Free Edisto - Padgett Powell by Padgett Powell Page B

like a bum’s nose?"
    "Well, no. But it was—I understand it gets
bigger—but it was dark and more wrinkly. Like whiskey drinkers’
faces if they’re really gone."
    "I see." He snifted. "Well, after your
bum’s nose comes in, you will need a girl. This is the only thing
to worry about. They will tell you you don’t need one and they will
tell the girls the same thing, so it can take longer to find one than
it should."
    He fixed me another volume-less drink, and him too.
    "So do this. There’s a kind of girl who won’t
listen to them, and you need to study them. How old are you?"
    "Twelve."
    He smiled. "Are there any special girls you
know?"
    "Diane Parker takes her clothes off for a
quarter. But I never went with them to see it. And a girl named
Andrea gave us the lowdown on the girls’ movie last year, and a
pamphlet they gave them about beginning to bleed. God, that’s
creepy—"
    "Okay. Not these girls themselves necessarily,
but see if you can get a line on their character traits and what
they’re like generally. Get to know them. Find one with some brains
when the time comes and use a balloon or use her ideas if she has
any."
    I considered this. We must have looked like a real
couple of cards, an ace and a joker maybe, sitting there in a
haint-painted shack on a whistling bluff on the nowhere coast of
Edisto, itself a speck on the Atlantic seaboard.
    "At the Grand," I said, "one of the
rubber machines says Sold for prevention of —ease only . What
does the scratchedout — ease mean?"
    "You’ll get the joke in time," he said.
"It was disease originally. Don’t worry about that either. It
comes or it doesn’t. Probably does. Don’t get anybody pregnant is
the other thing. When the time comes, if you don’t know what that
means, find out."
    "Gir1s get boys in trouble, you mean?"
    He said yes and smiled, and I don’t think knew
whether I was joking or not, but didn’t need to know. That’s the
thing I learned from him during those days: you can wait to know
something like waiting for a dream to surface in the morning, which
if you jump up and wonder hard you will never remember, but if you
just lie there and listen to the suck-pump chop of the surf and the
peppering and the palm thrashing and feel the rising glare of
Atlantic heat, you can remember all the things of the night. But if
you go around beating the world with questions like a reporter or
federal oral history junior sociologist number-two pencil electronic
keyout asshole, all the answers will go back into mystery like
fiddlers into pluff mud. You just sit down in the marsh and watch
mystery peek out and begin to nibble the air and saw and sing and run
from hole to hole with itself. Lie down and the fiddlers will come as
close to you as trained squirrels in a park. And how did he teach me
that? I don't know, but you don’t need a package of peanuts or
anything.
 
    A New Kind of Custody Junket Dawns
    About this time began a run of events. The first one
was so weird that I remember what shirt I was wearing. It was Friday,
and I came home on the bus (Taurus was out serving, I guess) and had
run up the steps before I saw both the Doctor’s and the
Progenitor’s cars, his a little crooked in the driveway. It was one
of those deals where you become an eavesdropper accidentally and have
to pick your moment to declare yourself so they won’t know what you
heard, or at least will think you didn’t hear the worst of it.
Through the screen I could make out their silhouettes like in a TV
interview of double agents or criminals or state witnesses where they
backlight and underexpose to protect the identity of the guilty and
sometimes they even woof out voices so they sound like speech-therapy
patients or retards or robots.
    "The hell I can’t," I heard him say.
    "Everson. I still don’t see what you’re so
worked—"
    "What’s so difficult? Every veterinarian with
an autopsy license is one thing, but I can go a lot further with—with
your bounty