A Woman Named Drown - Padgett Powell (6 page)

Mary pushed her stool away and saddlebagged herself
over the bar, reaching a set of keys which she retrieved in a
violent, upward fling. She marched into the kitchen. Hoop said,
"She's going to tear a page now, kid."

We heard a roar from the kitchen. In the garage,
through a door off the kitchen, we found Mary in a high, boxy, old
Mercury, revving its engine with a thoughtful, deliberate expression
on her face. We stood next to the car with our drinks, smelling the
exhaust. Mary floored carbon out, deafening us. She got out and
gallantly held open the door, to me.

"
Jesus," Hoop said.

"
Don't say a damned word, Hoop." To me:
"Get in."

I sat where placed, fingering the large knurled
steering wheel of the Mercury. Mary crossed to the rider's side. Hoop
attempted our old conspiratorial leer behind her, but it fell and he
suddenly yelled, "Go to Florida!"

"
Fine," Mary said.

"
Friggin Jesus."

Our eyes were stinging.

"
I got to get
Virginia out of here," Hoop proclaimed. He trailed a V sign into
the house. We heard him yell, "Evacuate!"

* * *

Beneath the moldy smell of the Mercury was the smell
of a showroom-new car. I eased it out of the garage into heavy rain,
which knocked dust off the hood in violent spore bursts, leaving
craters of fresh, new color. It looked for a moment as if we were
driving on the moon. The car was so high-centered and heavy it felt
full of water, full of water and horsepower. I got it up to a speed
which brought in some wind, and looked over at Mary--her hair flying
about like the photograph in the newspaper she swore wasn't her. I
was on a tear, full of gin and with a woman named Drown, and I drove
us to a club called the Car Wash, where I knew Ebert to hang out. A
naked woman hand-painted on the outside of the club spoke from a
cartoon balloon, NO DRINKIN ON PREMISE PLEASE. The artist had given
her very large breasts, using, apparently, a house brush that lent
them a hairy aspect.

Ebert came forward with a gaping kind of frozen grin
on his face:
This is so absurd I can't quite
laugh and I can't quite ignore it.
And we
were
in an all-black
club. "Man!" he said, when nearly to us.

"
Man what?" I said.

"
I ain't never seen you like this before."

"Like what?"

"
On the weekend."

Mary rolled her eyes. She retook my arm, and Ebert
turned back toward the bar as if to shepherd us through the quieted
crowd. The noise slowly resumed, and we went to the bar.

Ebert was not sober. "Man," he kept saying,
"you a trip."

Mary whipped a little flask of gin out and asked the
barman if it was all right.

"
She a trip, too," Ebert said. His eyes
were brilliant and looking over my head, as if he was checking the
horizon. Mary had the barman pouring her a drink from her flask,
which he put away for her. They had no tonic, so she took a 7-Up and
the first hit made her wince.

She winked at Ebert. "My main man, Ebert,"
I said to her, indicating him with a thumb. The jive felt very
artificial and I decided to cut it out. Ebert and I were better
friends when we couldn't manage to shake hands.

"
You a trip," Ebert said again. "Never
seen you like this."

He was still studying things afar, eyes wet. Watching
him, I lost some time. I suddenly noticed Mary at the pool tables.
She selected a cue and stood, hip out, chalking it.

"
Ebert," I said, "do you have loose
teeth?"

"
Naw, man," he said.

He didn't want to know why I would ask him something
like that. I could not have told him. Something about his dreaming,
teary gaze suggested old men without teeth, and I thought I saw him
clenching his jaw as if moving his teeth.

"
Your teeth are tight?"

"
They tight. They loose, too."

Mary had gotten into a game.

I motioned with three fingers and pointed to Ebert,
myself, and Mary, and the barman gave a quick nod upward and filled
the order. He carried Mary's fresh gin and 7-Up to her and she gave
me a theatrical scowl. Ebert put his head down onto the rim of his
glass, and when he raised it he had a dark ring imprinted on his
forehead. "Never
seen
you like this."

He was drunker than I cared to see him as our escort.
I gave Mary a little let's-get-going sign. She had made friends by
amazing all the dudes anywhere near the table. A guy came up to me.
"You carry her back sometime."

We drove home. The Mercury felt like two or three
boulders.

In bed I had the spins. I started deep breathing to
burn up some alcohol before throwing some up, and got a saliva run.

"
Put your foot on the floor," Mary said.

"
It's on the floor," I said. "I know
about that."

"
You know a lot," she said. I couldn't tell
if she was mocking.

"
What do you call the bedspins?" I asked.

"
The whirlies." I had thought maybe she had
an exotic name from her own generation. She reached over and felt my
forehead then, as if to say she had not meant to sound sarcastic if
she had. I lay there spinning, thinking: She maybe thinks I know
things, and maybe knows I don't.

    
S
o
that is how I find myself sitting at this wire-mesh table in the
mornings, taking hangover notes, reflex motions of a would-have-been
scientist. Since that first day three weeks ago we've not had
anything so spectacular as the drop-in. Hoop and Virginia's visit
established several data points:

1. Sam, or Stump, is presumably dead, and that is the
extent of my privileged knowledge.

2. He may have had something to do with Florida,
where it is, as if in obeisance to Hoop's outbursts, somehow tacitly
assumed we may go, so long as it--the going--does not obtain an
urgency. There is a sense in which we are packing our things
psychologically, and when the moment is right, but not demanding or
in any way special, we will take off and simply be there as
unprepared and innocent as we were that night in the Car Wash.

3. The no-bio rule is a
constant of this universe. You follow it if you want to operate. What
I know of Stump and Mary is largely known, and she is indifferent, as
she says, to any bio song and dance out of me.

* * *

Mary is moving through rich banks of azalea, her head
alone above the creamy reds, nickel arc of cold water lobbing heavily
all around her. I have begun reading her old acting scripts. They
turn up everywhere--in Stump's clothes, under table legs--and they
all seem to have been handled roughly. I have not found one yet with
its cover intact.

I don't know plays beyond the forced college stuff,
and I've never seen anything like these things. In every one there is
a role made for Mary. I found this in a script under Virginia's
daybed--cover gone, as usual--and was stupid enough to ask Mary the
title. "I forgot," she said.

JASMINE: Mother, John took me up to Black River and
we went swimming.

MRS. TAYLOR: Are we getting a bit too
familiar
,
Jasmine Ranelle?

JASMINE: Oh, Mother! It was nice. You know, the water
is so dark, and when we jumped in, the splashes were white and foamy,
like--like the head on an A&W!

MRS. TAYLOR: Like the head on an A&W!

JASMINE : Yes!

MRS. TAYLOR: Jesus my beads.

Mr. Taylor had been shot in a hunting accident and
Mrs. Taylor could not be too careful of her daughter and only child.
They went round and round over gentlemen callers, with Mrs. Taylor
becoming gradually more mannish and violent in her protection of
Jasmine Ranelle. Mrs. Taylor could even swing an ax handle!

Mary, I imagine, played a grand Mrs. Taylor. Late in
the second act she cracks a suitor over the head while he's kissing
Jasmine--with the flat side of a butcher knife. The audience sees her
creep up on them through a scrim, the knife is shadowed hugely behind
them, and Mrs. Taylor shrieks into the parlor and slaps the caller
with the knife. Suitor flees stage.

JASMINE: You ruin
everything,
Mother.

MRS. TAYLOR: I used the
back
side
of it, honey.

JASMINE: That's what you
always
say.

I had notions of Mary surprising me with versions of
her characters--say, the knife trick sometime, but she never did, of
course, and was generally not in favor of my associating her with her
roles, as our introduction on the lawn had suggested. She was not in
favor of anyone mistaking her for a play character.

I had a role to consider myself. Guy, young guy,
stops by, moves in, shoots pool, and drinks gin wearing widow's
husband's pastel golf outfits.

MRS. TAYLOR:: You don't know a thing about a one of
those young men.

JASMINE: That's the
point
,
Mother. I'm
getting
to
know them.

MRS. TAYLOR: You're getting nowhere!

JASMINE: And you're seeing to it!
[Runs,
crying, to her room]

Mary has trundled by with a wheelbarrow blocked from
sight by a bank of azalea. When she slides into view, I see the
straining tendons in her neck. Sweat is on her like rain. She is not
far from the gin flash point.

She'll come in, and all the gentle care of plants
outside will translate into a ruthless hammering of ice in the
kitchen. She uses a chrome gizmo which serves, screwed into
respective configurations, as a jigger, a corkscrew, and a hammer. On
her way to shower, she will deliver a drink and a hard kiss, holding
my neck with the back of her cold hand, leaving me to contemplate the
scene. The drink sits tall, emerald lime refracting through sparkling
soda, on a queer blond split-level end table with splayed conical
legs and rusting brass feet.

Yesterday I suffered the momentary illusion that I
was progressing at pool, but I am finally only mastering a more manly
look of indifference to the trouncing. You would think her cruel in
this if you did not see how absorbed she is, oblivious to even Ray
Conniff and Perry Como when she gets a challenging run. She would be
mean, I think, only if she were capable of pulling back in my behalf.

After pool Mary asked if I was any good with figures
and I said fair and she handed me a desk-style book of checks, which
she explained was "a bit behind."

It hadn't been balanced in eighteen months, there
were checks missing, there was a statement showing automatic deposits
from two sources which I was told were regular. I made the bold
presumption that they were Stump's pensions of some sort and
determined monthly cash flow, within a tolerance of three hundred
dollars, and figured the account to be breaking even or gaining
slightly.

Mary came out in a waxy wig that frightened me.

"
Want anything from the grocery?" she
asked.

"
What is that?"

"
My disguise."

"
For what?"

"Theatergoers."

"
Come on."

"
You've read the play. Give me a check."

"
Give me a list, I'll go. You look like a wick."

She shrugged and I went shopping. I had indeed read
the play. If she was telling the truth about people recognizing her
and mistaking her for the character she played, I could believe that
they would harass her. They could hardly not.

The woman named Drown was charged with manslaughter
(forty-three counts) because she had failed to relocate her shanty
town away from the river. A large flood swept her plantation into the
Mississippi and to the Gulf.

DROWN: Negligence! Was I negligent standing on the
second floor of my house in a nightgown Fighting water moccasins? Was
I negligent when I saw my cash box float out the window?