A Woman Named Drown - Padgett Powell (12 page)

Much of the beer consumed was consumed by Wallace and
me. We got into a game of drinking certain kinds to correspond with
brand deliveries, turning off all the beer clocks and signs except
those representing the day's brand. We looked like seven individual
low-budget beer commercials. I got inordinately fond of the first
beers in the morning that we used to slake through the Pine-Sol,
which felt like it was in our throats and was in our heads. The
clear, cold bubbles of the beer washed in, stinging through the
piney, gaggy, cottonlike ammoniac air of the freshly mopped bar, and
after a good hard mopping that made you sweat and a couple of good
cold cold ones to clear the eyes, we'd struggle to the wide, bright
door and look out at pure air and heat and Bonaparte bailing and the
headachy convection currents already coming off his toiling form and
feel, somehow--I did, and I think Wallace did, too--as if the day was
wonderful, the place fine, the weather clear, the salt tonic, the
world good.

Across this happy-face moment would then waft a small
cloud of the real, and we'd step back abruptly A and get another beer
and realize we were broke, Bonaparte was hopeless, and the sole
rescue was hundreds of customers who wanted boats we did not have,
fish no one could show them to, hospitality we were fundamentally
opposed to granting. Then we'd have a fourth beer, and then it was,
well before noon, altogether too bright to look at Bonaparte for any
longer than you'd look directly at the sun itself if someone told you
it was in lunar eclipse. I would prepare myself for the unlikely
advent of customers by placing on my arm an imaginary green towel of
the sort I'd worn when Mary and I worked at the beach club.

It was in all a wonderful time that I knew even
during the nose-pinching smallness of it I would remember as fondly
as you remember certain mean periods of your life and come to love
them for the meanness. Wallace I respected as a soldier--a person who
would have gone to West Point and been a rogue general who, despite a
career of insubordination, won; or a middling prizefighter who won on
indomitability alone. Instead, she had a bone·apart child and a
fishless fish camp and bottomless boats and won by strategic,
stubborn refusal to accede to . . . to what? I did not know: I do not
know. She refused to ask for any relief--it was as if what she wanted
was not a break but one more trial: one more dart in the plywood of
her ordeal. And that dart she wanted implanted, solidly, stuck into
the heart of the whole losing proposition.

I could not even figure, while I ate it, where the
bologna we had for lunch came from. The meat may have been in the
chest freezer that Bonaparte froze his crabs in. I never looked in
it, because the one time I thought to, it was slept upon by a placid
cat with one dusty eyeball goggling out, actually touching the rusty
top of the freezer. I saw no cause to wake him. You don't disturb a
cat like that to see bologna.

Performing my silent duties as valet to the nearly
hypothetical customer, I got to feeling that while Wallace might be
set up for the next dart of oppression, I was not, and I hardly saw
how my not scaring a couple of couples before they had two beers each
could possibly equal my consuming nearly as much bologna as
Bonaparte--he was
voracious
--and
I decided to get out before the next dark dart struck. In fact, it
occurred to me that
I had been it
--the
next dart--when I arrived. And now we all awaited the next profitless
windfall. These were the events that Bonaparte tracked, perhaps, with
his head cockings and whistlings and St. Vitusing out under the
broken green-shaded light at the end of the dock.

"Wallace, write me a check for fifteen hundred
dollars and I'll give you one for two thousand and you can get him a
boat. I'm going."

She turned to me, sucking the finger she burned
turning the rising mounds of bologna. Bonaparte did not like
punctures. "What?"

"
Sambo rumbles."

"
Kiss my ass."

She turned back to the stove. I got my grocery bag of
Stump's duds and left, passing Bonaparte in the marsh checking his
crab traps.

At the end of the white, graded road where I'd gotten
off the bus, nothing had changed, which somehow surprised me. I
expected to see even the same bus come barreling down on me from the
same direction I had ridden it. I was stunned to be standing where I
had stood, and exactly as I had stood before, except for the passage
of time at the camp, as if I were a boat sunk to my nose and bailing
myself out with all the efficacy of Bonaparte up to his chin. You can
feel odd standing in a sudden swarm of deerflies--having just thrown
darts for a month with a woman you've left with her retarded
kid--rippling sawgrass as far as the eye can see, razory salty wheat.

Air brakes caught me dreaming. Before me was the same
bus, the same driver. I got on. He smiled at me as if I were a
traveling salesman returning from a joke. I offered a hundred-dollar
bill for the fare and took the smirk off his face.

"
Napoleon musta got one dry," he said,
expecting me to share with him the lunacy of my days at the camp. I
did not. I heard a faint, shrill whistle from behind the bus as we
were getting going. Wallace was nailing up the HELP WANTED sign and
Bonaparte was whistling and listening vigorously. Then, from too far
to tell for sure, I swear he dropped trou and mooned the bus. The
driver was looking in his side mirror, but his expression gave no
clue.

In Naples I got heroic. I paid for Sears'
top-of-the-line johnboat and had it delivered. And I got it in my
head to go home.

    
H
ow
so nutty a notion took hold of me I can only guess. Throwing darts
through Pine-Sol fumes or reading amateur playscripts for a living
sets you up for a broadsiding by any crack-brained thing that comes
along remotely redolent of the practical or normal or responsible, I
suppose. And so I decided to go home, and I also decided to impress
the bus driver by writing as we flew up the backside of Florida. I
acquired another notebook from a newsstand in a bus station, and I
carried it past the driver with a processional gravity, as if I were
a priest. I am still in a kind of cold war with the bus driver.

I have written on a wire table, in a Mercury, at an
ammoniac fish camp, and now on a Big Red bus out of Naples, Florida,
barreling up the murky coast of Florida, going to see my old man. He
and my mother live in Lafayette in a mansion. There will be liquor,
and insults regarding my not taking over the oil-field-supply
business.

It is impossible to believe that whatever Mary
trained me for, or whatever I sought the day I broke rank, is coming
to a visit with my old man. Nothing is less agreeable.

I'd better rethink this whole business. I'm now in
the position, after all, of
missing
connections
. It is easy to stop in
Tallahassee, take too long walking to see the capitol dome, miss the
bus for Mobile, and take the one for Quitman.

Show up in Quitman and
start from there. Nothing is easier, or harder, than that.

* * *

My second day a-bus. Certain things are becoming
clear. At 10:30 this morning in Chipley, Florida, I entered a
Suwannee Swifty and bought a red T-shirt, a large Big Red soda water,
and resumed my seat directly over the bus-side exhortation to GO BIG
RED. This theater made me the envy of two children who got on the
bus, to whom I gave the soft drink. It worked; I "became
someone" through a maneuver of artificial staging. I need more
funky shirts, more improbable women, more nerve. We head south, to
the Gulf, non-express. Carrabelle flies by in a town-sized convection
current.

The red shirt stinks of cheap dye.

The bus glides.

The girl who got on at Niceville I tell I'm a
songwriter, and my new song, "I'm Happy to Be the One That's
Mostly on Top of You," I'm going to dedicate to her.

"Say whut?"

The bus has taken an unexpected stop--for a flat,
being attended to now by a Montgomery Ward truck--in Panacea. I enter
Eastside Beverage. A white man is saying to a black named Augusta
(from his work-shirt embroidery), "He is a nice snake."
Augusta says, "Don't start on me that shit." "I'll
show you," the proprietor says, heading for the back. Augusta
gets off his stool, ready to run, full of mock fear and a little true
fear.

The proprietor returns with a cigar box, opens it: a
boxful of snapshots.

"
Oh," Augusta says. "All right."

In a photo the white man holds a large diamondback in
one smooth loop between its head and tail. The mouth is open, slack.
"We enjoyed each other," the proprietor says. Augusta looks
at him with quick, hard, mock disapproval and some real disapproval.
Apparently the proprietor is seeking to have Augusta believe the
snake was alive and his pet.

"
That's a dead snake," I say.

"
Yeah, he died."

"
No, he's dead right there."

The proprietor does some sizing up of me. I get two
quarts of beer I do not want, to remain casual and fluid.

"
That snake was dead before you ever got near
it."

Augusta studies the picture.

"
These two quarts of beer are for Augusta, a man
who knows bullshit."

Augusta says, "That I do." He looks at the
proprietor in a way designed, however, to let him know he thinks I'm
crazy.

I'm on the bus. I've hit on something. I may be nuts,
feebleminded, but I've run agreeably aground on something.

When my degree at
Tennessee is conferred or not, when James has forgotten my room of
stuff, the carp my symbolic lock, Ebert his basketball, Camel Tent
the collegiate new girl, Mary our quaint ride, Wallace my kiss-ass
leave, I will be remembered along here as the guy who said Floyd
Drowdy's alleged pet rattlesnake was a dead fake, and Augusta will
take less shit and do less jiving around that rotten-tooth white simp
than before, and every day he walks in there and says, Let me have a
look at that
pet
, the
role I played will continue to be remembered.

* * *

We get back up out of this coast-run hernia and head
true west--on the same road Mary and I took, I think, U.S. 90--we
stop at a gas station. I'm
amazed
;
it's the one where Mary and I stopped, behind which Bobby Cherry and
the geezers talked of owls. I look behind it. Everybody's there. I
wave. They look at me. Then a look of recognition. Cherry is the
first to disacknowledge this, by looking down at his own beer, so I
sit at his table, where I sat before.

"
Bobby."

"
Sport."

After a beer, in utter silence, I lean over to him.

"
Are you the kind of guy does what he says he's
going to do?"

"
What?"

"
You heard me."

"Get him a beer." Bobby Cherry points to
me. A geezer in an apron goes to the cooler.

"
I take it that's important, still. The word."

"
Damn straight."

"
And you're
that kind.
"

"
Damn straight."

"
Good."

Bobby Cherry's getting concerned. "Why is it
good?" he says.

"
I want you to be the kind of guy you say you
are."

"
You don't think I am?"

"
Didn't say that."

"
I better get in my truck before I do something
I regret."

"
Get in your truck."

He does. Easy as that.

In a dime store in Milton, Florida, I tell the clerk,
"I don't think I'm a Communist."

She passes my items past her: a balsa glider in a
flat pack, tube socks, a tin box of split shot. "I know you're
not a Communist," she says. "I wish it would rain."

"
Yes, ma'am. I know you do. It's a shame we
undid the Indians," I say. "They had those rain dances.
Marched about a million of them right by here on the way to Oklahoma,
too."

"
Nope," she says, sacking my airplane,
socks, shot.