A Woman Named Drown - Padgett Powell (4 page)

I looked around. The counterman appeared to have
scoliosis. He bent to hear a customer and jerked back ' up, staring
wild-eyed at the customer. "No!" he shouted. "No more
bacon!" The customer smiled and went back to reading his menu.
The counterman retreated in a huff through double doors, out of
sight.

The boxers had quit. I did not see the smaller guy,
but the oak tree was putting Royal Crown dressing on his head and
then a lady's stocking over that. He picked up a load of gear
equivalent in bulk to a rodeo cowboy's tack and left.

The counterman returned and I got a refill. "Who
is that guy just left?" I asked him.

"
StebbinsStebbinsStebbins what--you fall off the
truck? You want me to tell you history all day or you want to be
somewhere else? No b.l.t.'s, in case that's your next move."

That was Harold, the counterman. What he had told
me--in two weeks I managed to decode--was that everybody who was
anybody knew Frank Stebbins, who had a middleweight match in France
coming up, and who was going to be history when it was over, and that
he (Harold) did not cook bacon anymore. Ever. The slighter boxer
reappeared at the counter near me, began looking suspiciously all
around the place, and said quietly to Harold, "A Curs."

More happily than I'd seen him all morning, Harold
virtually ran a Coors over to him. "Shifty'll chew your black
ass when he sees this."

"
He ain't gone see shit. Stebbins most kill me."
He took the Coors and poured it into a Coke can that he'd held under
the counter.

"
I'm looking for someone to spar with," I
said.

The boxer looked at me. "You botts," he
said. "I seen you before."

"
You've seen me drink beer in here, maybe."

"
I recall it. Wid honks."

"
Yes," I said, nodding solemnly, as if to
deepen the confession.

He looked to the ring as if we had not been speaking.

After a while I said, "I guess you have to go
with Stebbins, anyway."

"
What you mean?"

"
Nothing. Just that you spar with--"

"
Okayden."

"
Okay what?"

"
Tamarr."

"When?"

"
Sikserty."

"
You can call me Al."

"
Egret."

We tried to shake and got fouled up accommodating
each other's racial handshake, and wound up fumbling our fingers
together awhile. We were involved in this little charade when a
small, gray-haired squat of a man came up and grabbed Egret's Coke
can and threw it at Harold.

Neither Egret nor Harold said anything. The man stood
his ground, rasping breath, the gray hair coming out of his ears and
nostrils, his mouth stained olive by chewing tobacco. He looked at
Egret.

"
You conspiring to sign wid him now, or what?"
He meant me.

"
Haw, naw, Shif," Egret said. "He a
bottser himself."

Shif--Shifty of Shifty's Stable, as I came to
know--regarded me with a long squint. The hair was coming out of him
in tufts, in whorls--he looked like a tobacco-stained owl. He took a
deep breath. "You wear glasses!" he said.

I heard Egret do a little thing like a hiss under his
breath.

"
How long you wear glasses?"

I touched my glasses to make sure I still wore them
and said I didn't know.

"You box, you see." Egret did the siss
thing again. "Bottsin cure the blind. Tell him, Shif.
Siss
."

"
Boxing cure the blind," Shifty said.
"Look." He broke his eyes hard to one side, then back,
revealing red-veined, oystery eyeballs. He looked up, down, whirled
his eyes all around the sockets, following the motion with his
protruding green tongue. It occurred to me I had seen this
demonstration--on the sidewalk the day before, as Sweetlips and Roach
and I came in. He had presumably grabbed a passerby, attempting to
lure him in for eyesight correction.

"
Boxing exercise the eyes, see? You ought to box
for Shif. You sign wid anybody yet'?"

He grabbed a napkin from a chrome box, pushing it to
me with a ballpoint pen.

"
What's this?"

"
Sign this, you with me. We get a true contract
when the time is right."

"Let me wait on this one, Shif."

"Don't wait until it's
too
late.
"

He turned to Egret and pushed the napkin to him.

"
You. Sign again. And this time, no more goddamn
beer." Egret printed on the napkin with painstaking
concentration WILLIE EBERT.

Shifty folded the napkin into his pocket and limped
off.

"
What's your name?" I asked.

"
Like I told. Egret."

* * *

My time boxing was without event. Ebert was not good
enough to teach or to hurt me, though I'll wager he was considerably
tougher in the long haul. He was finally mostly a clown, very gentle
in the center, and he was living in a tough, tough world. When
Stebbins saw us pawing each other he yelled, "Punk and white
punk. Punkpunk." It didn't bother me, but Ebert explained
something to me later.

"
When Frank call you punk, it's race. When he
call me punk, it's sex."

I sat there, apparently failing to respond as he
would have liked.

He suddenly offered, "Got two kids."

"
What?"

"
Two kids."

"
Who?"

"
Me."

"
You?" I figured him about eighteen.

"
Selfsame individual you see."

All I had to go on was the
race
and
sex
thing. "They
black?"

"
Who?"

"
Your kids."

"
Dit."

"
All
black?"

"
Dit."

"
All right. Nobody's white, except me, nobody's
queer."

"
Dit."

"
Except Stebbins."

"Siss. I hope the Frog eat his ass."

"You want a beer?"

Ebert looked around. "
This
early?" It was about 7:30.

"
You better have one. Tomorrow I bust your ass."

"
Oh. He serous. Okayden. A Curs."

When I left Bilbo's that morning I did not go to
Camel Tent. I walked back to do some waving with the actress. We'd
reached a peak of waving. We were, I figured, waved out.

    
W
e had
been waving now for nearly three weeks, and it was not the simple
acknowledging of passersby. From the start, from that first morning I
surprised her by going the wrong way, it seemed she had waved with a
forthright openness that suggested we were not, to her mind,
altogether strangers. It is unsettling to be acknowledged by a
stranger who appears to think himself familiar, of course, and in
this case, as I've said, the stranger was hailing me boldly in a
turquoise robe, holding a forty-foot spray of water on a half acre of
violently blooming color.

I recall once being waved at by a man in drag from a
balcony window in Baton Rouge, and as I ignored him and kept walking,
he shouted loudly down, "Well, it's only
hey
!"
and shamed me. I gave him a weak, noncommittal wave that made him
laugh..

The watering woman and I had fully explored the
dynamic of stranger-to-stranger waving, and it had developed its own
periodicity. I could have drawn up the elemental chart of waving. On
a Monday she'd give me a haggard little gesture from very near her
hip, where her free hand rested as she watered with the other, and
I'd return in kind a little thing with a finger or thumb from near my
pants pocket. By Wednesday she'd be offering more arm, more motion,
with loose-wristed familiarity and a smile. By Friday we were at a
quantum ledge of hand semaphore; she waved like a relative down at
the docks to greet the ocean liner I was on. It made me respond by
waving so vigorously in return I'd go off the sidewalk.

On this Friday she saw me coming, crimped off the fat
red hose, and began to gesture so wildly I was certain she intended a
slapstick parody of us, that she was saying finally, Well, it's only
hey. She got her arm up stiff, not unlike a German salute, and swung
it gravely over her head, leaning a bit with the motion as if she
were signaling with a great, heavy, brass railroad lantern overhead.
It was so far out on the chart I could not wave back properly. I
walked up to her fence.
 
She gave
the hose a further dip and crimp, and some water flew onto her robe,
which she stared at, dabbing the spots into broader spots.

"That material will dry quickly," I said.

She looked at me. "I know how quickly this
material will dry. I spazzed out."

I was aware that we had already abandoned the
innocence of strangers waving at one another. It seemed a bit of a
shame.

"I hope you're not standing there like a geek
because you think I'm that woman named Drown."

"
Ma'am?" I said.

"
Ma'am
what
?"

"
I think you might be what?"

"
You think I might be a fool. Come on in and
let's have us a gin something." She turned and walked into the
flowers, from where, out of sight, she called, "Gate's
unlocked." She called then, from inside the house, "Fizzes
or will simple tonics do?"

I managed the gate and said with fake aplomb,
"Tonic's divine."

"
Divine is
right,
"
she called from the kitchen, where I could see her through a bank of
jalousie windows which enclosed a patio. It had flowered oilcloth
furniture and a concrete floor. On a table beside a yellow
weatherproof sofa with blue hydrangeas printed on it I saw a Sunday
newspaper entertainment section, the cover of which was a color
photograph of a woman standing on a spiral staircase. Her hair blew
to one side, and gray moss on oak trees blew in from the other. The
colors of the woman's face were printed out of register, yet it was
still recognizably the woman in the kitchen fixing gin somethings.
The caption read
Mary Constance Baker in "A
Woman Named Drown."

"
Some of these people get the idea you are what
you act in the amateur theater game," Mary Constance Baker said,
coming out with two drinks. "I have to wear a disguise to go
shopping."

"
Because you are famous here?"

"
Because there are folk out there who think I
drowned a plantation--mules, Ashleys, slaves, my mulatto children,
and all."

"
That happens in the play?"

"That happens in the play."

"
Sorry I missed it."

"
Sugar, play like that will be back every other
year. Sit down."

"
This is you," I said to her, pointing at
her photo in the Sunday paper.
 
"
Bingo."
She was already through with her drink, shaking the ice.

"
I hadn't seen this before."

"
It's no federal case. You shoot pool?"

"
No."

"
Come on."

We went into a sunken room, which was walled on the
garden side by glass blocks. The colors of the flowers came through
softened and mixed so that the room felt as out-of-register as the
newspaper photo.

She racked the balls and started running them off the
table.

"
Where'd you learn to shoot like this?" I
finally said.

Not looking up from her shot she said, "My old
man."

"
Where is he?"

She kept shooting.

"
What happened to him?"

"
What?" She interrupted a shot.

"
Your old man. What happened?"

"
Oh," she said, realigning. "Lost his
stick." She ran the table. She put her cue down and turned on a
two-tone hi-fi in the corner. "Ray Conniff," she said. "You
look ready." She left for the kitchen with my glass. If I could
see her dancing to Ray Conniff and His Singers as she made the
drinks. She came back, racked t again, and started dancing from shot
to shot, swooning dreamily, then snapping up with eyes all business,
sinking balls with precise cracking collisions of incidence and
reflection, rolling in rocket trails of the candied light.