Edisto - Padgett Powell (18 page)

Taurus in a Spot of Trouble

This one’s true. The one about Theenie’s lost
grandbaby might have been put together, fiction-mode. But this one
happened. Right before we went to that photo parlor—in fact, we
went in there to rest after the trouble—Taurus got in a fight with
a bum. We were in a little restaurant by the bus station in
Charleston. A jukebox was playing and this little girl had learned to
kick it and make the needle skip back to the beginning. She replayed
the song about five times and was giggling when the bum called her
over to the counter by saying, "Tell me what’s on your Santy
Claus list." It wasn’t
near
Christmas, but she went for
it. Well, it worked. The song ended. She ran back over and kicked the
box, but too late. She got mad and the bum drank his beer.

Taurus gives her a dime.

The bum says, "Why ’ont you mine your own
bizzness, buddy?"

Taurus says, "Why ’ont you mine yern?"

"Shih. Your kind chaps my ass."

The song came back in, the little girl beaming.

"Care to dance, mister?" Taurus said. I was
scared, but it was worth it.

"What are you—a hippie?"

Taurus looked at me. He was solid as a Marine.

"Yes, sir. I'm a pacifist. Don't believe in
violence of any kind."

"You don’t believe . . . ’at's what ruint
Veetnam. You step outside, son. I’mone teach you something.”

"I’d rather listen to this rock and roll,
sir."

"You’re a punk."

That did it. I saw Taurus change. His nose flared. He
put money on the table and walked out. They had a side alley. He went
in there. Taurus suggested I go back inside and dance with the girl
or something but I wasn’t budging. It didn’t matter because
before anything Mr. Psoriasis II came rolling down the alley at a
tilt after Taurus.

Taurus handled him like a bull, I swear. He never
moved his feet much and every time the bum charged, headfirst, Taurus
just caught him in the chest with short little punches that more than
anything kept the guy from falling down. The guy didn’t stop, so
Taurus opened his hand and slapped him very hard on the face.

The man stood back, amazed.

"Why don’t you quit?" Taurus said.

The man was congested and green-looking, with
pink-and-red splotches on his face. He charged and tripped and fell
at Taurus’s feet and skinned half his nose off, and it bled from
the inside, too. Taurus put a five-dollar bill by his head and said
this speech in the tightest voice I ever heard him use: "Take a
taxi to the county clinic. You broke your fucking nose."

We left. We tried to walk it off, I think. Just
before we went into that photo parlor, Taurus said, "The only
doctor that bastard’s going to is M.D. 20/20." He was cool,
but that deal had his nerves out. He was taking deep breaths every
few minutes. I had the idea he had been very correct in all that
crap, but he still didn’t like it one bit. One thing was sure:
Psoriasis II had a brand-new idea about hippies.

I cannot imagine my father doing anything like this.
He would talk too much or call the heat or something. Then explicate
it. But you could imagine Taurus directing a holdup with his hand in
a paper bag suggesting a gun. I saw Jake stop a fight like that with
his hand in a blue velvet Crown Royal bag. Taurus could do it, too.
I’m rambling off the page. I’ll miss him, is all.

But it was little things like this that will stand
out. Not the right—of course that's special. I was scared. But how
smart he was gets me. All this crap off Psoriasis II and he never
really gets riled out of shape. Just handles the situation without
more or less than it demands—like being named "Taurus” and
(apparently) deciding it will do. And never telling me his real name.
Now, here’s where he leaves this world. Someone else would correct
you. Someone else would threaten the bum with the police or kill him
in the alley. Well, I hatched a theory about it.

You can explain some of it with the heroin-baby
rumor. Say he did have a heroin birth and had half his time sense,
like memory, blown out. Then he could have to accept someone naming
him. But I doubt that story.

Going into the photo parlor, I caught the essence of
it. It was that he did not know what his life held and so studied it
very closely. And I was different: mine held all the plans the Doctor
and Daddy would negotiate, a cross-hatching of professional
ambitions. I was not going to get to be a two-cylinder syntax dude at
the Grand. I was, I am—I have to admit, that because my life is
cloyed by practical plans and attainable hopes—I am white. Best
thing to do, I figure, is to get on with it. So I said let’s go in
that joint for commemorative photos, my heart really beating then. I
had one of these white hearts that lub-dub this way:
then—next
;
and Taurus had one of these that go
now—next
; and the guys
at the Grand went now—now. And you can’t change that with
decisions to be cool. You can’t get to that
now—now
without a congenital blessing or disease, whichever applies.

So we went in, as I said, and took those shots, and I
looked, apropos of all this horseshit, like a grub, and Taurus like a
dusky man in jail.
 

The Official Hiatus
of
Simons Manigault Begins

Well, here I am in old brand-new Hilton Head, which I
thought was the first solid Arab bastion and a pure squat of Hell,
but now it seems a scalawag of our own sold it out. He went all down
the coast doing it. Got to Cumberland Island and he met the old
Carnegie Steel people, who stopped him, sold their whole joint cheap
to the feds. Yankee steel people preserving the South, Arabs the new
Yankees, scalawags persisting as usual, and the place is consequently
as confused as during Reconstruction.

But it’s somehow pleasant enough here. The oaks are
all pruned like I said, so they look like perfect trees in cement zoo
cages. Small creosoted timbers are driven into the ground, forming
borders for everything—plants, people, golf carts, restaurant
parking. Condominia are all over, roads deliberately curve everywhere
when they could go straight, the tinkling postcard marina, lobbies,
lounges, links, limousines.

All the Negroes are in green landscape clothes, or
white service jackets, or Volvos with their kids in tennis togs. It’s
something. Already their shacks and the bus riding with them smoking
dope and the Grand scenes are dimming into the remembered vividness
of a private gallery in my mind. I have to be on guard about it,
about it all becoming photographs in a drawer, like Daddy remembering
Jake’s daddy’s joint as a class operation, but Jake’s is just a
juke joint. That’s not right. There’s something fake in that. And
what I worry is, I’ll go back and do the same thing, or never go
back, which will have the same effect. I’ll just watch the
photographs yellow.

We never talked about it or anything, but Taurus had
a plan about this. He’d never be so eager to frame and crop the
past, because that poses the present—you have to pose it to
photograph it. And that means you can’t take the future in its full
array of possibility, because you’re fixing to have to compose it
for the present snapshot. It’s all square, very square. Nobody in
the Grand would ever do that. Nobody could. What presumption. There’s
not  enough of an image to work with, to crop. So they don’t
shoot up the present with instant past, with warm immediate memories
of how great it was, because it wasn’t great.

Except the new Negroes in the Volvos, I guess they
will try, they have enough to compose with, and you can’t blame
them. But at the Grand I couldn’t go around that night and say
goodbye. I would be freezing that night by anticipating Hilton Head,
with a put-on spirit of lament, which would be phony to them, an
insult, for if they were so lucky as to go, to get a Volvo run at
things and dress their kids in new clothes, they wouldn’t be
bitching about it or even hanging around to talk about it. If someone
did, he would come in with all his cash and buy the house for the
night. And when he got there, and if his life became as comfortable
and wonderful as the white lives already there, would he start
snapping up the present with instant past? It’s like when you watch
TV sports with instant replays. You don’t even get caught up in the
live play, because if you miss something you just run back in and see
the great action you missed—the scenes already past which make the
game you never saw so memorable. Hell, maybe there’s nothing so
wrong with that. Maybe Jake and those guys deserve better times at
any cost. But I think they could make a mistake of a large kind if
they ever come to Hilton Head and act white. I can’t express it.
But I know you can spend an evening with Preston and Jinx, and you
can’t spend one with Jim and Bill and the coroners. That’s a
fact.

I think of Jake with his foot up on the beer box,
elbows crossed on his knee, in his apron, smoking, looking off,
calling his mother if something goes the dog’s way. He knows he has
only a few pieces of the puzzle it takes to put together a life
leaving for a place like Hilton Head. And Taurus gone—hell he’d
just about handed me back Penelope and Ulysses like he sort of did by
setting me up with Londie, his girl’s prim cousin, instead of the
looser model I wanted, which would have made it all different for me.
And now I am a good gentry tyke in Cooper Boyd, headed shortly for
St. Cecilia Society balls with a million Altalondine Jenkinses
instead of talking trash with true Diane Parkers in roadhouses. He
knew what he was doing. But the point is, he just cut out, didn’t
hang around for a photo session to preserve anything.

He’ll walk into a Cajun bar down in Louisiana and
be on the inside in two minutes with some trick of astute casual
attention like calling that
Slitz
a little
Joe
, some
new profession, name maybe, no regrets, no losses, no cumbersome
ideas of what he is or is to be, no freight train of future bearing
down on him, no comet of good old days burning him to a cinder of
constantly failing memory.

When Taurus was gone I had a dream. You know how
sometimes you think you’ve dreamed something before, or part of
something before? And you dream again to develop it? I had that
feeling. It was one of those dreams where nobody looks like anyone
you know but they are people you know. And nothing follows or fits,
but it all means stuff anyway.

It opens on a prison visitation room with a wire
screen. An Elizabeth Taylorish woman, made up with red red lips and
purple cheeks, plays the Doctor, and a Paul Newmany dude plays
Taurus. He comes in under guard. Her eyes are rheumy, old rubbed-on
peepers from a crying jag. "Take another cell, just for the
night," she says.

"For God’s sake," he says.

"He’s a
man’s
man. I have warned
you."

"Be sure about dis ding, baby," he says,
gangster-style.

Sniffling, tear-racked, she ekes out: "Chemistry
never changes." She pouts like a minnow.

He rips up his side of the room. Guard doesn’t even
stop him. Just comes in and says, "Okay, buddy, it ain’t the
end of the world."

Then I think I dreamed of the morning after the night
I learned that chemistry never changes, when I found Taurus making
coffee at the Boy Scout camp, life on the open range. My sense is all
messed up on it, when these dreams were. In fact, how much of the
groaning rocks and chemistry talk was a dream, how much might have
been the same thing as thinking I felt the comfort of Taurus coming
in the house without knowing I knew it, I don’t know. I do know
when I got up I felt as dumbly wise as a fiddler crab. I looked at my
mother and father very closely. They were jake.

So that’s me. This is my motto. Never to forget 
that, dull as things get, old as it is, something is happening,
happening all the time, and to watch it.

Living in a joint where the oaks are robbed of their
moss and amputated of their little limbs is like living in an
architect’s model, and sleeping in redwood boxes is fakey, like
being a cigar, and we now have furniture that will not make noise,
and all those sailboats tinkling halyards against masts day and
night, never been out of the harbor, is evil, or something, at least
screwball as hell, but now I wonder: Who’s to say all that stuff I
left—the Grand, Taurus, the Georgia-Pacific pagoda and plantation
of weeds—what if all that’s the museum?

I got to heave to, hard-to-lee, or I’ll get in the
same trap I was in. Just because this place looks like a layout on a
ping-pong table don’t mean it ain’t happening right here too.
Whatever’s happening. Hell, Taurus would become a bartender and
watch the tennis ladies and seduce a share of them. And Theenie hauls
in here, finds the vacuum, falls to in a minute. And the Doctor and
the Progenitor get married and my custody junkets are over. It’s
the modern world. I have to accept it. I’m a pioneer. Still, I
haven’t seen any mullet or mullet people. It’s swordfish steaks
from Boston now. That’s where we’re at, now. And the Hilton
Lounge, cocktails, and red carpet, and I’m done with the Baby
Grand. Even if Jake’s still smoking while he studies the wall.

I’m done with the Baby Grand.

I’m done with the Baby Grand.

There.