Padgett Powell - Edisto

I think of Jake with his foot up on the beer box, elbows crossed on his knee, in his apron, smoking, looking off, calling his mother if something goes the dog’s way. He knows he has only a few pieces of the puzzle it takes to put together a life leaving for a place like Hilton Head. And Taurus gone — hell he’d just about handed me back Penelope and Ulysses like he sort of did by setting me up with Londie, his girl’s prim cousin, instead of the looser model I wanted, which would have made it all different for me. And now I am a good gentry tyke in Cooper Boyd, headed shortly for St. Cecilia Society balls with a million Altalondine Jenkinses instead of talking trash with true Diane Parkers in roadhouses. He knew what he was doing. But the point is, he just cut out, didn’t hang around for a photo session to preserve anything.

He’ll walk into a Cajun bar down in Louisiana and be on the inside in two minutes with some trick of astute casual attention like calling that Slitz a little Joe , some new profession, name maybe, no regrets, no losses, no cumbersome ideas of what he is or is to be, no freight train of future bearing down on him, no comet of good old days burning him to a cinder of constantly failing memory.

When Taurus was gone I had a dream. You know how sometimes you think you’ve dreamed something before, or part of something before? And you dream again to develop it? I had that feeling. It was one of those dreams where nobody looks like anyone you know but they are people you know. And nothing follows or fits, but it all means stuff anyway.

It opens on a prison visitation room with a wire screen. An Elizabeth Taylorish woman, made up with red red lips and purple cheeks, plays the Doctor, and a Paul Newmany dude plays Taurus. He comes in under guard. Her eyes are rheumy, old rubbed-on peepers from a crying jag. "Take another cell, just for the night," she says.

"For God’s sake," he says.

"He’s a man’s man. I have warned you."

"Be sure about dis ding, baby," he says, gangster-style.

Sniffling, tear-racked, she ekes out: "Chemistry never changes." She pouts like a minnow.

He rips up his side of the room. Guard doesn’t even stop him. Just comes in and says, "Okay, buddy, it ain’t the end of the world."

Then I think I dreamed of the morning after the night I learned that chemistry never changes, when I found Taurus making coffee at the Boy Scout camp, life on the open range. My sense is all messed up on it, when these dreams were. In fact, how much of the groaning rocks and chemistry talk was a dream, how much might have been the same thing as thinking I felt the comfort of Taurus coming in the house without knowing I knew it, I don’t know. I do know when I got up I felt as dumbly wise as a fiddler crab. I looked at my mother and father very closely. They were jake.

So that’s me. This is my motto. Never to forget that, dull as things get, old as it is, something is happening, happening all the time, and to watch it.

Living in a joint where the oaks are robbed of their moss and amputated of their little limbs is like living in an architect’s model, and sleeping in redwood boxes is fakey, like being a cigar, and we now have furniture that will not make noise, and all those sailboats tinkling halyards against masts day and night, never been out of the harbor, is evil, or something, at least screwball as hell, but now I wonder: Who’s to say all that stuff I left — the Grand, Taurus, the Georgia-Pacific pagoda and plantation of weeds — what if all that’s the museum?

I got to heave to, hard-to-lee, or I’ll get in the same trap I was in. Just because this place looks like a layout on a ping-pong table don’t mean it ain’t happening right here too. Whatever’s happening. Hell, Taurus would become a bartender and watch the tennis ladies and seduce a share of them. And Theenie hauls in here, finds the vacuum, falls to in a minute. And the Doctor and the Progenitor get married and my custody junkets are over. It’s the modern world. I have to accept it. I’m a pioneer. Still, I haven’t seen any mullet or mullet people. It’s swordfish steaks from Boston now. That’s where we’re at, now. And the Hilton Lounge, cocktails, and red carpet, and I’m done with the Baby Grand. Even if Jake’s still smoking while he studies the wall.

I’m done with the Baby Grand.

I’m done with the Baby Grand.

There.

I will say one thing: I’ve had some luck. There’s not a baseball diamond on the island. I take a tennis lesson on Tuesday, a golf lesson on Thursday, and my new bar is a joint called the 19th Hole. I chat regular with the pro golfer, a real PGA dude. They serve me lemonade. The lessons, the fees, club sandwiches, everything goes on little register tabs I sign and Daddy picks up. We will be in father-son tournaments before long. "You never heard of Sam Snead?" the golf pro says, already looking around to tell somebody I haven’t.

"This young fella never heard of Slammin’ Sammy Snead," he tells them, and I’m a curiosity all over again. Then they tell me about the beautiful, glorious, gone past of golfing greats who were not kids off scholarship college golf teams but gentlemen who honed themselves on the grindstone of caddying for two bits a round. You never see these guys fold their arms and smoke and look for hours at a wall, knowing they don’t know the whole alphabet of success, have all the pieces. They know the whole alphabet of worldly maneuver.

And how, I have to find out, did they ever come to think they know that?