Edisto - Padgett Powell by Padgett Powell

hunter."
    "You’re a son of a bitch." She snapped it
hard.
    "I will take him."
    "No, you won’t. You can’t."
    "The hell I can’t."
    I figured I had the beat, so I stepped three steps
down from where my lips had been pressing on the rusty, fly-smelling
screen and stomped back up and sashayed in with a perfect whine-bang
door slam and was on them so fast they never knew or suspected.
Looked like big doings: she didn’t have a drink, he did.
    "Hi, Daddy." We did the hug. "Am I
late or you early?"
    "I’m early,” he said, and looked at the
Doctor. "And late."
    "We still going?" I asked.
    “ Sure—why not?"
    "Don’t know," I said, going to my room
for my tote bag. It was highly unusual for him to come inside the
house like this to get me. The shirt I had on was my red Rugby.
    That weekend was the second event. We usually did
everything as if it was the state fair. It was like he took me out to
show me a good time and I could play games or ride rides if I wanted
to, except it was movies and restaurants we went to. But this time we
went over to a woman’s house I only later put together was his
secretary but then instead got the idea a lawyer herself. She had
this kid about two years older than me, and they put us together to
entertain ourselves while they sat and talked. She lived in a
carriage house and they had the whole yard of the big house, which
looked empty.
    Sometimes kids just hit it off despite the artificial
confinement, which is strange. Fully aware of the difficulty of
liking each other, like in an arranged marriage, we just put all that
aside and had a blast. I don’t know how it started but Mike, her
kid, said that we could ride his go-cart if we put on the new wheel
and didn’t go in the street. The new wheel was wrapped in brown
paper and was in a closet full of his mother’s shoes and when he
went in to get it he had to walk on the shoes and he fell over. Well,
the wheel was heavy and he couldn’t pick it up lying there, so he
tried to get up and the shoes kept buckling and sliding and turning
his ankles and we started laughing.
    "Here. Roll it to me."
    We rolled it out over the crumbly terrain—all these
Italian high-heeled shoes and boots as soft as puppies—and we
couldn’t stop laughing. Anyway, we got the wheel out and put it on
the go-Cart, reusing the cotter pin, and fired the engine up. Mike
called it the cooker pin. He had this track charted out through
little places where you could hardly make it, and every time one of
us hit a banana tree it was funnier than the shoes. You just get
laughing and can’t stop.
    We ran the course until white roots were showing in
the mud at the turns and the engine smoked and ticked out a blue
vapor. Then we went in and Mike, who had got the idea I was smart
because I said we could use a nail if straightening out that cotter
pin was too hard, showed me this kind of altar in his room. It was
his books, about ten books and some magazines like National
Geographic. He told me he was through with comics. Over the books on
a small banner he had written:
    MY GOAL IN LIFE: NOT T0 BE A IGNORAMUS THATS MY MOTO
    He showed me this shrine very proudly.
    "That’s a good motto," I said. I didn’t
know what to do about the spelling, so I didn’t do anything.
    The important thing, I suppose, is that this weekend
was the first one we spent that wasn’t entirely at the state fair
or big-brother Disneyland. It was the first time Daddy sort of
ignored me like the Doctor, and I must confess that I had a better
time than ever before on these custody junkets. It’s heavy
pressure, you know, to find your role four days out of the month, a
little two-day run every two weeks with no rehearsal. I suppose it
was no fun for him, either, being the director as well as actor and
still not getting it right. But that weekend he seemed a lot more
regular in a way it’s hard to describe. I think that woman (Mike’s
mother) looked sexy, for one thing, but that is strictly my