Walker Percy - The Moviegoer

“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.