Padgett Powell - Edisto

A fine speech and well-intended. But she’d tell it to every coroner and tennis attorney aiding and abetting Arabs to come around here. A wonderful bunch of suitors. Penelope never figured on such a healthy run of dudes when the Progenitor bagged it, I hope.

Taurus came in the house, played a game, accepted an invitation to spend a while with us, told me everything I asked, and otherwise kept his eyes open and his mouth shut. He was somebody you figured knew something. And he was supposed, as Theenie would have put it, to "rescure" me.

I was going to have to modify the Boy Act. He was definitely modifying the Coroner Act.

We See a Fight in Charleston

I told him nothing ever happens here but he wouldn’t listen, and couldn’t we hike in the woods, he wants to know. The woods, I say. What woods?

"All that dark close noise I passed coming down here," he says. "The black changing sound."

So I had to tell him they was no woods, they was leftovers.

"From what?"

"From, number one, from nothing happening to them except heat and afternoons of Negroes in white shirts with their eyes turning yellow looking at the road. And from, two, from the heat and the rain making so much grow that since no planters or even Sherman ever got here to weed anything out, it became a giant unpruned greenhouse festering in its very success," I said. "Burning up in an excess of youth, like city slums," I said. “Only this city is a rich unturned city of no lights.

"And it became a bog of verdure and got scurvy sort of and the big oaks became turkey oaks and the palm trees became palmettos, and than the Arabs landed.

"And they bought the choicest squats what were touched by wind or water, and hired some American scalawags who somehow got that tennis-ball-velvet grass to grow on sand and so converted sand dunes to sand traps, and they cemented the rest and painted it green and so the tennis pros showed up next (not the big ones, only ones like Rod Laver and I saw a college kid beat him), and then the tennis groupies in their German cars and then the Germans themselves came, BASF chemical conglomerate, but an old-time referendum took care of them and sent them home. They didn’t hide their intentions.

"So after the tennis groupies got moved into their exclusive condominia, their dogs came, replacing the natural old squatters like skunks and possum with Irish setters, a new breed of them that ignores birds for Frisbees, and then they shored it all up with fake redwood and yardmen disguised as gardeners and attorneys as world travelers on their sailing yachts that never leave the marina. That leaves the scurvy woods and the rickets people right where they were. Right here."

We had walked into this anemic scrub a ways. Before us I showed him an old homesite I call the Frazier ruins.

"Because I forgot a few details," I said. "Before the Arabs, but in the same choice sites they bought, the Marines bought the very first island, and for one simple and sufficient reason: it contained an adequate, maybe the largest, population of the region’s first and final indigenous denizen; the sand flea. So grunts get out there on Parris Island at attention and they tell them not to move a muscle on pain of whomp upside the head, and they become hamburger, and it probably won World War II. Because sitting in a foxhole with Jap bullets zinging all over Guam or shooting a flame thrower into a cave or walking waist-deep over a half mile of razor coral reefs because the LSTs ran aground and seeing half of you shot wasn’t as bad as doing pushups in sand fleas, so we won.

"And one other detail. Joe Frazier."

The homesite was little pine trees coming up through powdery old two-by-fours and rusty tin panels in the hot sand. Taurus was already looking at the skinks. Skinks are lizards made for speed.

"And the skinks." He already knew how to hold them in place with eye contact. You can walk right up on skinks sometimes if they know you are looking right at them and you do not break eye contact, but if you look away to take a step, they are gone, because they know you don’t know which way they went.

"This could have been where he trained," I said.

"Who?”

"Frazier."

"Oh."

"Maybe right under this tin is the rotten old croker sack, just resting in the sand after the hard work of getting Joe on his way to Everlast leather bags and Philadelphia and the big time and—"

'What croker sack?"

He stopped me, but of course he didn’t really want to know. I think he hadn’t been paying attention to me. And he was right: Who knows if Joe hit a croker sack? He might have just torn up a nightclub or something and somebody got him to a gym in time to put his natural destructiveness to work. But the time I took a Dixie cup of the Doctor’s Early Times out here to see what she saw in it, I was sure about Joe and the bag.

He was at the bag in his snot-dauber routine. On a short arm of rope swayed the bag, as large and solid as a piece of ocean, as heavy as tide. Joe hit it and it veered and he blew snot out of his left nostril and hit it coming back and stopped it still. Joe got on a bus. The bag hung there, the beam held it, the barn held on, the town, the heat. The green browned, Joe won.

In Philadelphia they had canvas bags with pockets worn in them by professional punches. They tied a rope across the gym chest-high to Joe and made him step across the gym under it, bobbing from side to side. They said, "Touch it with your ears, Frazier, but don’t make the rope move or you’ll do it all day." Joe got so good and fast at it that it sometimes seemed the rope moved, not his head, like you think only the cloth moves but a sewing machine needle doesn’t. He got so good he threw in extra touches: rolled his shoulders, hooked the snot off his nose, went hinh hinh to keep time, faked and mimicked punches. Off this motion would spin his success, would come long looping punches that would have busted croker sacks to pieces. The rope was steady; he followed it. It led him to the Heavyweight Championship of the World. The liquor didn’t make me numby or anything, but I did eat the wax out of the Dixie cup, which was a childhood thing of mine, and the liquory, stainy wax tasted much better than the snort itself.

"You want to see him fight?"

"What?" I said. "Who?”

"Frazier.”

"Where?"

"Charleston."

"Sure if we-"

"I’ll get tickets."

I was a goofball not to know about the fight; it was the Ali fight. Taurus just stood there in the sun, smiling. We walked all over the ruin, the tin breaking in great ka-thunks , spurting the skinks out of and back into their jillion million corrugated bunkers. The little bastards had it made: pinstriped miniature monitor dragons, gun-blue survivors, pen-and-ink leftover pygmies of the dinosaur days, living in modern galvanized tunnels buried in the sand like long Quonset huts shrunk down so small even the government lost them.

* * *

We drove half the night that night, up Highway 17, watching all the flintzy old motels with names like And-Gene Motel that are about closed for good since I-95 opened up and drained the blood out of the old roads. And clubs, or joints, or jernts , the Negroes say, umpteen eleven jernts with neon tubes running all over them, broken so the color and the gas leaked out with the road blood. It’s very sad. There’s one place built like a mosque or something, th this bulbous outline like a fancy sundae, and the neon still works: purple and red. We stopped get some beer because Taurus said you needed beer to go to a fight because you had to understand the people who might get carried away after it and start a fight with you. In the jernt was a gritty floor and a jukebox and some red booths. A woman in tight black pants and a red stretchy shirt sitting by the cash register got the beer, took the money, rung it in, got back on the stool, picked up a cigarette, blew smoke up at the ceiling, and we left.