A Woman Named Drown - Padgett Powell (9 page)

    
I
n
Jacksonville, Mary hooked a hard right, west, explaining it wouldn't
do to go south too fast in Florida. I took to riding in the back
seat, where things were agreeably peripheral, while Mary blared
head-on into the panhandle. I could pin down all the things whipping
around in the car and relax. Making a drink was much easier if you
didn't have to lean backward over the seat, surprised by Mary's
swerves and brakings. And I was free to sleep. I dreamed once of
Bilbo's. Everyone was gloved, not only the boxers, but Shifty and
Harold and a face or two I'd never seen--gloved, trunked, shod in
tight, shin-high boxing shoes.

When I woke, the wind was stinging me with my hair,
Styrofoam cups were flying about, Mary was eyes on the road. I picked
up a playscript. It was the titleless adventure of Mrs. Taylor and
daughter, Jasmine Ranelle. I read near the end.

Jasmine and the apparent ultimate suitor have
barricaded themselves in the Taylor garage, a wooden building set
apart from the main house. They are trying to start an outboard
engine which is suspended in an oil drum.

JASMINE: : It's supposed to have water in it, but
this will be louder.
[Suitor pulls starter
cord]

SUITOR: This thing's ancient. I'l1 bet it hasn't run
since--

JASMINE: Since he died. That's just it. This was his
motor. It was on the boat he was shot in. It kept running. It was
running when they found him. In circles. When we
start
it, it will drive her nuts.

SUITOR : If we start it.

JASMINE: It'll start. They don't make them like this
anymore.
[Suitor delivers more pulls; a
sputter, smoke coming from the drum]

JASMINE: There she goes!
[Tiptoes
to closed garage door and peeks through crack in direction of house]
This is going to be wild.
[Two more pulls
and another sputter]

SUITOR: What if she doesn't come?

JASMINE : If she doesn't come, and buddyroe she's
going to come, we'll lay down here and breathe fumes until we
die
.
[Engine takes, producing deafening, reverberating
roar]

I quit there: Mary virtually whiskey-turned us into
an old stone gas station, sliding us through a parking lot of crushed
white shell and pop tops to a dusty, billowing halt not too far from
a man sitting in a metal lawn chair.

"
I hope you got a license to drive like that,"
he said. "Not many do."

"
Bathroom," Mary said, getting out.

"
Ladies' is out," the man said. "You
look like you can handle thuther."

He winked at me. Mary headed for the men's room and I
opened my door, spilling cups and plastic ice bags and hamburger
wrappers.

The old man said, "Fillerup, son?"

"
Yes, sir," I said.

He winked again, starting to move.

He pumped the gas and sat back down; we waited for
Mary. I went around finally to check on her. The door was open,
commode in view. I walked on behind the station. There, under a giant
oak, were men in chairs. I had stopped just clear of the building.
All of them looked at me, stopped talking. I was in my canary suit. I
walked on to let them know that I might be dressed unusually but I
was not shy. Most of them were old, the kind of downright geezers who
go to great pains to cultivate looking old--leave their teeth at
home, don't shave, walk with canes that don't appear necessary. And
some of them were a generation younger, old tush-hogs between
hell-raising and geezering. One of the tush-hogs said; "You
drink beer?"

I sat at his table and flicked a piece of Styrofoam
off my yellow pants. "Yes," I said.

"
All right," the tush-hog said, and the
talking under the tree resumed, several men already engaged with
Mary.

"
Go on with it," my tush-hog said.

A geezer said, "Where was I?"

"
You was at the court-martial."

"
Right."

"
This is McCrae, bud," Tush-hog said to me,
indicating the geezer. "He's telling the story "Parker
McCrae and the Screech Owls.' "

"
I could shoot a squinch owl in the dark
backward l with a
mirror
if I'da had to," said McCrae.

"We know. Get on with it."

"
Where was I?"

"
They didn't believe you could identify the
thief, because it was dark."

"
It was
dark as hell
and can't nobody say it wasn't."

"
Nobody did. They said it was dark. That's why
they said you couldn't identify the thief."

"
It was dark."

Tush-hog looked down at his beer and then up at no
one. He looked at the geezer. "O.K., it was
dark
as shit
out there, Parker."

McCrae nodded sharply, once. He leaned forward on his
cane. "So I had to prove 'em I could see good enough out there
to name names. So I said, Come on tonight to a spot I know and bring
me a good .22 rifle."

"And they did."

"
They did. And we got there, and I knew there
was at least twenty-five squinch owls in them trees there. I asked
them if they saw any birds in them trees. No, they didn't. I told
them to clear the ground under the trees and to look for the birds up
close when they was under."

"
And they did."

"
They did so, yessir."

"
So you then picked off twenty-five invisible
screech owls."

"
Not so fast. Twenty-three."

Here, Tush-hog looked at me with a little sign of
mischief.

"
I shot five times and I told them to go get
them five birds. They lay 'em out there."

"
At the feet of the brass."

"
Lay 'em out and counted 'em and I shot five
more--
kicke kicke kicke kicke kicke!
Like that."

"
That's ten."

"
They was all just standing there and I wasn't
sure they believed me yet. There was . . . Where was I?"

"
Ten birds down, fifteen to go."

"
Not so fast. Thirteen. I can see better in the
dark than most in the day." Tush-hog put his face in his hands.

We waited. Mary's table was laughing at something
hilarious of their own making.

"
So I shot thirteen more and let them other two
stay. They couldn't see 'em anyway, so why not? Conservation,"
he said gravely, "that's the thing now."

"
You won the case," Tush-hog said.

"
Boy confessed when he seen me shoot them
squinch owls. Started blubbering about like a diaper gal."

Tush-hog looked me over. During the story I had
noticed an old Coke box on galvanized pipe legs with iced beer in it,
and I got up and got us three beers.

"
How do you pay for these?"

"You don't," Tush-hog said. "It's a
club."

McCrae snapped his beer open and went for it by
leaning forward to meet it on the table.

"
Bobby Cherry," Tush-hog said, swinging his
hand over our beers, and he tried to crush my hand, but wearing
canary Ban-Lon got me ready for him, and he did not crush me. I
toasted McCrae and the screech owls.

Mary got up, sailed over to us; Bobby Cherry stood
up, I didn't. "Handsome," she said, "you ready to go?"

"Yes, ma'am," I said. I stood up and tucked
in my shirt. If there's anything dorkier than a man wearing a yellow
golf suit behind a filling station with a bunch of the boys in their
jeans and pearl-button shirts, I suppose it's a man wearing a yellow
golf suit with the Ban-Lon shirt tucked in and the pants drawn up
high showing a lot of sock. This was Mary's method; she effected a
little drama under the oak by charming the men and then leaving with
the fruit she called handsome, and it was my job to look even more
geeky to further tweak them. She had done something of the opposite
with me in front of Hoop.

The car was still where Mary had slung it. She paid
the man in the metal chair, fired up, and we were off in a cloud of
rocks and pop tops. I picked up the playscript.

[MRS. TAYLOR
flings
open garage doors
. JASMINE
crosses
her arms, juts her jaw at
MRS. TAYLOR. SUITOR
holds his nose and his ears, and moves about
garage as if looking for clean air to gasp
]

* * *

I was finding it hard to hold in mind the hypothesis
of these days, if hypothesis is not too ludicrously grand a term for
my reaction-series theory of life. It occurred fit to me that
untenability is contained in the nature of the investigation; these
days, these characters, have at their center no center, no
towardness. I'm not putting this well. I mean; Mary is never Mary.

And the fools I've been meeting are not consciously
themselves. And they are happy. This is just beginning to come
together for me, and I'll leave it in this rawest form. Data: Mary
finds insupportable the awful singular role of Stump's widow; she
becomes Drown, Mrs. Taylor, boozist, lover, teaser of roadside
redneck. Friedeman found insupportable the awful earnest singular
path to scientific truth; he saves the damned from hell, on the side,
with Baptist hysterics. These are the brainy ones. Those less
burdened are capable of distracting themselves from artificial
singularity without trying: Sweetlips, chronicler of pygmy, believes
less in the importance of himself than in that of the tall tale for
its own sake; Hazel and Bruce similarly pursue not the betterment of
themselves so much as the betterment of their record. And the true
fools I've encountered are boring in on themselves with central,
self-important purpose: the Orphan. Hoop. And my friend Tom, I think,
despite his cartoonish surface, somewhere deep took things too
seriously and today sounds as if he is not happy. What to make of
this? Don't know. Where does, say, Dr. Eminence in Love with Polanski
fit in? She is a function of ambition and purpose plotted against
achievement and I think will wind up unhappy. Ebert, robbed of
central seriousness by racial predicament, will wind up
scatterbrained and scatterhearted enough to be happy. James, the
factotum, has already comprehended the beauty of failure, the glory
of the fancy end run around importance. Does this make sense?
Probably it does not. These are lab notes of life by dilettante, not
Nobel remarks.

These terms are not right--singularity, towardness,
centrality of purpose, self-importance. I am not on it yet. Perhaps I
am not citing all the data points. The Veteran: high singularity of
purpose--to locate the dead nigger--but that center is not his by
election; it is more correctly his by choice of the United States
government, agent
par excellence
of self-important aggrandizement. The Veteran himself we can suspect
of having been once not a fool. Am I talking about a quality of
oneness of enterprise, one-faceted living?

A simple laid-back vs. square orientation? It seems
better expressed somehow else, yet I will confess that the matter
does in some senses appear to be one of terms like these. And it may
be that the successful operators in this scattered mode are examples
simply of f lassitude and want of ambition. Still, I want to dignify
the downward with another parameter: Are they capitalizing upon
liabilities while the others are insisting on investing in assets
only? Mary seems able to accept a loss with a victory; Friedeman
surely paid for pausing in his career to ponder salvation and
damnation; but my own old man preaches pure profit until blue in the
face, and I have added to his congestion by simple indifference,
which indifference registers for him as aggressive courting of
another Depression. Perhaps it is
indifference
which the true fools lack. I cannot say. I will continue to record.

   
W
e did
towns. Quincy, Panacea, Sopchoppy, Carrabelle, Blountstown--the best
town names in the world. We even tried to take a tour of
Chattahoochee, the largest state asylum. We'd try something like that
and never think of something like Disney World. It became perfectly
and agreeably clear that neither of us had any idea what to do. We
watched folk who did have ideas.