The Moviegoer - Walker Percy [22]
“What made you feel wonderful?”
“It was the storm.” Kate clears the broken settee and pulls me down in a crash of wicker. “The storm cut loose, you and Mother walked up and down, up and down, and I fixed myself a big drink and enjoyed every minute of it.”
“Are you ready to go to Lejiers?”
“Oh I couldn’t do that,” she says, plucking her thumb. “Where are you going?” she asks nervously, hoping that I will leave.
“To Magazine Street.” I know she isn’t listening. Her breathing is shallow and irregular, as if she were giving thought to each breath. “Is it bad this time?”
She shrugs.
“As bad as last time?”
“Not as bad.” She gives her knee a commonplace slap. After a while she says: “Poor Walter.”
“What’s the matter with Walter?”
“Do you know what he does down here?”
“No.”
“He measures the walls. He carries a little steel tape in his pocket. He can’t get over how thick the walls are.”
“Are you going to marry him?”
“I don’t know.”
“Your mother thought it was the accident that still bothered you.”
“Did you expect me to tell her otherwise?”
“That it did not bother you?”
“That it gave me my life. That’s my secret, just as the war is your secret.”
“I did not like the war.”
“Because afterwards everyone said: what a frightful experience she went through and doesn’t she do remarkably well. So then I did very well indeed. I would have made a good soldier.”
“Why do you want to be a soldier?”
“How simple it would be to fight. What a pleasant thing it must be to be among people who are afraid for the first time when you yourself for the first time in your life have a proper flesh-and-blood enemy to be afraid of. What a lark! Isn’t that the secret of heroes?”
“I couldn’t say. I wasn’t a hero.”
Kate muses. “Can you remember the happiest moment of your life?”
“No. Unless it was getting out of the army.”
“I can. It was in the fall of nineteen fifty-five. I was nineteen years old and I was going to marry Lyell and Lyell was a fine fellow. We were driving from Pass Christian to Natchez to see Lyell’s family and the next day we were going up to Oxford to see a game. So we went to Natchez and the next day drove to Oxford and saw the game and went to the dance. Of course Lyell had to drive home after the dance. We got almost to Port Gibson and it was after dawn but there was a ground fog. The Trace was still dark in low spots. Lyell passed a car in one of the dips. It was a coupe with the word Spry painted on the door.” Kate tells this in her wan analytic voice and with something of a relish for the oddness of it. “Spry was the last thing I saw. Lyell ran head on into a truckful of cotton-pickers. I must have been slumped down so low that I rolled up into a ball. When I woke up I was lying on the front porch of a shack. I wasn’t even scratched. I heard somebody say that the white man had been killed. I could only think of one thing: I didn’t want to be taken to Lyell’s family in Natchez. Two policemen offered to drive me to a hospital. But I felt all right—somebody had given me a shot. I went over and looked at Lyell and everybody thought I was an onlooker. He had gravel driven into his cheek. There were twenty or thirty cars stopped on the road and then a bus came along. I got on the bus and went into Natchez. There was some blood on my blouse, so when I got to a hotel, I sent it out to be cleaned, took a bath and ordered a big breakfast, ate every crumb and read the Sunday paper. (I can still remember what good coffee it was.) When the blouse came back, I put it on, walked over to the station and caught the Illinois Central for New Orleans. I slept like a log and got off at Carrollton Avenue early in the evening and walked home.”
“When was the happiest moment?”
“It was on the bus. I just stood there until the door opened, then I got on and we went sailing along from bright sunshine down through deep clefts as cool and dark as a springhouse.”
Kate frowns and drums her fingers on the wicker. A diesel horn