The Moviegoer

Three

SATURDAY MORNING AT the office is dreary. The market is closed and there is nothing to do but get on with the letter writing. But this is no more than I expected. It is a fine day outside, freakishly warm. Tropical air has seeped into the earth and the little squares of St Augustine grass are springy and turgid. Camphor berries pop underfoot; azaleas and Judas trees are blooming on Elysian Fields. There is a sketch of cloud in the mild blue sky and the high thin piping of waxwings comes from everywhere.

As Sharon types the letters, I stand hands in pockets looking through the gold lettering of our window. I think of Sharon and American Motors. It closed yesterday at 30¹/₄.

At eleven o’clock it is time to speak.

“I’m quitting now. I’ve got sixty miles to go before lunch.”

“Wherebouts you going?”

“To the Gulf Coast.”

The clatter of the typewriter does not slacken.

“Would you like to go?”

“M-hm”—absently. She is not surprised. “It just so happens I got work to do.”

“No, you haven’t. I’m closing the office.”

“Well I be dog.” There is still no surprise. What I’ve been waiting to see is how she will go about shedding her secretary manner. She doesn’t. The clatter goes on.

“I’m leaving now.”

“You gon let me finish this or not!” she cries in a scolding voice. So this is how she does it. She feels her way into familiarity by way of vexations. “You go head.”

“Go?”

“I’ll be right out. I got to call somebody.”

“So do I.” I call Kate. Mercer answers the phone. Kate has gone to the airport with Aunt Emily. He believes she is well.

Sharon looks at me with a yellow eye. “Is Miss Cutrer any kin to you?” she cries in her new scolding voice.

“She is my cousin.”

“Some old girl told me you were married to her. I said nayo indeed.”

“I’m not married to anyone.”

“I said you weren’t!” She tilts her head forward and goes off into a fit of absent-mindedness.

“Why did you want to know if I was married?”

“I’ll tell you one thing, son. I’m not going out with any married man.”

But still she has not come to the point of waiting upon my ministrations — like a date. Still very much her own mistress, she sets about tidying up her desk. When she shoulders her Guatemalan bag and walks briskly to the door, it is for me to tag along behind her. Now I see how she will have it: don’t think I’m standing around waiting for you to state your business — you said you were closing the office — very well, I am leaving.

I jump ahead of her to open the door.

“Do you want to go home and let me pick you up in half an hour? Put your suit on under your clothes.”

“All right!” But it isn’t all right. Her voice is a little too bright.

“Meanwhile I’ll go get my car and my suit.”

“All right.” She is openly grudging. It is not right at all! She is just like Linda.

“I have a better idea. Come on and walk home with me to get my car and then I’ll take you to your house.”

“All right.” A much better all right. “Now you wait right here. This won’t take me long.”

When she comes out, her eyes are snapping.

“Is everything all right?”

“You mighty right it is”—eyes flashing, Uh oh. The boy friend has torn it.

“I hope you brought your suit down from Eufala.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Why no.”

“It’s some suit. Just an old piece of a suit. I was going to get me one at Maison Blanche but I didn’t think I’d be going swimming in March.”

“Do you like to swim?”

“Are you kidding?”

“No.”

“I’d rather swim than eat. I really would. Where’re we going?”

“To the ocean.”

“The ocean! I never knew there was an ocean anywhere around here.”

“It’s the open Gulf. The same thing.”

When I put her in the car, she addresses an imaginary third person. “Now this is what I call real service. Your boss not only lets you off to go swimming — he takes you to the beach.”

On these terms we set forth: she the girl whose heart’s desire is to swim; I, her generous employer, who is nice enough to provide transportation.

Early afternoon finds us spinning along the Gulf Coast. Things have not gone too badly. As luck would have it, no sooner do we cross Bay St Louis and reach the beach drive than we are involved in an accident. Fortunately it is not serious. When I say as luck would have it, I mean good luck. Yet how, you might wonder, can even a minor accident be considered good luck?

Because it provides a means of winning out over the malaise, if one has the sense to take advantage of it.

What is the malaise? you ask. The malaise is the pain of loss. The world is lost to you, the world and the people in it, and there remains only you and the world and you no more able to be in the world than Banquo’s ghost.

You say it is a simple thing surely, all gain and no loss, to pick up a good-looking woman and head for the beach on the first fine day of the year. So say the newspaper poets. Well it is not such a simple thing and if you have ever done it, you know it isn’t — unless, of course, the woman happens to be your wife or some other everyday creature so familiar to you that she is as invisible as you yourself. Where there is chance of gain, there is also chance of loss. Whenever one courts great happiness, one also risks malaise.

The car itself is all-important, I have discovered. When I first moved to Gentilly, I bought a new Dodge sedan, a Red Ram Six. It was a comfortable, conservative and economical two-door sedan, just the thing, it seemed to me, for a young Gentilly businessman. When I first slid under the wheel to drive it, it seemed that everything was in order — here was I, a healthy young man, a veteran with all his papers in order, a U.S. citizen driving a very good car. All these things were true enough, yet on my first trip to the Gulf Coast with Marcia, I discovered to my dismay that my fine new Dodge was a regular incubator of malaise. Though it was comfortable enough, though it ran like a clock, though we went spinning along in perfect comfort and with a perfect view of the scenery like the American couple in the Dodge ad, the malaise quickly became suffocating. We sat frozen in a gelid amiability. Our cheeks ached from smiling. Either would have died for the other. In despair I put my hand under her dress, but even such a homely little gesture as that was received with the same fearful politeness. I longed to stop the car and bang my head against the curb. We were free, moreover, to do that or anything else, but instead on we rushed, a little vortex of despair moving through the world like the still eye of a hurricane. As it turned out, I should have stopped and banged my head, for Marcia and I returned to New Orleans defeated by the malaise. It was weeks before we ventured out again.

This is the reason I have no use for cars and prefer buses and streetcars. If I were a Christian I would make a pilgrimage by foot, for this is the best way to travel. But girls do not like it. My little red MG, however, is an exception to the rule. It is a miserable vehicle actually, with not a single virtue save one: it is immune to the malaise. You have no idea what happiness Marcia and I experienced as soon as we found ourselves spinning along the highway in this bright little beetle. We looked at each other in astonishment: the malaise was gone! We sat out in the world, out in the thick summer air between sky and earth. The noise was deafening, the wind was like a hurricane; straight ahead the grains of the concrete rushed at us like mountains.

It was nevertheless with some apprehension that I set out with Sharon. What if the malaise had been abated simply by the novelty of the MG? For by now the MG was no novelty. What if the malaise was different with every girl and needed a different cure? One thing was certain. Here was the acid test. For the stakes were very high. Either very great happiness lay in store for us, or malaise past all conceiving. Marcia and Linda were as nothing to this elfin creature, this sumptuous elf from Eufala who moved like a ballerina, hard-working and docile, dreaming in her work, head to the side, cheek downy and spare as a boy’s. With her in the bucket seat beside me I spin along the precipice with the blackest malaise below and the greenest of valleys ahead. One great advantage is mine: her boy friend, the Faubourg Marigny character. The fellow has no better sense than to make demands on her and she has no use for him. Thank God for the macaroni.

Indeed as we pass through the burning swamps of Chef Menteur, it seems to me that I catch a whiff of the malaise. A little tongue of hellfire licks at our heels and the MG jumps ahead, roaring like a bomber through the sandy pine barrens and across Bay St Louis. Sharon sits smiling and silent, her eyes all but closed against the wind, her big golden knees doubled up against the dashboard. “I swear, this is the cutest little car I ever saw!” she yelled at me a minute ago.

By some schedule of proprieties known to her, she did not become my date until she left her rooming house where she put on a boy’s shirt and black knee britches. Her roommate watched us from an upper window. “Wave to Joyce,” Sharon commands me. Joyce is leaning on the sill, a brown-haired girl in a leather jacket. She has the voluptuous look of roommates left alone. It becomes necessary to look a third time. Joyce shifts her weight and beyond any doubt a noble young ham hikes up under the buckskin. A sadness overtakes me. If only — If only what? If only I could send Sharon on her way and go straight upstairs and see Joyce, a total stranger? Yes. But not quite. If only I could be with both of them, with a house full of them, an old Esplanade rooming house full of strapping American girls with their silly turned heads and their fine big bottoms. In the last split second I could swear Joyce knows what I am thinking, for she gives me a laughing naughty-you look and her mouth forms oh-ho! Sharon comes piling into the car and up against me. Now she can touch me.

“Where is Joyce from?”

“Illinois.”

“Is she nice?”

“Joyce is a good old girl.”

“She seems to be. Are you all good friends?”

“Are you kidding?”

“No.”

“Lordy lord, the crazy talks we have. If people could hear us, they would carry us straight to Tuscaloosa.”

“What do you talk about?”

“Everybody.”

“Me?”

“Why sure.”

“What do you say?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“Yes.”

“Well I can tell you one thing, son.”

“What’s that?”

“You’re surely not gon find out from me.”

“Why not?”

“Larroes catch medloes.”

Out Elysian Fields we go, her warm arm lying over mine. All at once she is free with herself, flouncing around on the seat, bumping knee, hip, elbow against me. She is my date (she reminds me a little of a student nurse I once knew: she is not so starchy now but rather jolly and horsy). The MG jumps away from the stop signs like a young colt. I feel fine.

Yes, she is on to the magic of the little car: we are earth-bound as a worm, yet we rush along at a tremendous clip between earth and sky. The heavy fragrant air pushes against us, a square hedge of pyrocantha looms dead ahead, we flash past and all of a sudden there is the Gulf, flat and sparkling away to the south.

We are bowling along below Pass Christian when the accident happens. Just ahead of us a westbound green Ford begins a U-turn, thinks it sees nothing, creeps out and rams me square amidships. Not really hard — it makes a hollow metal bang b-rramp! and the MG shies like a spooked steer, jumps into the neutral ground, careens into a drain hole and stops, hissing. My bad shoulder has caught it. I think I pass out for a few seconds, but not before I see two things: Sharon, she is all right; and the people who hit me. It is an old couple. Ohio plates. I swear I almost recognize them. I’ve seen them in the motels by the hundreds. He is old and lean and fit, with a turkey throat and a baseball cap; she is featureless. They are on their way to Florida. He gives me a single terrified look as we buck over the grass, appeals to his wife for help, hesitates, bolts. Off he goes, bent over his wheel like a jockey.

Sharon hovers over me. She touches my chin as if to get my attention. “Jack?”

The pain in my shoulder was past all imagining but is already better.

“How did you know my name was Jack?”

“Mr Daigle and Mr Hebert call you Jack.”

“Are you all right?”

“I think so.”

“You look scared.”

“Why that crazy fool could have killed us.”

The traffic has slowed, to feast their eyes on us. A Negro sprinkling a steep lawn under a summer house puts his hose down altogether and stands gaping. By virtue of our misfortune we have become a thing to look at and witnesses gaze at us with heavy-lidded almost seductive expressions. But almost at once they are past and those who follow see nothing untoward. The Negro picks up his hose. We are restored to the anonymity of our little car-space.

Love is invincible. True, for a second or so the pain carried me beyond all considerations, even that of love, but for no more than a second. Already it has been put to work and is performing yeoman service, a lovely checker in a lovely game.

“But what about you?” Sharon asks, coming close. “Honey, you look awful pale.”

“He bumped my shoulder.”

“Let me see.” She comes around and helps me take off my shirt, but the T-shirt is too high and I can’t raise my arm. “Wait.” She goes after her Guatemalan bag and finds some cuticle scissors and cuts the sleeve through the neck. I feel her stop.

“That’s not—”

“Not what?”

“Not from this wreck.”

“Sure.”

“You got a handkerchief?” She runs down to the beach to wet it in salt water. “Now. We better find a doctor.”

I was shot through the shoulder — a decent wound, as decent as any ever inflicted on Rory Calhoun or Tony Curtis. After all it could have been in the buttocks or genitals — or nose. Decent except that the fragment nicked the apex of my pleura and got me a collapsed lung and a big roaring empyema. No permanent damage, however, except a frightening-looking scar in the hollow of my neck and in certain weather a tender joint.

“Come on now, son, where did you get that?” Cold water runs down my side.

“That Ford.”

“Why that’s terrible!”

“Can’t you tell it’s a scar?”

“Where did you get it?”

“My razor slipped.”

“Come on now!”

“I got it on the Chongchon River.”

“In the war?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.”

O Tony. O Rory. You never had it so good with direction. Nor even you Bill Holden, my noble Will. O ye morning stars together. Farewell forever, malaise. Farewell and good luck, green Ford and old Ohioan. May you live in Tampa happily and forever.

And yet there are fellows I know who would have been sorry it happened, who would have had no thought for anything but their damned MG. Blessed MG.

I am able to get out creakily and we sit on the grassy bank. My head spins. That son of a bitch really rocked my shoulder. The MG is not bad: a dented door.

“And right exactly where you were sitting,” says Sharon holding the handkerchief to my shoulder. “And that old scoun’l didn’t even stop.” She squats in her black pants like a five year old and peers at me. “Goll—! Didn’t that hurt?”

“It was the infection that was bad.”

“I’ll tell you one dang thing.”

“What?”

“I surely wouldn’t want anybody shooting at me.”

“Do you have an aspirin in your bag?”

“Wait.”

When she returns, she gives me the aspirin and holds my ruined shoulder in both hands, as if the aspirin were going to hurt.

“Now look behind the seat and bring me the whisky.”

She pours me a thumping drink into a paper cup, also from the Guatemalan bag. The aspirin goes down in the burning. I offer her the bottle.

“I swear I believe I will.” She drinks, with hardly a face, hand pressed to the middle of her breastbone. We pull on my shirt by stages.

But the MG! We think of her at the same time. What if she suffered a concussion? But she starts immediately, roaring her defiance of the green Ford.

I forget my whisky bottle and when I get out to pick it up, I nearly fall down. She is right there to catch me, Rory. I put both my arms around her.

“Come on now, son, put your weight on me.”

“I will. You’re just about the sweetest girl I ever knew.”

“Ne’mind that. You come on here, big buddy.”

“I’m coming. Where’re we going?”

“You sit over here.”

“Can you drive?”

“You just tell me where to go.”

“We’ll get some beer, then go to Ship Island.”

“In this car?”

“In a boat.”

“Where is it?”

“There.” Beyond the waters of the sound stretches a long blue smudge of pines.

The boat ride is not what I expected. I had hoped for an empty boat this time of year, a deserted deck where we might stretch out in the sun. Instead we are packed in like sardines. We find ourselves sitting bolt upright on a bench in the one little cabin surrounded by at least a hundred children. It is, we learn, a 4-H excursion from Leake County, Mississippi. A dozen men and women who look like Baptist deacons and deaconesses, red-skinned, gap-toothed, friendly — decent folk they are — are in charge. We sit drenched in the smell of upcountry Mississippi, the smell of warm white skins under boiled cotton underwear. How white they are, these farm children, milk white. No sign of sun here, no red necks; not pale are they but white, the rich damp white of skin under clothes.

Out we go like immigrants in the hold, chuffing through the thin milky waters of Mississippi Sound.

The only other couple on the boat is a Keesler Field airman and his girl. His fine silky hair is cropped short as ermine, but his lip is pulled up by the tendon of his nose showing two chipmunk teeth and giving him a stupid look. The girl is a plump little Mississippi armful, fifteen or sixteen; she too could be a Leake County girl. Though they sit holding hands, they could be strangers. Each stares about the cabin as if he were alone. One knows that they would dance and make love the same way, not really mindful of each other but gazing with a mild abiding astonishment at the world around. Surely I have seen them before too, at the zoo or Marineland, him gazing at the animals or fishes noting every creature with the same slow slack wonderment, her gazing at nothing in particular but not bored either, enduring rather and secure in his engrossment.

We land near the fort, a decrepit brick silo left over from the Civil War and littered with ten summers of yellow Kodak boxes and ticket stubs and bottle caps. It is the soul of dreariness, this “historic site” washed by the thin brackish waters of Mississippi Sound. The debris of summers past piles up like archeological strata. Last summer I picked up a yellow scrap of newspaper and read of a Biloxi election in 1948, and in it I caught the smell of history far more pungently than from the metal marker telling of the French and Spanish two hundred years ago and the Yankees one hundred years ago. 1948. What a faroff time.

A plank walk leads across some mudholes and a salt marsh to an old dance pavilion. As we pass we catch a glimpse of the airman and his girl standing bemused at a counter and drinking RC Cola. Beyond, a rise of sand and saw grass is creased by a rivulet of clear water in which swim blue crabs and cat-eye snails. Over the hillock lies the open sea. The difference is very great: first, this sleazy backwater, then the great blue ocean. The beach is clean and a big surf is rolling in; the water in the middle distance is green and lathered. You come over the hillock and your heart lifts up; your old sad music comes into the major.

We find a hole in the rivulet and sink the cans of beer and go down the beach a ways from the children, to a tussock of sand and grass. Sharon is already in, leaving her shirt and pants on the beach like a rag. She wades out ahead of me, turning to and fro, hands outstretched to the water and sweeping it before her. Now and then she raises her hands to her head as if she were placing a crown and combs back her hair with the last two fingers. The green water foams at her knees and sucks out ankle deep and swirling with sand. Out she goes, thighs asuck, turning slowly and sweeping the water before her. How beautiful she is. She is beautiful and brave and chipper as a sparrow. My throat catches with the sadness of her beauty. Son of a bitch, it is enough to bring tears to your eyes. I don’t know what is wrong with me. She smiles at me, then cocks her head.

“Why do you look at me like that?”

“Like what?”

“What’s the matter with you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come on, son. I’m going to give you some beer.”

Her suit is of a black sheeny stuff like a swim-meet suit and skirtless. She comes out of the water like a spaniel, giving her head a flirt which slaps her hair around in a wet curl and stooping, brushes the water from her legs. Now she stands musing on the beach, leg locked, pelvis aslant, thumb and forefingers propped along the iliac crest and lightly, propped lightly as an athlete. As the salt water dries and stings, she minds herself, plying around the flesh of her arm and sending fingers along her back.

Down the beach the children have been roped off into two little herds of girls and boys. They wade — evidently they can’t swim — in rough squares shepherded by the deacons who wear black bathing suits with high armholes and carry whistles around their necks. The deaconesses watch from bowers which other children are busy repairing with saw grass they have gathered from the ridge.

We swim again and come back to the tussock and drink beer. She lies back and closes her eyes with a sigh. “This really beats typing.” Her arm falls across mine and she gives me an affectionate pat and settles herself in the sand as if she really meant to take a nap. But her eyes gleam between her eyelids and I bend to kiss her. She laughs and kisses me back with a friendly passion. We lie embracing each other.

“Whoa now, son,” she says laughing.

“What’s the matter?”

“Right here in front of God and everybody?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry! Listen, you come here.”

“I’m here.”

She makes a movement indicating both her friendliness and the limit she sets to it. For an hour we swim and drink beer. Once when she gets up, I come up on my knees and embrace her golden thighs, such a fine strapping armful they are.

“What do you think you’re doing, boy?”

“Honey, I’ve been waiting three weeks to grab you like this.”

“Well now that you’ve grabbed me you can turn me loose.”

“Sweetheart, I’ll never turn you loose.” Mother of all living, what an armful.

“All right now, son—”

“What?”

“You can turn me loose.”

“No.”

“Listen, big buddy. I’m as strong as you are.”

“No, you’re not.”

“I may not be as big as you are—”

“You are here.”

“—but I’m just as strong.”

“Not really.”

“All right, you watch here.” She balls up her fist like a man’s and smacks me hard on the arm.

“That hurts.”

“Then quit messing with me.”

“All right. I won’t mess with you.”

“Hit me.”

“What?”

“You heard me. Hit me.” She holds her elbow tight against her body. “Come on, boy.”

“What are you talking about? I’m not going to hit you.”

“Come on hit me. I’m not kidding. You can’t hurt me.”

“All right.” I hit her.

“Na. I don’t mean just playlike. Really hit me.”

“You mean it?”

“I swear before God.”

I hit just hard enough to knock her over.

“Got dog.” She gets up quickly. “That didn’t hurt. I got a good mind to hit you right in the mouth, you jackass.”

“I believe you,” I say laughing. “Now you come here.”

“What for? All right now!” She cocks her fist again. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“I just want to tell you what’s on my mind.”

“What?”

“You. You and your sweet lips. Sweetheart, before God I can’t think about anything in the world but putting my arms around you and kissing your sweet lips.”

“O me.”

“Do you care if I do?”

“I don’t care if you do.”

I hold springtime in my arms, the fullness of it and the rinsing sadness of it.

“I’ll tell you something else.”

“What?”

“Sweetheart, I can’t get you out of my mind. Not since you walked into my office in that yellow dress. I’m crazy about you and you know it, don’t you?”

“O me.”

I sit back to see her and take her hands. “I can’t sleep for thinking of you.”

“You swear?”

“I swear.”

“We made us some money, didn’t we?”

“We sure did. Don’t you want some money? I’ll give you five thousand dollars.”

“No, I don’t want any money.”

“Let’s go down the beach a ways.”

“What for?”

“So they can’t see us.”

“What’s the matter with them seeing us?”

“It’s all right with me.”

“Ho now, you son.”

“You’re my sweetheart. Do you care if I love you?”

“Nayo indeed. But you’re not getting me off down there with those rattlesnakes.”

“Rattlesnakes!”

“No sir. We gon stay right here close to those folks and you gon behave yourself.”

“All right.” I clasp my hands in the hollow of her back. “I’ll tell you something else.”

“Uh oh.” She rears back, laughing, to see me, a little embarrassed by our closeness. “Well you got me.”

“I’m sorry you work for me.”

“Sorry! Listen, son. I do my work.”

“I wouldn’t want you to think I was taking advantage of you.”

“Nobody’s taking advantage of me,” she says huffily.

I laugh at her. “No, I mean our business relationship.” We sit up and drink our beer. “I have a confession to make to you. I’ve been planning this all week.”

“What?”

“This picnic.”

“Well I be dog.”

“Don’t kid me. You knew.”

“I swear I didn’t.”

“But it’s the business part of it that worries me—”

“Business and pleasure don’t have to mix.”

“Well, all I wanted you to know was that when I acted on impulse—”

“I always act on impulse. I believe in saying what you mean and meaning what you say.”

“I can see that.”

“You just ask Joyce what I said about you.”

“Joyce?”

“My roommate.”

“What did you say?”

“You just ask her.”

I look up and down the beach. “I don’t see her.”

“I don’t mean now, you jackass.”

We swim and lie down together. The remarkable discovery forces itself upon me that I do not love her so wildly as I loved her last night. But at least there is no malaise and we lie drowsing in the sun, hands clasped in the other’s back, until the boat whistle blows.

Yet loves revives as we spin homewards along the coast through the early evening. Joy and sadness come by turns, I know now. Beauty and bravery make you sad, Sharon’s beauty and my aunt’s bravery, and victory breaks your heart. But life goes on and on we go, spinning along the coast in a violet light, past Howard Johnson’s and the motels and the children’s carnival. We pull into a bay and have a drink under the stars. It is not a bad thing to settle for the Little Way, not the big search for the big happiness but the sad little happiness of drinks and kisses, a good little car and a warm deep thigh.

“My mother has a fishing camp at Bayou des Allemands. Would you like to stop there?”

She nods into my neck. She has become tender toward me and now and then presses my cheek with her hand.

Just west of Pearl River a gravel road leaves the highway and winds south through the marshes. All at once we are in the lonely savannah and the traffic is behind us. Sharon still hides her face in my neck.

A lopsided yellow moon sheds a feeble light over the savannah. Faraway hummocks loom as darkly as a flotilla of ships. Awkwardly we walk over and into the marsh and along the boardwalk. Sharon cleaves to me as if, in staying close, she might not see me.

I cannot believe my eyes. It is difficult to understand. We round a hummock and there is the camp ablaze like the Titanic. The Smiths are home.

MY HALF BROTHERS and sisters are eating crabs at a sawbuck table on the screened porch. The carcasses mount toward a naked light bulb.

They blink at me and at each other. Suddenly they feel the need of a grown-up. A grown-up must certify that they are correct in thinking that they see me. They all, every last one, look frantically for their mother. Thérèse runs to the kitchen doorway.

“Mother! Jack is here!” She holds her breath and watches her mother’s face. She is rewarded. “Yes, Jack!”

“Jean-Paul ate some lungs.” Mathilde looks up from directly under my chin.

My half brother Jean-Paul, the son of my mother, is a big fat yellow baby piled up like a buddha in his baby chair, smeared with crab paste and brandishing a scarlet claw. The twins goggle at us but do not leave off eating.

Lonnie has gone into a fit of excitement in his wheelchair. His hand curls upon itself. I kiss him first and his smile starts his head turning away in a long trembling torticollis. He is fourteen and small for his age, smaller than Clare and Donice, the ten-year-old twins. But since last summer when Duval, the oldest son, was drowned, he has been the “big boy.” His dark red hair is nearly always combed wet and his face is handsome and pure when it is not contorted. He is my favorite, to tell the truth. Like me, he is a moviegoer. He will go see anything. But we are good friends because he knows I do not feel sorry for him. For one thing, he has the gift of believing that he can offer his sufferings in reparation for men’s indifference to the pierced heart of Jesus Christ. For another thing, I would not mind so much trading places with him. His life is a serene business.

My mother is drying her hands on a dishcloth.

“Well well, look who’s here,” she says but does not look.

Her hands dry, she rubs her nose vigorously with her three middle fingers held straight up. She has hay fever and crabs make it worse. It is a sound too well known to me to be remembered, this quick jiggle up and down and the little wet wringing noises under her fingers.

We give each other a kiss or rather we press our cheeks together, Mother embracing my head with her wrist as if her hands were still wet. Sometimes I feel a son’s love for her, or something like this, and try to give her a special greeting, but at these times she avoids my eye and gives me her cheek and calls on me to notice this about Mathilde or that about Thérèse.

“Mother, I want you to meet Sharon Kincaid.”

“Well now!” cries Mother, turning away and inserting herself among the children, not because she has anything against Sharon but because she feels threatened by the role of hostess. “There is nobody here but us children,” she is saying.

Sharon is in the best of humors, rounding her eyes and laughing so infectiously that I wonder if she is not laughing at me. From the beginning she is natural with the children. Linda, I remember, was nervous and shifted from one foot to the other and looked over their heads, her face gone heavy as a pudding. Marcia made too much over them, squatting down and hugging her knees like Joan Fontaine visiting an orphanage.

Mother does not ask how I happen to be here or give a sign that my appearance is in any way remarkable — though I have not seen them for six months. “Tessie, tell Jack about your class’s bus trip.”—and she makes her escape to the kitchen. After a while her domesticity will begin to get on my nerves. By the surest of instincts she steers clear of all that is exceptional or “stimulating.” Any event or idea which does not fall within the household regimen, she stamps at once with her own brand of the familiar. If, as a student, I happened to get excited about Jackson’s Valley Campaign or Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, it was not her way to oppose me. She approved it as a kind of wondrous Rover boy eccentricity: “Those? Oh those are Jack’s books. The stacks and stacks of books that boy brings home! Jack, do you know everything in those books?” “No’m.” Nevertheless I became Dick Rover, the serious-minded Rover boy.

It is good to see the Smiths at their fishing camp. But not at their home in Biloxi. Five minutes in that narrow old house and dreariness sets into the marrow of my bones. The gas logs strike against the eyeballs, the smell of two thousand Sunday dinners clings to the curtains, voices echo round and round the bare stairwell, a dismal Sacred Heart forever points to itself above the chipped enamel mantelpiece. Everything is white and chipped. The floors, worn powdery, tickle the nostrils like a schoolroom. But here on Bayou des Allemands everybody feels the difference. Water laps against the piling. The splintered boards have secret memories of winter, the long dreaming nights and days when no one came and the fish jumped out of the black water and not a soul in sight in the whole savannah; secrets the children must find out and so after supper they are back at their exploring, running in a gang from one corner to another. Donice shows me a muskrat trap he had left last August and wonder of wonders found again. They only came down this morning, Mother explains, such a fine day it was, and since the children have a holiday Monday, will stay through Mardi Gras if the weather holds. With Roy away, Mother is a member of the gang. Ten minutes she will spend in the kitchen working with her swift cat-efficiency, then out and away with the children, surging to and fro in their light inconstant play, her eyes fading in a fond infected look.

Thérèse is telling about her plans to write her Congressman about the Rivers and Harbors bill. Thérèse and Mathilde are something like Joan and Jane in the Civics reader.

“Isn’t that Tessie a case?” my mother cries as she disappears into the kitchen, signifying that Tessie is smart but also that there is something funny about her precocity.

“Where’s Roy? We didn’t see a car. We almost didn’t walk over.”

“Playing poker!” they all cry. This seems funny and everybody laughs. Lonnie’s hand curls. If our arrival had caused any confusion, we are carried quickly past by the strong current of family life.

“Do you have any more crabs, Mother?”

“Any more crabs! Ask Lonnie if we weren’t just wondering what to do with the rest. You haven’t had your supper?”

“No’m.”

Mother folds up the thick layer of newspaper under the crab carcasses, making a neat bundle with her strong white hands. The whole mess comes away leaving the table dry and clean. Thérèse spreads fresh paper and Mathilde fetches two cold bottles of beer and two empty bottles for hammering the claws and presently we have a tray apiece, two small armies of scarlet crabs marching in neat rows. Sharon looks queer but she pitches in anyhow and soon everybody is making fun of her. Mathilde shows her how to pry off the belly plate and break the corner at the great claw so that the snowy flesh pops out in a fascicle. Sharon affects to be amazed and immediately the twins must show her how to suck the claws.

Outside is the special close blackness of night over water. Bugs dive into the tight new screen and bounce off with a guitar thrum. The children stand in close, feeling the mystery of the swamp and the secrecy of our cone of light. Clairain presses his stomach against the arm of my chair. Lonnie tries to tune his transistor radio; he holds it in the crook of his wrist, his hands bent back upon it. Once his lip falls open in the most ferocious leer. This upsets Sharon. It seems to her that a crisis is at hand, that Lonnie has at last reached the limit of his endurance. When no one pays any attention to him, she grows fidgety — why doesn’t somebody help him? — then, after an eternity, Mathilde leans over carelessly and tunes in a station loud and clear. Lonnie turns his head, weaving, to see her, but not quite far enough.

Lonnie is dressed up, I notice. It turns out that Aunt Ethel, Roy’s sister, was supposed to take him and the girls to a movie. It was not a real date, Mother reminds him, but Lonnie looks disappointed.

“What is the movie?” I ask him.

“Fort Dobbs.” His speech is crooning but not hard to understand.

“Where is it?”

“At the Moonlite.”

“Let’s go.”

Lonnie’s head teeters and falls back like a dead man’s.

“I mean it. I want to see it.”

He believes me.

I corner my mother in the kitchen.

“What’s the matter with Lonnie?”

“Why nothing.”

“He looks terrible.”

“That child won’t drink his milk!” sings out my mother.

“Has he had pneumonia again?”

“He had the five day virus. And it was bad bad bad bad bad. Did you ever hear of anyone with virus receiving extreme unction?”

“Why didn’t you call me?”

“He wasn’t in danger of death. The extreme unction was his idea. He said it would strengthen him physically as well as spiritually. Have you ever heard of that?”

“Yes. But is he all right now?”

She shrugs. My mother speaks of such matters in a light allusive way, with the overtones neither of belief nor disbelief but rather of a general receptivity to lore.

“Dr Murtag said he’d never seen anything like it. Lonnie got out of bed in half an hour.”

Sometimes when she mentions God, it strikes me that my mother uses him as but one of the devices that come to hand in an outrageous man’s world, to be put to work like all the rest in the one enterprise she has any use for: the canny management of the shocks of life. It is a bargain struck at the very beginning in which she settled for a general belittlement of everything, the good and the bad. She is as wary of good fortune as she is immured against the bad, and sometimes I seem to catch sight of it in her eyes, this radical mistrust: an old knowledgeable gleam, as old and sly as Eve herself. Losing Duval, her favorite, confirmed her in her election of the ordinary. No more heart’s desire for her, thank you. After Duval’s death she has wanted everything colloquial and easy, even God.

“But now do you know what he wants to do? Fast and abstain during Lent.” Her eyes narrow. Here is the outrage. “He weighs eighty pounds and he has one foot in the grave and he wants to fast.” She tells it as a malignant joke on Lonnie and God. For a second she is old Eve herself.

Fort Dobbs is good. The Moonlite Drive-In is itself very fine. It does not seem too successful and has the look of the lonesome pine country behind the Coast. Gnats swim in the projection light and the screen shimmers in the sweet heavy air. But in the movie we are in the desert. There under the black sky rides Clint Walker alone. He is a solitary sort and a wanderer. Lonnie is very happy. Thérèse and Mathilde, who rode the tops of the seats, move to a bench under the projector and eat snowballs. Lonnie likes to sit on the hood and lean back against the windshield and look around at me when a part comes he knows we both like. Sharon is happy too. She thinks I am a nice fellow to take Lonnie to the movies like this. She thinks I am being unselfish. By heaven she is just like the girls in the movies who won’t put out until you prove to them what a nice unselfish fellow you are, a lover of children and dogs. She holds my hand on her knee and gives it a squeeze from time to time.

Clint Walker rides over the badlands, up a butte, and stops. He dismounts, squats, sucks a piece of mesquite and studies the terrain. A few decrepit buildings huddle down there in the canyon. We know nothing of him, where he comes from or where he goes.

A good night: Lonnie happy (he looks around at me with the liveliest sense of the secret between us; the secret is that Sharon is not and never will be onto the little touches we see in the movie and, in the seeing, know that the other sees — as when Clint Walker tells the saddle tramp in the softiest easiest old Virginian voice: “Mister, I don’t believe I’d do that if I was you”—Lonnie is beside himself, doesn’t know whether to watch Clint Walker or me), this ghost of a theater, a warm Southern night, the Western Desert and this fine big sweet piece, Sharon.

A good rotation. A rotation I define as the experiencing of the new beyond the expectation of the experiencing of the new. For example, taking one’s first trip to Taxco would not be a rotation, or no more than a very ordinary rotation; but getting lost on the way and discovering a hidden valley would be.

The only other rotation I can recall which was possibly superior was a movie I saw before the war called Dark Waters. I saw it in Lafitte down on Bayou Barataria. In the movie Thomas Mitchell and Merle Oberon live in a decaying mansion in a Louisiana swamp. One night they drive into the village — to see a movie! A repetition within a rotation. I was nearly beside myself with rotatory emotion. But Fort Dobbs is as good as can be. My heart sings like Octavian and there is great happiness between me and Lonnie and this noble girl and they both know it and have the sense to say nothing.

THREE O’CLOCK and suddenly awake amid the smell of dreams and of the years come back and peopled and blown away again like smoke. A young man am I, twenty nine, but I am as full of dreams as an ancient. At night the years come back and perch around my bed like ghosts.

My mother made up a cot in my corner of the porch. It is a good place, with the swamp all around and the piles stirring with every lap of water.

But, good as it is, my old place is used up (places get used up by rotatory and repetitive use) and when I awake, I awake in the grip of everydayness. Everydayness is the enemy. No search is possible. Perhaps there was a time when everydayness was not too strong and one could break its grip by brute strength. Now nothing breaks it — but disaster. Only once in my life was the grip of everydayness broken: when I lay bleeding in a ditch.

In a sudden rage and, as if I had been seized by a fit, I roll over and fall in a heap on the floor and lie shivering on the boards, worse off than the miserablest muskrat in the swamp. Nevertheless I vow: I’m a son of a bitch if I’ll be defeated by the everydayness.

(The everydayness is everywhere now, having begun in the cities and seeking out the remotest nooks and corners of the countryside, even the swamps.)

For minutes at a stretch I lie rigid as a stick and breathe the black exhalation of the swamp.

Neither my mother’s family nor my father’s family understand my search.

My mother’s family think I have lost my faith and they pray for me to recover it. I don’t know what they’re talking about. Other people, so I have read, are pious as children and later become skeptical (or, as they say on This I Believe: “in time I outgrew the creeds and dogmas of organized religion”). Not I. My unbelief was invincible from the beginning. I could never make head or tail of God. The proofs of God’s existence may have been true for all I know, but it didn’t make the slightest difference. If God himself had appeared to me, it would have changed nothing. In fact, I have only to hear the word God and a curtain comes down in my head.

My father’s family think that the world makes sense without God and that anyone but an idiot knows what the good life is and anyone but a scoundrel can lead it.

I don’t know what either of them are talking about. Really I can’t make head or tail of it. The best I can do is lie rigid as a stick under the cot, locked in a death grip with everydayness, sworn not to move a muscle until I advance another inch in my search. The swamp exhales beneath me and across the bayou a night bittern pumps away like a diesel. At last the iron grip relaxes and I pull my pants off the chair, fish out a notebook and scribble in the dark:

REMEMBER TOMORROW

Starting point for search:

It no longer avails to start with creatures and prove God.

Yet it is impossible to rule God out.

The only possible starting point: the strange fact of one’s own invincible apathy — that if the proofs were proved and God presented himself, nothing would be changed. Here is the strangest fact of all.

Abraham saw signs of God and believed. Now the only sign is that all the signs in the world make no difference. Is this God’s ironic revenge? But I am onto him.

Cheppity cheppity chep chep. Chep. Silence. Cheppity chep chep. Chep.

It starts as an evil turn of events. There is a sense of urgency. Something has to be done. Let us please do something about it. Then it is a color, a very bad color that needs tending to. Then a pain. But there is no use: it is a sound and it is out there in the world and nothing can be done about it. Awake.

Cheppity cheppity chep chep. Chep. Silence.

“Shtfire and save matches.”

Not ten feet below, two men try to start an outboard motor clamped to a handsome blue hull. The boat drifts into a miniature dock, knocks. The world is milk: sky, water, savannah. The thin etherlike water vaporizes; tendrils of fog gather like smoke; a white shaft lies straight as a ruler over the marsh.

“Why don’t you tighten up on your needle valve?”

“Why don’t you kiss my ass?”

The voices sound reedy and old in the wan white world. One of them must be my stepfather, Roy Smith. Yes, the helmsman. The green visor of his hat covers his face, all but a lip heavy with anger, but I recognize his arms. The muscle curves out far beyond the dimple of the elbow; his forearms are like little hams. Black-burnished hair sprouts through the links of his watchband. He sits embracing the red cowl of the motor, his abdomen strong and heavy between his legs.

Roy leans back, poises, pulls the rope with a short powerful chop. It catches with a throaty roar and this changes everything. The pleasant man in the bow is taken by surprise and knocked off balance as the boat skews against the dock. But now the boat seeks open water and the fishermen sit quickly about and settle themselves, their faces serene now and full of hope. Roy Smith is seen to be a cheerful florid man, heavy-set but still youngish. The water of the bayou boils up like tea and disgorges bubbles of smoke. The hull disappears into a white middle distance and the sound goes suddenly small as if the boat had run into cotton.

A deformed live oak emerges from the whiteness, stands up in the air, like a tree in a Chinese print. Minutes pass. An egret lets down on his light stiff wings and cocks one eye at the water. Behind me the screen door opens softly and my mother comes out on the dock with a casting rod. She props the rod against the rail, puts down a wax-paper bundle, scratches both arms under the sleeves and looks about her, yawning. “Hinh-honh,” she says in a yawn-sigh as wan and white as the morning. Her blouse is one of Roy’s army shirts and not much too big for her large breasts. She wears blue Keds and ladies’ denims with a flyless front pulled high over her bulky hips. With her baseball cap pressed down over her wiry hair she looks like the women you see fishing from highway bridges.

Mother undoes the bundle, takes out a scout knife and pries loose the frozen shrimp. She chops off neat pink cubes, slides them along the rail with her blade, stopping now and then to jiggle her nose and clear her throat with the old music. To make sure of having room, she goes out to the end of the dock, lays back her arm to measure, and casts in a big looping straight-arm swing, a clumsy yet practiced movement that ends with her wrist bent in, in a womanish angle. The reel sings and the lead sails far and wide with its gyrating shrimp and lands with hardly a splash in the light etherish water. Mother holds still for a second, listening intently as if she meant to learn what the fishes thought of it, and reels in slowly, twitching the rod from time to time.

I pull on my pants and walk out barefoot on the dock. The sun has cleared the savannah but it is still a cool milky world. Only the silvery wood is warm and raspy underfoot.

“Isn’t it mighty early for you!” Her voice is a tinkle over the water.

My mother is easy and affectionate with me. Now we may speak together. It is the early morning and our isolation in the great white marsh.

“Can I fix you some breakfast?”

“No’m. I’m not hungry.” Our voices go ringing around the empty room of the morning.

Still she puts me off. I am only doing a little fishing and it is like any other day, she as much as says to me, so let us not make anything remarkable out of it. She veers away from intimacy. I marvel at her sure instinct for the ordinary. But perhaps she knows what she is doing.

“I wish I had known you were going to get up so early,” she says indignantly. “You could have gone over to the Rigolets with Roy and Kinsey. The reds are running.”

“I saw them.”

“Why didn’t you go!”—in the ultimate measure of astonishment.

“You know I don’t like to fish.”

“I had another rod!”

“It’s just as well.”

“That’s true,” she says after a while. “You never did. You’re just like your father.” She gives me a swift look, which is unusual for her. “I noticed last night how much you favor him.” She casts again and again holds still.

“He didn’t like to fish?”

“He thought he did!”

I stretch out at full length, prop my head on a two-by-four. It is possible to squint into the rising sun and at the same time see my mother spangled in rainbows. A crab spider has built his web across a finger of the bayou and the strands seem to spin in the sunlight.

“But he didn’t really?”

“Unh un—” she says, dragging it out to make up for her inattention. Every now and then she wedges the rod between her stomach and the rail and gives her nose a good wringing.

“Why didn’t he?”

“Because he didn’t. He would say he did. And once he did! I remember one day we went down Little Bayou Sara. He had been sick and Dr Wills told him to work in the morning and take off in the afternoons and take up fishing or an interesting hobby. It was the prettiest day, I remember, and we found a hole under a fallen willow — a good place for sac au lait if ever I saw one. So I said, go ahead, drop your line right there. Through the tree? he said. He thought it was a lot of humbug — he wasn’t much of a fisherman; Dr Wills and Judge Anse were big hunters and fishermen and he pretended he liked it but he didn’t. So I said, go ahead, right down through the leaves — that’s the way you catch sac au lait. I be John Brown if he didn’t pull up the fattest finest sac au lait you ever saw. He couldn’t believe his eyes. Oh he got himself all wound up about it. Now isn’t this an ideal spot, he would say over and over again, and: Look at such and such a tree over there, look how the sunshine catches the water in such and such a way — we’ll have to come back tomorrow and the next day and all summer — that’s all we have to do!” My mother gives her rod a great spasming jerk, reels in quickly and frowns at the mangled shrimp. “Do you see what that scoun’l beast—! Do you know that that ain’t anything in the world but some old hardhead sitting right on the bottom.”

“Did he go back the next day?”

“Th. No indeed. No, in, deed,” she says, carving three cubes of shrimp. Again she lays back her arm. The shrimp gyrates and Mother holds still. “What do you think he says when I mention sac au lait the next morning?”

“What?”

“‘Oh no. Oh no. You go ahead.’ And off he goes on his famous walk.”

“Walk?”

“Up the levee. Five miles, ten miles, fifteen miles. Winter or summer. I went with him one Christmas morning I remember. Mile after mile and all of it just the same. Same old brown levee in front, brown river on one side, brown fields on the other. So when he got about a half a mile ahead of me, I said, shoot. What am I doing out here humping along for all I’m worth when all we going to do is turn around and hump on back? So I said, good-by, Mister, I’m going home — you can walk all the way to Natchez if you want to.” It is my mother’s way to see life, past and present, in terms of a standard comic exaggeration. If she had spent four years in Buchenwald, she would recollect it so: “So I said to him: listen, Mister, if you think I’m going to eat this stuff, you’ve got another think coming.”

The boards of the dock, warming in the sun, begin to give off a piney-winey smell. The last tendril of ground fog burns away, leaving the water black as tea. The tree is solitary and mournful, a poor thing after all. Across the bayou the egret humps over, as peaked and disheveled as a buzzard.

“Was he a good husband?” Sometimes I try, not too seriously, to shake her loose from her elected career of the commonplace. But her gyroscope always holds her on course.

“Good? Well I’ll tell you one thing — he was a good walker!”

“Was he a good doctor?”

“Was he! And what hands! If anyone ever had the hands of a surgeon, he did.” My mother’s recollection of my father is storied and of a piece. It is not him she remembers but an old emblem of him. But now something occurs to her. “He was smart, but he didn’t know it all! I taught him a thing or two once and I can tell you he thanked me for it.”

“What was that?”

“He had lost thirty pounds. He wasn’t sick — he just couldn’t keep anything down. Dr Wills said it was amoeba (that year he thought everything was amoeba; another year it was endometritis and between you and me he took out just about every uterus in Feliciana Parish). At the breakfast table when Mercer brought in his eggs and grits, he would just sit there looking at it, white as a sheet. Me, it was all I could do not to eat, my breakfast and his. He’d put a mouthful of grits in his mouth and chew and chew and he just couldn’t swallow it. So one day I got an idea. I said listen: you sat up all night reading a book, didn’t you? Yes, I did, he said, what of it? You enjoyed it, didn’t you? Yes, I did. So I said: all right. Then we’ll read it. The next morning I told Mercer to go on about his business. I had my breakfast early and I made his and brought it to him right there in his bed. I got his book. I remember it — it was a book called The Greene Murder Case. Everybody in the family read it. I began to read and he began to listen, and while I read, I fed him. I told him, I said, you can eat, and I fed him. I put the food in his mouth and he ate it. I fed him for six months and he gained twenty five pounds. And he went back to work. Even when he ate by himself downstairs, I had to read to him. He would get downright mad at me if I stopped. ‘Well go on!’ he would say.”

I sit up and shade my eyes to see her.

Mother wrings her nose. “It was because—”

“Because of what?” I spit over into the water. The spit unwinds like a string.

She leans on the rail and gazes down into the tea-colored bayou. “It was like he thought eating was not—important enough. You see, with your father, everything, every second had to be—”

“Be what, Mother?”

This time she gives a real French shrug. “I don’t know. Something.”

“What was wrong with him?”

“He was overwrought,” she replies at once and in her regular mama-bee drone and again my father disappears into the old emblem. I can hear echoes of my grandfather and grandmother and Aunt Emily, echoes of porch talk on the long summer evenings when affairs were settled, mysteries solved, the unnamed named. My mother never got used to our porch talk with its peculiar license. When someone made a spiel, one of our somber epic porch spiels, she would strain forward in the dark, trying to make out the face of the speaker and judge whether he meant to be taken as somberly as he sounded. As a Bolling in Feliciana Parish, I became accustomed to sitting on the porch in the dark and talking of the size of the universe and the treachery of men; as a Smith on the Gulf Coast I have become accustomed to eating crabs and drinking beer under a hundred and fifty watt bulb — and one is as pleasant a way as the other of passing a summer night.

“How was he overwrought?”

She plucks the hook clean, picks up a pink cube, pushes the barb through, out, and in again. Her wrists are rounded, not like a young girl’s but by a deposit of hard fat.

“It was his psychological make-up.”

Yes, it is true. We used to talk quite a bit about psychological make-ups and the effect of glands on our dismal dark behavior. Strangely, my mother sounds more like my aunt than my aunt herself. Aunt Emily no longer talks of psychological make-ups.

“His nervous system was like a high-powered radio. Do you know what happens if you turn up the volume and tune into WWL?”

“Yes,” I say, unspeakably depressed by the recollection of the sad little analogies doctors like to use. “You mean he wasn’t really cut out to be an ordinary doctor, he really should have been in research.”

“That’s right!” My mother looks over in surprise, but not much surprise, then sends her lead off like a shot. “Now Mister—!” she addresses an unknown fish and when he does not respond, falls to musing. “It’s peculiar though. You’re so much like your father and yet so different. You know, you’ve got a little of my papa in you — you’re easy-going and you like to eat and you like the girls.”

“I don’t like to fish.”

“You’re too lazy, if you ask me. Anyhow, Papa was not a fisherman, as I have told you before. He owned a fleet of trawlers at Golden Meadow. But did he love pretty girls. Till his dying day.”

“Does it last that long?”

“Anh anh anh anh anh!” In the scandal of it, Mother presses her chin into her throat, but she does not leave off watching her float. “Don’t you get risque with me! This is your mother you’re talking to and not one of your little hotsy-totsies.”

“Hotsy-totsies!”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you like Sharon?”

“Why yes. But she’s not the one for you.” For years my mother has thrown it out as a kind of proverb that I should marry Kate Cutrer, though actually she has also made an emblem out of Kate and does not know her at all. “But do you know a funny thing?”

“What?”

“It’s not you but Mathilde who is moody like your father. Sister Regina says she is another Alice Eberle.”

“Who is Alice Eberle?”

“You know, the Biloxi girl who won the audition with Horace Heidt and His Musical Knights.”

“Oh.”

Mother trills in her throat with the old music. I squint up at her through the rainbows.

“But when he got sick the next time, I couldn’t help him.”

“Why not?”

She smiles. “He said my treatment was like horse serum: you can only use it once.”

“What did happen?”

“The war came.”

“That helped?”

“He helped himself. He had been in bed for a month, up in your room — you were off at school. He wouldn’t go to the clinic, he wouldn’t eat, he wouldn’t go fishing, he wouldn’t read. He’d just lie there and watch the ceiling fan. Once in a while he would walk down to the Chinaman’s at night and eat a po-boy. That was the only way he could eat — walk down to the Chinaman’s at midnight and eat a po-boy. That morning I left him upstairs as usual. I sent Mercer up with his paper and his tray and called Clarence Saunders. Ten minutes later I look up and here he comes down the steps, all dressed up. He sits himself down at the dining room table as if nothing had happened, orders breakfast and eats enough to kill a horse — all the while reading his paper and not even knowing he was eating. I ask him what has happened. What has happened! Why, Germany has invaded Poland, and England and France have declared war! I’m here to tell you that in thirty minutes he had eaten his breakfast, packed a suitcase and gone to New Orleans.”

“What for?”

“To see the Canadian consul.”

“Yes, I remember him going to Windsor, Ontario.”

“That was two months later. He gained thirty pounds in two months.”

“What was he so excited about?”

“He knew what it meant! He told us all at supper: this is it. We’re going to be in it sooner or later. We should be in it now. And I’m not waiting. They were all so proud of him — and especially Miz Cutrer. And when he came home that spring in his blue uniform and the gold wings of a flight surgeon, I swear he was the best looking man I ever saw in my life. And so — cute! We had the best time.”

Sure he was cute. He had found a way to do both: to please them and please himself. To leave. To do what he wanted to do and save old England doing it. And perhaps even carry off the grandest coup of all: to die. To win the big prize for them and for himself (but not even he dreamed he would succeed not only in dying but in dying in Crete in the wine dark sea).

“Then before that he was lazy too.”

“He was not!”

“It is not laziness, Mother. Partly but not all. I’ll tell you a strange thing. During the war a bad thing happened to me. We were retreating from the Chongchon River. We had stopped the Chinese by setting fire to the grass with tracer bullets. What was left of a Ranger company was supposed to be right behind us. Or rather we thought we were retreating, because we got ambushed on the line of retreat and had to back off and head west. I was supposed to go back to the crossroad and tell the Ranger company about the change. I got back there and waited half an hour and got so cold I went to sleep. When I woke up it was daylight.”

“And you didn’t know whether the Rangers had come by or not?”

“That wasn’t it. For a long time I couldn’t remember anything. All I knew was that something was terribly wrong.”

“Had the Rangers gone by during the night?” asks my mother, smiling and confident that I had played a creditable role.

“Well no, but that’s not—”

“What happened to them?”

“They got cut off.”

“You mean they were all killed?”

“There wasn’t much left to them in the first place.”

“What a terrible thing. We’ll never know what you boys went through. But at least your conscience was clear.”

“It was not my conscience that bothered me. What I am trying to tell you is that nothing seemed worth doing except something I couldn’t even remember. If somebody had come up to me and said: if you will forget your preoccupation for forty minutes and get to work, I can assure you that you will find the cure of cancer and compose the greatest of all symphonies — I wouldn’t have been interested. Do you know why? Because it wasn’t good enough for me.”

“That’s selfish.”

“I know.”

“I’ll tell you one thing. If they put me up there and said, Anna, you hold your ground and start shooting, you know what I would do?”

“What?”

“I’d be long gone for the rear.”

I summon up the vision of my mother in headlong retreat before the Chinese and I have to laugh.

“We’ll never know what it was like though,” Mother adds, but she is not paying much attention, to tell the truth. I really have to laugh at her. She kneads a pink cube so the fish can smell it. “You know what, Jack?” Her eyes brim with fondness, a fondness carefully guarded against the personal, the heartfelt, a fondness deliberately rendered trite. “It’s funny you should mention that. Believe it or not, Roy and I were talking the other day and Roy, not me, said you would be wonderful in something like that.”

“Like what?”

“Cancer research.”

“Oh.”

Fishing is poor. The egret pumps himself up into the air and rows by so close I can hear the gristle creak in his wings.

AFTER BREAKFAST THERE is a commotion about Mass. The Smiths, except Lonnie, would never dream of speaking of religion — raising the subject provokes in them the acutest embarrassment: eyes are averted, throats are cleared, and there occurs a murmuring for a minute or two until the subject can be changed. But I have heard them argue forty five minutes about the mechanics of going to Mass and with all the ardor of relief, as if in debating the merits of the nine o’clock Mass in Biloxi as against the ten thirty in Bay St Louis they were indeed discussing religion and who can say they weren’t? But perhaps they are right: certainly if they spoke to me of God, I would jump in the bayou.

I suggest to Roy Smith, who has just returned from the Rigolets, that Sharon and I stay home and mind Jean-Paul. “Oh no,” says my mother under drooping lids. “Jean-Paul can go. Well all go. Sharon’s going too, aren’t you, Sharon?” Sharon laughs and says she will. They’ve been talking together.

The church, an old one in the rear of Biloxi, looks like a post office. It is an official-looking place. The steps are trodden into scallops; the brass rail and doorplate are worn bright as gold from hard use. We arrive early so Lonnie can be rolled to a special place next to a column. By the time Mass begins we are packed in like sardines. A woman comes up the aisle, leans over and looks down our pew. She gives me an especially hard look. I do not budge. It is like the subway. Roy Smith, who got home just in time to change to a clean perforated shirt, gives up his seat to a little girl and kneels in the aisle with several other men, kneels on one knee like a tackle, elbow propped on his upright knee, hands clasped sideways. His face is dark with blood, his breath whistles in his nose as he studies the chips in the terrazzo floor.

Sharon is good: she has a sweet catholic wonder peculiar to a certain type of Protestant girl — once she is put at her ease by the heroic unreligiousness of the Smiths (what are they doing here? she thinks); she gazes about yellow-eyed. (She thinks: how odd they all are, and him too — all that commotion about getting here and now that they are here, it is as if it were over before it began — each has lapsed into his own blank-eyed vacancy and the priest has turned his back.)

When the bell rings for communion, Roy gets heavily to his feet and pilots Lonnie to the end of the rail. All I can see of Lonnie is a weaving tuft of red hair. When the priest comes to him, Roy holds a hand against Lonnie’s face to steady him. He does this in a frowning perfunctory way, eyes light as an eagle’s.

THE WOMEN ARE IN the kitchen, my mother cleaning red-fish and Sharon sitting at a window with a lapful of snap-beans. The board sash opens out over the swamp where a flock of redwings rattle like gourds and ride down the cattails, wings sprung out to show their scarlet epaulets. Jean-Paul swings over the floor, swiveling around on his fat hip, his sharklike flesh whispering over the rough boards, and puts his finger into the cracks to get at the lapping water. There comes to me on the porch the voices of the morning, the quarreling late eleven o’clock sound of the redwings and the talk of the women, easy in its silences, come together, not in their likenesses (for how different they are: Sharon’s studied upcountry exclamations—“I surely didn’t know people ate crawfish!”—by which she means that in Eufala only Negroes eat crawfish; and my mother’s steady catarrhal hum—“If Roy wants bisque this year, he’d better buy it — do you know how long it takes to make bisque?”) but come together rather in their womanness and under the easy dispensation of the kitchen.

The children are skiing with Roy. The blue boat rides up and down the bayou, opening the black water like a knife. The gear piled at the end of the dock, yellow nylon rope and crimson lifebelt, makes aching phosphor colors in the sunlight.

Lonnie finds me and comes bumping his chair into my cot. On Sundays he wears his suit and his snapbrim felt hat. He has taken off his coat but his tie is still knotted tightly and fastened by a chain-and-bar clasp. When Lonnie gets dressed up, he looks like a little redneck come to a wedding.

“Do you want to renew your subscriptions?”

“I might. How many points do you have?”

“A hundred and fourteen.”

“Doesn’t that make you first?”

“Yes, but it doesn’t mean I’ll stay first.”

“How much?”

“Twelve dollars, but you don’t have to renew.”

The clouds roll up from Chandeleur Island. They hardly seem to move, but their shadows come racing across the grass like a dark wind. Lonnie has trouble looking at me. He tries to even his eyes with mine and this sets his head weaving. I sit up.

Lonnie takes the money in his pronged fingers and sets about putting it into his wallet, a bulky affair with an album of plastic envelopes filled with holy cards.

“What is first prize this year?”

“A Zenith Trans-World.”

“But you have a radio.”

“Standard band.” Lonnie gazes at me. The blue stare holds converse, has its sentences and periods. “If I get the Zenith, I won’t miss television so much.”

“I would reconsider that. You get a great deal of pleasure from television.”

Lonnie appears to reconsider. But he is really enjoying the talk. A smile plays at the corner of his mouth. Lonnie’s monotonous speech gives him an advantage, the same advantage foreigners have: his words are not worn out. It is like a code tapped through a wall. Sometimes he asks me straight out: do you love me? and it is possible to tap back: yes, I love you.

“Moreover, I do not think you should fast,” I tell him.

“Why not?”

“You’ve had pneumonia twice in the past year. It would not be good for you. I doubt if your confessor would allow it. Ask him.”

“He is allowing it.”

“On what grounds?”

“To conquer an habitual disposition.” Lonnie uses the peculiar idiom of the catechism in ordinary speech. Once he told me I needn’t worry about some piece of foolishness he heard me tell Linda, since it was not a malicious lie but rather a “jocose lie.”

“What disposition is that?”

“A disposition to envy.”

“Envy who?”

“Duval.”

“Duval is dead.”

“Yes. But envy is not merely sorrow at another’s good fortune: it is also joy at another’s misfortune.”

“Are you still worried about that? You accused yourself and received absolution, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Then don’t be scrupulous.”

“I’m not scrupulous.”

“Then what’s the trouble?”

“I’m still glad he’s dead.”

“Why shouldn’t you be? He sees God face to face and you don’t.”

Lonnie grins at me with the liveliest sense of our complicity: let them ski all they want to. We have something better. His expression is complex. He knows that I have entered the argument as a game played by his rules and he knows that I know it, but he does not mind.

“Jack, do you remember the time Duval went to the field meet in Jackson and won first in American history and the next day made all-state guard?”

“Yes.”

“I hoped he would lose.”

“That’s not hurting Duval.”

“It is hurting me. You know what capital sin does to the life of the soul.”

“Yes. Still and all I would not fast. Instead I would concentrate on the Eucharist. It seems a more positive thing to do.”

“That is true.” Again the blue eyes engage mine in lively converse, looking, looking away, and looking again. “But Eucharist is a sacrament of the living.”

“You don’t wish to live?”

“Oh sure!” he says laughing, willing, wishing even, to lose the argument so that I will be sure to have as much fun as he.

It is a day for clouds. The clouds come sailing by, swelled out like clippers. The creamy vapor boils up into great thundering ranges and steep valleys of cloud. A green snake swims under the dock. I can see the sutures between the plates of its flat skull. It glides through the water without a ripple, stops mysteriously and nods against a piling.

“Jack?”

“Yes?”

“Are we going for a ride?”

For Lonnie our Sundays together have a program. First we talk, usually on a religious subject; then we take a ride; then he asks me to do him like Akim.

The ride is a flying trip over the boardwalk and full tilt down the swamp road. Lonnie perches on the edge of his chair and splits the wind until tears run out of his eyes. When the clouds come booming up over the savannah, the creatures of the marsh hush for a second then set up a din of croaking and pumping.

Back on the porch he asks me to do him like Akim. I come for him in his chair. It has to be a real beating up or he won’t be satisfied. During my last year in college I discovered that I was picking up the mannerisms of Akim Tamiroff, the only useful thing, in fact, that I learned in the entire four years.

“I must get those plans.”

“Come on now Jack don’t.” Lonnie shrinks back fearfully-joyfully. His hand curls like a burning leaf.

My mother sticks her head out of the kitchen.

“Now aren’t those two a case?” She turns back to Sharon. “I tell you, that Lonnie and Jack are one more case.”

After I kiss him good-by, Lonnie calls me back. But he doesn’t really have anything to say.

“Wait.”

“What?”

He searches the swamp, smiling.

“Do you think that Eucharist—”

“Yes?”

He forgets and is obliged to say straight out: “I am still offering my communion for you.”

“I know you are.”

“Wait.”

“What?”

“Do you love me?”

“Yes.”

“How much?”

“Quite a bit.”

“I love you too.” But already he has the transistor in the crook of his wrist and is working at it furiously.

ON ITS WAY HOME the MG becomes infested with malaise. It is not unexpected, since Sunday afternoon is always the worst time for malaise. Thousands of cars are strung out along the Gulf Coast, whole families, and all with the same vacant headachy look. There is an exhaust fume in the air and the sun strikes the water with a malignant glint. A fine Sunday afternoon, though. A beautiful boulevard, ten thousand handsome cars, fifty thousand handsome, well-fed and kind-hearted people, and the malaise settles on us like a fall-out.

Sorrowing, hoping against hope, I put my hand on the thickest and innerest part of Sharon’s thigh.

She bats me away with a new vigor.

“Son, don’t you mess with me.”

“Very well, I won’t,” I say gloomily, as willing not to mess with her as mess with her, to tell the truth.

“That’s all right. You come here.”

“I’m here.”

She gives me a kiss. “I got your number, son. But that’s all right. You’re a good old boy. You really tickle me.” She’s been talking to my mother. “Now you tend to your business and get me on home.”

“Why?”

“I have to meet someone.”