Edisto - Padgett Powell (4 page)

And it would come for you, not your daughter
who had no sense, but you who did, who knew better all along, you the
wrong one in it. You would have to leave Simons and Mizmanigo and
weave baskets again, but that would be the price.

So Theenie and Taurus never talked, not after her
terrible recognition, trundling
kawhoosh
past him, floorboards
bending and springing her off the porch over the steps she would have
stumbled down, her crooked-worn and polished pump heels flying in the
sand. And her turning the yellow-and-white eyes on him for one last
look and whirling at last into the ushering arms of the rat palms. I
call them rat palms because we were pulling them off, the dead butts
of branches, one night for a fire, and because you must pull very
hard to rip them loose, I learned the hard way that whatever is
between the husk and the coconut-hair bark of the tree comes down on
your arm, and that night in the dark my whatever-in-between was no
drowsy rumpled sparrow or polite silken tree frog but a rat about the
size of possum and texture of armadillo, and it landed all over my
arm from hand to shoulder in one shuddering rush, and I nearly shook
my arm out of socket and got a chronic case of girls’ fear of rats
from that and still have it, and you would too.

So he goes in the house and reads W.P.A. stories on
the walls where the roaches have eaten away the flour but not the ink
of the newspapers, and he naps, wakes, and emerges into the old,
bored heat of this named but never discovered small place of the
South and hears the tin roof tic, tic in that heat. So they never
talk. One runs calf-eyed into the woods from the other, who later
watches her on Sony monitors in a wall bank of federally funded TV
sets. On a tape he sees what he sees of her, what he sees of—I
found out—of his only known or at least speculative origins,
watches as calmly as a surgeon an operation.

What would she have told him if she could have
stayed? Probably the usual speech she would make to coroners courting
the Doctor.

"She got a
double
use for
you
,
mister. If you cain’ see that, why you scudgin’ us all. Ever
since Mr. M. left, it’s been a trile with that Simons. Because iss
onliess us here. He roundbunction, in trouble, fallin’ out of
buses
, ekksetra. All she wont is somebody to keep him right.
Even
she
know that. And Law knows I do, I see enough of that
in my own. Somebody got to hep that boy kotch up. He so far ahead
he’s
behine
. Yes, he is." Her head nodding, in a rhythm
like a small, gentle locomotive; her whole head rolling on the
syllables. "Yessuh."

A fine speech and well-intended. But she’d tell it
to every coroner and tennis attorney aiding and abetting Arabs to
come around here. A wonderful bunch of suitors. Penelope never
figured on such a healthy run of dudes when the Progenitor bagged it,
I hope.

Taurus came in the house, played a game, accepted an
invitation to spend a while with us, told me everything I asked, and
otherwise kept his eyes open and his mouth shut. He was somebody you
figured knew something. And he was supposed, as Theenie would have
put it, to "rescure" me.

I was going to have to modify the Boy Act. He was
definitely modifying the Coroner Act.
 

We See a Fight in Charleston

I told him nothing ever happens here but he wouldn’t
listen, and couldn’t we hike in the woods, he wants to know. The
woods, I say. What woods?

"All that dark close noise I passed coming down
here," he says. "The black changing sound."

So I had to tell him they was no woods, they was
leftovers.

"From what?"

"From, number one, from nothing happening to
them except heat and afternoons of Negroes in white shirts with their
eyes turning yellow looking at the road. And from, two, from the heat
and the rain making so much grow that since no planters or even
Sherman ever got here to weed anything out, it became a giant
unpruned greenhouse festering in its very success," I said.
"Burning up in an excess of youth, like city slums," I
said. “Only this city is a rich unturned city of no lights.

"And it became a bog of verdure and got scurvy
sort of and the big oaks became turkey oaks and the palm trees became
palmettos, and than the Arabs landed.

"And they bought the choicest squats what were
touched by wind or water, and hired some American scalawags who
somehow got that tennis-ball-velvet grass to grow on sand and so
converted sand dunes to sand traps, and they cemented the rest and
painted it green and so the tennis pros showed up next (not the big
ones, only ones like Rod Laver and I saw a college kid beat him), and
then the tennis groupies in their German cars and then the Germans
themselves came, BASF chemical conglomerate, but an old-time
referendum took care of them and sent them home. They didn’t hide
their intentions.

"So after the tennis groupies got moved into
their exclusive condominia, their dogs came, replacing the natural
old squatters like skunks and possum with Irish setters, a new breed
of them that ignores birds for Frisbees, and then they shored it all
up with fake redwood and yardmen disguised as gardeners and attorneys
as world travelers on their sailing yachts that never leave the
marina. That leaves the scurvy woods and the rickets people right
where they were. Right here."

We had walked into this anemic scrub a ways. Before
us I showed him an old homesite I call the Frazier ruins.

"Because I forgot a few details," I said.
"Before the Arabs, but in the same choice sites they bought, the
Marines bought the very first island, and for one simple and
sufficient reason: it contained an adequate, maybe the largest,
population of the region’s first and final indigenous denizen; the
sand flea. So grunts get out there on Parris Island at attention and
they tell them not to move a muscle on pain of whomp upside the head,
and they become hamburger, and it probably won World War II. Because
sitting in a foxhole with Jap bullets zinging all over Guam or
shooting a flame thrower into a cave or walking waist-deep over a
half mile of razor coral reefs because the LSTs ran aground and
seeing half of you shot wasn’t as bad as doing pushups in sand
fleas, so we won.

"And one other detail. Joe Frazier."

The homesite was little pine trees coming up through
powdery old two-by-fours and rusty tin panels in the hot sand. Taurus
was already looking at the skinks. Skinks are lizards made for speed.

"And the skinks." He already knew how to
hold them in place with eye contact. You can walk right up on skinks
sometimes if they know you are looking right at them and you do not
break eye contact, but if you look away to take a step, they are
gone, because they know you don’t know which way they went.

"This could have been where he trained," I
said.

"Who?”

"Frazier."

"Oh."

"Maybe right under this tin is the rotten old
croker sack, just resting in the sand after the hard work of getting
Joe on his way to Everlast leather bags and Philadelphia and the big
time and—"

'What croker sack?"

He stopped me, but of course he didn’t really want
to know. I think he hadn’t been paying attention to me. And he was
right: Who knows if Joe hit a croker sack? He might have just torn up
a nightclub or something and somebody got him to a gym in time to put
his natural destructiveness to work. But the time I took a Dixie cup
of the Doctor’s Early Times out here to see what she saw in it, I
was sure about Joe and the bag.

He was at the bag in his snot-dauber routine. On a
short arm of rope swayed the bag, as large and solid as a piece of
ocean, as heavy as tide. Joe hit it and it veered and he blew snot
out of his left nostril and hit it coming back and stopped it still.
Joe got on a bus. The bag hung there, the beam held it, the barn held
on, the town, the heat. The green browned, Joe won.

In Philadelphia they had canvas bags with pockets
worn in them by professional punches. They tied a rope across the gym
chest-high to Joe and made him step across the gym under it, bobbing
from side to side. They said, "Touch it with your ears, Frazier,
but don’t make the rope move or you’ll do it all day." Joe
got so good and fast at it that it sometimes seemed the rope moved,
not his head, like you think only the cloth moves but a sewing
machine needle doesn’t. He got so good he threw in extra touches:
rolled his shoulders, hooked the snot off his nose, went
hinh hinh
to keep time, faked and mimicked punches. Off this motion would spin
his success, would come long looping punches that would have busted
croker sacks to pieces. The rope was steady; he followed it. It led
him to the Heavyweight Championship of the World. The liquor didn’t
make me numby or anything, but I did eat the wax out of the Dixie
cup, which was a childhood thing of mine, and the liquory, stainy wax
tasted much better than the snort itself.

"You want to see him fight?"

"What?" I said. "Who?”

"Frazier.”

"Where?"

"Charleston."

"Sure if we-"

"I’ll get tickets."

I was a goofball not to
know about the fight; it was the Ali fight. Taurus just stood there
in the sun, smiling. We walked all over the ruin, the tin breaking in
great
ka-thunks
, spurting the skinks out of and back into
their jillion million corrugated bunkers. The little bastards had it
made: pinstriped miniature monitor dragons, gun-blue survivors,
pen-and-ink leftover pygmies of the dinosaur days, living in modern
galvanized tunnels buried in the sand like long Quonset huts shrunk
down so small even the government lost them.

* * *

We drove half the night that night, up Highway 17,
watching all the flintzy old motels with names like And-Gene Motel
that are about closed for good since I-95 opened up and drained the
blood out of the old roads. And clubs, or joints, or
jernts
,
the Negroes say, umpteen eleven
jernts
with neon tubes running
all over them, broken so the color and the gas leaked out with the
road blood. It’s very sad. There’s one place built like a mosque
or something, th this bulbous outline like a fancy sundae, and the
neon still works: purple and red. We stopped get some beer because
Taurus said you needed beer to go to a fight because you had to
understand the people who might get carried away after it and start a
fight with you. In the jernt was a gritty floor and a jukebox and
some red booths. A woman in tight black pants and a red stretchy
shirt sitting by the cash register got the beer, took the money, rung
it in, got back on the stool, picked up a cigarette, blew smoke up at
the ceiling, and we left.

Well, I took one. Taurus looked in the sack when I
did, as if to count the remainder, but he didn't say anything.
 
It was awful, but I used it to hurry up and get there with.

We stopped at the Piggly Wiggly and got some food.
They had Hoppin’ John so I got some in a square carton with a nifty
wire handle and intricate closing designs cut into the flaps like a
goldfish carton at a fair.

We finally got there. It was in a gym, a big
blood-colored thing probably built by the W.P.A., because it had
those heavy, square, useless blocks of stone all over so you couldn’t
tell if it was a museum or what. It was as big as an airplane hangar,
with third-story windows they open with chains and pulleys from the
floor, and fans in the windows the size of propellers.

Five thousand people were in there on bleachers and
metal folding chairs around a boxing ring in which a Negro who looked
like a moose was trying to box a pink-white dude with a snow-white
flat-top haircut. I say white, but he had green-and-blue tattoos all
over his body—a standing bruise. I never had seen any real boxing
before and what got me was how nobody seemed to get hit and they
spent a lot of time hugging each other until the referee would tell
them none of that. The Negro was as big as James Earl Jones and as
bald and looked scared, and the white man was bobbing all the time
and sliding and grinning all the while like he knew a private secret.

"The black guy’s with the promoter’s
stable," Taurus told me.

"Stable?" I said. "Like horses?"

"The other guy’s from prison."

"You mean like Sonny Liston? He learned to box
there and got out—"

"No," he said. "He’s in there. He
lives there.”

"How do you know?"

"I saw their bus."

"Wha’d it say?"

"C.C.I."

"Charleston Cornhole Idiots."

"Columbia Correctional Institution.”

Well, that made all the difference in the world. Now
I saw the white guy’s secret. He was grinning because he was on the
town, out of stir for the night, chained up and bused down and
unchained for a night of freedom. And the Negro twice his size was
scared because he was in the ring with a convict.

Behind the boxers loomed an almost drive-in-sized
luminescent screen, white as the moon. The real fight would come on
that. You could see a big cable running across the floor away from it
that I guess the broadcast had to come through. The moose and the
bruise performed their bobbing and hugging, their tiny terrors like
mortal shadows against the very sky.