A Woman Named Drown - Padgett Powell (13 page)

"
No?"

"
Trucked 'em. Wouldn't let 'em touch the
ground."

"
Shame."

"
Pity."

"
We are bad."

She looks at me. I am testing her now.

"We are bad," I say again. "You have
hundreds of rubber buffalo and Indians in here for sale."
Perhaps she will think I'm a Communist, after all.

It is the old kind of dime store: brass nails are
worn up through the pine floors, large white opaque global lights
hang from the ceiling. Nothing of any value can be seen on the
shelves, in the bins. Yet several poorlooking women feel things, load
them, buy them--orange plastic toys, nylon hose, clothes pins,
perfume. The soda fountain is intact, closed. No public-address voice
will ever exhort shoppers to pay attention to anything in here. No
yellow light will be wheeled around to sale zones. As a consequence,
everyone pays attention to everything, regards everything as a sale
item. I have narrowly avoided purchasing a menagerie of small rubber
monsters, after feeling them for minutes, watching for the bus
driver, who I think has started nipping. He is clever. He disappears
for a few minutes at these endless country stops, where there is
rarely a formal bus station. I believe he would leave me if he could.
Our cold war is strong.

I have begun distributing gifts to children on the
bus, for which he doubtless thinks me a pederast. I get back on and
whisper to the driver, "I'm an existentialist, pure and simple."
He says nothing.

In Fairhope I follow him, catch him in the men's room
pulling on a half pint of Seagram's. "You're an existentialist,
too," I say, washing up.

"
I'm a drunk, kid." He says this with no
emphasis, no confession, no self-pity. I offer to shake hands. We
have a good, firm, countryman's shake.

"
When the hell is this ride over?"

"
Mobile."

"
Not New Orleans?"

"
Not me."

"
It's been a good one."

He is taking another
tight-lipped shot, which he sucks in with a teeth-baring grimace. He
cants the bottle to me. I roll a long slug in, open-throated, careful
not to lip his bottle. We exit together, I get the door and he
touches my shoulder in return.

* * *

It has been a good bus ride. Now the driver and I are
on even terms: I am above the common passenger, he is lower than
ship's captain. In Mobile, end of the line, we run into each other at
the same run-down hotel where he stays regularly. "Lot of Greek
in this town," he says in the lobby. He is out of uniform. In a
flowered shirt, he suddenly looks seedy, dangerous.

"
Are you Greek?" I ask.

"
Hell
no." He
laughs. "I
eat
Greek. Plenty Greek to eat here."

We wind up in the Athens Bar & Grill, where a
woman in green chiffon is trying to smother seated gentlemen with her
breasts while undulating her fatty navel at them. After a couple of
bottles of retsina, we eat something. The dancing gets wilder.
Fatima--Helen retires and middle-aged Greek men take over. They make
mime breasts, sculpt them out of air, and tease one another with
them. They hunch one another. One falls on his knees, miming sucking
his partner.

"
Shall we have more turpentine?" I ask.

"
I've had enough."

"
You must
not
be Greek."

"
I'm normal. I drive that bus twelve years. My
wife has cancer. My son works for the highway department. My wife
will die."

"
I'm sorry."

"
They're burning her now. They're in that stage.
This is not a joke. She stays
hot
."

"
I'm sorry."

"
Don't mention it."

We watch the show, the men dancing, their own wives
watching them perform these suggestions. I suddenly know I am going
back to Knoxville.

"
These Greeks are sports, aren't they?" I
say.

He--the driver, we have not exchanged names--shakes
his head, agreeably, sadly, gets up to go. In the hotel corridor the
next morning I pass two black women eating bagels. They are in
custodial blues, sitting heavily in a supply room, watching a
fire-alarm light blinking on the wall.

"
Is the building afire?" I ask.

One of the women says, "The buzzer ain't gone
off."

We look at the light, blinking regularly, fast. "I
thought it smelled like fire in here
last
night
," I say. "It stank."

"
Yes, it did," the second woman says. She
is farther into the janitor's closet, not eating. She has a bagel
with a neatly applied quarter inch of butter troweled onto it. It is
as if she will not begin eating until the message carried by the
blinking light is understood.

"
Well," I say, "I'm checking out."

They laugh, nodding.

"
I love you," I say to them.

The second one, with the ready bagel, says, "You
say that."

"
I say that."

The first woman looks at me, looks away. It seems to
me that people are ready to hear things never heard before so long as
they are not frightened for their physical safety or worried that
listening may cost them money. This is an untestable hypothesis, and
I don't know that I want to test it now that I have formed the
hypothesis so neatly. But I believe I gave it a fair test for a few
days, and proved it sufficiently well for a failed scientist. People
are hungry for new utterance. Does the reaction series of life
include new utterance in its function?

Can Mary be said to have shown me this by assuming
roles and living them? Was Bonaparte receiving and sending
wavelengths so novel no one in his right mind could pick up on them?

    
I
n
the cafeteria of the bus station I saw my driver again, dressed for
the road, looking invisible and harmless, in his blue regulation
suit. He poured a saucerful of coffee back into his cup, the saucer
shaking at a frequency so high and an amplitude so low that anyone
unconscious of wave theory would not have seen it shake. His whole
attitude suggested a man holding his breath. I joined him.

"
Back to Florida?" I asked him.

"
Shoot. A run north. Little-town run. From
Decatur over to Jackson."

"
From where?"

"
Decatur."

"
I know someone there."

I got up to get us more coffee and to check behind
the counter for Rod Serling: crackerjack nuke-whiz Tom lived in
Decatur, Alabama. The plottable slope of fate defining my errant life
was running straight to Tom.

"
I know someone there I'd like to see."

"
Well, come on. I'll take you there." He
said this as if he meant in his own car, at his own expense, and he
sort of did. He told me to meet him in seventeen minutes three blocks
down the street and he'd pick me up.

"
Sync up," he said, exposing his wristwatch
in a flourish of his uniformed arm. We matched our watches like
spies. All of this was to save me a six-dollar ticket.

"I fucked some turkeys there when I was a kid,"
he said.

"
You what?"

"
Fucked turkeys."

"
Fucked
turkeys
?"

"
Yeah. I was staying with my cousin and he asked
if I wanted to fuck something, so I said sure, and he showed me these
turkeys he said his father didn't want, and we fucked them."

"What do you mean,
didn't
want
?"

"
Well, it kills 'em, you know."

"
Kills 'em."

"
Kills hell out of 'em, actually." He
grinned a not altogether ashamed grin.

"
Only my uncle
did
want them. Beat the hell out of us."

In our remaining time he gave me a short course in
bestiality. Cows one does barefoot, holding the Achilles tendon with
the big toe. Sheep with their hind legs in your Wellies.

"
Dogs?"

"Never fucked a dog."

This seemed an oversight to me.

"
Did fuck some bass once."

I looked at him. Was he on to the theory of new
utterance himself? Was he just doing some Sweetlips pygmy on me? I
thought maybe he was not. He was too somber at some level to be
kidding.

"
Bass," I said. "How in hell do you
fuck bass?"

"
In the-he pointed down his throat--"the
little muscle thing there." He meant the fluted, sphincter-like
throat, and it had an aptness so thorough I did not doubt him. I was
talking to a sad, alcoholic bus driver who had fucked bass as a kid.
I was talking to a natural in the world of folk who can celebrate
their liabilities, carry their failures.

"
I've got a friend up in Decatur who hunts
armadillos for radiation exposure," I said. "Maybe you
can--"

"
Radiation's a sore point with me, bud."

On the way to Decatur he told me of his wife's
travail, a not atypical one, I presume. Her life had been prolonged
by radiation, he supposed, but watching her suffer, he did not see
the point of it. She was hairless, incontinent, and, as he put it,
hot. At night he held her hand. He did not mind being on the road
now. He applied, in fact, for long, errant tours of duty taking him
anywhere but home.

He drove me to Tom's very door, where I debarked in a
great hydraulic hiss onto a neatly trimmed yard in a new suburb. Tom
came out grinning like an idiot, appreciating the joke of my being
delivered, a lone passenger, by so large a vehicle, to his otherwise
undistinguished residence. The driver and I shook hands. He declined
to come in. He eased the giant machine around the corner and slowly
out of sight.

    
T
he
drop-in is not all it was once in the South, and my timing in coming
to see Tom was not good. Tom and his wife, Elaine, were expecting
guests for the weekend--the twin girls of Elaine's sister. At first I
thought that crowding alone was to be the principal hitch, but things
got complex.

When the girls arrived, Elaine fawned over them in a
demonstrative way I suspect was calculated to show Tom something, and
I came to think the something was that they needed girls, or
children, just like these. Tom entertained them with nervous
cartoonisms, affecting a kind of Dr. Seuss character. Elaine acted
happily dazed, serving as a kind of buffer between Tom and the somber
girls, who, as if in opposition, were mature and smiled only when
obligated.

After dinner the girls were put to bed and we sat
talking. Tom got a brilliant light in his eyes and said to me, "Do
you know what Elaine does?"

"
I do not," I reported.

Elaine gravely started to peel her blouse over her
head. I wondered if I had badly misjudged them. Beneath her blouse
was a T-shirt proclaiming
Slingshot champ of
1249 Bowick
.

Tom leaped from the table, returning with a cardboard
box, in the bottom of which was a carpet sample. It was one of our
targets before we got the tents and the rats. Elaine was flexing the
surgical tubing of a slingshot, inspecting for fissures. "Tom
had this made at the shop at work. Aircraft aluminum? I had my first
look at a nuclear-reactor slingshot.