Padgett Powell - Edisto

"I’m worried."

He was carefully matching the thread lines of the bottle to the lip of a drinking jar, and he poured a thin sheet of whiskey into the jar, just covering the bottom. It was snifter drinking without crystal or brandy. He swirled it more than he drank it. In Theenie’s cabin it still smelled like a washed dog sometimes. His nose hovered over the amber film in the glass.

"Okay," he said. He was not the target that Theenie was.

"I’m worried about puberty."

He smiled. "Don’t."

"Why not?"

"It’s too big."

"What do you mean?"

"Like nuclear war. Nothing to worry about."

"It comes or it doesn’t?"

"Yes. Except here, it’s coming. So there’s less to worry about than nuclear war.”

"There’s a lot of bad information floating around," I said.

"You’ll get through."

"My father told me a rubber was like a sock."

He pushed his lips together over the jar. "Well, what’s wrong with that?"

I stopped. He was scudgin’ me. "Well — because it’s more like a balloon, if anything," I said, hoping I was right.

"Sock, balloon," he said, in that kind of Jewish resigning whine they do on TV. "When the time comes, you won’t blow it up, you won’t put it on your foot." He looked at me. "I hope."

"So there’s nothing to worry about?"

He got up and prepared me one of these poverty snifters and pushed it over the enamel table and sat back down.

"Worry about this. You will need a girl. The sooner it hits, the better."

"It hits?"

""Well, no. It creeps up.”

"Your sac gets ruddy like a bum’s nose," I said.

"Where’d you hear that?"

"I saw it. We got this guy down at the Y who wouldn’t take off his bathing suit because he said he was older and it took about three hundred of us, heads walloping banging lockers, but we didit."

"And his equipment looked like a bum’s nose?"

"Well, no. But it was — I understand it gets bigger — but it was dark and more wrinkly. Like whiskey drinkers’ faces if they’re really gone."

"I see." He snifted. "Well, after your bum’s nose comes in, you will need a girl. This is the only thing to worry about. They will tell you you don’t need one and they will tell the girls the same thing, so it can take longer to find one than it should."

He fixed me another volume-less drink, and him too.

"So do this. There’s a kind of girl who won’t listen to them, and you need to study them. How old are you?"

"Twelve."

He smiled. "Are there any special girls you know?"

"Diane Parker takes her clothes off for a quarter. But I never went with them to see it. And a girl named Andrea gave us the lowdown on the girls’ movie last year, and a pamphlet they gave them about beginning to bleed. God, that’s creepy—"

"Okay. Not these girls themselves necessarily, but see if you can get a line on their character traits and what they’re like generally. Get to know them. Find one with some brains when the time comes and use a balloon or use her ideas if she has any."

I considered this. We must have looked like a real couple of cards, an ace and a joker maybe, sitting there in a haint-painted shack on a whistling bluff on the nowhere coast of Edisto, itself a speck on the Atlantic seaboard.

"At the Grand," I said, "one of the rubber machines says Sold for prevention of — ease only . What does the scratchedout — ease mean?"

"You’ll get the joke in time," he said. "It was disease originally. Don’t worry about that either. It comes or it doesn’t. Probably does. Don’t get anybody pregnant is the other thing. When the time comes, if you don’t know what that means, find out."

"Gir1s get boys in trouble, you mean?"

He said yes and smiled, and I don’t think knew whether I was joking or not, but didn’t need to know. That’s the thing I learned from him during those days: you can wait to know something like waiting for a dream to surface in the morning, which if you jump up and wonder hard you will never remember, but if you just lie there and listen to the suck-pump chop of the surf and the peppering and the palm thrashing and feel the rising glare of Atlantic heat, you can remember all the things of the night. But if you go around beating the world with questions like a reporter or federal oral history junior sociologist number-two pencil electronic keyout asshole, all the answers will go back into mystery like fiddlers into pluff mud. You just sit down in the marsh and watch mystery peek out and begin to nibble the air and saw and sing and run from hole to hole with itself. Lie down and the fiddlers will come as close to you as trained squirrels in a park. And how did he teach me that? I don't know, but you don’t need a package of peanuts or anything.

A New Kind of Custody Junket Dawns

About this time began a run of events. The first one was so weird that I remember what shirt I was wearing. It was Friday, and I came home on the bus (Taurus was out serving, I guess) and had run up the steps before I saw both the Doctor’s and the Progenitor’s cars, his a little crooked in the driveway. It was one of those deals where you become an eavesdropper accidentally and have to pick your moment to declare yourself so they won’t know what you heard, or at least will think you didn’t hear the worst of it. Through the screen I could make out their silhouettes like in a TV interview of double agents or criminals or state witnesses where they backlight and underexpose to protect the identity of the guilty and sometimes they even woof out voices so they sound like speech-therapy patients or retards or robots.

"The hell I can’t," I heard him say.

"Everson. I still don’t see what you’re so worked—"

"What’s so difficult? Every veterinarian with an autopsy license is one thing, but I can go a lot further with — with your bounty hunter."

"You’re a son of a bitch." She snapped it hard.

"I will take him."

"No, you won’t. You can’t."

"The hell I can’t."

I figured I had the beat, so I stepped three steps down from where my lips had been pressing on the rusty, fly-smelling screen and stomped back up and sashayed in with a perfect whine-bang door slam and was on them so fast they never knew or suspected. Looked like big doings: she didn’t have a drink, he did.

"Hi, Daddy." We did the hug. "Am I late or you early?"

"I’m early,” he said, and looked at the Doctor. "And late."

"We still going?" I asked.

“Sure — why not?"

"Don’t know," I said, going to my room for my tote bag. It was highly unusual for him to come inside the house like this to get me. The shirt I had on was my red Rugby.

That weekend was the second event. We usually did everything as if it was the state fair. It was like he took me out to show me a good time and I could play games or ride rides if I wanted to, except it was movies and restaurants we went to. But this time we went over to a woman’s house I only later put together was his secretary but then instead got the idea a lawyer herself. She had this kid about two years older than me, and they put us together to entertain ourselves while they sat and talked. She lived in a carriage house and they had the whole yard of the big house, which looked empty.

Sometimes kids just hit it off despite the artificial confinement, which is strange. Fully aware of the difficulty of liking each other, like in an arranged marriage, we just put all that aside and had a blast. I don’t know how it started but Mike, her kid, said that we could ride his go-cart if we put on the new wheel and didn’t go in the street. The new wheel was wrapped in brown paper and was in a closet full of his mother’s shoes and when he went in to get it he had to walk on the shoes and he fell over. Well, the wheel was heavy and he couldn’t pick it up lying there, so he tried to get up and the shoes kept buckling and sliding and turning his ankles and we started laughing.