Padgett Powell - Edisto

Taurus gives her a dime.

The bum says, "Why ’ont you mine your own bizzness, buddy?"

Taurus says, "Why ’ont you mine yern?"

"Shih. Your kind chaps my ass."

The song came back in, the little girl beaming.

"Care to dance, mister?" Taurus said. I was scared, but it was worth it.

"What are you — a hippie?"

Taurus looked at me. He was solid as a Marine.

"Yes, sir. I'm a pacifist. Don't believe in violence of any kind."

"You don’t believe. . ’at's what ruint Veetnam. You step outside, son. I’mone teach you something.”

"I’d rather listen to this rock and roll, sir."

"You’re a punk."

That did it. I saw Taurus change. His nose flared. He put money on the table and walked out. They had a side alley. He went in there. Taurus suggested I go back inside and dance with the girl or something but I wasn’t budging. It didn’t matter because before anything Mr. Psoriasis II came rolling down the alley at a tilt after Taurus.

Taurus handled him like a bull, I swear. He never moved his feet much and every time the bum charged, headfirst, Taurus just caught him in the chest with short little punches that more than anything kept the guy from falling down. The guy didn’t stop, so Taurus opened his hand and slapped him very hard on the face.

The man stood back, amazed.

"Why don’t you quit?" Taurus said.

The man was congested and green-looking, with pink-and-red splotches on his face. He charged and tripped and fell at Taurus’s feet and skinned half his nose off, and it bled from the inside, too. Taurus put a five-dollar bill by his head and said this speech in the tightest voice I ever heard him use: "Take a taxi to the county clinic. You broke your fucking nose."

We left. We tried to walk it off, I think. Just before we went into that photo parlor, Taurus said, "The only doctor that bastard’s going to is M.D. 20/20." He was cool, but that deal had his nerves out. He was taking deep breaths every few minutes. I had the idea he had been very correct in all that crap, but he still didn’t like it one bit. One thing was sure: Psoriasis II had a brand-new idea about hippies.

I cannot imagine my father doing anything like this. He would talk too much or call the heat or something. Then explicate it. But you could imagine Taurus directing a holdup with his hand in a paper bag suggesting a gun. I saw Jake stop a fight like that with his hand in a blue velvet Crown Royal bag. Taurus could do it, too. I’m rambling off the page. I’ll miss him, is all.

But it was little things like this that will stand out. Not the right — of course that's special. I was scared. But how smart he was gets me. All this crap off Psoriasis II and he never really gets riled out of shape. Just handles the situation without more or less than it demands — like being named "Taurus” and (apparently) deciding it will do. And never telling me his real name. Now, here’s where he leaves this world. Someone else would correct you. Someone else would threaten the bum with the police or kill him in the alley. Well, I hatched a theory about it.

You can explain some of it with the heroin-baby rumor. Say he did have a heroin birth and had half his time sense, like memory, blown out. Then he could have to accept someone naming him. But I doubt that story.

Going into the photo parlor, I caught the essence of it. It was that he did not know what his life held and so studied it very closely. And I was different: mine held all the plans the Doctor and Daddy would negotiate, a cross-hatching of professional ambitions. I was not going to get to be a two-cylinder syntax dude at the Grand. I was, I am — I have to admit, that because my life is cloyed by practical plans and attainable hopes — I am white. Best thing to do, I figure, is to get on with it. So I said let’s go in that joint for commemorative photos, my heart really beating then. I had one of these white hearts that lub-dub this way: then — next ; and Taurus had one of these that go now — next ; and the guys at the Grand went now — now. And you can’t change that with decisions to be cool. You can’t get to that now — now without a congenital blessing or disease, whichever applies.

So we went in, as I said, and took those shots, and I looked, apropos of all this horseshit, like a grub, and Taurus like a dusky man in jail.

The Official Hiatus

of Simons Manigault Begins

Well, here I am in old brand-new Hilton Head, which I thought was the first solid Arab bastion and a pure squat of Hell, but now it seems a scalawag of our own sold it out. He went all down the coast doing it. Got to Cumberland Island and he met the old Carnegie Steel people, who stopped him, sold their whole joint cheap to the feds. Yankee steel people preserving the South, Arabs the new Yankees, scalawags persisting as usual, and the place is consequently as confused as during Reconstruction.

But it’s somehow pleasant enough here. The oaks are all pruned like I said, so they look like perfect trees in cement zoo cages. Small creosoted timbers are driven into the ground, forming borders for everything — plants, people, golf carts, restaurant parking. Condominia are all over, roads deliberately curve everywhere when they could go straight, the tinkling postcard marina, lobbies, lounges, links, limousines.

All the Negroes are in green landscape clothes, or white service jackets, or Volvos with their kids in tennis togs. It’s something. Already their shacks and the bus riding with them smoking dope and the Grand scenes are dimming into the remembered vividness of a private gallery in my mind. I have to be on guard about it, about it all becoming photographs in a drawer, like Daddy remembering Jake’s daddy’s joint as a class operation, but Jake’s is just a juke joint. That’s not right. There’s something fake in that. And what I worry is, I’ll go back and do the same thing, or never go back, which will have the same effect. I’ll just watch the photographs yellow.

We never talked about it or anything, but Taurus had a plan about this. He’d never be so eager to frame and crop the past, because that poses the present — you have to pose it to photograph it. And that means you can’t take the future in its full array of possibility, because you’re fixing to have to compose it for the present snapshot. It’s all square, very square. Nobody in the Grand would ever do that. Nobody could. What presumption. There’s not enough of an image to work with, to crop. So they don’t shoot up the present with instant past, with warm immediate memories of how great it was, because it wasn’t great.

Except the new Negroes in the Volvos, I guess they will try, they have enough to compose with, and you can’t blame them. But at the Grand I couldn’t go around that night and say goodbye. I would be freezing that night by anticipating Hilton Head, with a put-on spirit of lament, which would be phony to them, an insult, for if they were so lucky as to go, to get a Volvo run at things and dress their kids in new clothes, they wouldn’t be bitching about it or even hanging around to talk about it. If someone did, he would come in with all his cash and buy the house for the night. And when he got there, and if his life became as comfortable and wonderful as the white lives already there, would he start snapping up the present with instant past? It’s like when you watch TV sports with instant replays. You don’t even get caught up in the live play, because if you miss something you just run back in and see the great action you missed — the scenes already past which make the game you never saw so memorable. Hell, maybe there’s nothing so wrong with that. Maybe Jake and those guys deserve better times at any cost. But I think they could make a mistake of a large kind if they ever come to Hilton Head and act white. I can’t express it. But I know you can spend an evening with Preston and Jinx, and you can’t spend one with Jim and Bill and the coroners. That’s a fact.