. No one can write or read or — brace yourself — think in any of my classes. Nor mine. Nods. Toasts. A few more rounds and the culprit has been determined: the president of the college! Not the dean, not social promotions, not even their less adept

colleagues (everyone not present). It’s the president. Then president stories.

The president was a general in the army before he was a college president, which allowed him to view academic developments in martial terms. So funds were not appropriated by budgetary solicitation, the till was sacked. The fine-arts department was not enlarged, it was reinforced. So-and-So would not be denied tenure, he would be discharged without dishonor. They called him the General.

"The General went up to poor Bill," somebody says, "and smiled so effusively Bill thinks he’s in trouble. Then he said he’d heard Bill planned to get married." They howled, because Bill knows the General knows he’s homo. He’s so scared for his job he can’t teach!