A Woman Named Drown

by Padgett Powell

  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’ll 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 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 ’era 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 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 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.

  WE 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.

  Cars from Pennsylvania headed south could blow even Mary off the road. Blacks hauling scrap cardboard or cans tooled all over the state at 30, tops. Teenagers in 4 x 4 trucks with tires so large deer could run under the trucks hummed by. And some folks had not so much an idea of what to do as slightly less ignorance about what to do than we did; Florida bars are alive in the mornings. I felt we wrote the book on having a clean slate of purpose.

  We spent a day in the town of Branford. The famous Suwannee slugged by in a slow roll to the Gulf, the dark, heavy water cut deep into limestone banks forming moonish, pocked bluffs.

  We took a room in a place called Hotel that had no desk, no desk clerk, no keys, no locks on doors. Rooms were open for a kind of self-registering. The procedure was to sleep and pay later.

  The rooms had screen doors in use, the solid doors behind them left open. White towels were suspended at eye level inside the screen doors for privacy. The door locks were hook latches. A bulb from the ceiling lit the room, controlled by a string to the headboard. The wallpaper had long, rust-colored water stains.

  We could hear the other roomers grunt and groan and shuffle around, and one of them fell hard in the night. The mattress was very high on old springs, and we swayed back and forth if either of us turned, rolled together to the soft middle. Mary looked beautiful coming out of the community bathroom with her shiny-washed face early in the morning. We left three dollars on the bed.

  We crossed the silver-colored iron bridge over the Suwannee, heading out of town with two large steaming coffees. The river was fogged in: a white, chilled valley.

  In odd, hilled towns we found retired whites coming and going around pharmacies that still had soda fountains, and outside these towns, coming and going in school buses, migrants working orange groves. We walked into groves to watch the picking. We were never questioned. We may have looked like a welfare team, reporters, a landed woman and her heir, I do not know. We would look at the workers from the edge of the action; the workers at us from cherry pickers, trucks, pallets of fruit. Mary, wearing a sweater cape-style, would walk on after a spell, as if the operations were satisfactory. I followed, a young man pulled for these inspections from a golf course.

  We drank screwdrivers for two days after the first of these visits, toasting the plight of the poor, and then we could not stand them anymore and went back to good, sour tonics.

  In one grove we walked up on a hognose snake. I surprised Mary by picking it up in the middle of its cobra act. I showed her the snake’s small upturned nose for shoveling out toads from their shallow beds. She stood about ten feet away—eight feet too far to see the nose architecture—and said, “Fascinating.”

  “I was a fool for snakes once,” I said. Mary looked at me as if I’d said the most outlandish thing a man in a golf suit holding a snake can say to a woman pretending to survey her citrus millions. I put down the hognose, and he instantly performed his death act. I did not bother to explain.

  Somehow we wound up in a hotel bar cuts above our roadhouse tastes, a well-thought-of old place a little north of Deerfield Beach. By 11:30 someone at the hotel had decided we were looking for work there, and we were found uniforms—Mary’s a chambermaid affair, mine butler—before the lunch rush. It was a Reuben and tongue crowd. I proclaimed myself no waiter, and the same someone who’d assumed we wanted work said, “No problem.” I was told to stand against a wall with a green towel over my arm.

  Carlisle: Mizress Drown to St. Louis, she say for an unpacific number of weeks. We had the sheets already in the barns. Say she would ax that good Reynold buyer to look it before market and inside bid and we’d do fine. We did. That’s all I got to say. All I know.

  And that was Carlisle’s total statement in the trial attempting to implicate him in the mulatto-child drowning. A cool fellow. Then his benign and likable cockiness, smoking cigars all over town with his mistress Drown delivering their alleged progeny in St. Louis. I stood against the wall with the green towel on my arm realizing that Carlisle, too, knew how to capitalize on liability, and watched Mary, nearly fluorescent, play the part of a waitress in Florida.

  I overheard a table, apparently an employer selling a new applicant on a position with the firm: “All our people are key people. We access you right away to in-house and can interface you after security with online for larger work. Compensation packages are just super. And our reputation is one of just super as far as fairness to everyone.”

  Employee: “My title would be …?”

  Boss: “Software Specialist. Another?”

  Boss orders them more double martinis.

  Mary and I leave in late afternoon, walk a fishing pier, and study all the bad luck. It is a spectacular sight to see a school of pompano streak through a disarray of baited lines without touching one: the fishermen standing up, the yellow flares of the fishtails sharp as knives slicing through the lines, the fishermen sitting down.

  My friend Tom is part of the world which concerns itself with hot and cold armadillos, and I am not. How did this happen? We were in the same program, the same office, taught the same undergraduates the same chemistry. We appreciated the same scientists. Then he went to Oak Ridge and I went to Bilbo’s.

  When we pass armadillos, I remark to Mary, “That one looked hot,” “That one was cold,” and she has no idea what I’m talking about, and does not want to know. H
er hair blows madly, whipped thin as cotton candy by the wind.

  We are somewhere, now, between social sets: we have done pool halls, open-air bars behind gas stations, and club-sandwich beach clubs. We are presently in a luncheonette vein. Nothing declared, no policy: it is just that two days ago we quit the hotel jobs and have been eating $1.89 lunches in dime stores, served by large, sweaty women who are not unhappy.

  Today I have passed another test. It happened that we took a booth next to four hefty women. Mary had her back to them; I faced them, looking over her shoulder. Neither of us took any note—studying the proposition of meat loaf against stuffed pepper—until a trim man with a cane approached them and one of the women said, “The Avon man cometh.” She then gave him a playful sock in the arm, and he gave them all a devious smile, sat down, and ordered some coffee. I saw all this, Mary did not, but it was clear to me she heard it: her head was up in a fixed, listening pose, her eyes bright.

  The trim man sipped his coffee elegantly and said without self-pity, “I was in Pampers for two months.” The women issued noises of mild condolence. “Wearing a diaper is not all bad,” the man said, a gleam in his eye. The women seemed satisfied by this remark: they seemed to have an immense respect for him.

  One of the women suddenly said, “It poured down rain right in the mall parking lot. Before I got inside I was sopping wet, so I went into May Cohen’s. They had these blouses for three dollars on a table? I said, I’ll take it and change and wear it. The one I was wearing was stuck, you know, to my bra—” She paused, and the women looked at the man for a moment, during which he did not move or look directly at any woman.

  “Anyway,” the woman picked up, “they were marked down from twenty-three dollars and I thought I had me a buy.”

  Another woman felt the material of her sleeve.

  “That’s the one?” a third woman asked.

  “Yes, honey, that’s why I’m telling you this.” The remaining two women felt the material.