Padgett Powell - Edisto

"Her second thesis?" Bill giggled.

"Or her second honeym—" Margaret was slurry and too slow.

"I don’t believe a word of it," Bill said. "Not a word. A Neeegrow. He’s as much black as I am."

Everybody looked at Bill, who blushed.

"A Nee-grow!” Jim said. "Jesus Christ.” Jim was Old Guard.

“So she sayez," Bill put in. "Moreover, sired by a famous writer.”

“Of the school — the Famous Writers School?"

‘Sired by Famous Writer out of Negress—’ "

"Shut up, Jim," said the Doctor, who on her foldedup legs was weaving slightly in the wicker settee.

"Yesss, honey. Do," said Margaret, who was patting the Doctor. "Some of us still have regular hopes in this wor1d."

Peals and knee-bouncing by Bill and Jim, Bill looking at the ceiling finally, with tears in his eyes. I slipped outside and went up the front stairs and climbed in the window to my room and didn’t hear any more of it. But this is where I learned all the crap on him they had, and, I thought, the main reason she was hyped up on him. If she even thought his father was a writer, then he was supposed to influence, any way it might happen, me.

On the Prevention of — ease Only

For a while there I guess he was still serving papers out of Charleston, because I would ride the bus home like always, except of course for the rear-door positioning. He dropped me off in the morning and went on up and got some blue folders with the criminal activities alleged therein and fell to on the people while I was in school. He said it was kind of hard, doing it, not being the law but just a kind of citizen-scab, a bounty hunter for gunslingers so small that they didn’t spend tax money on the sheriff to go get them with. They weren’t gunslingers, though — bad-check slingers, bad-language slingers. Mostly the baddest thing they committed, he said, was bad judgment. He didn’t like it and said sometimes he let the people go. All that does is delay things. The paper reverts to the attorney’s office and doesn’t look too good on his service record, and he said his attorneys knew from the cases he had found that there was something fishy when he gave up and turned one back in.

So he’s out being Matt Dillon, chasing down rottenteeth van people and gold-teeth Negroes descendent of Oglethorpe convicts and slaves, and I’m in the front seat of the bus like a bus rider emeritus. For a while there were jokes. "Hey, Sim! Comone back heah. The air better." At home the sun would be swung around and low, about ten feet up in the air. Its angle was perfect for about two hours to fill up the house with mirror light glaring up off the ocean, blinding upward through the sliding doors onto the ceiling so that any shadows thrown were thrown out the windows and you never saw them. It made it like a dollhouse or a perfectly lit stage set. The wind kept whistling that peppery noise against the house, little sand grains working their way through somehow, tumbling in their little glassy bounce across the floors like an eminent-domain march to the other side of the room, and piling up on false Edens such as a throw rug or under the TV. So I’m in there looking at the flash of ocean, moved by the heat in the direction of the sand, shadowless and hot, quiet except for the peppering which you quit hearing, wondering about things, touching the wicker to make it squeak, the glass decanters and their little tin bibs on chains telling you what kind of poison they hold, feeling the drapes, which lift off the floor like old big rats are behind every one of them, listening for a clue about something I can’t even figure out what it’s about.

And nothing happens. At a time like this you expect some news, an event, maybe just some excitement. But it doesn’t come. The sun swings on around and throws the set into the cool, dusky aftertime of the studio or stage where everything had been ready, lights and camera and player and no one to clap together two striped barricades and simply yell, Action. Instead, the lights quit and quiet and cool; dim dusk dawns on the regular old house, the plain land sales office pagoda.

"Sim!” Theenie would say if she caught me in one of these conditions. "What ails you?"

"Nothing."

"Somethin’ ailin’ you."

"Nothing."

"Hmmp!” she would say, going about her business. Or I could take the talkative route: "Nothing ever happens, Theenie."

"Say whah?" Very high.

"I said, Nothing ever happens."

"Hmmp!" she would say, going about her business,

One time I said: "I’m worried, Theenie?

"What choo worrit about." Not a question, a denial of my right or cause to worry, against the larger monopoly of adult rights.

"Puberty.” I looked at her to see if it worked. She looked like a horse in a stall wondering whether to kick a careless stable boy, eyes orbiting in quick I white slices like quarter moons.

"I’m worried about this thing they call puberty."

"You scudgin’ me. Why you wont to grind me, Sim?" and she flopped all the ironing together, which would have otherwise taken a half hour to fold up, and left, silent until tomorrow, until a short trial during which I could not refer to the question would secure my reprieve, and we could be jake again. If I did it like that, a puberty question was just a souvenir in the memory of her raising me up, but if I asked again, I was closer to a hellion. She could tell people how sweet I was to have asked, but not that she had to answer. It’s part race relations and part family relations, there.

So there in the upward glare of clinical Atlantic radiation I remain — before the Doctor comes in with a batch of papers to grade, new bottle in a skin-tight paper sack twisted around the neck. The breaking seal will suck a little air out of the kitchen, like the hiccup of a baby, air that slips into the bottle and hits the liquor and changes it like film or blood: blood, film, liquor are never seen before their innocence is lost. Also in this air-innocence class is rubbers, which didn’t get into the class for a while because I didn’t know what they were. In the top drawer of the Progenitor’s chest I found these gold-coin-like deals almost like candy mints except, thank God, light enough to tip me off before I tried to eat one. Then I thought they were amusement-park tokens or pirate doubloons you buy drinks with in a resort-town bar or something. Then I figured they were gambling chips from the Bahamas, where they’d been on a trip. Gambling chips — I was close. Anyway, the matter came up at school and somehow I learned what they were for, if not exactly what they were, so in one of our first Big Brother reunions after the Progenitor left, I advanced the line of inquiry about rubbers. "They stop babies, okay, I got that much, but how?"

"Well," he said, "you put them on."

"How?"

"Well—" He fumbled in the air in front of the steering wheel; we were in his car, engine running. He tucked the fingers on one hand into the palm of the other. Suddenly he rested his hands. "Like a sock."

"Like a sock?"

"Yessir,” he said, nodding, and very satisfied about something. "Anything else you want to know?" Else?

"No, sir.”

"Sure?"

"Yes, sir." He left out the juice part, the good part, left me imagining your tallywhacker (the Doctor’s favorite word for it) is some kind of electric eel or polyp stinger you have to insulate with rubber. Nothing about it stopping the paste of life. I have to learn about that at the back of the bus, where you can learn all you need to know on earth. Brylcreem, they said, and feels good. So. A sock stops hairdressing. One of the big disappointments of my childhood, I tell you.

But I had this talk with Taurus in the early days, just to check him out further with the Boy Act.