A Woman Named Drown

by Padgett Powell

  I could not even figure, while I ate it, where the bologna we had for lunch came from. The meat may have been in the chest freezer that Bonaparte froze his crabs in. I never looked in it, because the one time I thought to, it was slept upon by a placid cat with one dusty eyeball goggling out, actually touching the rusty top of the freezer. I saw no cause to wake him. You don’t disturb a cat like that to see bologna.

  Performing my silent duties as valet to the nearly hypothetical customer, I got to feeling that while Wallace might be set up for the next dart of oppression, I was not, and I hardly saw how my not scaring a couple of couples before they had two beers each could possibly equal my consuming nearly as much bologna as Bonaparte—he was voracious—and I decided to get out before the next dark dart struck. In fact, it occurred to me that I had been it—the next dart—when I arrived. And now we all awaited the next profitless windfall. These were the events that Bonaparte tracked, perhaps, with his head cockings and whistlings and St. Vitusing out under the broken green-shaded light at the end of the dock.

  “Wallace, write me a check for fifteen hundred dollars and I’ll give you one for two thousand and you can get him a boat. I’m going.”

  She turned to me, sucking the finger she burned turning the rising mounds of bologna. Bonaparte did not like punctures. “What?”

  “Sambo rumbles.”

  “Kiss my ass.”

  She turned back to the stove. I got my grocery bag of Stump’s duds and left, passing Bonaparte in the marsh checking his crab traps.

  At the end of the white, graded road where I’d gotten off the bus, nothing had changed, which somehow surprised me. I expected to see even the same bus come barreling down on me from the same direction I had ridden it. I was stunned to be standing where I had stood, and exactly as I had stood before, except for the passage of time at the camp, as if I were a boat sunk to my nose and bailing myself out with all the efficacy of Bonaparte up to his chin. You can feel odd standing in a sudden swarm of deerflies—having just thrown darts for a month with a woman you’ve left with her retarded kid—rippling sawgrass as far as the eye can see, razory salty wheat.

  Air brakes caught me dreaming. Before me was the same bus, the same driver. I got on. He smiled at me as if I were a traveling salesman returning from a joke. I offered a hundred-dollar bill for the fare and took the smirk off his face.

  “Napoleon musta got one dry,” he said, expecting me to share with him the lunacy of my days at the camp. I did not. I heard a faint, shrill whistle from behind the bus as we were getting going. Wallace was nailing up the HELP WANTED sign and Bonaparte was whistling and listening vigorously. Then, from too far to tell for sure, I swear he dropped trou and mooned the bus. The driver was looking in his side mirror, but his expression gave no clue.

  In Naples I got heroic. I paid for Sears’ top-of-the-line johnboat and had it delivered. And I got it in my head to go home.

  HOW SO NUTTY A notion took hold of me I can only guess. Throwing darts through Pine-Sol fumes or reading amateur playscripts for a living sets you up for a broadsiding by any crack-brained thing that comes along remotely redolent of the practical or normal or responsible, I suppose. And so I decided to go home, and I also decided to impress the bus driver by writing as we flew up the backside of Florida. I acquired another notebook from a newsstand in a bus station, and I carried it past the driver with a processional gravity, as if I were a priest. I am still in a kind of cold war with the bus driver.

  I have written on a wire table, in a Mercury, at an ammoniac fish camp, and now on a Big Red bus out of Naples, Florida, barreling up the murky coast of Florida, going to see my old man. He and my mother live in Lafayette in a mansion. There will be liquor, and insults regarding my not taking over the oil-field-supply business.

  It is impossible to believe that whatever Mary trained me for, or whatever I sought the day I broke rank, is coming to a visit with my old man. Nothing is less agreeable.

  I’d better rethink this whole business. I’m now in the position, after all, of missing connections. It is easy to stop in Tallahassee, take too long walking to see the capitol dome, miss the bus for Mobile, and take the one for Quitman.

  Show up in Quitman and start from there. Nothing is easier, or harder, than that.

  My second day a-bus. Certain things are becoming clear. At 10:30 this morning in Chipley, Florida, I entered a Suwannee Swifty and bought a red T-shirt, a large Big Red soda water, and resumed my seat directly over the bus-side exhortation to GO BIG RED. This theater made me the envy of two children who got on the bus, to whom I gave the soft drink. It worked: I “became someone” through a maneuver of artificial staging. I need more funky shirts, more improbable women, more nerve. We head south, to the Gulf, non-express.

  Carrabelle flies by in a town-sized convection current.

  The red shirt stinks of cheap dye.

  The bus glides.

  The girl who got on at Niceville I tell I’m a songwriter, and my new song, “I’m Happy to Be the One That’s Mostly on Top of You,” I’m going to dedicate to her.

  “Say whut?”

  The bus has taken an unexpected stop—for a flat, being attended to now by a Montgomery Ward truck—in Panacea. I enter Eastside Beverage. A white man is saying to a black named Augusta (from his work-shirt embroidery), “He is a nice snake.” Augusta says, “Don’t start on me that shit.” “I’ll show you,” the proprietor says, heading for the back. Augusta gets off his stool, ready to run, full of mock fear and a little true fear.

  The proprietor returns with a cigar box, opens it: a boxful of snapshots.

  “Oh,” Augusta says. “All right.”

  In a photo the white man holds a large diamond-back in one smooth loop between its head and tail. The mouth is open, slack. “We enjoyed each other,” the proprietor says. Augusta looks at him with quick, hard, mock disapproval and some real disapproval. Apparently the proprietor is seeking to have Augusta believe the snake was alive and his pet.

  “That’s a dead snake,” I say.

  “Yeah, he died.”

  “No, he’s dead right there.”

  The proprietor does some sizing up of me. I get two quarts of beer I do not want, to remain casual and fluid.

  “That snake was dead before you ever got near it.”

  Augusta studies the picture.

  “These two quarts of beer are for Augusta, a man who knows bullshit.”

  Augusta says, “That I do.” He looks at the proprietor in a way designed, however, to let him know he thinks I’m crazy.

  I’m on the bus. I’ve hit on something. I may be nuts, feebleminded, but I’ve run agreeably aground on something.

  When my degree at Tennessee is conferred or not, when James has forgotten my room of stuff, the carp my symbolic lock, Ebert his basketball, Camel Tent the collegiate new girl, Mary our quaint ride, Wallace my kiss-ass leave, I will be remembered along here as the guy who said Floyd Drowdy’s alleged pet rattlesnake was a dead fake, and Augusta will take less shit and do less jiving around that rotten-tooth white simp than before, and every day he walks in there and says, Let me have a look at that pet, the role I played will continue to be remembered.

  We get back up out of this coast-run hernia and head true west—on the same road Mary and I took, I think, U.S. 90—we stop at a gas station. I’m amazed: it’s the one where Mary and I stopped, behind which Bobby Cherry and the geezers talked of owls. I look behind it. Everybody’s there. I wave. They look at me. Then a look of recognition. Cherry is the first to disacknowledge this, by looking down at his own beer, so I sit at his table, where I sat before.

  “Bobby.”

  “Sport.”

  After a beer, in utter silence, I lean over to him. “Are you the kind of guy does what he says he’s going to do?”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Get him a beer.” Bobby Cherry points to me. A geezer in an apron goes to the cooler.

  “I take it tha
t’s important, still. The word.”

  “Damn straight.”

  “And you’re that kind.”

  “Damn straight.”

  “Good.”

  Bobby Cherry’s getting concerned. “Why is it good?” he says.

  “I want you to be the kind of guy you say you are.”

  “You don’t think I am?”

  “Didn’t say that.”

  “I better get in my truck before I do something I regret.”

  “Get in your truck.”

  He does. Easy as that.

  In a dime store in Milton, Florida, I tell the clerk, “I don’t think I’m a Communist.”

  She passes my items past her: a balsa glider in a flat pack, tube socks, a tin box of split shot.

  “I know you’re not a Communist,” she says. “I wish it would rain.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I know you do. It’s a shame we undid the Indians,” I say. “They had those rain dances. Marched about a million of them right by here on the way to Oklahoma, too.”

  “Nope,” she says, sacking my airplane, socks, shot.

  “No?”

  “Trucked ’em. Wouldn’t let ’em touch the ground.”

  “Shame.”

  “Pity.”

  “We are bad.”

  She looks at me. I am testing her now.

  “We are bad,” I say again. “You have hundreds of rubber buffalo and Indians in here for sale.” Perhaps she will think I’m a Communist, after all.

  It is the old kind of dime store: brass nails are worn up through the pine floors, large white opaque global lights hang from the ceiling. Nothing of any value can be seen on the shelves, in the bins. Yet several poor-looking women feel things, load them, buy them—orange plastic toys, nylon hose, clothes pins, perfume. The soda fountain is intact, closed. No public-address voice will ever exhort shoppers to pay attention to anything in here. No yellow light will be wheeled around to sale zones. As a consequence, everyone pays attention to everything, regards everything as a sale item. I have narrowly avoided purchasing a menagerie of small rubber monsters, after feeling them for minutes, watching for the bus driver, who I think has started nipping. He is clever. He disappears for a few minutes at these endless country stops, where there is rarely a formal bus station. I believe he would leave me if he could. Our cold war is strong.

  I have begun distributing gifts to children on the bus, for which he doubtless thinks me a pederast. I get back on and whisper to the driver, “I’m an existentialist, pure and simple.” He says nothing.

  In Fairhope I follow him, catch him in the men’s room pulling on a half pint of Seagram’s. “You’re an existentialist, too,” I say, washing up.

  “I’m a drunk, kid.” He says this with no emphasis—no confession, no self-pity. I offer to shake hands. We have a good, firm, countryman’s shake.

  “When the hell is this ride over?”

  “Mobile.”

  “Not New Orleans?”

  “Not me.”

  “It’s been a good one.”

  He is taking another tight-lipped shot, which he sucks in with a teeth-baring grimace. He cants the bottle to me. I roll a long slug in, open-throated, careful not to lip his bottle. We exit together, I get the door and he touches my shoulder in return.

  It has been a good bus ride. Now the driver and I are on even terms: I am above the common passenger, he is lower than ship’s captain. In Mobile, end of the line, we run into each other at the same run-down hotel where he stays regularly. “Lot of Greek in this town,” he says in the lobby. He is out of uniform. In a flowered shirt, he suddenly looks seedy, dangerous.

  “Are you Greek?” I ask.

  “Hell no.” He laughs. “I eat Greek. Plenty Greek to eat here.”

  We wind up in the Athens Bar & Grill, where a woman in green chiffon is trying to smother seated gentlemen with her breasts while undulating her fatty navel at them. After a couple of bottles of retsina, we eat something. The dancing gets wilder. Fatima-Helen retires and middle-aged Greek men take over. They make mime breasts, sculpt them out of air, and tease one another with them. They hunch one another. One falls on his knees, miming sucking his partner.

  “Shall we have more turpentine?” I ask.

  “I’ve had enough.”

  “You must not be Greek.”

  “I’m normal. I drive that bus twelve years. My wife has cancer. My son works for the highway department. My wife will die.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “They’re burning her now. They’re in that stage. This is not a joke. She stays hot.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  We watch the show, the men dancing, their own wives watching them perform these suggestions.

  I suddenly know I am going back to Knoxville.

  “These Greeks are sports, aren’t they?” I say.

  He—the driver, we have not exchanged names—shakes his head, agreeably, sadly, gets up to go.

  In the hotel corridor the next morning I pass two black women eating bagels. They are in custodial blues, sitting heavily in a supply room, watching a fire-alarm light blinking on the wall.

  “Is the building afire?” I ask.

  One of the women says, “The buzzer ain’t gone off.”

  We look at the light, blinking regularly, fast. “I thought it smelled like fire in here last night,” I say. “It stank.”

  “Yes, it did,” the second woman says. She is farther into the janitor’s closet, not eating. She has a bagel with a neatly applied quarter inch of butter troweled onto it. It is as if she will not begin eating until the message carried by the blinking light is understood.

  “Well,” I say, “I’m checking out.”

  They laugh, nodding.

  “I love you,” I say to them.

  The second one, with the ready bagel, says, “You say that.”

  “I say that.”

  The first woman looks at me, looks away.

  It seems to me that people are ready to hear things never heard before so long as they are not frightened for their physical safety or worried that listening may cost them money. This is an untestable hypothesis, and I don’t know that I want to test it now that I have formed the hypothesis so neatly. But I believe I gave it a fair test for a few days, and proved it sufficiently well for a failed scientist. People are hungry for new utterance. Does the reaction series of life include new utterance in its function?

  Can Mary be said to have shown me this by assuming roles and living them? Was Bonaparte receiving and sending wavelengths so novel no one in his right mind could pick up on them?

  IN THE CAFETERIA OF the bus station I saw my driver again, dressed for the road, looking invisible and harmless, in his blue regulation suit. He poured a saucerful of coffee back into his cup, the saucer shaking at a frequency so high and an amplitude so low that anyone unconscious of wave theory would not have seen it shake. His whole attitude suggested a man holding his breath. I joined him.

  “Back to Florida?” I asked him.

  “Shoot. A run north. Little-town run. From Decatur over to Jackson.”

  “From where?”

  “Decatur.”

  “I know someone there.”

  I got up to get us more coffee and to check behind the counter for Rod Serling: crackerjack nuke-whiz Tom lived in Decatur, Alabama. The plottable slope of fate defining my errant life was running straight to Tom.

  “I know someone there I’d like to see.”

  “Well, come on. I’ll take you there.” He said this as if he meant in his own car, at his own expense, and he sort of did. He told me to meet him in seventeen minutes three blocks down the street and he’d pick me up.

  “Sync up,” he said, exposing his wristwatch in a flourish of his uniformed arm. We matched our watches like spies. All of this was to save me a six-dollar ticket.

  “I fucked some turkeys there when I was a kid,” he said.

  “You what?”
/>   “Fucked turkeys.”

  “Fucked turkeys?”

  “Yeah. I was staying with my cousin and he asked if I wanted to fuck something, so I said sure, and he showed me these turkeys he said his father didn’t want, and we fucked them.”

  “What do you mean, didn’t want?”

  “Well, it kills ’em, you know.”

  “Kills ’em.”

  “Kills hell out of ’em, actually.” He grinned a not altogether ashamed grin.

  “Only my uncle did want them. Beat the hell out of us.”

  In our remaining time he gave me a short course in bestiality. Cows one does barefoot, holding the Achilles tendon with the big toe. Sheep with their hind legs in your Wellies.

  “Dogs?”

  “Never fucked a dog.”

  This seemed an oversight to me.

  “Did fuck some bass once.”

  I looked at him. Was he on to the theory of new utterance himself? Was he just doing some Sweetlips pygmy on me? I thought maybe he was not. He was too somber at some level to be kidding.

  “Bass,” I said. “How in hell do you fuck bass?”

  “In the”—he pointed down his throat—“the little muscle thing there.” He meant the fluted, sphincterlike throat, and it had an aptness so thorough I did not doubt him. I was talking to a sad, alcoholic bus driver who had fucked bass as a kid. I was talking to a natural in the world of folk who can celebrate their liabilities, carry their failures.

  “I’ve got a friend up in Decatur who hunts armadillos for radiation exposure,” I said. “Maybe you can—”