Padgett Powell - A Woman Named Drown

I stopped at a snack joint on the way back over the river and watched the movie of just too much weirdness continue to play before me. A guy stood at a picnic table punching one of those fist-held cutters into a box top of onions. He was crying from the onions. From inside the joint came a voice: "Just because your dog died, it's no reason to cry." Some laughter.

The guy threw his cutter into the onions and wheeled on me. "I caint take it!" he said.

He came nearer. "I can do the job they want, but I caint take a joke!"

It was possible to believe, looking at the tears streaming down, that they were not all onion-induced. He was breathing hard, truly worked up.

"You just got to grow up," the kitchen voice came.

"Dogs die." Howling in the kitchen.

The onion chopper ran to the serving window and raised it and yelled inside, " I caint take it! " He tore off his apron and threw it in the dirt. He looked furiously at me. "I just caint take a joke ," he said again, somewhat calmer.

"I don't blame you," I said. "I can't either."

"You don't understand." He was the Veteran stateside.

"You're right, I don't."

That satisfied him.

I slipped home, got in without spooking anyone.

I had nothing in my life not to take, but liked the attitude. I'm not taking it either, I thought, when it comes, and maybe it has come and I have been taking it-maybe dilettante chemistry and bright girlfriends in Europe and inheritances hovering overhead are taking a lot of it. Tom's hunting armadillo shit. Crackerjack nuke-whiz Tom, Fenster Ludge in tow, is taking it, and I'm not.

I wanted the Orphan badly, but not enough to take it.

The next morning I set out into old Knoxville for Camel Tent and passed on the way the woman I had passed for years who watered her garden every morning. She looked at me, surprised, I imagine, to see me walking in the opposite direction from that she expected of me. She waved. I waved back. I could not have known we had begun a correspondence. I did notice her, however, a bit more closely than ever before.

She was got up in a brilliant turquoise robe and wore sufficient bright makeup to herself resemble a giant flower, and around her were a thousand smaller blooms-of carmine azalea and purple iris and katydid-green leaves. Upon this dazzling garden she held a spray of nickel-colored water in a long arc from a fat red hose. I could see that she managed the spray by using her index linger over the hose mouth-I had an aunt who did that, the only other person I've ever seen do it that way. It was a bit of a riveting detail, and perhaps I looked at her too long. She waved again, and I waved back again.

I could not know, as I said, that we had begun a program of overland communications, and I didn't know I was waving to Knoxville's star actress, and I quite didn't expect to be moving in and setting up a base for recording these my lab notes of life. I was hell-bent on getting down to Camel Tent and securing some form of income to replace my paltry but regular stipend.

Once there, I argued for an hour about my surfeit of overqualifications to sew tents until I had a job sewing tents. When I sat down and hit the foot pedal and saw a hundred inches of cord shoot through cotton duck as heavy as a duffel bag out of a needle as big as an ice pick, I had no trouble recalling Penny Baker sewing his four fingers together. Near me a man was announcing how we were to distinguish male from female rattlesnakes. "You all better listen to this," he said, concentrating on his stitching. "It's valuable."

"Shut up, Sweetlips," a second man said from a nearby machine.

"O.K., fine," Sweetlips said. " Don't find out. I could care less. But the fact of the matter is females don't have any poison and if you know that , you're safe." He bent to his stitching.

"Tell it to the new girl."

"Do you know how to tell a female rattler?" Sweetlips said to me.

"No. How?"

"They don't have any rattlers." With that he placed a large paper cup on the floor under his machine and pissed in it from his sitting position. "They don't pay me to lollygag half the day in the head," he said. "So I don't ." He reminded me of the Veteran-I'll turn it off, then.

I sat amazed at the synchronicity of these things-pissing on floors, nuts, snakes everywhere, tents-and amazed at how correct they seemed, fitted together in a matter of hours with an overwhelming sense of orchestration that seemed to satisfy whatever urge bade me walk out of the laboratory. I felt fine, a fine idiot doing a fine idiot job, listening to fine idiot patter.

"The new girl's O.K.," Sweetlips said, after a while, to the other man. "I been watching him. Don't fuck with him or I'll kill you."

The other guy said, "Right, Killer."

When the shift ended, Sweetlips and the other guy took me to a place called Bilbo's Bar, Gym & Grill. Inside, we sat at a lunch counter on stools facing a boxing ring. We ordered beer. Sweetlips said, "We come here to watch the niggers beat the ever-living shit out of each other." He winked. He winked with an exaggeration reminiscent of a cartoon wink, signifying what irony I could not guess, because I took him at his word.

Presently the other guy, whom Sweetlips called Roach, said to me, "So tell us about the new girl."

"The new girl doesn't know her ass from a hole in the ground," I said.

"That's exactly what I said the minute I saw you," Sweetlips said. "Didn't I, Roach?"

"No, you were talking about rattlesnake pussy."

"You think that's a lie? Anybody'll tell you that. The female has no rattlers. New girl, isn't that a fact?"

I looked at Roach. He was indifferent to all of this.

Sweetlips leaned over me to Roach. "The new girl's all right. I repeat; Don't fuck with him or I'll kill you."

Two blacks started sparring. Roach said, "Shut up. This does me good."

We watched the boxers work. One of the guys was as solid as a live oak, and after a couple of rounds he came over to our side of the ring and said to Roach, provoked by nothing I saw, "Fuck you, too."

"You going to take that?" Sweetlips said. "I wouldn't."

"Kill him, then."

"I would."

By my reckoning it would have taken an army of Sweetlipses and Roaches to even pin the dude.

"I'm as strong as that nigger," Sweetlips said.

"Jump him, then."

"It wouldn't be fair."

I came to understand, during my brief tenure at Camel, that Sweetlips did two things, at all times tried to do two things; he proffered preposterous lies, making everyone present appear to believe them, and he boasted of his strength, which was perhaps a subset enterprise of the lying. One morning he announced that a pygmy rattlesnake had the dimensions of a short link of country sausage, showing us how long and how big around with his thumb and forefinger. On another occasion he claimed to have spotted a pygmy deer. "A full-ant ten-point buck no higher than a beagle!" No one challenged him on either pygmy, and he went on sewing, visibly more content.

On the issue of his strength he was even more hyperbolic. One morning he came in greasy, telling us he had on the way to work stopped and pulled a woman's Ford engine out of her car. "It saved her a garage charge."

Roach responded to this one. "Bledsoe," he said, "there's a string hanging out of your sleeve."

Sweetlips looked at his T-shirt sleeves, finding no string.

"Oh," Roach said. "I'm sorry. It's your arm."

Sweetlips jumped up, knocking over a tumbler of piss. " Whut! You don't think I'm strong! " He ran to Roach's machine and grabbed it and tilted the entire affair-Roach with it, the chair is connected-up about a foot off the ground, until Roach said, It was not an idle feat-the machine must have weighed three, four hundred pounds. Sweetlips's back, under his tight T-shirt, clenched up into a set of knots that looked like a bag of rocks and sticks.