Padgett Powell - A Woman Named Drown

* * *

Mary was still gardening like a demon. I made myself a drink and watched her.

When she still did not quit, I had the impulse to help. I ran out and volunteered to take the shovel. After some time of it, it seemed the gin, for once, was going to be necessary, and I saw again my lock interfering with the whiskery nosing of carp on the river bottom, and I was giddy about not having anything of my own in the world. I wiped my forehead, placed the shovel for another shot into the soil, and fainted. When I came to, I felt perfectly wonderful, entirely and unequivocally euphoric, and did not want to move.

Mary was standing over me. "You cut those camellias in half."

"Yes," I said.

"Can you get inside?"

"Yes ma'am."

"Make us some."

I made two tonics, and, correctly repositioned at the wire table, watched Mary finish up the garden, and after she did, we did not play pool. She started putting things in the Mercury, wearing a tall, angular towel on her head, looking like Queen Nefertiti.

My little faint seemed to have precipitated Florida up to the edge of happening, as if an "illness" was the final necessary requisite for a "vacation." I went to bed early and had visions of Mary's monkeys looking at me with plastic, rattle eyes, and orange and turquoise in nonspecific roadside glary scenes.

* * *

Late, or early-earlier, I now think, than I did when she got me up-Mary said, "Feel okay?"

"Fine."

"In thirty minutes, what's say, let's go."

She left the room.

I jumped up and dressed and got that cool, irritating feel of clothes on fevered skin. I found a sack and put Stump's suits in it and the playscripts. Mary hustled a last box of gin and mixers to the car, and we were off in a high-centered set of swerves, the Mercury rumbling like a tug.

Sometime in the certified wee hour, in fog, I saw WOODBINE GEORGIA on a road sign, and it got cold. Again, rising up, I saw GEORGIA GIRL DRIVE-IN, a green-framed trapezoid of wet plate glass, and in a blast CAMDEN ICE COMPANY, an old wooden loading dock with ice crushers on it. We stopped after crossing the syrupy St. Marys River and sat at a picnic table with a winged concrete roof, part of an abandoned Florida Welcome Station. Across the road were two abandoned motels and a liquor store. "I left the freeway, and we've been making time," Mary said. We must have left Knoxville just at dark.

I saw no palms, no monkeys, no fruit, no glare. A red neon WHISKEY shone from the liquor store.

As if reading my thoughts exactly, Mary said, in an affected redneck accent, "Me and Stump believed in a different kind of Florida."

We passed a strip of ruined nontowns, Yulee, Oceanway, Lackawanna. Old motels, those still standing, were either apartments or flea markets. Some were just rubble in a sandy semicircle of ragged palms.

In Jacksonville, Mary hooked a hard right, west, explaining it wouldn't do to go south too fast in Florida. I took to riding in the back seat, where things were agreeably peripheral, while Mary blared head-on into the panhandle. I could pin down all the things whipping around in the car and relax. Making a drink was much easier if you didn't have to lean backward over the seat, surprised by Mary's swerves and brakings. And I was free to sleep. I dreamed once of Bilbo's. Everyone was gloved, not only the boxers, but Shifty and Harold and a face or two I'd never seen-gloved, trunked, shod in tight, shin-high boxing shoes.

When I woke, the wind was stinging me with my hair, Styrofoam cups were flying about, Mary was eyes on the road. I picked up a playscript. It was the titleless adventure of Mrs. Taylor and daughter, Jasmine Ranelle. I read near the end.

Jasmine and the apparent ultimate suitor have barricaded themselves in the Taylor garage, a wooden building set apart from the main house. They are trying to start an outboard engine which is suspended in an oil drum.

JASMINE:: It's supposed to have water in it, but this will be louder.

[Suitor pulls starter cord]

SUITOR: This thing's ancient. I'l1 bet it hasn't run since-

JASMINE: Since he died. That's just it. This was his motor. It was on the boat he was shot in. It kept running. It was running when they found him. In circles. When we

start it, it will drive her nuts.

SUITOR: If we start it.

JASMINE: It'll start. They don't make them like this anymore.

[Suitor delivers more pulls; a sputter, smoke coming from the drum]

JASMINE: There she goes! [Tiptoes to closed garage door and peeks through crack in direction of house] This is going to be wild.

[Two more pulls and another sputter]

SUITOR: What if she doesn't come?

JASMINE: If she doesn't come, and buddyroe she's going to come, we'll lay down here and breathe fumes until we die .

[Engine takes, producing deafening, reverberating roar]

I quit there: Mary virtually whiskey-turned us into an old stone gas station, sliding us through a parking lot of crushed white shell and pop tops to a dusty, billowing halt not too far from a man sitting in a metal lawn chair.

"I hope you got a license to drive like that," he said. "Not many do."

"Bathroom," Mary said, getting out.

"Ladies' is out," the man said. "You look like you can handle thuther."

He winked at me. Mary headed for the men's room and I opened my door, spilling cups and plastic ice bags and hamburger wrappers.

The old man said, "Fillerup, son?"

"Yes, sir," I said.

He winked again, starting to move.

He pumped the gas and sat back down; we waited for Mary. I went around finally to check on her. The door was open, commode in view. I walked on behind the station. There, under a giant oak, were men in chairs. I had stopped just clear of the building. All of them looked at me, stopped talking. I was in my canary suit. I walked on to let them know that I might be dressed unusually but I was not shy. Most of them were old, the kind of downright geezers who go to great pains to cultivate looking old-leave their teeth at home, don't shave, walk with canes that don't appear necessary. And some of them were a generation younger, old tush-hogs between hell-raising and geezering. One of the tush-hogs said; "You drink beer?"

I sat at his table and flicked a piece of Styrofoam off my yellow pants. "Yes," I said.

"All right," the tush-hog said, and the talking under the tree resumed, several men already engaged with Mary.

"Go on with it," my tush-hog said.

A geezer said, "Where was I?"

"You was at the court-martial."

"Right."

"This is McCrae, bud," Tush-hog said to me, indicating the geezer. "He's telling the story "Parker McCrae and the Screech Owls.' "

"I could shoot a squinch owl in the dark backward l with a mirror if I'da had to," said McCrae.

"We know. Get on with it."

"Where was I?"

"They didn't believe you could identify the thief, because it was dark."

"It was dark as hell and can't nobody say it wasn't."

"Nobody did. They said it was dark. That's why they said you couldn't identify the thief."

"It was dark."

Tush-hog looked down at his beer and then up at no one. He looked at the geezer. "O.K., it was dark as shit out there, Parker."

McCrae nodded sharply, once. He leaned forward on his cane. "So I had to prove 'em I could see good enough out there to name names. So I said, Come on tonight to a spot I know and bring me a good.22 rifle."

"And they did."

"They did. And we got there, and I knew there was at least twenty-five squinch owls in them trees there. I asked them if they saw any birds in them trees. No, they didn't. I told them to clear the ground under the trees and to look for the birds up close when they was under."