Edisto - Padgett Powell (5 page)

"What’s that fireman doing here?"

"He’s the fire marshal. I don’t know."

We watched the fire marshal talk to a dude with
pointy shoes and skinny pants near the door. Then the dude sort of
held his hands up in the air and pushed it several times like he was
saying "All right" or "Calm down" to the fireman.
Then the fireman left and they began closing the doors, but people
pushed through. Then they locked them with chains I around the
handles, the bar kind you press to open school doors. People hit the
doors with chairs, which you could tell were chairs because their
legs came popping through the glass, that thick, glue-colored glass
in school doors with chicken wire set inside. It sounded like guns.

When the first flicker of light hit the screen, it
threw up the boxers’ shadows bigger than Olympic giants and the
whole crowd shut up. Like that. We must have looked like a photograph
of a crowd, faces silent, still, looking through blue cigarette
smoke.

One more tiny flicker and the hum-drum cranked up
louder than ever and I didn’t hear any more chairs go off. It
flickered a bunch and the fighters started sort of ducking from the
light, crouching down and taking a peek at the screen so not to miss
anything.

When it flickered off they were huddled in a little
clench, taking a peek, and when it came on it cast their shadows up
on the screen, and we laughed, because you’d see tiny mortals in a
huddle and then they’d start lighting and it would come on and
they’d be bigger than Godzilla for a couple of crazy, huge hooks;
then sloppy amateurs again, then birUP: Killers on the Skyline, the
biggest sluggers of all time.

The crowd started booing, so the promoter threw in
the towel on his moose, who was glad, and they got out of the ring
and everyone just watched the screen. A second or two of faraway
light like heat lightning kept hitting it, notching up the noise with
every moon—like vision; the audience a bunch of primitives getting
giddy because they can’t figure out the television, don’t know
whether to watch the fantastic little men in it or to watch it,
weirded out by the promise of the spectacle but also by this queer
satellite light or whatever pouring a faraway world into this hot,
smoky gym.

A flash of something real: Ali! and cheers go up.
Coppery and gliding, done up in white shoe tassels, eyes bright as a
squirrel’s, dancing like skip-to-the-music. Those tassels whipping
around, wrapping and unwrapping, cracking like whips,
violent
-looking
things, snapping and fibrous and lashing his solid legs. You can’t
hear yourself.

And Joe!
Louder
cheers. He chugs in wearing
pedal pushers, big green paisley bloomers, already snot-daubing, a
million hunkering little ducks and hooks in the perfect rhythm of the
taut rope, buoy down and buoy up, and
hinh
and
hinh
,
Joe’s got the sound going already.

You know what he is?" I say.

"Who?"

"He’s a renascent smart ass."

Taurus looked at me.

"But now Joe," I said. "There is
business
in Joe." I had him smiling.

A rumor comes by that Joe’s family is in the gym
and people are looking for them, but fat chance of that because
there’s every dude with a wallet between Denmark and Olar in the
joint, pimps and kers and city
muh-fuh
gentlemen in colorful
undershirts, and country cane pole ones ln flannel shirts, but Taurus
is looking at one bunch up top I decide might as well be them. There
are three or four heavyset kind-of-old ladies in Cossack hats like
fur bowls on their heads—probably their Sunday rigs. And behind
them stand some men a blt younger and thin-looking in cigar-brown
suits with their white shirts very bright, and dark, skinny ties.
Their faces are dark and narrow too. Overall they look a bit unsure
about things, like it’s church.

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—the 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.