A Woman Named Drown - Padgett Powell (11 page)

"
Al, make a check for two thousand. To
yourself."

I am writing today, not in the Mercury, but beside a
plywood stand selling key-lime pies. I have eaten two slices of pie
to justify writing on a picnic table beside the pie stand, but am
drawing suspicious looks all the same. The girl in the stand has a
tape player. We have just heard Freddie Fender sing of "wasted
days and wasted nights." Now Diana Ross of "no mountain
high enough."

We had taken the motel room, showered, and I sat down
near the door. Mary sat on the bed, her arms on her knees, leaning
toward me like a father. "There's nothing personal in this,"
she said.

"
In what?"

"
You can take the Merc or the two thousand."

I looked at her, and the color TV, on a stand about
eye level with me. I mulled this one over until I found myself
playing with my lips and stopped.

"
I understand," I said. What was odd was
that I believe I did understand. She was closing a very successful
road show and meant for us, as actors, to move on. And she was clever
enough to fold following a packed-house night rather than when the
play was in trouble.

"What about Stump's wardrobe?" I said.

"
I'll take it if you want a new one."

I pictured myself in the clothes I would get from the
nearest Stuckey's--monkey T-shirts treated with Tris, orange surfing
trunks coming to my knees--and said I'd keep Stump's if it was all
right. It was more unnatural, in her scheme of things, for her to
reclaim her husband's tattered clothes than for me to simply wear
them out.

"
Okay." She got up and signed a check and
came over to me and bent at the waist and rolled her forehead across
mine, back and forth, holding my neck, like inking a thumb for
fingerprints, and walked out the door with a jangle of keys, a swift
solid car door, a blast, a reverse, a small rock skid, gentle rubbery
crushing of stone.

The check for two thousand dollars was beside the ice
bucket. I kept the door open, letting natural light in, while I
showered again and watched TV and otherwise took advantage of the
room until checkout. I expected to feel abandoned or lonely, but I
did not, exactly. I felt I had observed the terms of our dramatic
no-bio creed and was a fine performer and had no call to long for
anything under the sun. And it still hurt, some.

Adjacent to the motel was the key-lime pie stand,
looking like four plywood Ping-Pong tables thrown into an A-frame,
housing a pasty-faced girl you might see at a trailer park. I ate the
two slices of pie at a picnic table and looked at the highway.

    
A
bus
came along and let a load of tourists have at the key-lime pie stand,
and I got on. Heading west, through what I think was once Everglades,
we passed a HELP WANTED sign and I got off. I walked down a white
graded road to a fish camp. The building was small and low,
suggesting an I enclosed trailer. It had plywood floors and a plywood
ceiling, about head high. Down the longest reach of the joint a woman
was throwing darts. She was not throwing them at a dart board and she
was not throwing . them with the deft, wristy, English toss. She was
letting them go like Bob Feller, lead leg higher than her head. On
the wall forty feet away was a target painted in crude circles. The
bull's-eye alone was big as a bowling ball.

When she finished up the set, I said, "Is there
a job here?"

"
Ho!" she said, plucking the darts loose.
She went behind the bar. She got a beer and slid it to me and took
one herself. She broke her pop top without opening the beer, and
holding a dart dagger-style, she neatly collapsed the tab with one
punch.

"
These things changed my world," she said.
She flicked the ring off the bar to the floor.

I nodded. I looked out the door, to the water. There
was a fallen dock, and tied to it some wooden rowboats sunk to
gunwales. They looked like alligators.

"
So," she said. "Drink all you want,
eat if you want to, don't give any customers a hard time."

"That's it?"

She didn't answer, except to wipe the bar with a
ribbed towel which she flopped around like leavening bread. Certain
parallels--equivalences were in a lab instead of a fish camp, in a
true reaction series rather than life's--were stunning. Instead of a
pool shark, before me stood some kind of major-league dart pitcher.
Where there had been gin, there was beer. And it looked as though the
same no-questions, no-lies ambience was going to operate.

I suddenly saw that Mary had truly acted according to
the constants and coefficients and activities and affinities of the
whole series of reactions around me defining this odd interlude. She
"left me" with no more wrongful or sorrowful moment than an
atom leaves another, than blood becomes iron and oxygen. And I was
the evolving product, now in a fish-camp retort with a new reagent
not unlike--in fact, startlingly similar to--the last. Who governed
these combinations? How could it all be a random walk?

Down near the water was a large kid. He got in one of
the sunken boats and started bailing with a cutout Clorox-bottle
scoop tied to his wrist.

"
Do we rent those boats to customers?"

She had arranged the darts into a neat parallel
arsenal on the bar and lit a cigarette and sat up close on the other
side on a stool. She put her beer on a cardboard coaster and passed
me one.

"
If somebody ever wants a boat, mister, you take
their money and drive to Sears and make the down payment on a
johnboat. Then, if somebody else wants one, we'll rent a boat."
She took a giant drag on her cigarette, blowing smoke to the ceiling,
in a spreading roil.

At the boats, the kid was bailing away.

"
Or let Bonaparte go to Sears," she said.
"That kid can
drive
."
She leaned a bit to one side and got a look of concentration on her
face. I thought she was straining to see Bonaparte. I heard an odd,
small, mewing noise. "Hope you don't mind gas," she said.

"
It's two things he does. Drive and bail. It
would be Christmas if he got to drive and get a dry boat."

Bonaparte was sitting almost chest deep, scooping the
water near him and pouring it out at arm's length.

"
Bonaparte," I said.

"
That might be cruel," she said. "That
might be cruel." She threw the ribbed rag at a big sink behind
the bar.

"
They told me he had a bone apart in his head to
explain his condition. That's how they said it, too. Well, we weren't
too excited about it. We weren't too excited about it and got drunk,
and next thing we're calling him Bonaparte. Is that cruel?"

"
I don't know," I said.

"
You ready?"

Before I could gesture, another beer slid to within
an inch of the one I was on. Bonaparte, steadily working, seemed to
pause and listen to something between pours of his scoop. He was not
more than a head and an arm bailing in a blinding disk of sun on
water.

"
He gives me the vim to go on," she said. I
noticed him again pause as if listening to distant signals. "So,
where'd you leave your clubs, Arnie?" She laughed at herself.

"
Let's get you some khakis and tell all the
customers you're the fish guide. Can you see the expression on their
face when you wade into one of them wrecks with a Lorance under your
arm?" She started wheezing with laughter. Recovering, she said,
"That is some suit."

We drank, looking at Bonaparte bail.

"
You wasn't . . .
golfing
,
was you?"

"
No," I said.

"
You a darts man?"

"
Might be."

She marched over, lined up, wound up, and
delivered--the dart went a half inch into the wall with a gratifying
thuuung. On my turn, I missed the whole target, but I hit the wall
and I hit it very hard, and she watched me like a spring-training
scout, arms folded.

"You catch on fast," she said.

We played a game. In the
late going--innings, I guess--she'd actually paw the floor as if
grooving the mound, and grunt when she released. I had never seen
better form. Not a customer came.

* * *

The fish-camp position made my time at Mary's seem an
apprenticeship. Or it may be that Mary had me so well trained that
certain early mistakes were avoided at the camp. Her name was Wallace
("That's cruel, too. Don't call me Wa1ly"), she played no
roles other than the main one, and I mistook her for none else. You
don't see a woman like her in a Sunday supplement. I did see her
frequently in the regional fishing weekly,
The
Glade Wader
. She'd create accounts of
boatloads of fish brought in at our nameless camp (in the paper she
called us Bonaparte's) and phone this apocrypha in to the editor,
when we had not even made the down payment on the johnboat and
Bonaparte was flailing away harder than ever.

We would clean the place--it never got messed up,
really, but we soaked it down in Pine-Sol in the mornings anyway,
because the cats carried crabs and fish under it and we were in
effect disinfecting the ground as well as the floors. We poured
gallons of pine-smelling ammonia out and swabbed ourselves into
sweats by ten in the morning and split a six-pack and looked out of
the easy gloom of the bar into the headachy light, and there,
committed as a saint, full of belief, bailing the entire Gulf of
Mexico, was Bonaparte. He took to blowing a whistle periodically,
perhaps designating invisible progress.

"
Vim," Wallace would say, both of us
squinting at Bonaparte, both of us nodding, happy to be inside, in
the cool gloom, dizzy on fumes and cold carbonation. A man came in
one afternoon, sized the place up, had a beer, listened to Bonaparte
bail and whistle, said, "Sounds like a disco out there,"
and left.

A couple came in one morning and watched him bail for
a while before suddenly going into a disquisition on hippies. "We
saw a van," the man said. "Purple."

"
With
butterflies
on it," the woman added.

"
All over it," the man said.

Wallace served them. We were just finishing the
Pine-Sol detail. The woman opened both their beers and poured them
into glasses which she inspected in the light before filling,
squinting her nose at the ammonia. We could hear Bonaparte working as
steadily in the glare coming from outside as a pump in an oilfield.

The light came in whole and hot and salty, and
reflected off the damp board floor in broken, mirrory planes. The
customers were shading their eyes.

"
I wish all I had to do was drive around in a
dope van all day," the man said.

"
With butterflies on it," added the woman.

"
That would be the life." He motioned to
Wallace for beer number two. It was 10:30.

"
Hippies," the woman said.

"
What's he doing out there?" the man asked,
with an emphasis that somehow seemed to link Bonaparte with the
hippies.

"
He's bailing, you sonofabitch," Wallace
said, and she walked to the dart wall and planted a foot up on it and
yanked out a dart. She wound up and fired one, and the sonofabitch
and his wife left.

"
See what I mean about you not offending
customers?" she asked me. "I can do it, and I can do enough
of it."

She fired three darts. "Sonofabitch thinks he
can drink beer at ten o'clock and some kid can't drive a purple
truck." A three-legged cat walked in with a large live crab in
its mouth. "Get outside, honey," she said to it, and the
cat backed easily out, the crab waving claws to us, as if for help.

After the demonstration of Wallace's diplomacy with
customers, I assumed a new demeanor around the few that straggled in.
I was a kind of personal valet, the ambassador of good will at
Bonaparte's. My job, as I saw it, was to prevent customers from
talking, lest they draw Wallace's wrath. I usually took their beer
orders with the gravity of a funeral-home operator, giving a long,
soulful look directly at them, then the slightest, tenderest nod I
could manage toward Bonaparte out at the docks, then another kind of
nod toward Wallace. This Wallace nod was in the thumb-jerk category,
but was very subdued, and I followed it with a shrug, as if to say,
Given the kid out there, the lady is
disturbed, and likely to go of, you understand
.
Most did--in fact, some customers, provided this one-two of tactful
apprising, gave an exaggerated and solemn nod of their own, clammed
up altogether, and would point to their brand of beer rather than
call it. These folk I had where I wanted--I felt like a matador with
the bull quieted and sword ready. Wallace would interrupt the moment
of their reverential silence with a great, sudden
thuuung
of dart that would make them spill beer.