The Moviegoer

by Walker Percy

  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.

  3

  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.

  4

  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 muc
h 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 hig
h-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.”