Padgett Powell - Edisto

It had a shell ring. That’s a ring of oystershells piled about head-high in a circle about fifty yards across. Indians made them, they say for ceremonies and whatnot, and of course even live sacrifices get bandied about, but my information is that they don’t really know. The rock hounds and anthropods come out and remove chunks of the rings like bites out of a doughnut, but I don’t think they ever find anything but oystershells. The digs are all old-looking. My guess is it’s where the Indians had their oyster roasts, and a fine way to use the shells too, because it cuts out the wind for 360 degrees.

Anyway, we thought about the ghosts of Indians and rumrunners and all those old things that took place on a coast, and we didn’t really square off for the kissing like we wanted to. Just became regular jake friends while Taurus, etc. I felt little.

But at least he went to bat for me, and if I whiffed, it wasn’t his fault, maybe not my fault, certainly not button-nosed Altalondine Jenkins’s fault, and most certainly not that big wobbly blessing’s fault, for if ever there was a walking incitement to riot she was it. Call her my first love, fine with me.

I think that was his plan, really, to show me not cutie-cakes but what you can find if you look for genteel Diane Parkers — big, wonderful, warm girls who are just a hint upset about things. A smudge of abandon. Maybe that’s my motto. Me and old Mike can team up. He can worry about being an ignoramus and I can worry about round, wonderful girls with their edges ruined by 1ife’s little disasters, who remain solid and tough in their drive to feel good — to themselves and to you — and offer a vision of snug harbor.

Photos for the Record

We got back from sailing, still ratified by mullet. I said let’s stop at this photo parlor. It was an ancient type, with medieval backdrops and little dull pictures of you about three for a dollar. We walked in and didn’t see anybody.

"What fer ya?" comes from the rear of the hall. All we could see was amusement things, like punching bags with strength meters, pinball games, and the like, down both walls to darkness.

"Some photographs," I said. We had walked up on the speaker, who was sitting in a metal scallop lawn chair. Around him were a stove, refrigerator, TV, end tables, some fruit. We were in his living room.

"Sit down," he says. "It’s hot."

"Yessir," Taurus says, "plenty hot."

There was his wife, too, in another scallop chair. She said, "Hmmp."

"You young Americans just sit down and give a account of y’self," the old guy says.

"This is sure one nice game hall," Taurus says.

"Hmmp."

"This, son?" The old man points around. "This a gyp joint, son."

We sat there.

"Was nice, once. Had a bunch more in it. Our daughter sells it off next door."

The wife chuckled. He looked at her. "What?"

"The bear," she said.

"Had this bear in here, she sold it, it would. .you would squeeze it to show how strong you were on a dial thing. Only thing was, it squoze back."

She chuckled again.

"So we had a bunch a’ navy come in here one day and a big boy got that bear and wouldn’t give up and it broke bofe his ribs."

"Both?” I said.

" Bofe of ’em," he said happily, then he sobered up. "Time was, a thing like that was funny. They all left laughing like hell."

"Today you’d get sued," the wife said.

"Evathing changes." He looked around. "Boys, remember that. This ain’t nothin' but a gyp joint. We just holding on. Evathang changes."

Then he drew near and looked Taurus in the eye. "We’re from Georgia ?

We sat there.

"Wel1, about those pictures," I said.

"Sho. Come on, come right on up. Me and Opal wasn’t doing nothing but feeling sorry for ourself anyway."

We took snapshots in these Confederate scenes. I thought we’d come out looking like J.E.B. Stuart and Nathan Bedford Forrest. Taurus looked like a criminal and I looked like a mole. But we had them photographs.

* * *

In this old real snapshot we have (you can tell it’s old by the beer can I use — it has rims visible on the end, and it’s bitten open by the turtle-beak shapes of a church key), I am pouring seawater on the Doctor, who is lying face down in the sand. The water is frozen glisteny, one inch from hitting her. And I have this smile and kind of nervous-looking feet and legs, like I know I’m going to have to run. Well, the old man is off about six feet, I guess, watching this — he took the picture. I don’t remember running. I don’t remember ever wearing the dumb bathing suit they have me in, either. It’s all crinkly and flimsy and baggy, like lettuce or something. But other than that, you can tell everything’s fine. Daddy didn’t shoot out of focus, or shake the camera, and didn’t cut half the Doctor or me out with a bad aim. And she looks very serene, very settled, maybe beautiful. You can tell even I know it because, though my legs are nervous and ready, I’m very pleased with what I’m doing. I’m happy about it.

But later it’s not so clear, things. I have another beach memory. I’m out in the water and all of a sudden the Doctor is waving me in and calling me. So I head in and she starts waving even harder — I see then she’s not calling me in, but screaming me out. I wasn’t even coming in when she started. It’s most weird. There’s a stir up the beach, I see, by an old boat. Daddy is over there and their guests. Well, I can only get near enough to see Daddy shoot a pistol at the boat. Everything relaxes. I get past her then and up to the boat and he’s shot a snake.

"Are you satisfied?" Daddy says to the Doctor.

"It’s still alive," she says. Then to me: "Get back, Simons Everson!”

I take a step or two back.

"There was no need to kill it," Daddy says, and walks off.

Then I saw what I thought was guts on the sand start moving. The snake was twisting like a spring and I thought the guts were attached and that explained it. But the guts got two feet away, over unstained sand, and kept going. It was babies!

"You might have killed it," I called to them, "but you missed these here," and I was going to pick them up, they were very cute, when it really broke loose, the Doctor snatching at me hysterically and the old man kept walking, laughing, down to the beach. There’s no photograph of that, of any of that.

A Revelation of Foolery

Well. You knew he was a rake before you saw him courting women bosom-loosed in the swelling green sea, because, if for no better reason, he had learned that trick of keeping his mouth shut for the most part around women, like the varsity ninth-graders around cheerleaders. Except in their case it’s a practiced move and in his it’s genuine.

One day about a month before the Saturday we took Dietrich and the Princess sailing, I went up to the shack very early and before I knocked someone stepped from behind a palm holding a whiskey bottle, quiet and sure as a Pinkerton man on stakeout. It was Taurus.

It scared me so bad, this electric thing went off in my sac, which they call pissing in your pants, but it’s different.

“Hey, fucker," I gasped, white.

"You’re mighty early."

"Early bird gets the worm" was all I could say, since my heart had caught the electric jolt too. You always have these hook-man convict stories on your brain out here, and what with the constant wind, you can’t hear people move, so it’s worse, and I’m holding my heart.

Well, I didn’t think much of it. But then when I went up to go sailing, his car was idling and warm, he was all set, practically closing those shutters before I got there, like he had seen me coming, and I learned something about the early-bird morning. I knew he had not waited to scare me. He had chased me. He chased me and designed a calm steady stepping into view from behind a tree to disguise the pursuit. He followed me. From the Cabana. Then it all started to fall in place.