A Woman Named Drown - Padgett Powell (7 page)

PROSECUTOR: You were negligent when you did not
inform your colored workers of the imminent danger.

DROWN: What was there to tell? They could see it was
raining. They knew damned well how high the water was--they were at
the river day and night salvaging bateaus and wagons and whatever
else came down. They were getting rich in trees over the water with
gang hooks, hooting and laughing. You don't know a damned thing about
poor niggers if you think they would have listened to a rich white
woman telling them to abandon a rolling mint like that river.
[Jury whispers among itself; judge calls for
order]

PROSECUTOR: No further questions at this time.

This speech turned the tide in Drown's favor. She was
let off on the manslaughter business, which, it seems, had been only
a thin pretext for exposing the real issue: she had two mulatto
children drowned in the flood, who were allegedly hers by a black
worker named Carlisle. What implicated her was having taken two other
children--fully black ones--into her home the night of the flood.
This survival of only two of the four children on her place gave
credence to the town talk which for years had rumored her to have had
twins, no less, by Carlisle, a big handsome man who sometimes worked
as her chauffeur.

PROSECUTOR: Were you not in St. Louis for a period of
five months seven years ago--seven years before two seven-year-old
children were
allowed
to drown on your property while two others were saved?

DEFENSE: Objection.

COURT: Sustained.

PROSECUTOR: And was not your place run at that time
by--

DEFENSE: This line of questioning is irrelevant.

COURT: Can the prosecution prove this questioning
related to the specific charges?

PROSECUTOR: We can.

And so Carlisle, otherwise uneducated and ill
equipped, had run the Drown place for five months. (The name Drown is
the character's real name, and the playwright seems to have been
either ignorant of or delighted by this heavy-handedness.) Apparently
his overseerage was competent, for a large crop of high-quality
tobacco was harvested, and Carlisle, in his pride, was seen in town
smoking self-rolled cigars so large he was dubbed Havana Carlisle.
Retrospectively, it was argued that the cigar-parading was evidence
that he knew of his mistress's birthing business in St. Louis.

Drown beat the rap, but Mary Constance Baker had more
trouble with it. She was convinced that a part of the audience--the
mall ladies who recognized her, for instance--believed she slept with
blacks. Thus I have come to do the banking and the marketing, as she
calls it.

I got back from shopping and it occurred to me for no
reason that we had taken another invisible step toward our undeclared
trip to Florida, where I swear we are somehow bound to go, whether
vexed by Hoop to do so or not. I've had my drunk-driving skills
checked, can count money, and now have demonstrated some kind of
real-world dexterity in fetching three bags of groceries five
blocks-these are the talents of secular dependability required of a
companion on the road, it would seem, at least in my imagined
itinerary of our imagined traveling together.

 
We had a steak on the garden patio last night
and we got on the oilcloth-covered chaise together, Mary sitting in
my arms, and upon a casual remark of mine about the flowers, she
said, "It's too cold for them in winter here." In my no-bio
disadvantage, a remark like that indeed suggests Florida, and I think
I suggest Stump, whose clothes fit me to a t, and I think, all
together, we're in small maneuvers for leaving for Florida, but
there'll be no song and dance about that either.

"
Thought I'd go see an old friend tomorrow, if
you'd like to go," Mary said.

The idea of being alone in her house seemed radical.
"Sure."

"
They're a gas. Hazel and Bruce."

"
Okay."

She turned around, and up and kissed me so suddenly
she reminded me of a girl nervous about sex and deciding to get the
butterflies over with. I felt young, too: Stump's Ban-Lons give me a
strange feeling on the skin, not unlike I'm wearing ladies' nylon
hose. The garden was close and green and dark, and a sprinkler was
spicking somewhere, casting a mist on us. Mary's skin has a
half-size-too-large feel, giving it a satin effect, a softer touch
than a younger woman. It is hard to imagine we want to leave at all.
It is a halcyon, unjudged time: billiards crack, drinks fizzle,
colors pour into the house from dazzling flowers every morning
watered, making it a cozy, gauzy life, as if we were candied fruits
sweetening in a snifter of brandy.

    
H
oop
and Virginia were practice, it turns out, for Hazel and Bruce. Mary
put a half gallon of gin in the car and handed me the keys. On the
drive, out into an old suburb development, she said, "Sugar,
these people are somewhat rough-cut."

"
What's rough?"

"
Hazel is a doll, for my money, but you might be
startled." I resolved not to be.

We found a low, cinder-block, brown house with rotted
turquoise eaves and a rusted-out screen porch. A woman I presumed
Hazel swung open the screenless door to the porch and bent over a
bit, squinting through black cat-eye glasses before rushing Mary,
chortling and pumping elbows. Their embrace was a confused
arrangement and an ongoing adjustment of Hazel's cigarette and Old
Milwaukee and slipping eye-glasses, and Mary's gin and cut flowers
and Honeyhowlonghasitbeens and honeyhowgoodyoulooks. When introduced,
Hazel looked at me and then said to Mary, "I see what you mean.
You lucky dog. If I was twenty years younger.

In the house she sat us in the kitchen at a redwood
table with benches. She put a tray of ice cubes and two jelly glasses
on the table and sat down opposite us, still in a
can't-believe-how-good-you-look-long-it's-been stream of talk, and
Mary poured our drinks.

A flushing noise introduced Bruce from the bathroom,
and he came in, fiddling with his fly. When he saw us, he bent
sharply over and zipped, then walked over to his place at the table,
which was marked by another Old Milwaukee in a circle of water and an
ashtray.

Hazel stood up and kissed him, having to hold her
glasses in place, and Bruce also had to restore his glasses high up
onto his nose with his middle finger. He held them there while he
bent down to a Styrofoam cooler on the floor and got two beers, then
looked up at us and got two more, and Mary said, "We brought our
own, thanks."

"
I'd give my eyeteeth," Hazel said, "if
I could still drink hard stuff."

"
Doctor told her it 'ud kill her," Bruce
said. Hazel kissed him again.

The girls went into old times, which were privately
hilarious, while Bruce and I watched each other drink.

After about twenty minutes, old times had become
current events, and they had nothing currently in common except the
visit, so Bruce and I were acknowledged.

Hazel turned to him with yet another smacky kiss
misaligning their eyeglasses. These kisses seemed designed and
sufficient to make up for centuries of neglect. She held her lips to
his cheek while he held his glasses in place.

"Do you know what this rascal did on our first
date?" Hazel suddenly said. "He takes me to this bar
outside town and says we're going on to another one ten miles away,
so I better go to the can."

"
Seven miles," Bruce said.

"
Yeah. So I go in, and there's this nude poster
of Burt Reynolds naked, right where you
have
to look when you sit down. And there's a
board
over his pud."

"
His what? I never heard you call it that."
Bruce sipped his Old Milwaukee, settling it back on the table in a
circling motion.

"
You're about only a foot from it, right in
front of you," Hazel said, "and the killer is, it's
big--the board is
much bigger
than it needs to be.
I'm not moving that
board
, I say, and for a long time I don't,
and then I forgot and damned if I don't. When I do, I can hear this
roar go up in the bar."

Bruce adjusts his glasses, smiling.

"
The sonsofbitches have a red light wired up to
the board which goes on when you lift it," Hazel said.

"
Our first date.
"

"
She comes out and they have it so the red light
is still on, and everybody says together, How big is it? It was
funny."

"
And do you know what else was so funny, Mary?"

We were laughing. "What?" Mary asked.

"
They time you."

"
She had a good time. Forty seconds. The
record's five minutes on a girl that was sick first before she could
look."

"
Our first date! What a stunt. Come over here,
honey," Hazel said to Mary, patting the table. "I don't
ever get to see you." When she got Mary seated, she took her
hand and held it in both of hers and patted and held on to it on the
table. Bruce got up and came to my side of the table. Mary was
watching me. "Now listen to what I done to him on our second
date," Hazel said.

"
This was pretty good," Bruce put in. I had
the feeling they were their own full-time archivists, historians of
Old Milwaukee moments, as much as they were anything else on earth.
They were amazing. One side of Bruce's face was a giant lipstick
smudge from Hazel's endless kisses--they were completely happy,
completely happy about nothing.

Hazel had picked up early on a thing Bruce said
during the Burt Reynolds date, and she put it to good advantage on
their second date. Bruce, when asked how it was going, was in the
habit of saying, "I'm looking pretty good this year, don't you
think?" Hazel had him take them to visit a friend of hers, and
during the normal early conversation the friend asked Bruce how he
was.

"
He don't say, I'm fine, like he ought to,"
Hazel says. "He's still cock of the walk from the damn red-light
trick. He pipes right up, Well, Hazel here thinks I'm looking pretty
good this year, how about you? And my friend says, I can't tell,
Bruce, I'm blind. It like to killed him. She is blind."

Hazel is laughing and Bruce is nodding with a kind of
red-handed smile on. "He's so full of himself he doesn't even
look at her! She's waving her head around like Ray Charles and he
don't see it!l Hav-A-Tampa Bruce!"

"
She calls me that because I'm from Tampa. She
thinks it's funny." Bruce smiled what I was coming to consider
his polite smile.

"You ought to be flattered," Hazel says.
"Them things are
big
."
She roars.

"
You made a mistake that day, too," Bruce
now adds.

"
I sure did," Hazel confesses, beginning to
giggle, and again I think they are interested in the record more than
in the events. They want to get these stories out right. Mary is
giving me a bit of the old Mother Nature look, as from the Hoop show,
and I realize these are not unlike afternoons.

"
A pretty good mistake," Bruce confirms.
Hazel nods.

"
A doozy," she says.

"
What did you do?" I asked.

"
We went in this convenience store on the edge
of town after the blind date--we call it Bruce's blind date--and a
girl I knew was working there. Well, I remembered her as being
beautiful, and I saw her, and she smiled, and her teeth were gone. I
said, God, honey, what happened to your teeth?"

Here Bruce collapsed laughing, finally losing his
glasses.

"
God, honey, I said, what happened to your
teeth?

She said, Nothing. I looked again and her teeth were
there
, but they were
so
dark
you could
barely see them. They were little stubs, all gunky and black."

"
Like a bunch of sardines, or something,"
Bruce managed to get out, and whether it was truly funny or if I'd
succumbed to the power of the archive, it struck me as the funniest
remark I'd ever heard.