by Walker Percy
Something was indeed wrong with Elgin’s camera. The figures, tiny figurines, were reddish, like people in a film darkroom, and seemed to meet, merge, and flow through each other. Lights and darks were reversed like a negative, mouths opened on light, eyes were white sockets. The actors looked naked clothed, clothed naked. The figures seemed to be blown in an electronic wind. Bodies bent, pieces blew off. Hair danced atop heads like a candle flame. I stared. Didn’t Elgin say the figures were nothing but electrons?
FIRST FEATURE: MISS MARGOT’S ROOM
Who were these two dim rosy figures moving silently in a red sea?
I rewound the reel and examined the reel case. The label was neatly printed, MISS MARGOT’S ROOM, exactly like the chaste and formal museum signs mounted on the brass posts supporting velvet ropes in Belle Isle.
Two figures were standing, talking. They were not naked. Their clothes were light and their faces dark. It was Merlin and Margot. I recognized the shape of Merlin’s rooster shock of hair even though it flickered on his head like Pentecostal flame. Margot I knew instantly from the bright earmuff fluffs of hair at her ears and her mannish yet womanish way of setting her fist on her hip.
When they talked, their mouths opened on light.
They embraced.
The sound was not much better than the video. The voices were scratchy and seemed to come not from the room but from the sky like the blackbirds rattling and rising and falling. When they turned, their voices went away. Half sentences blew away like their bodies.
They embraced again. Merlin held her off, their bodies flowing apart like a Y.
MERLIN: You know that I always—(pause)—wish you every—
(You know that I always will love you? I wish you every happiness?)
MARGOT: (An assentive murmur.)
MERLIN: But what an ire—Oh, Christ—end—of a phizz infirm—
(But what an irony! Oh, Christ that it should end because of a physical infirmity?)
MARGOT: It did—
(It didn’t?)
MERLIN:—a disproportion like Lee losing Gettysburg because of di—
(Diarrhea?)
MARGOT: Don’t be
MERLIN: It’s flat-out god—unax—Jesus.
(It’s flat-out goddamn unacceptable, Jesus?)
MARGOT: Jesus, men. You are all so—
(Jesus what?)
Were they talking about me?
No.
They embrace again. Blobs like breasts swell on Merlin’s shoulder and blow off toward Margot.
MERLIN: I fear for—But I wish you both ever—
(I fear for you. But I wish you both every happiness.)
You both? Me? No.
MARGOT: (A deprecative murmur.)
MERLIN: I love you so f (?)—v (?)—much.
(I love you so fucking much? so very much? probably the former considering the two-syllable beat.)
MARGOT: I love you—oh s—(?)—oh sh—(?)
(I love you too. Oh so much. Or: I love you too. Oh shit, or sheet? or she-it. Probably the last, two beats, two syllables, and knowing Margot.)
MERLIN: DO you believe I love—enough—truth?
(? ? ?)
MARGOT: (A wary murmur.)
MERLIN: Why—wonder—
(? ? ?)
MERLIN: —could be exploit—
(He could be exploiting you?)
MARGOT: (Turning away: they come apart, Y becoming II.)
MERLIN: (An expostulation.)
MARGOT: !
MERLIN: —mon—
(? ? ?) (Money?)
MARGOT: NO.
MERLIN: Christ—not—even sure—part.
(Christ, you’re not even sure you have the part?)
MARGOT: You bas—
(You bastard.)
MERLIN: Well—?
MARGOT: Up—oars, oo bas—
(Up yours, you bastard.)
MERLIN: Oh, Jesus—I’d kike—oars.
(Oh, Jesus how I’d like to be up yours?)
MARGOT: (An indifferent murmur.)
MERLIN: Besides that—a basic incap—intimace—
(Besides that he has a basic incapacity for intimacy?)
MARGOT: I don’t care.
MERLIN: What a lousy trucking fire engine.
(What a lousy fucking triangle? I am reasonably sure of this reading: that it was not Elgin’s equipment but Merlin himself who scrambled “fucking triangle” to “trucking fiangle” (fire engine). A joke. Yes, I am 99 percent sure.)
MARGOT: DO you believe I still—you?
(Do you believe I still love you?)
MERLIN: Oh, Chr—
MARGOT: Sh—sh—sh!
(Shush shush shush? or: shit shit shit? shit shit shit.)
The tiny figurines embrace again, sectors of their trunks blowing out like pseudopods of amoebae. Their bodies seem to have magnetic properties.
MERLIN: —wish you—all happ—
(I wish y’all happiness? I wish you all happiness? The latter? Merlin wouldn’t say “y’all.”)
Merlin vanishes. Margot droops and is still, like a puppet hung from its string.
It is a triangle. At first I thought I was part of the triangle, the losing angle, so:
Then I see they are not talking about me at all, that it is a different triangle:
Another figure materializes (they don’t seem to use doors). It is Jacoby. There is no way of recognizing him except by his shortness and stockiness and his big head, which he carries confidently between his shoulders. Like many short men he is of a piece, body, brain, organs compacted and operating in close order. All would be well with him, one feels, except he is shorter than Margot. He makes up for this shortcoming by a kind of confident lolling back of head. It is his way of not having to look up at her; he holds her off as if to say: Well, my dear, let’s have a look at you.
They make a Y connected as far as the waist.
They do not speak but their mouths and eyes open on light. Are they whispering?
They dress, putting dark on light. No, it is undressing, for dark is light and light is dark. They are shedding light clothes for dark skin.
They approach each other. Sections of their bodies detach and fly off. Other sections extend pseudopods.
They turn, their hair blowing sideways in an electric wind. There are two sockets of light on Margot’s back. They are, I recognize, the two dimples on either side of her sacrum.
Margot lies across the bed and pulls him onto her. He is gazing down at her. Her head comes off the bed and bends back until her face is looking upside down at the camera. Her eyes close on light, but her mouth opens letting out light.
Still there is no conversation but presently a voice says, at first I think from my room or even from the sky with the blackbirds: Oh oh oh ah ah aaah, oh my Jesus oh ah ah sh—sh—sh—
? ? ?
But the voice is not immediately recognizable as either Margot’s or Jacoby’s, being hoarser than Margot’s and higher than Jacoby’s.
A prayer?
INTERMISSION
I switch off the machine and walk out into the skyey day. There is the blinded dazzled headachy sensation of coming out of a movie in the afternoon. The blackbirds are rising and settling, the wind has picked up but is fitful, blowing sycamore leaves back and forth across my tiny pigeon porch.
I sit on my porch and watch the blackbirds rising and settling and the clouds hurrying toward the hurricane like latecomers to the kickoff.
The blackbirds fall silent. The clouds straighten out and form a line. The sky becomes flat and yellow. The view from the porch is very simple. There are six parallel horizontal lines, the bottom rail of the iron fence, the top rail, the near edge of the River Road, the far edge, the top of the levee, the straight bottom line of the clouds. There are many short vertical lines, the iron spikes of the fence. There is a single oblique line, a gravel road leading from the River Road over the levee. Atop the levee are the triangles of the bonfires. The slanting boom of a ship
intersects with the triangle of the bonfires, making trapezoids and smaller triangles.
The hurricane machine cranks up. The live oaks blow inside out. It is necessary to use the hurricane machine even though a real hurricane is coming, not just because the real hurricane is not yet here, but because even if it were it wouldn’t be as suitable for film purposes as an artificial hurricane.
SECOND FEATURE: MISS RAINES ROOM
There are three red figures on the pink bed. Pieces of bodies, ribs, thighs, torsos, fly off one body and join another body. Hair blows in a magnetic wind. Mouths and eyes open on light. Light pubic triangles turn like mobiles, now narrowing, now widening, changing from equilateral triangles to isosceles triangles to lines of light. The posters of the bed make a frame.
Lucy is lying lengthwise in the middle of the bed. She is recognizable by the flame-curl of hair under her ears, by her big breasts, and by the still slightly immature not wholly incurved line between calf and knee. Lucy is like a patient. Certain operations are being performed on her. The other two figures handle her as efficiently as nurses. Raine is slim and swift, moving so fast her body leaves ectoplasm behind. Dana stands naked and musing beside the bed, one hand browsing over his shoulder like an athlete in a locker room.
The three lie together. Their bodies fuse but their arms move like a six-arm Shiva.
Now they are doing something else. Dana kneels in a horizontal plane, takes Lucy’s head in both hands, and guides it toward him. Raine moves much more quickly. Her sleek head flies off and burrows into Lucy’s stomach.
The figures make a rough swastikaed triangle:
Elgin is right. The sound track is poor. No words are audible except near the end an unrecognizable voice which is neither clearly male or female seems to come from nowhere and everywhere—and only fragments at that: Oh Christ dear sweet Jesus oh oh—
Another prayer?
Crows begin to fly north against the wind. It is unusual to see crows in such numbers, flocking like blackbirds. Then they straggle out for a mile. Ellis Buell says crows are the smartest of all birds. This is probably true. At least I know for a fact they know the range of a shotgun (Fluker claims they can distinguish a twenty gauge from a twelve, then move just out of range). The only time I ever killed a crow was by pure luck and a .22 rifle. He was flying at least five hundred feet high. Without expectation I led him by three feet and shot him through the head. Surprised, he fell at my feet with a thump. A ruby drop of blood hung from his black bill.
Still I had to watch the 5:30 news!
Unhooking the videotape, I turned on the TV. The hurricane watch had been changed to a hurricane warning. Marie, two hundred miles due south, was headed due north. She filled the whole Gulf. It became necessary to make preparations.
Everyone became serious and happy.
Storekeepers seriously-happily boarded up their windows. Volunteers seriously-happily sandbagged the levee. Shoppers seriously-happily shopped for battery radios, batteries, flashlights, Coleman lamps, kerosene lamps, kerosene, candles, canned goods, powdered milk, dried apricots, Hershey bars, raisins.
Happiest and most serious of all were owners of fallout shelters dug out during the A-bomb scare many years ago and never used. Happy families huddled underground around TV sets showing Marie spinning ever closer.
Happy drinkers sat in friendly bars under the levee drinking Dixie beer and reminiscing about other hurricanes. Even householders of low-lying houses left home happily, headed for motels in the Mississippi hills. Ordinarily bored police rode happily up and down country roads and bayous warning people to evacuate.
I too made certain preparations. I made a shopping list but, unlike other shoppers, I first discarded certain objects before purchasing others. Assembling the video cameras, tape deck, tapes, recorder, amplifier—some $4,500 worth—I packed the lot in a Gladstone bag and at nightfall hauled it over the levee to a skiff locked to a cypress in the batture, rowed out two hundred yards, and dropped the bag in the channel. When I regained the batture I was half a mile downstream but it was easy rowing back in dead water.
Only then did I make my shopping list. Besides the usual hurricane items it contained:
1 18" Stillson wrench
4 10' sections Gerona plastic pipe, 3" diameter
4 3" sleeves
1 90° elbow
1 45° elbow
1 3" nipple (foot long)
1 3" to 1" reducer
1 lb. sealing PBC cmpd
1roll duct tape
2kerosene lamps
1 gal. kerosene
During the filming and before I went to the hardware store, I visited Tex and Siobhan. They were getting on each other’s nerves worse than ever. They both got on my nerves. Siobhan clung to me and beat me in the ribs with her fist. It was necessary to do something about Siobhan. It had been necessary for some time. The difference was that now it was possible to do something.
Siobhan loved music and took lessons on the old French spinet. Tex promised to buy her a new “pinana.”
“I’m going to buy you the biggest Steinway grand pinana in New Orleans. You gon play the new pinana for Tex?”
“No,” she said, not looking at Tex but clinging to my thigh with a fierce scissors grip of her thin legs and beating me fretfully. “Is he really going to buy me a piano?”
“Absotively, posalutely!” cried Tex.
Then I had a piece of luck. In his boring, repetitive way he began to come at me, jabbing me the way Siobhan beat me with her fist, jabbing with things he had said so often before he didn’t even listen himself.
“I’m telling you, boy, you better change that old black pipe under the house. That stuff rots like wood. I smelled a gas leak yesterday.”
“How could you smell it? There’s no captan in it. Methane has no smell.”
“I smelled it!”
He didn’t smell it. He wasn’t listening to himself. He didn’t even know he said he smelled it.
“I’m going to the hardware store now. Now listen to me, Tex. Here’s what I want you to do.”
For the first time he was startled to attention by my tone, as if somebody had jostled him and he had waked from a long boring dream. He was listening! I was going to tell him what to do. He knew this and knew he was going to do it.
“What?”
“For a long time you’ve wanted to take Siobhan to Odessa to visit your folks.”
“Sho,” he said, listening.
“I want her out of here tonight. This is a bad storm. Both of you get going now. I mean now. You can either drive to New Orleans and fly to Texas or drive all the way, but leave within the hour.”
It was the best I could do: Siobhan, I do believe the old bastard meant well, I only hope he didn’t drive you crazy or bore you to death.
“We’d rather drive, wouldn’t we, Siobhan? We’ll play count animals. I’ll count moocows and minnie cats and you count down hogs and twobit horses.”
“No fair!” said Siobhan, but she did let go of me and go to Tex. She liked the idea of a trip. “There are more cats and cows than hound dogs and quarter horses.”
They were going and that was that. Here is an incidental discovery: If you tell somebody what to do, they will do it. All you have to do is know what to do. Because nobody else knows.
The film company was shooting the last scene before the hurricane. The set was the front gallery of Belle Isle. It was the only remaining scene which could not be shot in Burbank. Following the scene, the crew planned to pack up their station wagons and go home.
It was not a long scene but it required many takes. In the scene the sharecropper, played by Elgin, and the sheriff, played by the actor who looked like Pat Hingle, come to Belle Isle accompanied by the Christlike hippy stranger, played by Dana, who has reconciled poor white sharecroppers, poor black sharecroppers, overseers, sheriffs, blacks, whites, and the half-caste girl, who was accepted by neither race. They have come to rescue the planter, played by Merlin, and his daugh
ter the librarian, played by Margot, from the hurricane. The planter, however, fixed in his ancient prejudices and secretly liking the apocalyptic fury of the hurricane, decides to remain. He also expects his daughter to stay with him. The daughter decides to leave her father and go with the stranger. It is the farewell scene between father and daughter. After the farewell, the planter, who is not so much prejudiced as indifferent, caught up by aesthetic rather than social concerns, returns to the house alone, to his organ. Crashing chords of a Chopin polonaise fuse with the mounting fury of the hurricane.
“I want more of a Lear-like effect, Bob,” said Jacoby, turning off the hurricane machine after one of many takes. “You know, mad king raging on the heath, wild-eyed, hair blowing.”
“Yeah, right, Lear, okay,” said Merlin ironically, but Jacoby missed the irony.
Before the shooting began. I went to the bank and withdrew $75,000 from Margot’s and my checking account.
“What the hail, Lance?” said Macklin Maury Lamar, my cousin, who was president of the bank.
“We’re giving it to the American Negro College Fund.”
“Ah.”
I told him this for two reasons. One was that it was the only reason he would believe, believing as he did that I was still a liberal and therefore capable of any madness. (Yet curiously it was for him an understandable madness: you know how old Lance is, etc., etc.)
The other reason was that my explanation was, in a sense, true.
“Yeah,” said Macklin. “A wonderful cause. In fact I agree with you, that’s what they need.”
What was worrying Macklin was not this particular withdrawal but the likelihood of losing Margot’s and my half-million-dollar checking account. Or my asking him to pay interest.
“How do you want it, Lance?”
“In cash. Any denominations.”
“Why the cash, Lance?” asked Macklin, laughing heartily, eyes worried.