Padgett Powell - A Woman Named Drown

"You takin 'm to Florida or something?" Hoop said to her. "He looks just like Sam."

"No plans, Hoop."

"What's your handicap, son?"

"I peg the meter," I said.

"Ha! Whorin Mary! I'm off the friggin scale myself. We'll shoot thirty-six sometime. That's how to beat you youngsters. Thirty-six. Sudden death ." He offered the handshake again. "Sudden friggin death."

"Let's go up with the girls, Hoop. I want to meet your wife."

"Blame you for that, I don't," he said. Tapping his front teeth with a fingernail, he said, "Perfect teeth."

We went up from the sunken den into the bright patio.

"God damn if you aren't a green thumb to beat the friggin band, Connie," he yelled as we entered the undiffused, flowery light. He opened a bank of the jalousie windows and beheld the garden, stooping a bit to look through the slits. "Jesus the rumrunner, would you look at that?" We both looked through the slits.

"Remind me to cut you a spray, Ginny," Mary said to Virginia, who stood by smiling. She did have perfect teeth.

"Oh, please-" Virginia said.

"No, it's no trouble. You know me: Too many glads in the glasshouse."

"Goddamn. Trouble, my purple baboon ass. She's got to cut 'em down, honey. Need someplace to walk in this friggin Amazon."

"It's my pleasure, Ginny, it really is."

"Thank you, Constance," Virginia said.

"Hey! Friggin idea! You gals go out there and mow some friggin parrot jungle down and the kid 'n me makes a round."

Hoop rushed toward the bar, a substantial rattan-and-hardwood thing I hadn't noticed, dusty in a corner of the patio. Virginia and Constance went out with a pair of shears.

"Would you look at the dust!" Hoop yelled. "Find me some swabbin gear, Chief."

I went in the kitchen, made us two drinks, and returned with a rag and soap. "She's been making them in there."

"I know, for Christ sake. Broad's got this bar from the islands, beautiful friggin teak here, won't use it. We take it apart and hide it on board and get it here and get it back together-that's the friggin miracle, and tight when we busted her up-no friggin numbers on it like your dinosaurs and shit."

"Where was this?"

"Mutton fart capital of the world."

"You were in the navy?"

"Guam, Guadalcanal, one of them G islands. No, Seabees. All them islands is alike. This bastard could've come from the halls of friggin Montezuma. What the shit difference. It's heavy, pure-quill teak, we stole it from an operating whorehouse , we got it here is the thing. Contrabandits! Joke!"

Hoop threw the rag and soap bottle at the bar's small chrome sink. "Whore called Five-ton sits on it, crying, see? Because Stump and me are having at it with screwdrivers, see?" He goes into falsetto. "I love you, Joes, no shit, Joes, but need post office for sell love.' Five-ton whines this at us, see? Imagine that: some wiseheimy tells 'em a friggin whorehouse is a post office and they buy it. 'You want first class, Joe?' It was a scream. 'You want special delivery?' There Five-ton is, trying to hold the bar down, crying, and Stump and me start pulling it apart. Beautiful." He is wiping the bar with great, broad strokes. I already feel drunk again. Hoop's rag is steaming in vigorous circles on the teak.

"Doesn't come over here that he don't wash the friggin bar," Mary is suddenly whispering in my ear. I have the sensation that some time has passed that I missed. Hoop is furiously twisting a dish towel inside a glass.

"It's his past ," Mary says. She rolls her eyes. Virginia comes in with flowers, looking for a vase, her perfect teeth apologetically out front.

Hoop squeaks the rag in his glass and holds it to the light. " That's a clean glass," he says. "Something about a really clean glass, eh, Chief?"

Virginia passes through the room again, still looking for a vase.

I had the feeling that time was lurching and braking and bouncing me around within it. Ray Conniff and His Singers, for one thing, were suddenly very much with us, and I seemed to be swaying along with Mary to them.

"Always use your twist on these," Hoop said, grinding a lemon rind around a glass rim. "People never follow their friggin recipes ?

I jumped because of breath in my ear. "How's your clutch?" Mary said, inches from me.

" 'Ere you go, Chief." Hoop plunked three new drinks squarely on fresh cocktail napkins in front of us. "From the bar, where they ought to be," he said I proudly. Mary blew smoke at him and took a stool next to mine. She put a finger into the waistband of my putter pants.

"Hoop," she said, "you're a goose." She was tugging at the waistband in rhythm to Ray Conniff and His Singers. Hoop squinted at her. She shook ice at him.

"Excuse me," I said.

On my way to the bathroom I saw Virginia's spray of shrimp-colored gladiolas on a marble stand and was drawn to them like a huge, clumsy bee. My face went in-lipstick corals and green leaves as delicate as nylon. Virginia was, I then saw, taking a nap on a daybed a few feet away. She looked patient, flat on her back, serene, her teeth concealed.

When I got back to the bar, Hoop and Mary were squared off about something I got the feeling was well rehearsed.

"If it had sunk it would still be all right," Mary was saying.

"Sunk?" Hoop boomed. "Aboard the U.S.S. — "

"Too much that should sink never does!" Mary intoned, slapping the bar with a flat-palmed crack that made Hoop jump. She put her arm around my shoulder.

Hoop winked at me.

I said, "Hi, Poop. Hoop."

He tried to take my glass.

"Have you gathered," Mary said, again inches from my ear, "that my old man and Hoop won the Second World War holding hands?"

"Sort of."

"And I imagine a young man like you has been around, too."

"I've not been a man named Drown." Looking back, I see this remark could have been tasteless-I still don't know that her husband didn't drown-but it was innocently said.

"Funny," Mary said.

"Do you do that stuff for a living?"

"Ha," Mary said, motioning for Hoop to light her cigarette. "That's community theater. I do to get out of the house."

Hoop lit her up and she blew a big spiral at the ceiling, watching it as if she had forgotten us for a bit.

"My point is, the world doesn't go around on biographies. Remember that and we'll get on fine. No bio."

"I will." I had to recall the Orphan.

"Act!" Hoop suddenly shouted. "That's about right . Chief knows more than he looks. She acts , all right."

Mary looked at Hoop. "Ensign Hooper here believes in quartering on board while in port." She held her cigarette near her ear, smoke swirling irregularly up around her hair.

She looked at me with low eyelids. "What do you intend to do about Mother Nature?" she said.

*Hoop stopped his fussing with bar things.

"I'm not sure yet," I said.

"Mush!" Hoop said. "We're out of ice." He went to the kitchen.

Mary leaned toward me, as if falling, and pressed her forehead to mine, holding me behind the neck with her cold drink hand. She rolled our foreheads together.

"How do these work?" Hoop stood in the door with a blue plastic tray of ice cubes. "There's no arm."

"Twist them, Hoop," Mary said.

"There's no arm," Hoop said again.

"They don't make arms on them anymore," I offered.

Hoop looked at me. "Yeah, I see."

I took it for a slur. "You torque them, Hoop," I said, trying to somehow slur him back.

"Yes, Hoop," Mary said. " Torque you ice trays ."

She made the sense I couldn't. She was holding some liquor. She laughed.

Hoop turned and retreated. We heard ice cubes popping loose and hitting the floor.