A Woman Named Drown

by Padgett Powell

HOOP AND VIRGINIA WERE practice, it turns out, for Hazel and Bruce. Mary put a half gallon of gin in the car and handed me the keys. On the drive, out into an old suburb development, she said, “Sugar, these people are somewhat rough-cut.”

  “What’s rough?”

  “Hazel is a doll, for my money, but you might be startled.” I resolved not to be.

  We found a low, cinder-block, brown house with rotted turquoise eaves and a rusted-out screen porch. A woman I presumed Hazel swung open the screenless door to the porch and bent over a bit, squinting through black cat-eye glasses before rushing Mary, chortling and pumping elbows. Their embrace was a confused arrangement and an ongoing adjustment of Hazel’s cigarette and Old Milwaukee and slipping eyeglasses, and Mary’s gin and cut flowers and Honeyhowlonghasitbeens and Honeyhowgoodyoulooks. When introduced, Hazel looked at me and then said to Mary, “I see what you mean. You lucky dog. If I was twenty years younger …”

  In the house she sat us in the kitchen at a redwood table with benches. She put a tray of ice cubes and two jelly glasses on the table and sat down opposite us, still in a can’t-believe-how-good-you-look-long-it’s-been stream of talk, and Mary poured our drinks.

  A flushing noise introduced Bruce from the bathroom, and he came in, fiddling with his fly. When he saw us, he bent sharply over and zipped, then walked over to his place at the table, which was marked by another Old Milwaukee in a circle of water and an ashtray.

  Hazel stood up and kissed him, having to hold her glasses in place, and Bruce also had to restore his glasses high up onto his nose with his middle finger. He held them there while he bent down to a Styrofoam cooler on the floor and got two beers, then looked up at us and got two more, and Mary said, “We brought our own, thanks.”

  “I’d give my eyeteeth,” Hazel said, “if I could still drink hard stuff.”

  “Doctor told her it ’ud kill her,” Bruce said. Hazel kissed him again.

  The girls went into old times, which were privately hilarious, while Bruce and I watched each other drink. After about twenty minutes, old times had become current events, and they had nothing currently in common except the visit, so Bruce and I were acknowledged. Hazel turned to him with yet another smacky kiss misaligning their eyeglasses. These kisses seemed designed and sufficient to make up for centuries of neglect. She held her lips to his cheek while he held his glasses in place.

  “Do you know what this rascal did on our first date?” Hazel suddenly said. “He takes me to this bar outside town and says we’re going on to another one ten miles away, so I better go to the can.”

  “Seven miles,” Bruce said.

  “Yeah. So I go in, and there’s this nude poster of Burt Reynolds naked, right where you have to look when you sit down. And there’s a board over his pud.”

  “His what? I never heard you call it that.” Bruce sipped his Old Milwaukee, settling it back on the table in a circling motion.

  “You’re about only a foot from it, right in front of you,” Hazel said, “and the killer is, it’s big—the board is much bigger than it needs to be. I’m not moving that board, I say, and for a long time I don’t, and then I forgot and damned if I don’t. When I do, I can hear this roar go up in the bar.”

  Bruce adjusts his glasses, smiling.

  “The sonsofbitches have a red light wired up to the board which goes on when you lift it,” Hazel said. “Our first date.”

  “She comes out and they have it so the red light is still on, and everybody says together, How big is it? It was funny.”

  “And do you know what else was so funny, Mary?”

  We were laughing. “What?” Mary asked.

  “They time you.”

  “She had a good time. Forty seconds. The record’s five minutes on a girl that was sick first before she could look.”

  “Our first date! What a stunt. Come over here, honey,” Hazel said to Mary, patting the table. “I don’t ever get to see you.” When she got Mary seated, she took her hand and held it in both of hers and patted and held on to it on the table. Bruce got up and came to my side of the table. Mary was watching me.

  “Now listen to what I done to him on our second date,” Hazel said.

  “This was pretty good,” Bruce put in. I had the feeling they were their own full-time archivists, historians of Old Milwaukee moments, as much as they were anything else on earth. They were amazing. One side of Bruce’s face was a giant lipstick smudge from Hazel’s endless kisses—they were completely happy, completely happy about nothing.

  Hazel had picked up early on a thing Bruce said during the Burt Reynolds date, and she put it to good advantage on their second date. Bruce, when asked how it was going, was in the habit of saying, “I’m looking pretty good this year, don’t you think?” Hazel had him take them to visit a friend of hers, and during the normal early conversation the friend asked Bruce how he was.

  “He don’t say, I’m fine, like he ought to,” Hazel says. “He’s still cock of the walk from the damn red-light trick. He pipes right up, Well, Hazel here thinks I’m looking pretty good this year, how about you? And my friend says, I can’t tell, Bruce, I’m blind. It like to killed him. She is blind.”

  Hazel is laughing and Bruce is nodding with a kind of red-handed smile on. “He’s so full of himself he doesn’t even look at her! She’s waving her head around like Ray Charles and he don’t see it! Hav-A-Tampa Bruce!”

  “She calls me that because I’m from Tampa. She thinks it’s funny.” Bruce smiled what I was coming to consider his polite smile.

  “You ought to be flattered,” Hazel says. “Them things are big.” She roars.

  “You made a mistake that day, too,” Bruce now adds.

  “I sure did,” Hazel confesses, beginning to giggle, and again I think they are interested in the record more than in the events. They want to get these stories out right. Mary is giving me a bit of the old Mother Nature look, as from the Hoop show, and I realize these are not unlike afternoons.

  “A pretty good mistake,” Bruce confirms. Hazel nods.

  “A doozy,” she says.

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  “We went in this convenience store on the edge of town after the blind date—we call it Bruce’s blind date—and a girl I knew was working there. Well, I remembered her as being beautiful, and I saw her, and she smiled, and her teeth were gone. I said, God, honey, what happened to your teeth?”

  Here Bruce collapsed laughing, finally losing his glasses.

  “God, honey, I said, what happened to your teeth? She said, Nothing. I looked again and her teeth were there, but they were so dark you could barely see them. They were little stubs, all gunky and black.”

  “Like a bunch of sardines, or something,” Bruce managed to get out, and whether it was truly funny or if I’d succumbed to the power of the archive, it struck me as the funniest remark I’d ever heard.

  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 conspiratorially, 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 flood 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 fine, 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 lands 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. Mary’s 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 differnt 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.

  IN 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.