Free Edisto - Padgett Powell by Padgett Powell Page A

remain—before the Doctor comes in with a batch of
papers to grade, new bottle in a skin-tight paper sack twisted around
the neck. The breaking seal will suck a little air out of the
kitchen, like the hiccup of a baby, air that slips into the bottle
and hits the liquor and changes it like film or blood: blood, film,
liquor are never seen before their innocence is lost. Also in this
air-innocence class is rubbers, which didn’t get into the class for
a while because I didn’t know what they were. In the top drawer of
the Progenitor’s chest I found these gold-coin-like deals almost
like candy mints except, thank God, light enough to tip me off before
I tried to eat one. Then I thought they were amusement-park tokens or
pirate doubloons you buy drinks with in a resort-town bar or
something. Then I figured they were gambling chips from the Bahamas,
where they’d been on a trip. Gambling chips—I was close. Anyway,
the matter came up at school and somehow I learned what they were
for, if not exactly what they were, so in one of our first Big
Brother reunions after the Progenitor left, I advanced the line of
inquiry about rubbers. "They stop babies, okay, I got that much,
but how?"
    "Well," he said, "you put them on."
    "How?"
    "Well—" He fumbled in the air in front of
the steering wheel; we were in his car, engine running. He tucked the
fingers on one hand into the palm of the other. Suddenly he rested
his hands. "Like a sock."
    "Like a sock?"
    "Yessir,” he said, nodding, and very satisfied
about something. "Anything else you want to know?" Else?
    "No, sir.”
    "Sure?"
    "Yes, sir." He left out the juice part, the
good part, left me imagining your tallywhacker (the Doctor’s
favorite word for it) is some kind of electric eel or polyp stinger
you have to insulate with rubber. Nothing about it stopping the paste
of life. I have to learn about that at the back of the bus, where you
can learn all you need to know on earth. Brylcreem, they said, and
feels good. So. A sock stops hairdressing. One of the big
disappointments of my childhood, I tell you.
    But I had this talk with Taurus in the early days,
just to check him out further with the Boy Act.
    "I’m worried."
    He was carefully matching the thread lines of the
bottle to the lip of a drinking jar, and he poured a thin sheet of
whiskey into the jar, just covering the bottom. It was snifter
drinking without crystal or brandy. He swirled it more than he drank
it. In Theenie’s cabin it still smelled like a washed dog
sometimes. His nose hovered over the amber film in the glass.
    "Okay," he said. He was not the target that
Theenie was.
    "I’m worried about puberty."
    He smiled. "Don’t."
    "Why not?"
    "It’s too big."
    "What do you mean?"
    "Like nuclear war. Nothing to worry about."
    "It comes or it doesn’t?"
    "Yes. Except here, it’s coming. So there’s
less to worry about than nuclear war.”
    "There’s a lot of bad information floating
around," I said.
    "You’ll get through."
    "My father told me a rubber was like a sock."
    He pushed his lips together over the jar. "Well,
what’s wrong with that?"
    I stopped. He was scudgin’ me. "Well—because
it’s more like a balloon, if anything," I said, hoping I was
right.
    "Sock, balloon," he said, in that kind of
Jewish resigning whine they do on TV. "When the time comes, you
won’t blow it up, you won’t put it on your foot." He looked
at me. "I hope."
    "So there’s nothing to worry about?"
    He got up and prepared me one of these poverty
snifters and pushed it over the enamel table and sat back down.
    "Worry about this. You will need a girl. The
sooner it hits, the better."
    "It hits?"
    ""Well, no. It creeps up.”
    "Your sac gets ruddy like a bum’s nose,"
I said.
    "Where’d you hear that?"
    "I saw it. We got this guy down at the Y who
wouldn’t take off his bathing suit because he said he was older and
it took about three hundred of us, heads walloping banging lockers,
but we didit."
    "And his equipment looked