So I resolved to go home, passing the Jax Beer Brewery and discovering it converted to the Jackson Brewery Mall and selling, among other things, fiberglass pirogues and faux Izod shirts with the alligator replaced by tiny crayfish, and to collect my cousin Patricia.
Oh, Patricia Hod. You are thirty and firm and dazed of head, but you are all of that. You lay with me for a month under the scrutiny of my mother and did not run or whimper or rail or fret. You lay there like a man. I ran like a boy, but we are going to overlook all of that. That is to be overlooked. Overlook that. Overlook me. Look me over. Look at me, Patricia Hod. I come to you ruined and smiling and smart. You can do much much much worse than this, Patricia Hod. I can put my chinos on one leg at a time, like everybody else (though I cannot work for certain boys in Atlanta wearing them like everybody else), or I can jump into them like a fireman, or I can jump out of my chinos like a man on fire. I and my chinos are changeable, Patricia Hod.
Outside the Flamingo Bar & Grill it began to rain. The marquee was lit by ordinary incandescent lightbulbs, which stuck nakedly out of individual porcelain sockets. I wondered how many of them lit when the switch was thrown. It was a simple matter to replace the blown bulbs. A step-ladder, some bulbs, a gentleman sober enough to stand and deliver. The world was mine. The world is anybody’s if you will square off and hit it.
This is something I have learned, and I think I have learned it in time. I have learned it, I think, and continue to learn it, I think, from women.
23
I THOUGHT OF THE ways you approach the abandoned. It is not unlike the rabid: will they hide from you or charge? I thought the least advisable strategy would be weeping for forgiveness. At the other end of the spectrum of the untenable would be promising the abandoned forgiveness. Somewhere in the resonant middle ground was a posture of defiant culpability that offered restitution of the way it was before. I was not looking forward to this articulation before a woman who had drowned cats and set fires before subsiding into lost-love catatonia in London. On the other hand, and this was partly why Patricia Hod was looming so attractive, you could not imagine approaching an ingénue under these terms. She’d see the matter too clearly: you left. The End. You wanted a woman who saw your leaving as a matter of necessary and sophisticated contradiction: rose mole stipple upon a trout; oh, brindled cow. Oh, fall down. Then get up. You needed a Calamity Jane for these affairs, or Annie Oakley. Dale Evans was out. Dale would wait for Roy, and Roy, bless his heart, would never be short, late, wrong, impotent, drunk, or out of key. I will woo but I will not croon.
I seized the pay phone and called Patricia Hod’s house in Columbia. Her mother, my aunt who goes on such vicious toots that the attending alcoholics seek medical counsel for her, answered. “Well, well, Marster Simons.” This is an upcountry slur of the low country. “How do you do?”
“I do fine, Aunt Sasa. Is Patricia there?”
“I thought that might be what you’d ask. Have you ever seen Pat Boone? I can’t stand him.”
I heard a loud, shouted voice in the background: “DON’T SAY THAT! YOU JUST DON’T KNOW HIM WELL ENOUGH!”
My aunt, apparently responding to this, said, “What?”
And the voice said, somewhat less loud: “You just don’t know him well enough.”
“Who?” my aunt asked.
“Whoever you said you can’t stand,” the voice said.
“I said,” my aunt said, “I can’t stand Pat Boone.”
“Oh,” said the voice, which I’d now identified as my uncle’s. “I thought you meant someone you knew.”
“Jesus Christ Almighty,” my aunt said, returning her attention to the phone. “Patricia’s not here. She’s on a date.” My aunt zinged this in like an Amazon sharpshooter. It was her way of saying she had the whole story, the whole score, and had taken a position in it, apparently, not surprisingly on Patricia’s side. But this was complex: Patricia and I together was likely to be something she would, against the rest of the family excepting my mother, side with, so she would probably not render Patricia altogether unavailable to me. She would just tender some difficulty. “She’s out with a fellow named Johnny Ham,” she said, and I heard her take a drink. Then she whispered, “I can’t stand him.”
I started laughing and she did, too.
“Aunt Sasa,” I said. “Tell you what. Would you, ah, tell Patricia to meet me in Edisto?”
“In Edisto,” she said, with several kinds of false shock in her tone. What for? After you left her there? Why should she? Etc. I could only assume she knew the circumstances, but it was the kind of thing, also, where she might just be gratuitously saying “In Edisto?” In Africa? In Ohio? In the yard? Outside?
“At the house,” I said. “There is a key in the A/C compressor. I will be there in three days.”
My aunt said then, gravely, “I have never gotten a thing I wanted from this family.”
“I can’t stand it, either, Aunt Sasa.”
“I hope,” she said, taking another ice-clunking gulp of something, “you get what you want. Bye.”
I held that ambiguous phone in the air in the Flamingo Bar & Grill for a moment, wondering if it meant she’d tell Patricia or would not tell Patricia, and put it down finally, worried suddenly about the imaginary-conversation prohibition. I’d had a most real conversation, but no one would believe it.
24
JAKE’S LOOKED CLOSED, SO I did not stop. It would have been nice to lay in a trunkful of provisions against Patricia’s absence or presence — this was going to be a trek either way. The joint (Jake’s) looked abandoned in the way that only the truly bereft business can: the only difference between its countenance when closed and when doing business hand over fist is a padlock on the door. With his bank-vault door he didn’t need a padlock. Somewhere behind it Jake lived, either in the room behind and above the bar or in the house out back where his mother had lived. It was a shack covered in rolled linoleum brick siding, or possibly the stuff was composition asphalt; it had never occurred to me to feel it once I understood it wasn’t brick. Was there, or should there be, anything particularly telling about a people who would have wood houses look like brick and Cadillacs that look like giant June bugs? I trusted, prowling by Jake’s and easing into our road, that I weren’t going into racial mope. I had done enough of that as a child.