Edisto

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I’m in Bluffton on a truancy spree, cutting, we call it, but all you do is walk off the unfenced yard during recess, where three hundred hunched-over kids are shooting marbles. I can’t shoot a marble with a slingshot, so I split and go into Dresser’s Rexall for a Coke or something, expressly forbidden me by the Doctor because it makes me hyper, she says, but should I drink milk all my life instead or go on now to house bourbon? That is not the point.

Suddenly there she is on a counter stool between me and a cherry Coke, or I’m even considering a suicide — sixteen godoxious syrups in a thimble of soda — but I can handle this disappointment. I could go to the Texaco and have a bottle and talk to Vergil. They even have Tom’s peanuts for a goober-bottle rig — you just pour in the peanuts and drink. But Clyde, his pumpman, will try to take off his wooden leg on me. One day I got curious and he unbuttoned his shirt and showed me the network of sweaty straps all over his chest that holds the leg on, and I got closer, and he loosened the straps and took down his overalls, and all of a sudden the leg was off, a small cypress log, and he bounced his stump around on the chair, pecan-colored and hard-looking, and I about fainted. Now I have to beg him to leave it on. When I get pale, Vergil will stop him. "Keep your leg on, Clyde." "Okeydoke," Clyde says, but he still fidgets with the straps and giggles.

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