The Moviegoer - Walker Percy [36]
“You know what’s in this slab?” The concrete is smooth as silk.
“No.”
“Chance number six copper pipe. Nobody will ever know it’s there but it will be there a long time.” I see that with him it is not purely and simply honesty; it is his own pleasure at thinking of good pipe in a good slab.
Back at the hummock, Mr. Sartalamaccia takes me aside and holds his hat away to the east. “You see that ditcher and doozer?”
“Yes.”
“You know What that’s going to be?”
“No.”
“That’s the tidewater canal to the Gulf. You know how much our land is going to be worth?”
“How much?”
“Fifty dollars a foot.” Mr. Sartalmaccia draws me close. Again he tells it as the veriest piece of news. Deal or no deal, this is a piece of news that bears telling.
Later Sharon tells me I was smart to trick him into revealing the true value of my duck club. But she is mistaken. It came about from the moment I met him that thenceforward it pleased him to speak of the past, of his strange odyssey in 1932 when he gazed at Old Faithful in Yellowstone Park and worked on the causeway to Key West and did not go hungry—it pleased him to speak with me of the past and to connive with me against the future. He speaks from his loneliness and together we marvel at the news of the canal and enjoy the consolation of making money. For money is a great joy.
Mr. Sartalamaccia has become possessed by a secret hilarity. He gives me a poke in the ribs. “I’ll tell you what we can do, Mr. Bolling. You keep your land! I’ll develop it for you. You make the offsite improvements. I’ll build the houses. We’ll make us some money.” He shrinks away in some kind of burlesque.
“How much do you think we can make?”
“Well I don’t know. But I can tell you this.” Mr. Sartalamaccia is hopping in a sort of goat dance and Sharon stands dreaming in the green darkness of the glade. “I’ll give you fifteen thousand for it right now!”
Our name is Increase.
Sharon and I spin along the River Road. The river is high and the booms and stacks of ships ride up and down the levee like great earth engines.
In the Shell station and in a drift of honeysuckle sprouting through the oil cans and standing above Sharon with a Coke balanced on her golden knee, I think of flattening my hummock with bulldozers and it comes back to me how the old Gable used to work at such jobs: he knew how to seem to work and how to seem to forget about women: stand asweat with his hands in his back pockets.
It is a great joy to be with Sharon and to make money at it and to seem to pay no attention to her. As for Sharon: she finds nothing amiss in sitting in the little bucket seat with her knees doubled up in the sunshine, dress tucked under. An amber droplet of Coca-Cola meanders along her thigh, touches a blond hair, distributes itself around the tiny fossa.
“Aaauugh,” I groan aloud.
“What’s the matter?”
“It is a stitch in the side.” It is a sword in the heart.
Sharon holds a hand against the sun to see me. “Mr. Bolling?”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember the price Mr. Sartalamaccia first mentioned?”
“Eight thousand dollars.”
“He was really gon mess you up.”
“No he wasn’t. But if it hadn’t been for you, I’d have taken the eight thousand.”
“Me?”
“You got me to come down here.”
She assents doubtfully, casting back in her mind with one eye screwed up.
“Do you know how much you saved me, or rather made for me? At least seven thousand dollars and probably a great deal more. I’m obliged to give you ten percent.”
“You’re not giving me any money, son.”
I have to laugh. “Why not?”
“Ain’t nobody giving me any money.” (Now she catches herself and speaks broadly on purpose.) “I got plenty money.”
“How much money do you have?”
“Ne’mind.”
By flexing her leg at a certain angle, she can stand the Coke on a facet of her knee. What a structure it