Padgett Powell - A Woman Named Drown

I could have kept going at Camel. All I had to do was listen to Sweetlips and Roach do their camp and worry about Penny Baker fingers. I set up an interesting routine. I went back to Bilbo's and found a dude who wouldn't kill me and learned a little boxing in the mornings. The watering woman and I, you might say, fell in love waving. I flirted at a hundred paces, got beat up for three rounds, listened to pygmy hysteria for eight hours. It was not a bad time. My previous life, of soft-metal bonding mechanics, seemed no less preposterous than Sweetlips's life of pygmy sightings and giant strength. I was completely comfortable being completely out of control.

Iwas in fact beginning to feel like I was drunk but free of motor impairment. Whatever presented itself to me as partaking of the continuum of nuttiness was the thing for me. I would not act my age or observe my station.

Back at Bilbo°s Bar, Gym & Grill the next morning I had coffee. The same massive dude was sparring, this time with a slighter opponent, who was having a bad time of it. The lighter guy looked ready to quit, ready to cry, for that matter, but did neither. At every break the oak tree called him a punk.

I looked around. The counterman appeared to have scoliosis. He bent to hear a customer and jerked back ' up, staring wild-eyed at the customer. "No!" he shouted. "No more bacon!" The customer smiled and went back to reading his menu. The counterman retreated in a huff through double doors, out of sight.

The boxers had quit. I did not see the smaller guy, but the oak tree was putting Royal Crown dressing on his head and then a lady's stocking over that. He picked up a load of gear equivalent in bulk to a rodeo cowboy's tack and left.

The counterman returned and I got a refill. "Who is that guy just left?" I asked him.

"StebbinsStebbinsStebbins what-you fall off the truck? You want me to tell you history all day or you want to be somewhere else? No b.l.t.'s, in case that's your next move."

That was Harold, the counterman. What he had told me-in two weeks I managed to decode-was that everybody who was anybody knew Frank Stebbins, who had a middleweight match in France coming up, and who was going to be history when it was over, and that he (Harold) did not cook bacon anymore. Ever. The slighter boxer reappeared at the counter near me, began looking suspiciously all around the place, and said quietly to Harold, "A Curs."

More happily than I'd seen him all morning, Harold virtually ran a Coors over to him. "Shifty'll chew your black ass when he sees this."

"He ain't gone see shit. Stebbins most kill me." He took the Coors and poured it into a Coke can that he'd held under the counter.

"I'm looking for someone to spar with," I said.

The boxer looked at me. "You botts," he said. "I seen you before."

"You've seen me drink beer in here, maybe."

"I recall it. Wid honks."

"Yes," I said, nodding solemnly, as if to deepen the confession.

He looked to the ring as if we had not been speaking.

After a while I said, "I guess you have to go with Stebbins, anyway."

"What you mean?"

"Nothing. Just that you spar with-"

"Okayden."

"Okay what?"

"Tamarr."

"When?"

"Sikserty."

"You can call me Al."

"Egret."

We tried to shake and got fouled up accommodating each other's racial handshake, and wound up fumbling our fingers together awhile. We were involved in this little charade when a small, gray-haired squat of a man came up and grabbed Egret's Coke can and threw it at Harold.

Neither Egret nor Harold said anything. The man stood his ground, rasping breath, the gray hair coming out of his ears and nostrils, his mouth stained olive by chewing tobacco. He looked at Egret.

"You conspiring to sign wid him now, or what?" He meant me.

"Haw, naw, Shif," Egret said. "He a bottser himself."

Shif-Shifty of Shifty's Stable, as I came to know-regarded me with a long squint. The hair was coming out of him in tufts, in whorls-he looked like a tobacco-stained owl. He took a deep breath. "You wear glasses!" he said.

I heard Egret do a little thing like a hiss under his breath.

"How long you wear glasses?"

I touched my glasses to make sure I still wore them and said I didn't know.

"You box, you see." Egret did the siss thing again. "Bottsin cure the blind. Tell him, Shif. Siss ."

"Boxing cure the blind," Shifty said. "Look." He broke his eyes hard to one side, then back, revealing red-veined, oystery eyeballs. He looked up, down, whirled his eyes all around the sockets, following the motion with his protruding green tongue. It occurred to me I had seen this demonstration-on the sidewalk the day before, as Sweetlips and Roach and I came in. He had presumably grabbed a passerby, attempting to lure him in for eyesight correction.

"Boxing exercise the eyes, see? You ought to box for Shif. You sign wid anybody yet'?"

He grabbed a napkin from a chrome box, pushing it to me with a ballpoint pen.

"What's this?"

"Sign this, you with me. We get a true contract when the time is right."

"Let me wait on this one, Shif."

"Don't wait until it's too late. "

He turned to Egret and pushed the napkin to him.

"You. Sign again. And this time, no more goddamn beer." Egret printed on the napkin with painstaking concentration WILLIE EBERT.

Shifty folded the napkin into his pocket and limped off.

"What's your name?" I asked.

"Like I told. Egret."

* * *

My time boxing was without event. Ebert was not good enough to teach or to hurt me, though I'll wager he was considerably tougher in the long haul. He was finally mostly a clown, very gentle in the center, and he was living in a tough, tough world. When Stebbins saw us pawing each other he yelled, "Punk and white punk. Punkpunk." It didn't bother me, but Ebert explained something to me later.

"When Frank call you punk, it's race. When he call me punk, it's sex."

I sat there, apparently failing to respond as he would have liked.

He suddenly offered, "Got two kids."

"What?"

"Two kids."

"Who?"

"Me."

"You?" I figured him about eighteen.

"Selfsame individual you see."

All I had to go on was the race and sex thing. "They black?"

"Who?"

"Your kids."

"Dit."

" All black?"

"Dit."

"All right. Nobody's white, except me, nobody's queer."

"Dit."

"Except Stebbins."

"Siss. I hope the Frog eat his ass."

"You want a beer?"

Ebert looked around. " This early?" It was about 7:30.

"You better have one. Tomorrow I bust your ass."

"Oh. He serous. Okayden. A Curs."

When I left Bilbo's that morning I did not go to Camel Tent. I walked back to do some waving with the actress. We'd reached a peak of waving. We were, I figured, waved out.

We had been waving now for nearly three weeks, and it was not the simple acknowledging of passersby. From the start, from that first morning I surprised her by going the wrong way, it seemed she had waved with a forthright openness that suggested we were not, to her mind, altogether strangers. It is unsettling to be acknowledged by a stranger who appears to think himself familiar, of course, and in this case, as I've said, the stranger was hailing me boldly in a turquoise robe, holding a forty-foot spray of water on a half acre of violently blooming color.

I recall once being waved at by a man in drag from a balcony window in Baton Rouge, and as I ignored him and kept walking, he shouted loudly down, "Well, it's only hey !" and shamed me. I gave him a weak, noncommittal wave that made him laugh..