A Woman Named Drown - Padgett Powell by Padgett Powell

Author:Padgett Powell [Powell, Padgett]
Format: epub
Published: 2011-07-13T00:57:44.785540+00:00

We are riding again, Mercury tearing the highway air out of itself. Mary's looking fine in a T-shirt. I'm in one, too. We're up to some kind of redneck act, it seems.

At an interstate picnic rest area, we saw an alligator eating golf balls. A woman was opening the door of an RV and tossing out one golf ball at a time to the alligator. I stood there and watched in my Stump suit. Between tosses a second woman came out of nowhere and started reading me the riot act about endangered species and federal animal-welfare acts and I helplessly protested. She would not believe I had nothing to do with the feeding. "Watch that trailer," I told her. Nothing happened.

I knocked on the RV. A man opened the door. A hairy gut hung out, which forced his T-shirt to ride up to his chest. "Forget it, pal," he said.

"Forget what?"

"Whatever crap you are." He slammed the door.

I walked back to Mrs. Audubon. "See?" I said.

"I already saw, just like I said," she said.

I return to the consummate logic of flying in the Mercury, mixing drinks in midair, taking life's lab notes. There is no misunderstanding like that golfball business between the back seat and front. Mary adjusts the rearview mirror until our eyes meet; she's ordering a light tonic with a lot of lime. She stops the car and freshens up in a rest room, comes out with new lipstick and her hair brushed back: the four-o'clock double, no lime. She drives. I serve drinks to the driver.

About this time I join her in the front, and until dark we are at our touristy best, watching Florida's sandy glare become Florida's neon evening. One of us comes up with something to say, usually by gesture alone, about Chico's Monkey Emporium, Floyd's Go-Cart Royale, a Hep-Ur-Sef station, the Daytona Pamplona (a Cuban disco, we think). A club advertising music by Maurice and the Fucking Parrots is too much: Mary takes her foot off the accelerator as we pass it. We look at each other. The club's marquee actually proclaims;TONIGHT: MAURICE AND THE FUCKING PARROTS.

Maurice and the Fucking Parrots are the worst band you could assemble with human musicians, or parrot musicians, for that matter, and we dance for hours. We rest in the car, watching the clear skies darken, the crushed-shell parking lot begin to whiten with a light of its own, peaceful as the moon. The night is ruined so aggressively, so eagerly, so thoroughly by Maurice's horrible music that it is somehow made perfect.

We rescue ourselves FInally at two with the Mercury's powerful rumble and surge into the chilled highway air. Mary throws her head back and to the side, lips parted, silent actress awaiting a kiss. We stop on an undeveloped piece of A1A and walk into some low dunes with Stump's navy blankets.

"Balance the books tomorrow," she says. It is an odd note.

* * *

We got up the next morning to a changed world--to a new act, I might should say.

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