Padgett Powell - Indigo: Arm Wrestling, Snake Saving, and Some Things In Between

ALSO BY PADGETT POWELL

Edisto

A Woman Named Drown

Typical

Edisto Revisited

Aliens of Affection

Mrs. Hollingsworths Men (reissued as Hologram)

The Interrogative Mood

You & Me

Cries for Help, Various

For L.P.

The sign of a true writer is that his stories are your stories.

One day shes there, of a piece, as they say, all the moods and curves and scents, the comfortable fit, the heat that comes off her body at nightshes a little furnace over there and always has been. No wonder, I go. No wonder you wake up cold.

Time moves the way it does, and one morning I lie in bed listening to her in the kitchen making coffee, and know something is missing. Maybe has been for a while. I dont know a better way to explain it, one morning I know theres a little less of her there. It is sudden enough, this first morning, that its possible its not her, that something has gone wrong with methings have gone wrong suddenly before. The feeling comes back a week later, and a week after that. An erosion, sometimes in little pieces, sometimes in whole blocks. We make an appointment to see the doctor, and at the last minute she calls it off.

I work most afternoons in a small cabin-like house next to the house where we live, and lately, often as not, I cant find her when I get back. I have learned to look first down by the tiny red shack in the meadow, maybe two hundred yards from the house, where she sometimes sits on the steps, thinking. The place is full of old newspapers and baby spiders.

Pretty soon I am spending nights in a chair by the front door, and the world runs in pauses and spurts as it will sometimes do when you are stricken for sleep. Tonight I startle awake, dreaming of freezing to death in Lake Michigan. The door is wide open, twelve thirty at night, creaking noises as it blows open and shut. I drive every road in a five-mile radius that night and do not get her back until sometime after two. It is the sheriffs department that finds her, and she comes back into the house barefoot and freezing cold, shaking, her feet stark white.

By now time means next to nothing. Night and day are interchangeable, the days of the week, even seasons. Some nights she wont eat, one evening she rolls up a copy of Sports Illustrated and, thinking its a knife, stabs me in the hallway. She forgets how to make coffee. She hasnt started a day without coffee ten times in forty years.

As the new coffee cook, I am going through a pound of Starbucks every four days. I scald myself most mornings, and once I watch what I have made eat a hole through the coffee filter. I think maybe Im not adding enough water. That same morning, without any particular warning, she is in tears. Is somebody dead? Has she killed someone in the night?

I hold her a little while, as long as shell let me hold her. You never killed anybody. Who would you kill?

You know, she says, him.

Twenty minutes later, coffee grounds sticking to her chin, she is happy and relievedguiltlessalmost herself again, headed out the door to fill the bird feeders, and it is in that moment of calm, when things are better, that I know its all gone.

She has to be tricked into the place where shell die, and she knows what shes there to do. An unbelievable betrayal, the reasons are worthless, they make sense but no difference.

Seven months is all thats left, a little more. Three visits to the emergency room in the first few weeks. Twenty stitches across her eye, swollen shut. Seven falls in six days, a wheelchair. A hundred and forty miles, round-trip, every day, sometimes twice. She only picks at the food I bring, picks in the beginning and then she barely eats at all, turning her head away from the spoon. It has been a while now since shes been able to feed herself. Her face has narrowed and her eyes seem enormous and dark. Someone elses eyes, newborn, not a memory left.

The call comes at three in the morning, and shes gone. I knew it was coming that night, the hospice people offered to put another bed in her room. And I couldnt. In all my life, Ive never let even my dogs go like thisten, twelve dogs, Ive held every one of them at the end. And I cant really say if it matters that she doesnt know who I am, or even who she is. Probably not, at least to her. But does it matter that I wasnt there? The same question, day after day. And even knowing there is nothing for me in an answer, its somehow still all that matters.

The death certificate says sixty-three pounds. And that is what it looked like, about sixty-three pounds.

It rolls in like the fog, but not on little cats feet. The kind of fog where youre never quite sure of the distance. Nothing is defined. Friends empty her closets, folding and boxing every sweater and coat and pair of pants like it was all going back where it came from, under the Christmas tree. I give away two thousand books to the Whidbey Island animal rescue society, and my old truck goes to my brothers dog. The dog rides around shotgun, jiggling his tongue at the unaltered females of Billings, Montana. I smile at that, Tom and his dog haunting the streets of Billings in a fourteen-year-old sun-faded Honda Ridgelineoriginal leather, moonroof, and its famous hidden trunk, located under the truck bed. I say goodbye to the truck, pleased that my brother is pleasedit turns out that giving stuff away agrees with me.

Still, nothing is completely gone because you give it away. Id owned the Ridgeline two years when the noises began. Still under warranty. Id turn the engine over and in fifteen seconds the noises would start, frog-like noises from the back seat. If you want to hear the sound for yourself, put your fingers in your ears and clear your throat.

The service-department lady at Honda did not care for my attitude. I sometimes wonder if there is someone out there who looks like me doing terrible things and I keep running into the victims. The woman would not try putting her fingers in her ears and said if I couldnt replicate the noise, she obviously couldnt fix the problem. So, a hoax. Fair enough, Ive been caught. I cant help myself, I just have to sit around in car dealerships for an hour and fifteen minutes with ghost symptoms. Larry, line two is music to my ears. In fact, it and leg surgery are my hobbies. The dealership lady called the service manager, who did put his fingers in his ears and said it sounded like a suspension problem. Two hours later, I got the car back, but the suspension wasnt it. The lady was more polite this time. She said, Well, if it happens again... , etc., and then: At least you got a free car wash. Three hours and fifteen minutes to get a free car wash, why didnt I think of this sooner?

I take the Ridgeline to Dana Gildersleeve, whose Whidbey Tire & Auto was the best car repair shop on the island, especially taking into consideration the barbershop mien of the waiting area, and in one minute Dana has the situation under control. He opens the hidden trunk, revealing a little tribe of neon green frogs living in apparent harmony around the spare tire. Harmony in the first sense of the word, where but for lack of a tenor, the frogs could take the act on the road.