Typical (20 page)

She had watched the crew from a lawn chair, drinking coffee while they changed her haunted-looking, unpainted, unannounced house into something like ballpark mustard with mica in it, and never had asked them what they thought they were doing. Nor had she asked the man with the shotgun what he was doing. And now it did not seem proper to ask the sheriff. The dog food was done, the porch under which the puppies were to live was done, and something else would be done, and it was in the spirit of winnowing to let it be done.

But in bed that night, before they got to the sheriff’s spontaneous trash talking, she did let out one question.

“Listen,” she said. “Isn’t this, prisoners and—” She made a kind of scalloping motion with her hand in the air, where he could see it. “I appreciate it, but isn’t it …
graft
or something?”

The sheriff took a deep breath as if impatient, but she already knew he would not, if he were impatient, show it; he was a man who could talk about rape in bed, but in other important ways he was a gentleman. He was breathing to compose.

“If you see something I have,” he said, “there is something behind it I have given.” He breathed for a while.

“Law is a series of
deals,”
he said next, “and so is law enforcement.” More breathing. “Nobody in law enforcement, unlike
law,
makes money
near
what the time goes into it.”

They looked at the ceiling.

“If you don’t do Wall Street, this is how you do it.” A deep sigh.

“That dogfighter I got your puppies from made fifteen thousand dollars the next week in one
hour,
and I let him do it, and I did not take a dime. You have two good dogs he would have knocked in the head. He is a homosexual to boot.”

Mrs. Schuping was sorry she had asked, and never did again. But if she saw the sheriff studying something about the place she might attempt to steer him off. He seemed to look askance at her mixed and beat-up pots and pans one night, and, fearful that he would strip the county-prison kitchen of its commercial cookware—perhaps inspired by the odd presence of her commercial toaster—and stuff it all into hers, she informed him casually that broken-in pots were a joy to handle.

She missed his siting for the deck and the boardwalk into the swamp, however, and the one clue, mumbled in his sleep, “Ground Wolmanized, that’ll be hard,” she did not know how to interpret until the ground-contact-rated, pressure-treated posts were being put in the yard behind her house and on back into the swamp by black fellows with posthole diggers and the largest, shiniest, knottiest, most gruesome and handsome arms she had ever seen.

She watched them, as she had watched the housepainters, this time putting brandy in her coffee—something she had tried once before and not liked the taste of. Sitting there drinking spiked coffee, she felt herself becoming a character in the gravitational pull of the sheriff despite, she realized, efforts nearly all her life not to become a character—except for calling herself Mrs. Schuping.

The boardwalk through the thinned swamp looked miraculous, as if the burning had been a plan of architectural landscaping. The handsome, lean swamp, the walk suggesting a miniature railroad trestle going out into it, resembled a park. If you winnowed and got down pretty clean and were normal, she thought, and something happened—like a big-bubba sheriff and thousands of dollars of windfall contracting and a completely different kind of life than you had had—and you started becoming a character, and you paid nothing for it and did not scheme for it, and it reversed your winnowing, and you liked brandy suddenly, at least in coffee, while watching men who put classical sculpture to shame, was it your fault?

Padgett Powell is the author of six novels, including
The Interrogative Mood
and
You & Me.
His novel
Edisto
was a finalist for the National Book Award. His writing has appeared in the
New Yorker
,
Harper’s Magazine
,
Little Star
, and the
Paris Review
, and he is the recipient of the Rome Fellowship in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the Whiting Writers’ Award. He lives in Gainesville, Florida, where he teaches writing at MFA@FLA, the writing program of the University of Florida.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1991 by Padgett Powell

Cover design by Jason Gabbert

978-1-4804-4158-3

This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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