Padgett Powell - Edisto

Anyway, we left together and drove home to the Cabana. And he stayed there that night. I didn’t need any air ducts to know that.

"God, Iv," I heard come from their room.

"God what?"

"Chemistry."

"Chemistry what?"

"Chemistry never changes?

And then a set of rock groans no oracle ever bettered. And I’m drunk, which probably made it worse. And if chemistry never changes, why’d they split up? I guess somebody could wonder that, but it’s probably only me, drunk. Everyone who knows them says they split up because the Doctor’s a bitch, if they are on his side, and because the Progenitor’s an asshole, if they’re on hers, and some people say both. That leaves me to wonder. I don’t. I know. The Doctor is a Democrat and the Progenitor is a Republican. I don’t mean registered voters now, I mean their whole attitude. They both voted for Nixon, so it’s not that simple. They both vote for Nixon but she thinks it’s a land where you decide your boy is a novelist and feed him books and he is one, and he thinks in these supply-demand curves and says book reading’s fine but there will have to be baseball for balance and law school in order that I be a producer and not a ward of the state, and bam — they are in it, fighting in a corner.

"He’s bright enough. Let him read if he wants to."

"He has to work on it, Iv."

"He’s a boy, for God’s sake."

"Not any boy. My boy."

Crack!

"If you hit me again, it’ll be the last time."

I wondered about that one for years. How did he do it? A short, deft blow that broke her nose? A high — handed Cagney slap? Or a schooled punch, like a hook? We boxed, twice. He got me these gloves the size of plums and put them on me and placed my guard and said keep your guard up and come on. I did, with whirring weightless arms, concentrating on his T-shirt near his armpits, enveloping him in a storm of bad ideas until he reached out and thumped my mouth and I quit.

So what he did to her I don’t know. I did not see any mark the next day. But I knew that in a universe alleged to contain only men who beat their wives and men who don’t, he was a doer. At least he was in principle, because I’m not sure one shot is a true beating. It wouldn’t be if she had cracked him one, which for all I know she was trying to do, like me, swinging away, when he produced the audible whap. They could have this same kind of talk about business or money or careers or jobs, which is why I say their differences fall under the loose heading

of political.

"I sold the Market Street property," he’d say.

"You what?"

"I sold it."

"Without consulting me?"

Silence. Then she orates: "If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t — we wou1dn’t — have two quarters to rub together. I’m through with you." A sweeping noise of drink and napkin, a cabinet door slams, she heads for the bedroom, door locks. He must sit there with a solid look on his face. He mixes another drink.

Once, though, they worked up to the ignition point, and she said, "It’s over. Get out."

"Hell, it’s my house. You get out." And beat her to the bedroom. That one tickled me.

But it’s still kind of hard to lie there hearing all this, even though some of it’s funny. Too much of it’s about you, in the third person, when they could just get you in there for your opinion instead of relegating you to misfit. Hell, I would have told them all they needed to know. They’d have both been jaked up if they had asked me. I don’t know how they ever managed to dream that they had an object, like a commodity on a market they had to invest this way or that. And finally, there was a feeling I had that they had quit being themselves in favor of my becoming themselves, as if they were sacrificed to me. They assumed this sacrifice willingly together and only later discovered there were two lives being gambled on one.

So imagine the impact of my falling out of a bus, suspected of smoking modern hemp with Negro kids, and my taking up with a process server nobody knows a thing about but Theenie, who swears he’s the evil incarnation of her lost heroin grandbaby out of her bad-jazz-singer crazyass daughter. Imagine that. And I think all that carrying on on my part necessitated some immediate investment consultations, changed the curve of custody junkets, invigorated faculty parties, sweetened my last hours at Jake’s Baby Grand, for I knew a chapter was closing, and imperiled, of course, my friendship with the process server I got to even name like he was a character in those novels I was supposed to write.

A Saturday without Cartoons

The next morning Daddy was still there and I was sort of glad, but more certainly embarrassed, and in a way entirely different from coroner embarrassment. I'd got used to that. I could dismiss them with a marshaling of my lips into what I considered a pucker of disgust. But now the Progenitor was with Penelope. Great Olympic siren squeals had issued forth from the rocks of their bed. A coroner I hated was one thing, but now it was a guy I had a relationship with, like a very good friend in there — a guy who told me a rubber is like a sock.It hypered me out. About 6 a.m. I tried the hamburger and fishing broadcast and then hit the beach to get out of there.

Taurus wasn’t at the shack, but I saw some smoke up at the abandoned Boy Scout camp and kept walking. It was Taurus, with a fire lit up under a triangle-shaped coffeepot, like in a cowboy movie. It was just like the open range. He was stoking dead palmetto fronds in. You could smell the coffee. It almost had a scorchy smell.

I was going to go up like a drifter and ask for some grub and do a movie parody, but didn’t. He just handed me a cup. I was drinking it before I realized I hate coffee and then realized I didn’t hate it anymore, and that those first three true cold ones had probably produced my first true hangover and had changed coffee, like liquor, into something to drink, not to fake-drink with milk. Did he know about this, my blowout?

The fire was down quickly, because the fronds burn so fast, and I got up to pull a Sabal branch. I had to about swing on it to get it loose, and when I did I fell with it, and on the ground beside me was a sparrow, dead. He was still able to move his head if you did it for him. I couldn’t figure out where he came from — under the branch, in the shelter they make against the tree? Was he in there and I somehow killed him? Or was he already on the ground and I didn’t see him?

"You seen this bird before?"

"No," he said.

"I think I killed him."

"I wasn’t really looking, though."

"He. . you can still move him. I must have."

He didn’t say anything more, so we drank coffee.

“The oracle at the heating system spoke of great new formations in my fate," I said. "There are what you might have to call propitious portents."

"What would they be?"

"It looks like Daddy’s back."

"That’s good."

"It’s good?"

“Sure it’s good."

"You know him?"

"Heard his name around. Serving."

"Never met him?"

"No."

"I seem to know this means you’ll be going."

"Could."

"How is that?"

"What?"

"That you’ll have to go."

He looked at me. I was blabbering. It was one of those times where you’re supposed to act indifferent, or knowing, to what you don’t know. I saw these ninth-graders pull it off by keeping their traps shut one night on a school-bus field trip and kissing the cheerleaders instead of yapping like younger kids with no one to kiss. All you had to do was shut up and the girls got very adult about you.

"Well, like Frank Zappa said."

"What’d he say?" It worked. I turned him into the curious one.

"That’s where it’s at, baby."