Indigo, p.1
Indigo, page 1
ALSO BY PADGETT POWELL
Edisto
A Woman Named Drown
Typical
Edisto Revisited
Aliens of Affection
Mrs. Hollingsworth’s Men (reissued as Hologram)
The Interrogative Mood
You & Me
Cries for Help, Various
For L.P.
Contents
Foreword by Pete Dexter
Cleve Dean
Hitting Back
Juan Perez
C. Ford Riley
Bill Wegman
Don Barthelme
Flannery O’Connor
Grace Paley
Lena Padgett, Nan Morrison
Denis Johnson
Spode
New Orleans
Bermuda
Gumbo
Squirrel
William Trevor
Peter Taylor
Saving the Indigo
Acknowledgments of Previous Publication
Foreword
The sign of a true writer is that his stories are your stories.
One day she’s 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 night—she’s 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 don’t know a better way to explain it, one morning I know there’s a little less of her there. It is sudden enough, this first morning, that it’s possible it’s not her, that something has gone wrong with me—things 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 can’t 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 sheriff’s 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 won’t eat, one evening she rolls up a copy of Sports Illustrated and, thinking it’s a knife, stabs me in the hallway. She forgets how to make coffee. She hasn’t 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 I’m 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 she’ll 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 relieved—guiltless—almost 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 it’s all gone.
She has to be tricked into the place where she’ll die, and she knows what she’s there to do. An unbelievable betrayal, the reasons are worthless, they make sense but no difference.
Seven months is all that’s 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 she’s been able to feed herself. Her face has narrowed and her eyes seem enormous and dark. Someone else’s eyes, newborn, not a memory left.
The call comes at three in the morning, and she’s gone. I knew it was coming that night, the hospice people offered to put another bed in her room. And I couldn’t. In all my life, I’ve never let even my dogs go like this—ten, twelve dogs, I’ve held every one of them at the end. And I can’t really say if it matters that she doesn’t know who I am, or even who she is. Probably not, at least to her. But does it matter that I wasn’t there? The same question, day after day. And even knowing there is nothing for me in an answer, it’s 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 cat’s feet. The kind of fog where you’re 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 brother’s 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 Ridgeline—original leather, moonroof, and its famous hidden trunk, located under the truck bed. I say goodbye to the truck, pleased that my brother is pleased—it turns out that giving stuff away agrees with me.
Still, nothing is completely gone because you give it away. I’d owned the Ridgeline two years when the noises began. Still under warranty. I’d 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 couldn’t replicate the noise, she obviously couldn’t fix the problem. So, a hoax. Fair enough, I’ve been caught. I can’t 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 wasn’t 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 didn’t 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.
For many years before I gave the truck to Tom’s dog, it was used mostly on weekends, hauling the garbage to the dump, and for many years the maggots fell off the garbage bags, and into the hidden trunk, and the frogs never ran out of food. Still, in the end they disappeared, I don’t know why but it wasn’t starvation. Maybe they found a quieter truck, but for as long as they were in my care I kept an eye on them, and kept them fat and tame. I still sometimes see a blue Ridgeline on the road and conjure up the old gang sitting around the spare. This also makes me smile. I am turning into a grinning machine.
Meanwhile, stuff continues to disappear, mostly to Good Cheer, and when enough of it is gone I pack up what is left and head for South Dakota. To teach. And suddenly my life is filling up with things that are nothing to do with what they are called. Good Cheer, forewords, introductions, Creative Writing, Fine Arts, the Critical Tract of Graduate Studies. How this bodes for the teaching business, I can’t say. In any case, I leave the island and point the Penske moving van east. Mrs. Dexter’s ashes ride up in front.
To get to South Dakota from Whidbey Island, turn right off the ferry to State Route 525, right again to the interstate, and follow that till you freeze your nuts off. That’s the Black Hills, more or less. Another day, until your nuts factually click together when you walk, like you’ve got snooker balls in your pocket, and you’re in Vermillion. And the University of South Dakota. We like to think of ourselves as the Harvard of . . . a minute, here . . . of South Dakota, the Harvard of South Dakota.
Academia, a desk, a parking sticker, a title: Writer in Residence, Weather Permitting. Or, as Padgett puts it, the world. He can call it the world now that he’s out of it for good. He was at the University of Florida for thirty-five years, give or take. Thirty-five is a lot of years and if your goal in life is to see Padgett Powell cheerful, go to Florida and ask him about the good writers he turned out. He is not as cheerful about his own stuff. Go figure.
It is not impossible that you are wondering by now, Where’s my damn foreword? I know I would be. The answer is, what I am forewording is not so much this particular book but the possibilities when a live brain stumbles across spectacular writing, and for this I am drawn back to the title story of the second collection of stories by another spectacular writer, Flannery O’Connor. Her collection was called Everything That Rises Must Converge, and with the exception of a few of Robert Frost’s poems, it was the first consequential writing I ever read. I was a long time figuring out what that title meant.
In any case, the story and the title are still there in my head, along with Flannery O’Connor’s other stories—and along with Robert Frost—and other spectacular voices I have stumbled across on the long road to academia. There are maybe ten or twelve in all and one of them of course belongs to Padgett Powell. It is perhaps my own spectacularly good idea to resist naming the others.
A quick story about comparing writers:
This was a few years ago, don’t ask me when. I got a call from Esther Newberg’s assistant. Esther is a literary agent, but it doesn’t hurt to be careful about that my agent stuff, just on the off chance some soldier of the ever-fickle new correctness decides it’s insensitive. For the record, Esther is not mine, and I am not hers. Unless she says I am.
So. Esther’s assistant says she has some excellent news, although I know enough about the way things work that if it were really excellent news I would be talking to Esther herself. As far as I can tell, she lost interest a long time ago in making money, at least for herself. She is that rarest kind of agent who has reached a place in life where it is no longer necessary to keep score. I only hope saying this doesn’t get her shunned out of the agents’ club, but then she has probably had showdowns with every publisher in the world and as far as I know there is nobody left in New York to intimidate, so what does a girl do for fun? The answer is that she goes to some ranch in Arizona where they torture you for two weeks, feed you nuts and berries, pair you up with a horse, wake you up before five for sit-ups, etc., and it feels so good when they stop, New York looks tickled pink to have you back. What else? Well, she likes being the one who bears good tidings, and from what I’ve seen of agents and cities, there are worse things you can turn out to be.
But the assistant. Esther’s assistants are lovable, always lovable, they always sound glad to hear my voice. My suspicion is that they get paid to be nice, where with Esther—how to put it?—I am one of her boys, and I think she likes me. Meaning I am very likely the only American alive who calls New York City for cheering up. But this time Esther is not in New York but on a borrowed horse, back in Arizona, so the assistant is calling to let me know about the prize, a prestigious prize. Yes, I know this is straight out of A Christmas Story, but there is nothing I can do about that. These things are ordained.
So I say, What kind of prize?
The answer is, It’s from France.
Then she says, “It’s very prestigious,” and then, in a tone not necessarily meant to be heard, “. . . or so I have been told.” For reasons I am not able to explain, I am afraid to follow the trail of “or so I have been told” back to its source. I will just say that until this afternoon, the only prize I ever heard of in France is the yellow shirt you get to wear for winning yesterday’s stage of the Tour de France. Oh, and the trophy that Rafael Nadal bites every time he wins the French Open.
The next day, maybe a week, I call Padgett but he’s in Europe and so I speak to his lovely instead. The thought runs through my head that word of the prestigious prize has gotten out. Maybe Padgett has gone to Paris to meet the plane. Maybe he won last year and has been hired to make the presentation speech. How to ask? I go, “So, is this about the prize?”
What are the chances?
Two literary awards from Europe in the same week—my unknown prize, Padgett’s unknown prize. Padgett’s, however, comes with ten thousand pounds sterling, which is money over there, and the contest buys five thousand copies of the book and distributes them among freshmen students at the University of Edinburgh. Hungry young minds, you might say. With attention spans. Who don’t read books because they have to, but because they want to.
My award, as mentioned, is highly prestigious. Prestigious beyond crass monetary rewards. It includes a hotel room for three days and a daily stipend to cover lunch. It is not clear who pays for the plane tickets over.
And this in some odd way is familiar.
If you will indulge me for only a couple more minutes, I’ll get to Indigo. I promise. But first come back with me a little further, maybe twenty years—the blink of an eye in the history of the world—back before news of literary awards, before Esther was home on the range and Padgett was on his way to Europe. Me, I was at home in my office, looking out the window, feeling queasy. It doesn’t take much to get me queasy and never has. A much-loved black Labrador had died that week—the dog belonged to the neighbors, but slept and ate with us. He also ate with the neighbors, and his death was due to the complications of diabetes. I once saw this animal eat the same slab of steak twice in less than a minute. The truth is I loved this animal and could never find it in my heart to barbecue steaks without throwing one on for old Charcoal too, and the incident I am talking about now, he woofed this slab of meat down right off the grill, tossed it back up because it was too hot for his stomach, then ate it again almost before it hit the ground.
So I am standing at the window overlooking Puget Sound, queasy. I have known since the day we moved in, Mrs. Dexter and me, that this is the best house we will ever have, and I remember this scene exactly, notwithstanding the fact that every time I run the math, the years come out all wrong, and not only wasn’t I looking out over Puget Sound, I hadn’t even heard of Charcoal yet, or the island. Wrong dog, wrong side of America. But these are only details, just the old bean doing those things it does. It probably just wants attention.
Anyhow, the week I am still talking about now, even though I was in Philadelphia—the fourteenth floor of 400 North Broad Street in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, definitely in Philadelphia—Time magazine had printed an article about promising young writers. This, then, is where I first locked horns with Padgett Powell, on the pages of Time. As horn-locking goes, it wasn’t much of a show. The occasion was each of us had published a first novel. There may have been a couple of other names mentioned, I can’t remember. What happened was, I’d written an excellent first paragraph—I still like that paragraph—followed by, well, a first novel. Padgett had written a pretty good first paragraph followed by a novel that I saw compared favorably, maybe in The Philadelphia Inquirer, with John Updike and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Specifically, as I remember, with The Great Gatsby, which was one of my own favorite novels, being among the handful that I’d ever read. I still like Gatsby, but this tendency to praise books because you’ve read them does you no favors later in life, looking back on all the things you didn’t know you didn’t know. It explains, for instance, how I once believed Norman Mailer was the cat’s nuts, and look how that turned out.
So there are advantages I think to putting off reading until you’ve been around long enough to understand what things mean, but there are drawbacks too. I remember all this because Mrs. Dexter and I had just that afternoon picked up a seven-week-old golden retriever that cried whenever you put him in his cardboard box, and finally Mrs. Dexter got out of our bed and slept with the puppy, and I sat alone on the edge of the bed on a cold sheet with my heart in my hands, wondering how I was going to break the news that the big plans were off. See, Mrs. Dexter at least half believed me when I said I was going to be a writer and we were going to have an exciting life—Mrs. Dexter and I and the baby that was still a couple of months from coming out, and the future had never looked brighter, but then I have found that the future is never as bright as when Time says you have one. At this point I had, as mentioned, read the previously mentioned collection of Flannery O’Connor stories, a book of Robert Frost, and the first seventy pages of Edisto, and, not illogically, concluded this was writing. Real writers, not newspaper columnists. And my chances of squeezing into that world with those writers were exactly as good as persuading Charcoal to chew steak before he swallowed it.
