Padgett Powell - A Woman Named Drown

Minnie smoking on the parapet, the Pacifist sitting on the roof with his head not a foot from her lap, Earl becalmed into a swaying surveillance of his car, I shaped the gravel around the wine. We looked like a guerrilla camp.

And so what is it, the older-women thing, that put the Pacifist and me into our revolts? Discovery of discoveries, looking at Minnie as I am, it comes to me: they have adjusted anti-actualization quotients like the blacks have. Thus, Minnie doubly is the queen bee that she is in this universe of practiced loss.

Mary was like a ball glove handed to you in the seventh inning, used by someone else during the critical innings, and you get to play when the game is nearly won or lost with a trained glove that promises to be error-free. She was frayed, she was wrinkled, she had a cotton-candy softness, but all in all, she was a package of reticence and careless ease so correctly balanced I had never been so attracted to a person in my life.

"Sheeeeeit," the Pacifist suddenly said, going into a fit again. Minnie grabbed his hair and shook it gently and let go; the Pacifist looked up, around, to see what the pressure had been. I was pouring her another wine and he did not know she had touched him.

Things were, at this moment, clear and not clear to me. Overall, I had taken a little downside sabbatical that had shown me something I would find it best to know only as the Nose Chemist knew his ketones: with Havana Carlisle in the back of my mind, I could inherit a two million net deal with enough grace that I would not worry about acquiring a $400 River Road plate, not haze a yardman-not much more, finally, was certain. Havana kept appearing to me: instead of cigar-waving down the main street of his town in Missouri, he was waving his cigar across my crushed-shell trucking lot. He was telling the company: Let's raise our anti-actualization quotients to comfortable levels and go on about our business with these pipes.

The world seemed a place of improbable wild hope. I told my father I will run his business-my business-and all I see, all I can hold probable about that, is gathering these fools together and seeing how far we can go on two million dollars. Bonaparte washes trucks, whistling shrilly all the live-long day, and drives. Wallace dispatches trucks by heaving darts into the territory board. The Veteran watches the grounds at night. My bus driver takes a load of oil pipe, and another, here, and there, and never has to return. When I get ambitious, I'll have Tunkie Friedeman come down and formulate a revolutionary synthetic that will set the pace for the next generation of pipe.

And Mary. I resolve, in the morning, to drop by. One does not, when calling on Mary, need pause to buy flowers.