A Woman Named Drown - Padgett Powell Read Online Free

from his sitting position. "They don't pay me to lollygag half the day in the head," he said. "So I don't ." He
reminded me of the Veteran--I'll turn it off, then.
    I sat amazed at the synchronicity of these
things--pissing on floors, nuts, snakes everywhere, tents--and amazed
at how correct they
seemed, fitted together in a matter of hours with an overwhelming
sense of orchestration that seemed to satisfy whatever urge bade me
walk out of the laboratory. I felt fine, a fine idiot doing a fine
idiot job, listening to fine idiot patter.
    " The new girl's O.K.," Sweetlips said,
after a while, to the other man. "I been watching him. Don't
fuck with him or I'll kill you."
    The other guy said, "Right, Killer."
    When the shift ended, Sweetlips and the other guy
took me to a place called Bilbo's Bar, Gym & Grill. Inside, we
sat at a lunch counter on stools facing a boxing ring. We ordered
beer. Sweetlips said, "We come here to watch the niggers beat
the ever-living shit out of each other." He winked. He winked
with an exaggeration reminiscent of a cartoon wink, signifying what
irony I could not guess, because I took him at his word.
    Presently the other guy, whom Sweetlips called Roach,
said to me, "So tell us about the new girl."
    " The new girl doesn't know her ass from a hole
in the ground," I said.
    " That's exactly what I said the minute I saw
you," Sweetlips said. "Didn't I, Roach?"
    "No, you were talking about rattlesnake pussy."
    " You think that's a lie? Anybody'll tell you
that. The female has no rattlers. New girl, isn't that a fact?"
    I looked at Roach. He was indifferent to all of this.
    Sweetlips leaned over me to Roach. "The new
girl's all right. I repeat; Don't fuck with him or I'll kill you."
    Two blacks started sparring. Roach said, "Shut
up. This does me good."
    We watched the boxers work. One of the guys was as
solid as a live oak, and after a couple of rounds he came over to our
side of the ring and said to Roach, provoked by nothing I saw, "Fuck
you, too."
    " You going to take that?" Sweetlips said.
"I wouldn't."
    " Kill him, then."
    " I would."
    By my reckoning it would have taken an army of
Sweetlipses and Roaches to even pin the dude.
    " I'm as strong as that nigger," Sweetlips
said.
    " Jump him, then."
    " It wouldn't be fair."
    I came to understand, during my brief tenure at
Camel, that Sweetlips did two things, at all times tried to do two
things; he proffered preposterous lies, making everyone present
appear to believe them, and he boasted of his strength, which was
perhaps a subset enterprise of the lying. One morning he announced
that a pygmy rattlesnake had the dimensions of a short link of
country sausage, showing us how long and how big around with his
thumb and forefinger. On another occasion he claimed to have spotted
a pygmy deer. "A full-ant ten-point buck no higher than a beagle!" No one challenged him
on either pygmy, and he went on sewing, visibly more content.
    On the issue of his strength he was even more
hyperbolic. One morning he came in greasy, telling us he had on the
way to work stopped and pulled a woman's Ford engine out of her car.
"It saved her a garage charge."
    Roach responded to this one. "Bledsoe," he
said, "there's a string hanging out of your sleeve."
    Sweetlips looked at his T-shirt sleeves, finding no
string.
    "Oh," Roach said. "I'm sorry. It's
your arm."
    Sweetlips jumped up, knocking over a tumbler of piss.
" Whut! You don't think I'm strong! "
He ran to Roach's machine and grabbed it and tilted the entire
affair--Roach with it, the chair is connected--up about a foot off
the ground, until Roach said, It was not an idle feat--the machine
must have weighed three, four hundred pounds. Sweetlips's back, under
his tight T-shirt, clenched up into a set of knots that looked like a
bag of rocks and sticks.
    I could have kept going at Camel. All I had to do was
listen to Sweetlips and Roach do their camp and worry about Penny
Baker fingers. I set up an interesting routine. I went