A Woman Named Drown - Padgett Powell (10 page)

Cars from Pennsylvania headed south could blow even
Mary off the road. Blacks hauling scrap cardboard or cans tooled all
over the state at go, tops. Teenagers in 4X4 trucks with tires so
large deer could run under the trucks hummed by. And some folks had
not so much an idea of what to do as slightly less ignorance about
what to do than we did; Florida bars are alive in the mornings. I
felt we wrote the book on having a clean slate of purpose.

We spent a day in the town of Branford. The famous
Suwannee slugged by in a slow roll to the Gulf, the dark, heavy water
cut deep into limestone banks forming moonish, pocked bluffs.

We took a room in a place called Hotel that had no
desk, no desk clerk, no keys, no locks on doors. Rooms were open for
a kind of self-registering. The procedure was to sleep and pay later.

The rooms had screen doors in use, the solid doors
behind them left open. White towels were suspended at eye level
inside the screen doors for privacy. The door locks were hook
latches. A bulb from the ceiling lit the room, controlled by a string
to the headboard. The wallpaper had long, rust-colored water stains.
We could hear the other roomers grunt and groan and shuffle around,
and one of them fell hard in the night. The mattress was very high on
old springs, and we swayed back and forth if either of us turned,
rolled together to the soft middle. Mary looked beautiful coming out
of the community bathroom with her shiny-washed face early in the
morning. We left three dollars on the bed.

We crossed the
silver-colored iron bridge over the Suwannee, heading out of town
with two large steaming coffees. The river was fogged in; a white,
chilled valley.

* * *

In odd, hilled towns we found retired whites coming
and going around pharmacies that still had soda fountains, and
outside these towns, coming and going in school buses, migrants
working orange groves. We walked into groves to watch the picking. We
were never questioned. We may have looked like a welfare team,
reporters, a landed woman and her heir, I do not know. We would look
at the workers from the edge of the action; the workers at us from
cherry pickers, trucks, pallets of fruit. Mary, wearing a sweater
cape-style, would walk on after a spell, as if the operations were
satisfactory. I followed, a young man pulled for these inspections
from a golf course.

We drank screwdrivers for two days after the first of
these visits, toasting the plight of the poor, and then we could not
stand them anymore and went back to good, sour tonics.

In one grove we walked up on a hognose snake. I
surprised Mary by picking it up in the middle of its cobra act. I
showed her the snake's small upturned nose for shoveling out toads
from their shallow beds. She stood about ten feet away--eight feet
too far to see the nose architecture--and said, "Fascinating."

"
I was a fool for snakes once," I said.
Mary looked at me as if I'd said the most outlandish thing a man in a
golf suit holding a snake can say to a woman pretending to survey her
citrus millions. I put down the hognose, and he instantly performed
his death act. I did not bother to explain.

Somehow we wound up in a hotel bar cuts above our
roadhouse tastes, a well-thought-of old place a little north of
Deerfield Beach. By 11 :30 someone at the hotel had decided we were
looking for work there, and we were found uniforms--Mary's a
chambermaid affair, mine butler--before the lunch rush. It was a
Reuben and tongue crowd. I proclaimed myself no waiter, and the same
someone who'd assumed we wanted work said, "No problem." I
was told to stand against a wall with a green towel over my arm.

CARLISLE: Mizress Drown to St. Louis, she say for an
unpacific number of weeks. We had the sheets already in the barns.
Say she would ax that good Reynold buyer to look it
before
market and inside bid and we'd do fine. We did. That's all I got to
say. All I know.

And that was Carlisle's total statement in the trial
attempting to implicate him in the mulatto-child drowning. A cool
fellow. Then his benign and likable cockiness, smoking cigars all
over town with his mistress Drown delivering their alleged progeny in
St. Louis. I stood against the wall with the green towel on my arm
realizing that Carlisle, too, knew how to capitalize on liability,
and watched Mary, nearly fluorescent, play the part of a waitress in
Florida.

I overheard a table, apparently an employer selling a
new applicant on a position with the firm: "All our people are
key people. We access you right away to in-house and can interface
you after security with on-line for larger work. Compensation
packages are just super. And our reputation is one of just super as
far as fairness to everyone."

Employee; "My title would be . . .?"

Boss; "Software Specialist. Another?"

Boss orders them more double martinis.

Mary and I leave in late afternoon, walk a fishing
pier, and study all the bad luck. It is a spectacular sight to see a
school of pompano streak through a disarray of baited lines without
touching one; the fishermen standing up, the yellow flares of the
fishtails sharp as knives slicing through the lines, the fishermen
sitting down.

My friend Tom is part of the world which concerns
itself with hot and cold armadillos, and I am not. How did this
happen? We were in the same program, the same office, taught the same
undergraduates the same chemistry. We appreciated the same
scientists. Then he went to Oak Ridge and I went to Bilbo's.

When we pass armadillos, I
remark to Mary, "That one looked hot," "That one was
cold," and she has no idea what I'm talking about, and does not
want to know. Her hair blows madly, whipped thin as cotton candy by
the wind.

* * *

We are somewhere, now, between social sets; we have
done pool halls, open-air bars behind gas stations, and club-sandwich
beach clubs. We are presently in a luncheonette vein. Nothing
declared, no policy: it is just that two days ago we quit the hotel
jobs and have been eating $1.89 lunches in dime stores, served by
large, sweaty women who are not unhappy.

Today I have passed another test. It happened that we
took a booth next to four hefty women. Mary had her back to them; I
faced them, looking over her shoulder. Neither of us took any
note--studying the proposition of meat loaf against stuffed
pepper--until a trim man with a cane approached them and one of the
women said, "The Avon man cometh." She then gave him a
playful sock in the arm, and he gave them all a devious smile, sat
down, and ordered some coffee. I saw all this, Mary did not, but it
was clear to me she heard it: her head was up in a fixed, listening
pose, her eyes bright.

The trim man sipped his coffee elegantly and said
without self-pity, "I was in Pampers for two months."

The women issued noises of mild condolence. "Wearing
a diaper is not all bad," the man said, a gleam in his eye. The
women seemed satisfied by this remark: they seemed to have an immense
respect for him.

One of the women suddenly said, "It
poured
down rain right in the mall parking lot. Before I got inside I was
sopping wet, so I went into May Cohen's. They had these blouses for
three dollars on a table? I said, I'll take it and change and
wear
it. The one I was wearing was stuck, you
know, to
my bra
--"
She paused, and the women looked at the man for a moment, during
which he did not move or look directly at any woman.

"
Anyway," the woman picked up, "they
were marked down from
twenty-three dollars
and I thought I had me a
buy
."

Another woman felt the material of her sleeve.

"
That's the one?" a third woman asked.

"
Yes, honey, that's why I'm telling you this."
The remaining two women felt the material.

"
Well. Everything has a gimmick. You won't
believe this. Look. This is why it was three dollars."

The woman stood up, moved a distance from their
table, and shrugged her shoulders several times, ending in an
arms-straight-down posture, standing woodenly and slumped before
them. Her sleeves had slipped down six inches past her hands, giving
her the aspect of a rayon ape.

"
Can you
believe
it`?" she said. "Everything has a gimmick."

The other ladies clucked a good-natured disgust. The
trim man was stoic, uncommenting, sipping his coffee. The woman had
modeled her shirt directly to him, her bra not precisely invisible in
this dry blouse. Mary never turned to witness this scene, but she
watched me watch, and I believe that I passed. It is a kind of
theater no hack playwright could stage, and I believe that is what
she wants me to see in this and in every other mundane adventure we
happen to witness. Mary is getting younger by the day. We are ever
more lost to the practical world, more located in our desired
universe of self-directed drama.

    
W
e
are riding again, Mercury tearing the highway air out of itself.
Mary's looking fine in a T-shirt. I'm in one, too. We're up to some
kind of redneck act, it seems.

At an interstate picnic rest area, we saw an
alligator eating golf balls. A woman was opening the door of an RV
and tossing out one golf ball at a time to the alligator. I stood
there and watched in my Stump suit. Between tosses a second woman
came out of nowhere and started reading me the riot act about
endangered species and federal animal-welfare acts and I helplessly
protested. She would not believe I had nothing to do with the
feeding. "Watch that trailer," I told her. Nothing
happened.

I knocked on the RV. A man opened the door. A hairy
gut hung out, which forced his T-shirt to ride up to his chest.
"Forget it, pal," he said.

"
Forget what?"

"
Whatever crap you are." He slammed the
door.

I walked back to Mrs. Audubon. "See?" I
said.

"
I already saw, just like I said," she
said.

I return to the consummate logic of flying in the
Mercury, mixing drinks in midair, taking life's lab notes. There is
no misunderstanding like that golfball business between the back seat
and front. Mary adjusts the rearview mirror until our eyes meet;
she's ordering a light tonic with a lot of lime. She stops the car
and freshens up in a rest room, comes out with new lipstick and her
hair brushed back: the four-o'clock double, no lime. She drives. I
serve drinks to the driver.

About this time I join her in the front, and until
dark we are at our touristy best, watching Florida's sandy glare
become Florida's neon evening. One of us comes up with something to
say, usually by gesture alone, about Chico's Monkey Emporium, Floyd's
Go-Cart Royale, a Hep-Ur-Sef station, the Daytona Pamplona (a Cuban
disco, we think). A club advertising music by Maurice and the Fucking
Parrots is too much: Mary takes her foot off the accelerator as we
pass it. We look at each other. The club's marquee actually
proclaims;TONIGHT: MAURICE AND THE FUCKING PARROTS.

Maurice and the Fucking Parrots are the worst band
you could assemble with human musicians, or parrot musicians, for
that matter, and we dance for hours. We rest in the car, watching the
clear skies darken, the crushed-shell parking lot begin to whiten
with a light of its own, peaceful as the moon. The night is ruined so
aggressively, so eagerly, so thoroughly by Maurice's horrible music
that it is somehow made perfect.

We rescue ourselves FInally at two with the Mercury's
powerful rumble and surge into the chilled highway air. Mary throws
her head back and to the side, lips parted, silent actress awaiting a
kiss. We stop on an undeveloped piece of A1A and walk into some low
dunes with Stump's navy blankets.

"
Balance the books
tomorrow," she says. It is an odd note.

* * *

We got up the next morning to a changed world--to a
new act, I might should say. I do not know whether to blame--blame is
not the word, let's say to hold accountable--Maurice and the Fucking
Parrots or not. We got up, normal as you please, greasy-faced from a
night of Atlantic sand and wind, ready for a day-rate room and some
rest, and Mary took the stage.