A Woman Named Drown - Padgett Powell (3 page)

"
I don't know," the second woman said.
"Them things--"

"
He'll
hold that
thing, honey. It ain't nothing but
Satan's
failed little messenger boy
."

I looked at the docile copperhead, sanest fellow in
the room, proving by not biting anyone how the truly damned are
saved. I was starting to get high--high, I suppose, on the number of
improbables that seemed to be appearing before me. I liked the
feeling. Dreaming through more polyester loudness, I pictured to
myself a 1, with all the zeroes in the world representing an endless
chain of unconnected, connected events--my new theory of the human
life reaction series. It seemed that I had been wasting my time by
not acknowledging this necessary connectedness of the unnecessary
things one can do in a life. I could do all the things in the world I
wanted to do, ungoverned by imposed criteria for serious living, and
they would connect, evolve, according to unalterable laws that were
operating as surely as the one that popped Newton on the head with
the apple, that made Mr. Millikan's oil drops swerve, that made Herr
Kekule's snakes bite their tails and roll overnight into the benzene
ring.

All I had to do was get loose in the limbec of life.
A voice from this local, queer providence came to me from a row
behind: "Did you know Camel Tent hiring, Jimmy?" I turned
to look. Jimmy said he didn't know and didn't want to know, because
Penny Baker sewed four of his fingers together and his (Jimmy's) wife
now had a good enough job for the both of them. "So why fix it
if it works, right?" Jimmy said, and his friend nodded Amen.

I stopped at a snack joint on the way back over the
river and watched the movie of just too much weirdness continue to
play before me. A guy stood at a picnic table punching one of those
fist-held cutters into a box top of onions. He was crying from the
onions. From inside the joint came a voice: "Just because your
dog died, it's no reason to cry." Some laughter.

The guy threw his cutter into the onions and wheeled
on me. "I caint take it!" he said.

He came nearer. "I can do the
job
they want, but I caint take a joke!"

It was possible to believe, looking at the tears
streaming down, that they were not all onion-induced. He was
breathing hard, truly worked up.

"
You just got to grow up," the kitchen
voice came.

"
Dogs die." Howling in the kitchen.

The onion chopper ran to the serving window and
raised it and yelled inside, "
I caint
take it!
" He tore off his apron and
threw it in the dirt. He looked furiously at me. "I just caint
take a
joke
," he
said again, somewhat calmer.

"
I don't blame you," I said. "I can't
either."

"
You don't understand." He was the Veteran
stateside.

"
You're right, I don't."

That satisfied him.

I slipped home, got in without spooking anyone.

I had nothing in my life not to take, but liked the
attitude. I'm not taking it either, I thought, when it comes, and
maybe it has come and I have been taking it--maybe dilettante
chemistry and bright girlfriends in Europe and inheritances hovering
overhead are taking a lot of it. Tom's hunting armadillo shit.
Crackerjack nuke-whiz Tom, Fenster Ludge in tow, is taking it, and
I'm not.

I wanted the Orphan badly, but not enough to take it.

    
T
he
next morning I set out into old Knoxville for Camel Tent and passed
on the way the woman I had passed for years who watered her garden
every morning. She looked at me, surprised, I imagine, to see me
walking in the opposite direction from that she expected of me. She
waved. I waved back. I could not have known we had begun a
correspondence. I did notice her, however, a bit more closely than
ever before.

She was got up in a brilliant turquoise robe and wore
sufficient bright makeup to herself resemble a giant flower, and
around her were a thousand smaller blooms--of carmine azalea and
purple iris and katydid-green leaves. Upon this dazzling garden she
held a spray of nickel-colored water in a long arc from a fat red
hose. I could see that she managed the spray by using her index
linger over the hose mouth--I had an aunt who did that, the only
other person I've ever seen do it that way. It was a bit of a
riveting detail, and perhaps I looked at her too long. She waved
again, and I waved back again.

I could not know, as I said, that we had begun a
program of overland communications, and I didn't know I was waving to
Knoxville's star actress, and I quite didn't expect to be moving in
and setting up a base for recording these my lab notes of life. I was
hell-bent on getting down to Camel Tent and securing some form of
income to replace my paltry but regular stipend.

Once there, I argued for an hour about my surfeit of
overqualifications to sew tents until I had a job sewing tents. When
I sat down and hit the foot pedal and saw a hundred inches of cord
shoot through cotton duck as heavy as a duffel bag out of a needle as
big as an ice pick, I had no trouble recalling Penny Baker sewing his
four fingers together. Near me a man was announcing how we were to
distinguish male from female rattlesnakes. "You all better
listen to this," he said, concentrating on his stitching. "It's
valuable."

"Shut up, Sweetlips," a second man said
from a nearby machine.

"
O.K., fine," Sweetlips said. "
Don't
find out. I could care less. But the fact of the matter is females
don't have any poison and if you know
that
,
you're safe." He bent to his stitching.

"
Tell it to the new girl."

"
Do you know how to tell a female rattler?"
Sweetlips said to me.

"
No. How?"

"They don't have any rattlers." With that
he placed a large paper cup on the floor under his machine and pissed
in it from his sitting position. "They don't
pay
me to lollygag half the day in the head," he said. "So I
don't
." He
reminded me of the Veteran--I'll turn it off, then.

I sat amazed at the synchronicity of these
things--pissing on floors, nuts, snakes everywhere, tents--and amazed
at how
correct
they
seemed, fitted together in a matter of hours with an overwhelming
sense of orchestration that seemed to satisfy whatever urge bade me
walk out of the laboratory. I felt fine, a fine idiot doing a fine
idiot job, listening to fine idiot patter.

"
The new girl's O.K.," Sweetlips said,
after a while, to the other man. "I been watching him. Don't
fuck with him or I'll kill you."

The other guy said, "Right, Killer."

When the shift ended, Sweetlips and the other guy
took me to a place called Bilbo's Bar, Gym & Grill. Inside, we
sat at a lunch counter on stools facing a boxing ring. We ordered
beer. Sweetlips said, "We come here to watch the niggers beat
the ever-living shit out of each other." He winked. He winked
with an exaggeration reminiscent of a cartoon wink, signifying what
irony I could not guess, because I took him at his word.

Presently the other guy, whom Sweetlips called Roach,
said to me, "So tell us about the new girl."

"
The new girl doesn't know her ass from a hole
in the ground," I said.

"
That's exactly what I said the minute I saw
you," Sweetlips said. "Didn't I, Roach?"

"No, you were talking about rattlesnake pussy."

"
You think that's a lie? Anybody'll tell you
that. The female has no rattlers. New girl, isn't that a fact?"

I looked at Roach. He was indifferent to all of this.

Sweetlips leaned over me to Roach. "The new
girl's all right. I repeat; Don't fuck with him or I'll kill you."

Two blacks started sparring. Roach said, "Shut
up. This does me good."

We watched the boxers work. One of the guys was as
solid as a live oak, and after a couple of rounds he came over to our
side of the ring and said to Roach, provoked by nothing I saw, "Fuck
you, too."

"
You going to take that?" Sweetlips said.
"I wouldn't."

"
Kill him, then."

"
I would."

By my reckoning it would have taken an army of
Sweetlipses and Roaches to even pin the dude.

"
I'm as strong as that nigger," Sweetlips
said.

"
Jump him, then."

"
It wouldn't be fair."

I came to understand, during my brief tenure at
Camel, that Sweetlips did two things, at all times tried to do two
things; he proffered preposterous lies, making everyone present
appear to believe them, and he boasted of his strength, which was
perhaps a subset enterprise of the lying. One morning he announced
that a pygmy rattlesnake had the dimensions of a short link of
country sausage, showing us how long and how big around with his
thumb and forefinger. On another occasion he claimed to have spotted
a pygmy deer. "A
full-ant
ten-point buck no higher than a beagle!" No one challenged him
on either pygmy, and he went on sewing, visibly more content.

On the issue of his strength he was even more
hyperbolic. One morning he came in greasy, telling us he had on the
way to work stopped and pulled a woman's Ford engine out of her car.
"It saved her a garage charge."

Roach responded to this one. "Bledsoe," he
said, "there's a string hanging out of your sleeve."

Sweetlips looked at his T-shirt sleeves, finding no
string.

"Oh," Roach said. "I'm sorry. It's
your arm."

Sweetlips jumped up, knocking over a tumbler of piss.
"
Whut! You don't think I'm strong!
"
He ran to Roach's machine and grabbed it and tilted the entire
affair--Roach with it, the chair is connected--up about a foot off
the ground, until Roach said, It was not an idle feat--the machine
must have weighed three, four hundred pounds. Sweetlips's back, under
his tight T-shirt, clenched up into a set of knots that looked like a
bag of rocks and sticks.

I could have kept going at Camel. All I had to do was
listen to Sweetlips and Roach do their camp and worry about Penny
Baker fingers. I set up an interesting routine. I went back to
Bilbo's and found a dude who wouldn't kill me and learned a little
boxing in the mornings. The watering woman and I, you might say, fell
in love waving. I flirted at a hundred paces, got beat up for three
rounds, listened to pygmy hysteria for eight hours. It was not a bad
time. My previous life, of soft-metal bonding mechanics, seemed no
less preposterous than Sweetlips's life of pygmy sightings and giant
strength. I was completely comfortable being completely out of
control.

    
I
was
in fact beginning to feel like I was drunk but free of motor
impairment. Whatever presented itself to me as partaking of the
continuum of nuttiness was the thing for me. I would not act my age
or observe my station.

Back at Bilbo°s Bar, Gym & Grill the next
morning I had coffee. The same massive dude was sparring, this time
with a slighter opponent, who was having a bad time of it. The
lighter guy looked ready to quit, ready to cry, for that matter, but
did neither. At every break the oak tree called him a punk.