Padgett Powell - Edisto

"This beer kissy hot!" She looks for Wheat, who’s still doddering. "Kissy hot! Buckwheat!"

Wheat’s almost remounted and he makes the several pedals necessary to pull up behind Lilly. "You so slow, no wonder your wife left you," she shouts at the river.

"She din’ leave me," Wheat says. "She died."

"The ultimate leff ," Lilly says, and they howled, all the ladies. Even Wheat giggled.

"Well, where is it?" Lilly says.

"Wheah whah?"

"The cold beer l"

"Ho1d your horse." Wheat digs into the bicycle basket. Past fried chicken in a shoebox with wax paper, and some stray mullet all mixed in with the chicken, old paper sacks, and cardboard, through fishing tackle too, corks and tangled lines and hooks, empty beer cans, finally he pulls out a six-pack of Old Milwaukee. Paper is stuck to it because it’s sweating.

"Goddamn, Buckwheat!" Lilly yells.

"Goddamn whah!" Wheat yells back.

"It’s gone be kissy hot, too. Where’s the ice?"

"The ice?"

"You forgot the ice!"

"No, I din’. I must overlooked it."

Another howl.

“Well, gimme the bucket."

Wheat starts to lift out the bucket of mullet and she sees him struggling with it. "Well, that fits. You spose to put them at the house."

"I cuhn,” he says.

"Why you cuhn ?”

"Iss lock. You din’ give me no key." There is a victorious thrust in his voice.

"Well, give me a beer, you old fool."

Wheat tears loose a beer.

Lilly hands him the key and the mullet she’s sat on.

He puts the mullet in the bucket and mounts up and starts to go and then stops. "Say, Needa," he says. Another lady answers. "You gone to the church Friday?”

"Friday. For what?"

“For the wedd’n."

"Wedd’n? Who gettin' marrit?"

"Me." There’s a titter from the ladies.

"You? Who gone marry you?"

"I thought choo was." A big howl. Buckwheat pedals off.

So we finally got to see some mullet action. It turned out Lilly was a pro. She had the timing down. Mullet fishing is timing — more timing I’d say than sheephead fishing, though it’s close. When the mullet comes up to the ball of worms — a big gob, I prefer — he must do something to the worms like a duck does to silt and algae. First a gentle mouthing and then a fierce gumming and sucking. Which makes the cork just shiver. If it moves it’s because it accidentally gets hung up and moves off with the mullet. Usually it just shivers. T'hat’s when you have to hit him, and firmly, but not horse-rough. It’s an art to nail a fish and then relax without letting the authority escape. Especially a mullet, which is a thinking fish — you have to let him know you know how delicate his mouth is but that he’s creelbound all the same and no funny stuff. I’m good at it, but that Lilly was a pro.

I was watching old Psoriasis down there when she set the hook and doubled her pole, and whatever she had hooked remained solidly deep and moved sideways at a good clip. Lilly strained up, making her pole whine. It still stayed down. Usually you have a mullet out in one smooth motion.

Lilly yelled to the river, "Gahad damn!" and everybody watched the deepness move to her right. She pulled even harder, the pole tip itself in the water, a bamboo semicircle connecting Lilly on the pier to the river, quivering and ticking like a dowser. Then it came up. It was only a mullet foul-hooked in the belly. She thought she had the biggest mullet of all time. Psoriasis was down there sucking his teeth, his sorry excuse for a laugh. The other ladies all said what they had thought. Lilly said what she had thought.

I baited Taurus up and my own and caught one during their analysis — not too big but big enough to offer the ladies, which would buy our way into the fishing hole without any resentment. I also thought we could pique old Psoriasis, but then I realized it would be better to be seen keeping some mullet for ourse1ves — that would fry his butt better.

"We might keep a couple," I said to Lilly, "just to eat tonight. But we won’t need the rest and ya’ll can have them." Fine, fine. It’s a good way to get bait insurance, this, too. You’re giving somebody fish and run out of bait, and unless he’s a fool he will supply you with some.

Taurus did very well for his first trip — caught three mullet and a red bass, which got everybody, even Psoriasis, excited. The first time I went for mullet I was skunked, because I waited for the cork I to go under. "He won’t under it, child," a woman finally said.

"He won’t take it under?"

"No. Watch it close. It’ll shiver like. Then pull hard."

“How hard?”

"Not too hard."

I was confused, because they were laying back like tuna men for no apparent reason cork-vvise. (I heard this local news guy say, “That’s the way it crumbles, cookie-wise.")

Anyway, I caught five or six, including two big ones, which I announced we would keep, and held up at Psoriasis, who looked away at his line, which hadn’t had a bump. "Ya’ll keep the rest, and this red bass," I said, and dropped it loudly into their bucketful of sad-eyed slimy mullet.

And so Taurus and I went home for the last supper, a meal of two old mullet with hemorrhages in their jaundiced eyes, pouting up at us like their dogs had died.

A Vision of Snug Harbor

Then we went to town one last time, for no reason other than the good old days, which you could taste suddenly getting closer to their end and sweeter, like the last pieces of candy. We got up early on a Saturday I was not scheduled for a custody junket. Taurus had his car idling by the shack, mumbling little piffs of hot smoke into the cool cloud of fog which held everything still like a sharecropper photograph. We closed the green shutters on the sea window and one of them fell off, about breaking my foot. I said before they were sorry shutters anyway, which he got from Charleston, and they were sorry even though no dime-store stuff. Each weighed about a hundred pounds, which is why the one fell and why they never departed this world in the hurricanes which probably took a house or two out from under them. That’s why Taurus could come to find them out of service yet still for sale, shutters stouter than planters’ summer homes and stronger than a cotton economy. When that one fell in the sand, old and spent as it had to be, with scaling paint so thick it could cut your fingers like can lids, it looked like the top of a treasure chest to me. It was green and crooked, with sand already drifting into the louvers.

"Theenie’s going to pitch a fit about cutting her wall open," I said.

"We’ll put it back later."

"It won’t matter," I said. "When she gets back and sees that hole, she’ll put a mattress in it until we get a professional carpenter with tar paper and tin tabs and real lumber to shore it back up right?

"Hmmp," he said, just like Theenie. He was a cool jake to the end. We took off.

We had breakfast at an old hotel on the Citadel Square in Charleston. John Calhoun’s out there in bronze about forty feet tall, and it seems he’s doing something about the Confederacy by standing up there so very proudly, but I don’t know what, because I don’t know what he did, if he was a decent Reb or a bad one or anything. Looking out the cool dewy windows of the hotel, feeling the cold glass, I could still see that sad shutter in the sand.

We order these country-gentleman breakfasts, and this other waitress than ours comes to the table. She just comes up very close to it, even presses it with her front, and just kind of turns her lips or bites the inside corner of her mouth, tucking her lips to one side.

“Hey," she says to Taurus, but then she looks quickly at me, too. It’s a funny way to show them, but I get the idea this girl has manners.