A Woman Named Drown - Padgett Powell (2 page)

Under his open window was a puddle. It was water,
rainwater, but it would not do to tell the Veteran this.

"
The sonofabitch," I said, pulling a long
face at the puddle. I overdid it--a hair too much sympathy tended to
alienate him from its source. He became suspicious. There was nothing
to do for it now.

"
Does the radio bother you?" His clock
radio was on, low.

"
No."

"
I'll turn it fucking
off
,
then." He landed on his bed on his knees and violently twisted
the radio off. I'd been in a few of these minuets with him before and
had discovered it a mistake to change course. To tell him now that it
had been noisy as hell and to thank him would deepen the suspicion
and send him on a new, uncharted rant. Once he asked me how I liked
his mother.

"
The radio was fine," I said.

"
If it bothers you, just speak up!
Say
something!
"

 "
O.K."

"
O.K., fucking-A."

We both pondered the puddle.

Standing there, having quit over at school, for the
first time I was willing to try to understand this madman, to find
out what had happened. Before, I had I been willing only to play with
him in the interest of an amateur knowledge of what I presumed was
paranoia. It is funny how a little uncertainty, a little petty
love-and-life dislocation like mine, can give you pause, tune you
quickly to the genuine losses around you.

I knew enough not to ask anything remotely like what
happened. All I could do was stand there and regard the puddle with
him. He was calming down. I noticed I had not come with my hunting
knife, which I always did--fully drawn and kept between the Veteran
and myself to not the least distress on the part of the Veteran. I
was talking to the Veteran unarmed.

I wondered how I'd look with something like a little
true mileage on me. I noticed for the first time what the Veteran
really looked like; he was handsome. You couldn't tell how many times
his odometer might already have been around. He was not quite a
bright, careful boy.

There was finally a bit of powerful logic in this
dead-fucking-nigger thing, too. The rooms--all of them--did smell
like piss, and the smell did seem to strengthen when you were away,
and the Veteran's puddle was perpetual, whereas my window, always
open, never seemed to take in rain. And the Veteran had absolutely
nothing in his room to steal except his cheap clock radio, which is
the perfect inspiration for a petty thief to foul things. Standing
there with him, I thought finally that his truest touch was in
believing his tormentor dead: I half thought there might be 
something to it all whenever he said dead.

The only sense this makes is to see the scene and its
effect on me as what we call an energy of activation in the long
series of planless, purposeless goings-on that followed. I have been
occupied since all the quitting began with people who are anything
but custodians of their chances in life.

I am determined to draw a curve through these
plotless days which will make order of them, to force a spline
accurately down along the roller coaster of nonsense I started riding
when I left the lab. A giant component of the reaction series I can
hazard now (living with Mary, and having so splendid a time I wonder
where I was but here all my life) has to do with women, with what my
real relation to them is and is to be. For surely Miss Dr. Eminence
in Love with Polanski was right. I was wrong for her, I was wrong to
her, I was wrong with her. And I have a few suspicions that the
wrongness is something not simply personal between me and her. I have
some reservations about--I shall hazard a very early hypothesis, as
only a false scientist would--young women in general, about this
whole teasing setup. Which setup I needn't attempt to describe yet.
What happened next falls precisely upon the curve of this function I
would describe.

    
I
quit
the Veteran and his room. In the hall I ran into the Nurse, as I
called her then. I call her the Orphan now, for what was about to go
down. The Veteran was yelling something at the dead nigger.

"
Y'all find him?" she asked.

"
He's tricky, I bet."

Ordinarily I would have complied with some eye
rolling and offered to tell her some Veteran stories, but having gone
and got righteous, having gone in there unarmed, half looking for the
dead nigger myself, I failed to respond. This was timing: for months
I had stumbled around in this hall trying to locate a natural opener
with this woman, whose full head of red hair suggested to me electric
sex. We had passed, nodded, paused, resumed, slipped into respective
rat ranges across the hall from one another a hundred times. Now we
were talking, and I was not going to talk. She rested a load of books
on her hip and said, "You want a beer?"

"
Yes."

I followed her in. She went out of sight and came
back with two beers and her mail, which she tossed through at a
table, kicking off her shoes and rubbing her stockinged feet
together. I saw that she was in not a nurse's uniform but a simple
white shift, the only thing I'd ever seen her in. I sat down and
pretended to be comfortable.

"
]ust crap," she said of the mail.

I suddenly got the notion she had been crying a short
time before, when she turned from me, crossed the room, turned back,
and fell like big timber onto her bed, one arm behind her head and
the white dress high, the red hair wide and fanned and brilliant. Her
room was as drab as mine except for her hair. They were alike except
for her hair and my tent. Thoughts like these kept me from feeling
too conspicuous sitting there as she began a series of deep sighs.

"
So," she finally sighed. "Tell me
about yourself."

"
Like what?"

"
Like where were you born, who are your parents,
that sort of thing."

"
Who are my parents?"

"
Yes. Of course." I should have left.

"
Who are yours?" I asked.

"
I don't know." She said this with such
gravity, such theatrical weight, that I refused to respond with
suitable alarm.

"
You're not a nurse," I said.

"
I'm in history."

"
You're in history."

"
Yes."

"
You're in history." She was getting
impatient. "Hmmm," I said.

"
The art of conversation isn't what it used to
be."

She was somehow managing to raise the hem of the
shift and her tits into relief without seeming to move. As badly as I
wanted to leave, I couldn't, and l as badly as I wanted not to be led
in this programmed exchange, I was led.

"
You don't know who your parents are and you're
in history."

"
Look, big boy--"

"
O.K. I'm sorry."

It was better now that she had bucked up a bit and
stopped the miserable sighing. I felt in a way she was as fragile as
the Veteran, whom we could still hear stomping. I sat there, and
unprompted further, she began a fluid account of her life history,
without offering me another beer. She had been adopted and raised "
by a wonderful couple, whom she estranged by seeking as a teenager to
discover her true parents. Along the  way, virtually disowned by
her hurt foster parents, she found herself in mean straits. She was
an eighteen-year-old go-go girl in a strip club in Baltimore
supporting a clod in medical school who left her, etc. I suffered
something like an embolism of testosterone picturing her dancing
naked in a cage with her head afire and breasts awhirl. She was
sighing again. She was in history, she now solemnly announced, "to
assemble the skills necessary to discover my true identity."

I tried bravely to cooperate. "Why is that so
important to you?"

She looked at me with a certain, quiet horror. "I
don't know who I
am
."

"
You're you," I offered brightly, and got
more of the look.

"
No. What if my parents were--
coal
miners
or something?"

"Oh. I see."

I didn't see, of course, but the Veteran, yet
stomping around in his enraged search, put the notion in my head that
she was in pursuit--and for all I knew, it was literally something
like this bothering her--she was after, in a way, her own set of dead
niggers. I sat there looking at her, the only body in the place not
after a dead nigger. She was extremely good-looking, extremely
good-looking.

"
So. You. What about you?"

She was extremely good-looking
.
"What if we skip that?" I said. "What if you don't
know anything about me except the as is?"

"
Nooo," she said. "That's weird."
She took another gargantuan sigh. "There's been just too much
weirdness in my life."

I wondered if it would be too much weirdness to cross
the room and lie down on top of her, as every gesture of hers for the
last twenty minutes suggested one should, and decided it would be.

"
Thanks for the beer."

"
You bet."

She did not get up as I let myself out. She lay there
like Theda Bara, looking at the ceiling, pondering her lost parents.

    
I
was
charged up. I wanted to go to a revival across the river for reasons
then and still not altogether clear, yet now I can detect some order
in all the disorder. I am not certain that life itself is not some
complex series reducible to its hundred thousand discrete reactions
between reactant A and B yielding product C and D with this or that
energy consumed or released to yield E and F from C and D, and so
forth. I left the Veteran in pursuit of his dead nigger and visited
the Orphan, a silent-screen actress in pursuit of hers, and in three
weeks would be living with a true actress. In between, I went to a
revival, ostensibly to get a look at the inside of a tent--Tom and I
had never erected our monstrous units, each larger than the rooms
they were wadded into--and what I saw was a conglomeration of folk
all as desperate for phantoms as the Veteran and the Orphan, and all
arguably after a dead man who might never exist for them. There were
not a few actresses present as well, the real kind that central
casting never gets. They were rolling on the ground, for the most
part, being held gently at their crotches and breasts by a man with a
copperhead.

After my day, I was not in a state to be further
amazed, but I was further amazed. A smallish man--I took him to be
about the size of Polanski--in a blue double-knit suit was screaming
at near the pain threshold into a whizzing, hissing, scratchy public
address system. How many years will you be in hell? he asked the
congregation. The congregation was uncertain. He offered to tell
them. "Pitcher to yourself a 1," he yelled, "and
foller it with
all the zeroes in the world
,
and that's how many years you'll be in hell."

The congregation held its breath. All the while the
preacher was drawing zeroes in the air with one hand and holding in
his other, calmly aloft, the copperhead. I neglected to follow the
sermon, but it soon had its effect. Suddenly the man was on his heels
discreetly feeling women rolling on the ground, touching the snake to
them. One woman got up, brushed herself off, returned to her seat,
located her purse, lit up a cigarette, sat back in her chair, and
told her companion, "G0 on, honey, get called. Nothing like it
in the world."