Padgett Powell - Edisto

"Here. Roll it to me."

We rolled it out over the crumbly terrain — all these Italian high-heeled shoes and boots as soft as puppies — and we couldn’t stop laughing. Anyway, we got the wheel out and put it on the go-Cart, reusing the cotter pin, and fired the engine up. Mike called it the cooker pin. He had this track charted out through little places where you could hardly make it, and every time one of us hit a banana tree it was funnier than the shoes. You just get laughing and can’t stop.

We ran the course until white roots were showing in the mud at the turns and the engine smoked and ticked out a blue vapor. Then we went in and Mike, who had got the idea I was smart because I said we could use a nail if straightening out that cotter pin was too hard, showed me this kind of altar in his room. It was his books, about ten books and some magazines like National Geographic. He told me he was through with comics. Over the books on a small banner he had written:

MY GOAL IN LIFE: NOT T0 BE A IGNORAMUS THATS MY MOTO

He showed me this shrine very proudly.

"That’s a good motto," I said. I didn’t know what to do about the spelling, so I didn’t do anything.

The important thing, I suppose, is that this weekend was the first one we spent that wasn’t entirely at the state fair or big-brother Disneyland. It was the first time Daddy sort of ignored me like the Doctor, and I must confess that I had a better time than ever before on these custody junkets. It’s heavy pressure, you know, to find your role four days out of the month, a little two-day run every two weeks with no rehearsal. I suppose it was no fun for him, either, being the director as well as actor and still not getting it right. But that weekend he seemed a lot more regular in a way it’s hard to describe. I think that woman (Mike’s mother) looked sexy, for one thing, but that is strictly my unhaired opinion. At school the word is, you don’t know what girls really are until you have hair, kind of a Samson thing, I guess. I regularly enjoy unveiling mythic structure in Bluffton Elementary education. Taurus knows, I am pretty sure, from this exchange I witnessed between him and a girl who served us in a restaurant, but I am still sorting that out and finishing it.

On Monday morning early, when I got back, there was fog in the palmettos and the tree edges looked blue. Taurus’s car was parked and spiffing out white balls of smoke into the fog, like smoke rings. Daddy stopped the car with the shift stick and it clicked to a stop like the ratchet stands I got to help set up for the drums one night at the Baby Grand for this old drummer with a band that had been everywhere. It was the saxophone player that was famous, and the rest of the band was nobody, so they had to do all the work. The drummer let me open out these chrome stands that had silver feet and arms you stood up and set the right-size drum in. He did that part. The stands clicked until they were open and then wouldn’t close. The drum heads were worn clean in the centers but had this crud all around the edge you could scrape off with your fingernail, like a crayon deal where you color all the colors on the paper and then black all over that and then etch a design by scraping off the black, leaving a rainbow-y picture. On the drum this left a pure-white scratch mark.

Anyway, he stopped the car like a ratchet stand and was up the stairs before I had the tote bag out of the back seat, and I thought he was going in, but he stopped. He turned and waited for me on the landing and said goodbye and left. That was very strange — getting out, for one thing, and then going up there and not going in but turning and seeing me up like a guest, and then our doing the hug and him leaving. They were waiting inside as I crossed the unswept floor. I noticed all the windows were open and the drapes standing out like air-conditioner sales strips. You couldn’t see it but you could feel the damp clam of fog on everything. The Doctor was in her wicker pose and the settee was cricking crisply in the cool air and they both had these steaming black coffees and were looking patiently at each other.

"Hi, Ducks," she said.

"Everything okay?"

"Just fine."

"Ready for school?"

I was in my room and stopped. "Ready as ever,” I said. Apparently it was another shirt day, so I got a black Western rig with bat-wing shoulders, makes me look like Wyatt Earp.

When I came out Taurus was saying, "It sounds queer to me."

"Well," she said, sipping coffee to punctuate as for a lecture point. "What have you seen out here that wasn’t?"

"Well," he said, doing the same coffee thing, "aren’t you divorced?"

"We can still be friends, then?" She hurried on, ignoring him.

He tipped his cup at her. "Why not?"

"I mean. .”

"Sport," he said to me, "let’s go." We were off, me to school to drive fat pencils into newsprint, him to Charleston to catch crooks too cheap for the government to bother.

The End of Inquiry by Direct Methods

It looked about time I did some investigation of girls. Diane Parker was still a quarter, so I got in on one of these field trips. It was very subtle.

Diane got her quarters from five of us, and we all left the bus-stop zone together at a trot and went into the woods. School woods always have a greasy worn-out feel from regular and undeviating use by kids. You always see a rubber or a rubber package, but more distinctive is this special compound of sand and pine straw which makes pine straw look dirty for the only time in its life, packed around the edges of deep trails like base-running paths on the playground.

Well, on this gunky straw Diane pulled her pants down and we looked for about five seconds. Then she was headed back up the trail fast, leaving us with the mystery. Before we could begin to work on it, we saw the bus and started running too — again very subtle, all of us running after Diane Parker out of the woods. She made $1.25. I had this feeling sort of like I needed to pee when I saw her naked. This was aggravated during the run to the bus, but subsided. I could find out what this was if I pored over the literature, but I frankly don’t care to. I am sure that Diane met her contractual obligations, showing us what she did, but I knew when I saw it that there was more to it than this little cleft-chin thing you marvel at how smooth it looks. I thought at least it would move. Which speaks my case; all the hollering about this soft little nose you can see for a quarter is about something else. What, I don’t know.

Well, from here you have two paths of inquiry. It’s like you’ve seen the text and now you can consult the critics or the artist. The Doctor showed me this stuff. We have all these critical editions with your essays and writer interviews right in them. I had seen the text for five seconds, so I got an eighth-grade critic. "Of course you get inside it, fotch," says one celebrated pundit for my barbecued Fritos.

"Well, what’s it like?" I say, not even sure I mean to ask what it feels like. "It’s not like anything,” he says. "You just have to do it yourself." I suspect he hasn’t "done it."

At this point benevolence steps up, and for no more of my lunch I am awarded this news by Roland, the patrol boy who jumped out of the bus, they said, the time I fell out, and was the first one to the tree where I stopped rolling. "It’s like in your mouth. Feel in your cheek," he says, distending his cheek with his finger inside his mouth. I do this. "Yeah," says the first guy with my Fritos. “It’s sorta like that."

Well, swell. I now know a whole hell of a lot more than I did. So I will have to go back to the source. To hell with the critics.

Now, your artists are somewhat famous, I gather, for playing around with people who ask them what it all means, which is why one interview spawns more critical essays than the book ever did. So I had to be careful. But then how careful can you be, asking a girl under fifteen something like this? So I shoot the moon, as it were, because there’s this girl who disappeared last year — some said to have a baby and some said to go to reform school and some said both — but anyway, she looked very adult coming back, always had a purse with her and a sweater on her shoulders like a cape. And she got a lot of attention from back-of-the-room types, which she largely ignored, except it made her hold her head and walk different going away from them.