McCrae nodded sharply, once. He leaned forward on his cane. "So I had to prove 'em I could see good enough out there to name names. So I said, Come on tonight to a spot I know and bring me a good.22 rifle."
"And they did."
"They did. And we got there, and I knew there was at least twenty-five squinch owls in them trees there. I asked them if they saw any birds in them trees. No, they didn't. I told them to clear the ground under the trees and to look for the birds up close when they was under."
"And they did."
"They did so, yessir."
"So you then picked off twenty-five invisible screech owls."
"Not so fast. Twenty-three."
Here, Tush-hog looked at me with a little sign of mischief.
"I shot five times and I told them to go get them five birds. They lay 'em out there."
"At the feet of the brass."
"Lay 'em out and counted 'em and I shot five more-kicke kicke kicke kicke kicke! Like that."
"That's ten."
"They was all just standing there and I wasn't sure they believed me yet. There was. . Where was I?"
"Ten birds down, fifteen to go."
"Not so fast. Thirteen. I can see better in the dark than most in the day." Tush-hog put his face in his hands.
We waited. Mary's table was laughing at something hilarious of their own making.
"So I shot thirteen more and let them other two stay. They couldn't see 'em anyway, so why not? Conservation," he said gravely, "that's the thing now."
"You won the case," Tush-hog said.
"Boy confessed when he seen me shoot them squinch owls. Started blubbering about like a diaper gal."
Tush-hog looked me over. During the story I had noticed an old Coke box on galvanized pipe legs with iced beer in it, and I got up and got us three beers.
"How do you pay for these?"
"You don't," Tush-hog said. "It's a club."
McCrae snapped his beer open and went for it by leaning forward to meet it on the table.
"Bobby Cherry," Tush-hog said, swinging his hand over our beers, and he tried to crush my hand, but wearing canary Ban-Lon got me ready for him, and he did not crush me. I toasted McCrae and the screech owls.
Mary got up, sailed over to us; Bobby Cherry stood up, I didn't. "Handsome," she said, "you ready to go?"
"Yes, ma'am," I said. I stood up and tucked in my shirt. If there's anything dorkier than a man wearing a yellow golf suit behind a filling station with a bunch of the boys in their jeans and pearl-button shirts, I suppose it's a man wearing a yellow golf suit with the Ban-Lon shirt tucked in and the pants drawn up high showing a lot of sock. This was Mary's method; she effected a little drama under the oak by charming the men and then leaving with the fruit she called handsome, and it was my job to look even more geeky to further tweak them. She had done something of the opposite with me in front of Hoop.
The car was still where Mary had slung it. She paid the man in the metal chair, fired up, and we were off in a cloud of rocks and pop tops. I picked up the playscript.
[MRS. TAYLOR flings open garage doors. JASMINE crosses her arms, juts her jaw at MRS. TAYLOR. SUITOR holds his nose and his ears, and moves about garage as if looking for clean air to gasp]
* * *
I was finding it hard to hold in mind the hypothesis of these days, if hypothesis is not too ludicrously grand a term for my reaction-series theory of life. It occurred fit to me that untenability is contained in the nature of the investigation; these days, these characters, have at their center no center, no towardness. I'm not putting this well. I mean; Mary is never Mary.
And the fools I've been meeting are not consciously themselves. And they are happy. This is just beginning to come together for me, and I'll leave it in this rawest form. Data: Mary finds insupportable the awful singular role of Stump's widow; she becomes Drown, Mrs. Taylor, boozist, lover, teaser of roadside redneck. Friedeman found insupportable the awful earnest singular path to scientific truth; he saves the damned from hell, on the side, with Baptist hysterics. These are the brainy ones. Those less burdened are capable of distracting themselves from artificial singularity without trying: Sweetlips, chronicler of pygmy, believes less in the importance of himself than in that of the tall tale for its own sake; Hazel and Bruce similarly pursue not the betterment of themselves so much as the betterment of their record. And the true fools I've encountered are boring in on themselves with central, self-important purpose: the Orphan. Hoop. And my friend Tom, I think, despite his cartoonish surface, somewhere deep took things too seriously and today sounds as if he is not happy. What to make of this? Don't know. Where does, say, Dr. Eminence in Love with Polanski fit in? She is a function of ambition and purpose plotted against achievement and I think will wind up unhappy. Ebert, robbed of central seriousness by racial predicament, will wind up scatterbrained and scatterhearted enough to be happy. James, the factotum, has already comprehended the beauty of failure, the glory of the fancy end run around importance. Does this make sense? Probably it does not. These are lab notes of life by dilettante, not Nobel remarks.
These terms are not right-singularity, towardness, centrality of purpose, self-importance. I am not on it yet. Perhaps I am not citing all the data points. The Veteran: high singularity of purpose-to locate the dead nigger-but that center is not his by election; it is more correctly his by choice of the United States government, agent par excellence of self-important aggrandizement. The Veteran himself we can suspect of having been once not a fool. Am I talking about a quality of oneness of enterprise, one-faceted living?
A simple laid-back vs. square orientation? It seems better expressed somehow else, yet I will confess that the matter does in some senses appear to be one of terms like these. And it may be that the successful operators in this scattered mode are examples simply of f lassitude and want of ambition. Still, I want to dignify the downward with another parameter: Are they capitalizing upon liabilities while the others are insisting on investing in assets only? Mary seems able to accept a loss with a victory; Friedeman surely paid for pausing in his career to ponder salvation and damnation; but my own old man preaches pure profit until blue in the face, and I have added to his congestion by simple indifference, which indifference registers for him as aggressive courting of another Depression. Perhaps it is indifference which the true fools lack. I cannot say. I will continue to record.
We did towns. Quincy, Panacea, Sopchoppy, Carrabelle, Blountstown-the best town names in the world. We even tried to take a tour of Chattahoochee, the largest state asylum. We'd try something like that and never think of something like Disney World. It became perfectly and agreeably clear that neither of us had any idea what to do. We watched folk who did have ideas.
Cars from Pennsylvania headed south could blow even Mary off the road. Blacks hauling scrap cardboard or cans tooled all over the state at go, tops. Teenagers in 4X4 trucks with tires so large deer could run under the trucks hummed by. And some folks had not so much an idea of what to do as slightly less ignorance about what to do than we did; Florida bars are alive in the mornings. I felt we wrote the book on having a clean slate of purpose.
We spent a day in the town of Branford. The famous Suwannee slugged by in a slow roll to the Gulf, the dark, heavy water cut deep into limestone banks forming moonish, pocked bluffs.
We took a room in a place called Hotel that had no desk, no desk clerk, no keys, no locks on doors. Rooms were open for a kind of self-registering. The procedure was to sleep and pay later.