A Woman Named Drown - Padgett Powell (8 page)

When we left, Hazel and Bruce remained seated at the
picnic table and waved at us as we walked ourselves out of the house.
The last thing I saw was Bruce pushing his glasses and Hazel kissing
him on the cheek with her smacky lips full of overfresh lipstick.

On the way home I got the notion that we'd just
gone
to a play together, that this was sort of the kind of entertainment
Mary had in mind if we went to Florida, and that I'd had a little
audition myself with Mary watching me all afternoon. I now had
apparently proved myself a worthy audience for the road show we would
take in.

Mary and I sat out again in the oilcloth chaise,
kissing like teenagers, her throat a soft, firm, pipey thing that
amazed me more than anything had that day. I suppose I mean to say
that Mary amazed me, but it was things smaller than the whole
proposition that kept riveting me--her throat, her skin, her flowers,
her smooth idle days, her nut friends, her no-bio. Her liquory, solid
taste and lack of babble. It was the first time I'd ever been
involved with someone without a large measure of something like
dependence obtaining--"emotional dependence," the
university psychiatrist called it when I consulted him about my
growing European phone debt--and I say this of course realizing that
I was by election almost dependent upon her in two weeks for even the
food I ate. We were not maneuvering one another, we were striking no
contracts, tacit or implicit. We were, to my mind, free to like each
other and that was that. As I say, I found this amazing and still do.
We could smell the entire garden, cool and breezeless.

"
Florida has palms with T-shirt monkeys with
rattle eyes climbing them, bombing Yankee white trash with coconuts,"
Mary suddenly offered.

"
They have Yankee white trash?"

"
Sure. Wear Bermuda shorts and long socks and
hard shoes."

I took this to mean we were indeed going, and pretty
soon. Leaving with her in her stagecoach Mercury seemed as radical as
staying in her house by myself, but I supposed the going was just one
more moment in the reaction series of life I had decided to subscribe
to, so I told myself I'd best prepare to arrive in Florida dressed as
the husband of a widow I knew not too well. If it was not pure
coincidence that I read of Havana Carlisle one day and met
Hav-A-Tampa Bruce the next, then elemental forces decidedly beyond my
control were at work.

    
I
was
not far wrong. Mary's pace in the garden changed, and she began
transplanting some small camellias from a nursery bed to a permanent
terrace. In general she started moving about like a nesting bird
putting this here and that there. I decided to do something about my
room.

I must have gotten a look of cogitation on about
giving up my own place, because Mary suddenly called from twenty
yards away, "What's the matter with you?"

"
Nothing. Sorting things out."

"
Please don't," she said, and went on with
the camellias.

I went straight to Bilbo's and had coffee and found
Ebert. He gave me a look of mock amazement. "Am I seen you
today
or
tamarr
? I thought
you retire?"

"
Been busy."

"I know. Shack up."

"
Right. Get cleaned up and come with me."

"
Not the Car Wash."

"
No."

We went to my old room. I found James, the janitor,
who called himself the factotum, and who was arguably the only normal
human being in the place. When he initially showed me the room, he
conducted himself not unlike a porter at the best hotel in the world,
opening the door for me, crossing the room and opening the window,
standing back to let me approve of everything. "You got a good
view," he said.

The view was of an adjacent building's roof with a
compressor on it. With a deafening screech, the compressor engaged.
He did not flinch; he took a deep, satisfying breath, as if showing
me the quality of good mountain air. "That radiator works,"
he said, "but the furnace does not," and laughed. "I
am James, the factotum." Here he paused, as if to let me
comprehend things, and I believe I did: for $85 a month, a man with a
title like factotum would not be asked to fix anything like a
furnace.

"
Guy moved out down the hall," he then
said, a bit conspiratorily, as though confident that I'd gotten his
meaning so far and we could now begin to be intimate. "Come on."

I followed him to another room, in which he showed me
a cardboard box. In it were some books on Freud and a snorkel and
mask. "You can have this shit," he said. "She will not
know a thing about it." I would learn that "she" was
the manager, whose desires and requests James took some pleasure in
contravening.

My accepting the books and swim mask was, I believe,
my acceptance of his terms of operation, his not fixing things and
grand title.

So I got James up to the room and introduced him to
Ebert.

"
Nice suit," James said, indicating my
powder-blue togs.

"
Cold
,"
Ebert said. "You a cold brother." James ignored him--I
think he consciously repudiated all black blackness.

"
James," I said, "all this shit is
yours, and give Ebert what of it he'd like."

"
What?"

"
I'm through with this stuff."

"
You are
what
?"

"
There's that snorkel the other dude left. I'm
leaving everything in here with it."

This felt wonderful, though at bottom it made me
nervous: it was a room packed full of the dear trash we all get
attached to, and you usually require a fire or a Hood to rid yourself
of it.

Ebert said, "Man, what you mean?"

James said, "Yes. I believe he is disturbed."
He had a penchant for well-enunciated, and sometimes abstract,
speech. "It is a complex thing," he added. "I am
amazed and amused."

Ebert picked up my basketball and palmed it aloft.
"Man can't give all his shit away."

"
You want that basketball? It's new."

"
I see it
new
,"
Ebert said, using the emphasis to reinforce his assessment that I had
cracked. He looked at the photograph of Dr. Eminence in Love with
Polanski taped over my desk.

"
This your
chick
,"
he said. He thumped it.

"
You can have that, too."

"
I don't even know her."

"I don't either."

James laughed at this and walked to the window from
which he had shown me the view. Something in his attitude there
suggested he had accepted the estate: the trip to the window was a
sidelong inventory of the trouble and value of the inheritance.

Ebert dribbled the basketball, thundering the old,
hardwood floors.

"
Cut that out," James said. "Pick what
you want."

"
Take this off your hand," Ebert said,
holding the ball. "And this." He got an electric alarm
clock. "You a trip."

James and I were by this point in a line, high,
ineffable conspiracy. I was feeling physically lighter, and he was
calculating profit, the overwhelming return on the worthless books
and snorkel he had initially invested with me. He had categorized the
stuff into boxed trash and pawnable goods.

"
Fellows, it's been real," I said. James
gave me a limp, earnest handshake. "Good lucks," he said.
It was perhaps the only anomaly of speech I ever heard out of him,
and I would not presume to call it an error, for it could have been
his own correctly grammatical way of saying there are several kinds
of luck.

"
You too, James."

Ebert wouldn't look at us. From across the room, I
offered him a power fist and left, taking only the large brass
padlock I had locked the room with. I poked back in and told James to
give my tent to the Veteran and waved again and was off. Crossing the
Tennessee I dropped the lock into the water, where I could picture it
landing softly in the mud, sending short brassy reflections into the
murk, being nosed by carp.

* * *

Mary was still gardening like a demon. I made myself
a drink and watched her.

When she still did not quit, I had the impulse to
help. I ran out and volunteered to take the shovel. After some time
of it, it seemed the gin, for once, was going to be necessary, and I
saw again my lock interfering with the whiskery nosing of carp on the
river bottom, and I was giddy about not having anything of my own in
the world. I wiped my forehead, placed the shovel for another shot
into the soil, and fainted. When I came to, I felt perfectly
wonderful, entirely and unequivocally euphoric, and did not want to
move.

Mary was standing over me. "You cut those
camellias in half."

"
Yes," I said.

"
Can you get inside?"

"
Yes ma'am."

"
Make us some."

I made two tonics, and, correctly repositioned at the
wire table, watched Mary finish up the garden, and after she did, we
did not play pool. She started putting things in the Mercury, wearing
a tall, angular towel on her head, looking like Queen Nefertiti.

My little faint seemed to
have precipitated Florida up to the edge of happening, as if an
"illness" was the final necessary requisite for a
"vacation." I went to bed early and had visions of Mary's
monkeys looking at me with plastic, rattle eyes, and orange and
turquoise in nonspecific roadside glary scenes.

* * *

Late, or early--earlier, I now think, than I did when
she got me up--Mary said, "Feel okay?"

"Fine."

"
In thirty minutes, what's say, let's go."

She left the room.

I jumped up and dressed and got that cool, irritating
feel of clothes on fevered skin. I found a sack and put Stump's suits
in it and the playscripts. Mary hustled a last box of gin and mixers
to the car, and we were off in a high-centered set of swerves, the
Mercury rumbling like a tug.

Sometime in the certified wee hour, in fog, I saw
WOODBINE GEORGIA on a road sign, and it got cold. Again, rising up, I
saw GEORGIA GIRL DRIVE-IN, a green-framed trapezoid of wet plate
glass, and in a blast CAMDEN ICE COMPANY, an old wooden loading dock
with ice crushers on it. We stopped after crossing the syrupy St.
Marys River and sat at a picnic table with a winged concrete roof,
part of an abandoned Florida Welcome Station. Across the road were
two abandoned motels and a liquor store. "I left the freeway,
and we've been making time," Mary said. We must have left
Knoxville just at dark.

I saw no palms, no monkeys, no fruit, no glare. A red
neon WHISKEY shone from the liquor store.

As if reading my thoughts exactly, Mary said, in an
affected redneck accent, "Me and Stump believed in a
different
kind
of
Florida
."

We passed a strip of ruined nontowns, Yulee,
Oceanway, Lackawanna. Old motels, those still standing, were either
apartments or flea markets. Some were just rubble in a sandy
semicircle of ragged palms.