A Woman Named Drown - Padgett Powell Read Online Free Page B

touched my glasses to make sure I still wore them
and said I didn't know.
    "You box, you see." Egret did the siss
thing again. "Bottsin cure the blind. Tell him, Shif. Siss ."
    " Boxing cure the blind," Shifty said.
"Look." He broke his eyes hard to one side, then back,
revealing red-veined, oystery eyeballs. He looked up, down, whirled
his eyes all around the sockets, following the motion with his
protruding green tongue. It occurred to me I had seen this
demonstration--on the sidewalk the day before, as Sweetlips and Roach
and I came in. He had presumably grabbed a passerby, attempting to
lure him in for eyesight correction.
    " Boxing exercise the eyes, see? You ought to box
for Shif. You sign wid anybody yet'?"
    He grabbed a napkin from a chrome box, pushing it to
me with a ballpoint pen.
    " What's this?"
    " Sign this, you with me. We get a true contract
when the time is right."
    "Let me wait on this one, Shif."
    "Don't wait until it's too
late. "
    He turned to Egret and pushed the napkin to him.
    " You. Sign again. And this time, no more goddamn
beer." Egret printed on the napkin with painstaking
concentration WILLIE EBERT.
    Shifty folded the napkin into his pocket and limped
off.
    " What's your name?" I asked.
    " Like I told. Egret."
    * * *
    My time boxing was without event. Ebert was not good
enough to teach or to hurt me, though I'll wager he was considerably
tougher in the long haul. He was finally mostly a clown, very gentle
in the center, and he was living in a tough, tough world. When
Stebbins saw us pawing each other he yelled, "Punk and white
punk. Punkpunk." It didn't bother me, but Ebert explained
something to me later.
    " When Frank call you punk, it's race. When he
call me punk, it's sex."
    I sat there, apparently failing to respond as he
would have liked.
    He suddenly offered, "Got two kids."
    " What?"
    " Two kids."
    " Who?"
    " Me."
    " You?" I figured him about eighteen.
    " Selfsame individual you see."
    All I had to go on was the race and sex thing. "They
black?"
    " Who?"
    " Your kids."
    " Dit."
    " All black?"
    " Dit."
    " All right. Nobody's white, except me, nobody's
queer."
    " Dit."
    " Except Stebbins."
    "Siss. I hope the Frog eat his ass."
    "You want a beer?"
    Ebert looked around. " This early?" It was about 7:30.
    " You better have one. Tomorrow I bust your ass."
    " Oh. He serous. Okayden. A Curs."
    When I left Bilbo's that morning I did not go to
Camel Tent. I walked back to do some waving with the actress. We'd
reached a peak of waving. We were, I figured, waved out.

         W e had
been waving now for nearly three weeks, and it was not the simple
acknowledging of passersby. From the start, from that first morning I
surprised her by going the wrong way, it seemed she had waved with a
forthright openness that suggested we were not, to her mind,
altogether strangers. It is unsettling to be acknowledged by a
stranger who appears to think himself familiar, of course, and in
this case, as I've said, the stranger was hailing me boldly in a
turquoise robe, holding a forty-foot spray of water on a half acre of
violently blooming color.
    I recall once being waved at by a man in drag from a
balcony window in Baton Rouge, and as I ignored him and kept walking,
he shouted loudly down, "Well, it's only hey !"
and shamed me. I gave him a weak, noncommittal wave that made him
laugh..
    The watering woman and I had fully explored the
dynamic of stranger-to-stranger waving, and it had developed its own
periodicity. I could have drawn up the elemental chart of waving. On
a Monday she'd give me a haggard little gesture from very near her
hip, where her free hand rested as she watered with the other, and
I'd return in kind a little thing with a finger or thumb from near my
pants pocket. By Wednesday she'd be offering more arm, more motion,
with loose-wristed familiarity and a smile. By Friday we were at a
quantum ledge of hand semaphore; she waved like a relative down at
the docks to greet the ocean liner I was on. It