Walker Percy - The Moviegoer

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.