Edisto - Padgett Powell Read online

  That’s about how Joe looks, bouncing in his corner as if he’d like to kneel down in a pew. And Ali orbiting, advertising, selling, leering like he ought to have on an Elvis Presley costume instead of a terry robe, and Joe snot-daubing, and if they were his people in there, they drove up in probably one big Buick and planned to drive all the way back that night just to see their boy on a drive-in movie screen beamed in by a radio contraption in space a million miles away, and Joe is worried about them driving that far, as if he doesn’t have enough to worry about with, I have to admit, a majestic-looking machine of a man ass-holing all around the ring, and Ali, Mr. ex-Cassius Clay, is worried about a woman at ringside he’s going to leave his sweet wife for named Veronica Porshe. I read that later.

  Well, there’s a bunch of circus barking, and ding and they’re off. Whatever it is that goes on, goes on punctuated by dings and the yelling becomes who won that i one don’t know i don’t know either who won that one and ding and yelling again. Five thousand fire-code violators yelling, elbowing, stomping, craning, holding their heads when they can’t stand it, lusting for their chosen hero on this living moonscape of escape when-

  Silence.

  Ali is going over, going over like, like a tree—

  All noise.

  We see only then, before he hits the deck, Joe’s extra-special message to Mr. Smart Ass, looping out of the dark like one of those mace balls, Ali’s eyes skittering toward it white like a horse’s. All the people are in the air.

  In the air they grab each other and shake each other like their stepchildren, and make noise like children being shaken, hysterical garbling and nonsense, jerking each other silly, agape at a fallen god. And Taurus wasn’t even looking. He stood there as if an anthem were playing and looked at the Cossack ladies. And they were looking straight ahead, not at the screen.

  "He southpawed him," I screamed, but he didn’t seem to hear.

  "I never knew what that word meant until—" But I he wasn’t listening.

  We left and drove again, half until ever, and did not stop at a jernt or talk or anything, and I made it to school the next day on time.

  How He Got His Name

  It sounds funny, but I named him. And it is less ridiculous, someone being named Taurus, than you might think. The first night we went to the Baby Grand together I named him.

  We strolled in, I the homunculus, and he the true circus property, because any dude that looks white and walks into a sweet shop without the credential of knowing someone very well or of wearing a badge is like a circus clown and his safety will depend on the dudes deciding he is a clown. That is what good race relations means. So we go on in past Jinx and Preston at the pool table, and I supply a nod up in the air while I walk and sort of overdo it in order to point at Taurus without using the geek’s gesture of a direct indication—we walk right past them like nothing’s new. That casualness tells them that I know him very well and they must continue shooting pool not to blow protocol. They see I am bringing an inside guest, not an outside guest, and they must meet him as if at a big party, with gracious informality, when they happen to find themselves within speaking range.

  It’s a high show, because even though I am boy wonder in here, the Duchess’s little duke, I’ve never brought a guest. In fact, the only whites I’ve ever seen in the Grand are the old-family boys who come in stoned and with goods to share when there’s some music. The Doctor could probably bring in a coroner, but she wouldn’t.

  "Two 45s," I tell Jake.

  He reaches down in the silver icebox and looks up at us before hauling them up.

  "Cold ones, now, Jake. My friend is thirsty? You try to put the world in simple terms when it’s complicated.

  Two tallboys hit the bar, sixteen ounces and long as howitzer shells.

  “Jake, want you to meet—"

  They were ahead of me. Taurus had one hand on his beer and the other up in the air, with his elbow on the bar as though to arm-wrestle, and Jake swung into it in the Negro sidewinder handshake. They paused and Jake gave a most delicate knuckle bump with his free hand before touching both his hands to the bar rag tucked into his apron string.

  "We heard you had a potner," Jake said to me. Taurus watched us both.

  "But I’m worrit about you bringin’ him in heah." Jake picked up the beers and wiped the water off the bar and set them down. I was unsteady on my stool, legs up in the air like one of the famous Southern ladies whose feet never touch the floor when they sit in chairs.

  "Why?" I said.

  "Cause if he tries to keep up wid jew, we mought have to care him out," and he laughed his girlish laugh, very artificial, very considerate: he was putting on a bit of the old nigger act while watching my new potner. Everything would be fine.

  "Jake," Taurus said, easily settling his can down on Jake’s side of the bar, "I would genuinely prefer a Slitz, please."

  "Malt?"

  "Malt."

  Jake got it. "Say, I know you take care of Sim and no problem, iss no problem. He all reet."

  "I got you," Taurus said then, split open his brand, and he was in. Slitz—Jesus, he hit the dialect and drank fast. It was then that I named him.

  He set out for Preston and Jinx at the pool table and I had to climb down the stool like Tarzan’s boy down a chrome vine. Just then two women came in (you call them anything but that—sistahs, snakes, or momma if the relationship is a close one) and bumped into Jinx and Preston, who were turning their backs to the front door to adjust for Taurus’s coming up to the table. Well, it would have been a regular meeting like at the bar except the snakes had action on their minds and saw Taurus with me scrambling after him carrying a beer can as big as my arm, and one of them said, hip-setting, "Who dis?”

  It was out before I thought to say it, with a certitude that gave the name all the undeniability of a flat, plastic decal across the rear windshield of a low I Buick: "Taurus. This is my fr—"

  "Mistah hoo?” If a baby owl could hoot, it wouldn’t be any higher than that sound was. She was mocking, of course, especially with the "Mister," but she was interested enough to mock.

  "Taurus," I said again. The miracle was, nobody laughed.

  "Taurus?" the second snake said.

  "Taurus!" said the first. And he was veritably laminated into the community, as easy as you please, a fixture like me. I thought for a long time that it went so easily because of my diplomatic powers and immunities, that he moved like a fish in cool water because I stocked the tank.

  "This is Preston and this is Jenkins," I said.

  "Preston," Taurus said, and shook Preston’s arm and looked into his eyes, which are like eyes deep in a gorilla suit, and the same with Jinx, who is more shy and whose eyes bulge out so he looks at the floor to hide them.

  "They call me Jinx," he said, and looked up.

  Already Jinx’s eyes had that liquid, yellow, mullet look, from drinking too much that night and I guess the nights before. Preston’s were drier but too dark and low to really tell. If there was ever a raid or a fire or anything at the Grand, I thought Preston would carry me out like I was Fay Wray and Jinx would be caught rear guard—grabbed by his leg going out a window or burned up. Of course I knew everybody and they me, but these guys always seemed genuinely happy to see me, unlike the others, and Preston even understood what I meant when I offered him my warm, undrunk 45s, and he drank them without a show of thanks, to preserve my reputation.

  Cold air that night drove a bunch of people in, and everybody drank to keep warm, and Jake fried chicken wings half the night and kept putting beers and chicken wings in wax paper on the bar, and greasy faces and fingers took them. A deep press of people kept coming by and so everybody met Taurus in the party-decorous way, and late (kind of, for me) we got ready to go.

  Taurus stopped and said to Preston on the way out, "Preston, I need you to do me a small favor. Tell Louester Samuels that I’m not going to serve her the paper about the mixup in Charleston. It went back to public service—t
he sheriff." Taurus walked out and Preston looked down at me.

  "You know this Louester?” I said.

  "Yeah, she heah now."

  "She’s in here?"

  "She in heah, shihh. You saw her, first bitch in the door. He saw’m, too. Hell, Simaman, she momma work for you momma, if iss the right one."

  "Well, I’ve never seen her, Preston."

  "He know her?"

  "I don’t think so."

  "He know sump’m. How he know I know her?"

  "Later on, Preston. Later on."

  The next day Taurus told me a couple of stories about serving paper and said it was good money on a loose schedule but he didn’t like to do it. I thought they’d be good stories for the Doctor. But what got me that night was how he watched everything and waited patiently for the moments to unfold before him. To the extent he lets me name him. He never corrected me. I called him Taurus from there on, fine with him. And little things like that Slitz trick. He was controlling things, but like the elephant promised the monkey, he wasn’t going to force it.

  The Federal Oral History

  "Take him to the museum," the Doctor told me, "and get those boys to show him the tape of her." She did not mean the Charleston Museum, a place where you can see all the birds east of the Mississippi preserved in these little bullet shapes like they were squeezed to death by the hand of, and rode in from the field in the pants pockets of, James Audubon himself, and kept in drawers like silverware after that, since about 1850—I never thought about it before, but those could be antebellum birds. A whale is hanging from the ceiling, and drawing rooms cut out of local homes are in there too, whole complete rooms like they glued everything down and buzzsawed it loose from the Russell House or somewhere, and lugged it over and put little cards in it telling what everything was.

  She meant the art museum. The best thing in that was the desk man, who sat stoned just inside looking at a Salvador Dali picture book, saying "Wow" very gently, and told you where you wanted to go in the museum, and whom past you could have carried any painting in there as long as you put the finished side at him so the gliding colors and lines would mesmerize him. But it wasn’t the painting part we wanted anyway. We wanted the federal oral history program, which was in an outbuildlng. That’s where they had Theenie on a tape. Now I personally don’t think Taurus needed to see her again, certainly not for the purposes the Doctor had in mind. Because he took the news that he was the Grandson of the Lost Nigger Maid so cool she thought he did not believe it, which most certainly was not the case. You could not say he believed anything and you could not say he disbelieved anything. He was a heroin baby, I told you that. I thought I made it up. but now I don’t know. I may have heard It in the Doctor’s relayed story. Once he told me he remembers very little of what happened before "last night."

  "That’s an exaggeration," I said.

  "That’s an exaggeration," he said. But he offered no more. And he never said his name was other than the tag I gave him, or where he came from, or why he was here.

  What that means, a heroin baby, if he is one, I don’t know, because my first and last brush with that stuff was reading the most genteel addict of all time’s monograph, which the Doctor didn’t have to tell me to read, because I got after that one on my own, thinking from the title it was going to present some titillating scenes of delectable and naked girls, which it did not. Everybody in that book sounded like these Dobermans I heard about at the Grand. They feed them ashes in their food, which somehow lowers the oxygen in their blood, and when they grow up they don’t believe in anything, except maybe killing, and even the handler has to wear a football suit, more or less, and throw meat to wherever he wants them to go.

  "Them Dobes light a nigga’s ass up," Preston says.

  Well anyway, it was something like these Dobes that happened to Taurus, which I say changed his whole approach to believing things. Like killing everything. Except his stance was more like killing nothing, as if he thought everything was alive or possible. It’s hard to say. But I do know he did not not believe that Theenie was his grandmother any more than he did believe it, and so going for the Doctor’s reason to see the tape was moot, but we went anyway, for the trip.

  We went past the stoned dude down a hall with the two-tone wainscoting of green and lighter green—very soothing greens that they use in schools for hypers. Then we got to the studio.

  In there on three walls were TVs banked into holes like microwave ovens, and all over the room, in strapped-up boxes with cables and ropes and wires and sockets and jacks all over them, was this Sony stuff—enough to, I swear, film a whole war. Half of it’s on triangle dollies and tripods. I expected even a director’s bullhorn.

  Well, hidden down in this load are these two guys bent over a switch panel, messing with it, so that six of the TVs are on and President Nixon is talking on all of them. He says the same thing, but the angles are different and they’re playing a sentence over and over and pointing at different screens. It’s pretty obvious they’re casing him for lies like everybody does, even without forty-five TV sets. I heard all that stuff.

  Suddenly they turn around and look at us.

  "Yes?" says one of them. I notice how pale and zitty he looks for a college guy.

  We don’t say anything and their foreheads start wrinkling up.

  "Ye-yes?" he says again.

  "Are you Bob Patterson ?" Taurus says.

  "It’s Robert." He doesn’t move toward us or anything, just says It’s Robert like you’d say It’s candy.

  It’s time for the Boy Act and a solid job of it too, and before I knew it, I was acting like I had palsy and stumbling around the room across these rivers of technology, and going to try to hit his balls like that midget at the cockfight. It was funny how fast I was this pygmy wiseass, in a way that scared me it was so thorough and deep and quick, and I can’t explain how I knew to do it or why I wanted to, but I would have hit that bastard harder than a golf ball, when Taurus has me by the back and holds me.

  He has his thumb on my shoulder, his middle finger down my back on the edge of vertebrae, and he has a light frog on the muscle so I can’t move without getting a real frog.

  "Well, Robert," he says, "Dr. Manigault sent us to see one of your tapes."

  "The famous basket tape," I said, and Taurus frogged me so that I gargled a little trying to shut up.

  "Oh yes," Robert Patterson said. "She did call."

  Then he put his head in his hand and acted like he had a headache. "It’ll take us a while to find it. It’s not in our permanent collection." The other guy got up and said he knew where it was and bumped into us, so they said we should stand outside until they got it set up, or until the second guy did, because he was the only one doing anything human. So we waited in the hall. I knew of the tape but I’d never seen it. They got Theenie at the market weaving one Saturday when she was off, and I learned of it only because she wouldn’t talk about it. The Doctor told me because they had had to have a man-to-man talk after it happened, to settle Theenie down. That was because Theenie somehow thinks TV is the law, and being on it is like being on trial or something. TV and the law are both these large things that are technical and controlled by white people, so it nerved her out.

  I would tease her. "Hey Theenie, when’s your show coming on?"

  “What show?”

  "Your TV show."

  "Ain’t no show."

  "Wel1, I’m going to get me a TV Guide and find out."

  "No you ain’t. There ain’t no show."

  "I heard there was."

  "Where you hear?"

  "I heard is all. Like you do. From a little bud."

  She used to tell me she heard stuff about me from a little bird.

  "Aw Got! Simons. Simons, why you wont to grind me up? You allus just grinin’ me up." And here she would be about to cry, I swear, and I’d pull off surprised. I only did it twice, because it really did get to her. You could do the same thing by saying she had a phone
call from a man about her social security check and she’d start in on aspirin and leave early.

  “I’m leaving, never coming back, Miz Manigault. Simons, that Simons is just grinin' me up . . . " And she’d leave ten minutes early and always be back. She could take any other teasing but the gubmen and the TV show.

  They called us back in and we watched the tape. In the frame were tourists and baskets and then Theenie and her aunt—she calls her that but I think lt’s her neighbor—weaving, over against a wall. The second video lord, who was nice to us, is running over the baskets with an electric-shaver light-meter thing, poking it at everything. Then he gets this boom mike and says okay and the action starts. Then leaves the frame and we hear a thump and sound check sound check okay.

  So they had Theenie and her aunt there, all conned by those python co-ax and lesser electric mba, afraid to move because of the equipment d the occasion. But they won’t take any kind of picture guff except TV, which is too big to refuse, unless they are disoriented by having gone to Chicago or someplace when young, or somehow else got sophisticated. An integration program or two don’t change a person’s fundamental suspicion of film. It may even be old voodoo stuff.

  Once we stopped on Meeting Street to get some flowers and a lady was selling baskets. The thing is, they always have about a thousand items arranged around them and they sit in some aspect of focus in the center or at a corner of the inventory and weave more. You could run off with eighty pieces before they could get up and shake off the marsh grasses and throw the one-tined weaving fork at you and call down Wrath. It wouldn’t be pretty when It caught up with you and the loot, sitting around with eighty hot basket things you stole from a woman. So no one ever tries it. They are so confident—sitting and weaving, their whole factory spread out, being walked on by tourists—they watch only the present basket, reach into their grocery sack beside the chair for new straw, and answer questions.