Free Edisto - Padgett Powell by Padgett Powell

citizen-scab, a bounty hunter for gunslingers
so small that they didn’t spend tax money on the sheriff to go get
them with. They weren’t gunslingers, though—bad-check slingers,
bad-language slingers. Mostly the baddest thing they committed, he
said, was bad judgment. He didn’t like it and said sometimes he let
the people go. All that does is delay things. The paper reverts to
the attorney’s office and doesn’t look too good on his service
record, and he said his attorneys knew from the cases he had found
that there was something fishy when he gave up and turned one back
in.
    So he’s out being Matt Dillon, chasing down
rottenteeth van people and gold-teeth Negroes descendent of
Oglethorpe convicts and slaves, and I’m in the front seat of the
bus like a bus rider emeritus. For a while there were jokes. "Hey,
Sim! Comone back heah. The air better." At home the sun
would be swung around and low, about ten feet up in the air. Its
angle was perfect for about two hours to fill up the house with
mirror light glaring up off the ocean, blinding upward through the
sliding doors onto the ceiling so that any shadows thrown were thrown
out the windows and you never saw them. It made it like a dollhouse
or a perfectly lit stage set. The wind kept whistling that peppery
noise against the house, little sand grains working their way through
somehow, tumbling in their little glassy bounce across the floors
like an eminent-domain march to the other side of the room, and
piling up on false Edens such as a throw rug or under the TV. So I’m
in there looking at the flash of ocean, moved by the heat in the
direction of the sand, shadowless and hot, quiet except for the
peppering which you quit hearing, wondering about things, touching
the wicker to make it squeak, the glass decanters and their little
tin bibs on chains telling you what kind of poison they hold, feeling
the drapes, which lift off the floor like old big rats are behind
every one of them, listening for a clue about something I can’t
even figure out what it’s about.
    And nothing happens. At a time like this you expect
some news, an event, maybe just some excitement. But it doesn’t
come. The sun swings on around and throws the set into the cool,
dusky aftertime of the studio or stage where everything had been
ready, lights and camera and player and no one to clap together two
striped barricades and simply yell, Action. Instead, the lights quit
and quiet and cool; dim dusk dawns on the regular old house, the
plain land sales office pagoda.
    "Sim!” Theenie would say if she caught me in
one of these conditions. "What ails you?"
    "Nothing."
    "Somethin’ ailin’ you."
    "Nothing."
    "Hmmp!” she would say, going about her
business. Or I could take the talkative route: "Nothing ever
happens, Theenie."
    "Say whah?" Very high.
    "I said, Nothing ever happens."
    "Hmmp!" she would say, going about her
business,
    One time I said: "I’m worried, Theenie?
    "What choo worrit about." Not a
question, a denial of my right or cause to worry, against the larger
monopoly of adult rights.
    "Puberty.” I looked at her to see if it
worked. She looked like a horse in a stall wondering whether to kick
a careless stable boy, eyes orbiting in quick I white slices like
quarter moons.
    "I’m worried about this thing they call
puberty."
    "You scudgin’ me. Why you wont to grind
me, Sim?" and she flopped all the ironing together, which would
have otherwise taken a half hour to fold up, and left, silent until
tomorrow, until a short trial during which I could not refer to the
question would secure my reprieve, and we could be jake again. If I
did it like that, a puberty question was just a souvenir in the
memory of her raising me up, but if I asked again, I was closer to a
hellion. She could tell people how sweet I was to have asked, but not
that she had to answer. It’s part race relations and part family
relations, there.
    So there in the upward glare of clinical Atlantic
radiation I