A Woman Named Drown - Padgett Powell by Padgett Powell

Ross of "no mountain
high enough."
    We had taken the motel room, showered, and I sat down
near the door. Mary sat on the bed, her arms on her knees, leaning
toward me like a father. "There's nothing personal in this,"
she said.
    " In what?"
    " You can take the Merc or the two thousand."
    I looked at her, and the color TV, on a stand about
eye level with me. I mulled this one over until I found myself
playing with my lips and stopped.
    " I understand," I said. What was odd was
that I believe I did understand. She was closing a very successful
road show and meant for us, as actors, to move on. And she was clever
enough to fold following a packed-house night rather than when the
play was in trouble.
    "What about Stump's wardrobe?" I said.
    " I'll take it if you want a new one."
    I pictured myself in the clothes I would get from the
nearest Stuckey's--monkey T-shirts treated with Tris, orange surfing
trunks coming to my knees--and said I'd keep Stump's if it was all
right. It was more unnatural, in her scheme of things, for her to
reclaim her husband's tattered clothes than for me to simply wear
them out.
    " Okay." She got up and signed a check and
came over to me and bent at the waist and rolled her forehead across
mine, back and forth, holding my neck, like inking a thumb for
fingerprints, and walked out the door with a jangle of keys, a swift
solid car door, a blast, a reverse, a small rock skid, gentle rubbery
crushing of stone.
    The check for two thousand dollars was beside the ice
bucket. I kept the door open, letting natural light in, while I
showered again and watched TV and otherwise took advantage of the
room until checkout. I expected to feel abandoned or lonely, but I
did not, exactly. I felt I had observed the terms of our dramatic
no-bio creed and was a fine performer and had no call to long for
anything under the sun. And it still hurt, some.
    Adjacent to the motel was the key-lime pie stand,
looking like four plywood Ping-Pong tables thrown into an A-frame,
housing a pasty-faced girl you might see at a trailer park. I ate the
two slices of pie at a picnic table and looked at the highway.

         A bus
came along and let a load of tourists have at the key-lime pie stand,
and I got on. Heading west, through what I think was once Everglades,
we passed a HELP WANTED sign and I got off. I walked down a white
graded road to a fish camp. The building was small and low,
suggesting an I enclosed trailer. It had plywood floors and a plywood
ceiling, about head high. Down the longest reach of the joint a woman
was throwing darts. She was not throwing them at a dart board and she
was not throwing . them with the deft, wristy, English toss. She was
letting them go like Bob Feller, lead leg higher than her head. On
the wall forty feet away was a target painted in crude circles. The
bull's-eye alone was big as a bowling ball.
    When she finished up the set, I said, "Is there
a job here?"
    " Ho!" she said, plucking the darts loose.
She went behind the bar. She got a beer and slid it to me and took
one herself. She broke her pop top without opening the beer, and
holding a dart dagger-style, she neatly collapsed the tab with one
punch.
    " These things changed my world," she said.
She flicked the ring off the bar to the floor.
    I nodded. I looked out the door, to the water. There
was a fallen dock, and tied to it some wooden rowboats sunk to
gunwales. They looked like alligators.
    " So," she said. "Drink all you want,
eat if you want to, don't give any customers a hard time."
    "That's it?"
    She didn't answer, except to wipe the bar with a
ribbed towel which she flopped around like leavening bread. Certain
parallels--equivalences were in a lab instead of a fish camp, in a
true reaction series rather than life's--were stunning. Instead of a
pool shark, before me stood some kind of major-league dart pitcher.
Where there had been gin, there was beer. And it looked as though the
same no-questions, no-lies ambience was going to