Padgett Powell - Edisto

It’s funny how one minute you don’t know a thing and then something happens which in itself is not telling but which serves nonetheless as a thump on a long line of dominoes. And his closing that shutter on the sailing day was the thump and they began to fall. It was as early as the time before, if not earlier, yet he was well ahead of me, not closing from behind with whiskey in hand like a smoking pistol. The whiskey was in a sack.

One night some time before, the Doctor had run out of liquor and I told her Jake didn’t carry her stuff anymore, and besides, they had a saxophone player in from a faraway place and of old local fame and it would be packed. She hesitated a bit and then went up on her toes over the refrigerator and opened a small cabinet and drew out a bottle in a sack. I even remember thinking how young her calves looked flexed up, and not particularly about the liquor being up there, which was the novel thing.

Nor did anything really dawn when I saw Taurus that morning with a sack just like it. But when we got back from sailing I went home, got on a chair, got to it, skinned the sack back, and Old Setter — his liquor-trembled in my hand. Penelope!

I cloistered the evidence and jumped down, knees buckling with confusion. No, actually I was sprightly. I had some of that electric hook-man thing in my nuts, but it was different from the fear electricity. This tickled a little.

I didn’t know what to think. I holed up in my room, bassinet bound by books provided by my sweet mother. The entire Modern Library among other things, original glossy jackets on them. Trilogies, juvenilia, oeuvres! The works. I opened the window and unhooked the screen and dropped it off into the sand. Leaned back in a straight chair with my feet in the window, looked at the coquina beach, surf chomping, and took a steady gale of sand in the teeth while I sorted it out.

I had been consummately stupid! The whiskey was a lighthouse light over an entire reef of secrets. At night when I had thought myself asleep-now suddenly I could recall gentle sounds, innocent door knocks and paddings thereto and slipping bolts and whining hinges and paddings, softer and heavier, coming back. Whiskeys and ices tinkling and low, steady voices, twelve bells and all’s well, and I must have been rolling over and off into turns of deeper, dreamless watch. Because now I knew there had been the bower sounds then too, the deep moaning of oracle rocks in the Carrier vents, sounds like blankets settling on cold patients, fluffed up in the air with a snap of woolen breath by healthy nurses and floating down on ailing folk to make them better, much better by morning. And how comfortable I felt, thinking it just the fun I was having with him, when it was more. It was fun she was having, and that mattered, I had to admit, and it mattered also when the Progenitor had come home and I consciously heard the Carrier moan, because then I did not want to call them the Progenitor and the Doctor but my mother and father, the way Jake would call his mother Momma when he went back to see her every afternoon before opening up, after he had cleaned up the joint, and they just sat on her porch.

So who was I going to blame? At first I thought him, for not telling me, but then he couldn’t very well have advertised it or I’d have had him on the coroner list before long probably, and then I realized he did tell me, the same way he told me everything else, with one ounce of suggestion and pounds of patience. He didn’t have to step out from behind a tree, he could have gone anywhere. He could have left that bottle at the Cabana, or thrown it away. And God knows he’s a sport — I’d seen him release to warm Atlantic bay water the boundless bosom of my very own first girlfriend, though I hadn’t managed more than three words to her and with any more would have come off like the fat dude, though on the flip side, seething with green innocence. He’s a sport, he’s game, and even I admit she’s a goodlooking broad even for your mother. And lonely, and all that. So I can’t blame her — Taurus is a sight (and a damn sight) better than ten coroners boiled into one human being if you could do that.

So what was my complaint? My teeth were full of sand, mainly. I went down and got the screen and put it back in and tried to shake it off. Made a hamburger and a Coke, I was still full of salt from the sailing. The only thing was, I thought the Progenitor — Daddy — had been negotiating a return since that night he got me at the Grand. Was that true? When had I heard the "we’l1 be friends" conversation between Taurus and my mother? Was it over and done with before I caught on? Is that why he had to take my girlfriend from me? He was giving me my mother? And my father? Could he do that? I didn’t know. I half wished he had given me my girlfriend instead. But I couldn’t help any of it, that was sure, since I seemed to be snapping-to about one or two months late. I was a reader turning pages written some time ago, discovering what happened next.

We Take Communion

About 3 a.m., Habits and Methods time Sunday morning, I realized that actually I did not know if they — Taurus and my mother — had called it quits or not. Maybe the same naiveté which first had me ignore the alien whiskey and the comforting extra weight in the house at night would now have me believe that, because negotiations for nuptial resurrection seemed to be under way, they (she and Taurus) would cease paramarital twinings. Hell, there was still the old man drinking a Bloody Mary with Mike’s mother, one leg over the other, bouncing his Florsheim above the coffee table, and me and Mike outside checking out all right as prospective stepbrothers. And maybe they’d put on that conversation about remaining "friends" — even I knew that ruse. It’s a diplomatic stunt. Bound allies suffer a falling-out and become political friends. Then they won’t fight for each other anymore, but the treaties get a lot more delicate and worrisome, and somehow their close ties are more important than when there were good military commitments between them. But maybe they faked it — never had the falling-out.

Anyway, I figured who was I kidding about them — my ersatz Big Brother, whose one certifiable ID card was scaring Theenie eighty-five miles in two hours, and my pedagogic, sot mother, who was, I have to admit, sharp for all that. What business was it of mine anyway, and how was it better if they had quit? It was precisely the stuff Taurus had taught me to keep an eye out for, to know by indifferent acute attention. So I would.

I had been all excited when I figured it out, throwing that screen in the dirt and breathing hard. But for what? What was the trouble, exactly? That she did it? That he did it? That it was done to me? No, I don’t think so.

I think it was like at the Grand. There are some dudes there who come out of the woods and woodwork with razor scars down their faces, across foreheads, through ears cloven into baby fists, from the corners of eyes like scalding tear tracks. Even Jake has a little one — it dents his nostril. And my information, which I got from watching the bug-tussles they get in before Jake halts them with the shortest shotgun in the world, is that two out of a hundred of those scars had to do with gambling and the remaining ninety-eight faces cut deep to bone, blood flying like hogs stuck, are about pussy. And even the two gambling fights are about not the money lost but the pride lost in losing. And that’s close to the ninety-eight reasons for the other.

So pussy is the big nightclub reaper. It beats liquor, dancing, music, hemp, pills, rapping, racing cars, money, friends, and good times. And that’s why, even at my youthful point of promise, my hair not even cropped in yet, I vibrate on the edge of the deep end over some bottle of liquor in a sack in a cabinet. What the hell can that stuff be, for God’s sake? More than your finger inside your cheek, you rest assured. But what? I even think now, given this new disturbance I have had, that I am not going to know what it is even if old Altalondine dropped trou and said, "Get some of this cooter, stud, and if you can’t kiss me you can pull my hair," and I, say, did — jumped on it like a woodpecker alighting on a sapling and did what you do — if this happened tomorrow, I would have no better idea why finding Taurus in Penelope’s bower was so big a deal, and why you will cut somebody’s nose off when under different circumstances it’s enough to punch it in.