The Moviegoer - Walker Percy [48]
“He bumped my shoulder.”
“Let me see.” She comes around and helps me take off my shirt, but the T-shirt is too high and I can’t raise my arm. “Wait.” She goes after her Guatemalan bag and finds some cuticle scissors and cuts the sleeve through the neck. I feel her stop.
“That’s not—”
“Not what?”
“Not from this wreck.”
“Sure.”
“You got a handkerchief?” She runs down to the beach to wet it in salt water. “Now. We better find a doctor.”
I was shot through the shoulder—a decent wound, as decent as any ever inflicted on Rory Calhoun or Tony Curtis. After all it could have been in the buttocks or genitals—or nose. Decent except that the fragment nicked the apex of my pleura and got me a collapsed lung and a big roaring empyema. No permanent damage, however, except a frightening-looking scar in the hollow of my neck and in certain weather a tender joint.
“Come on now, son, where did you get that?” Cold water runs down my side.
“That Ford.”
“Why that’s terrible!”
“Can’t you tell it’s a scar?”
“Where did you get it?”
“My razor slipped.”
“Come on now!”
“I got it on the Chongchon River.”
“In the war?”
“Yes.”
“Oh.”
O Tony. O Rory. You never had it so good with direction. Nor even you Bill Holden, my noble Will. O ye morning stars together. Farewell forever, malaise. Farewell and good luck, green Ford and old Ohioan. May you live in Tampa happily and forever.
And yet there are fellows I know who would have been sorry it happened, who would have had no thought for anything but their damned MG. Blessed MG.
I am able to get out creakily and we sit on the grassy bank. My head spins. That son of a bitch really rocked my shoulder. The MG is not bad: a dented door.
“And right exactly where you were sitting,” says Sharon holding the handkerchief to my shoulder. “And that old scoun’l didn’t even stop.” She squats in her black pants like a five year old and peers at me. “Goll—! Didn’t that hurt?”
“It was the infection that was bad.”
“I’ll tell you one dang thing.”
“What?”
“I surely wouldn’t want anybody shooting at me.”
“Do you have an aspirin in your bag?”
“Wait.”
When she returns, she gives me the aspirin and holds my ruined shoulder in both hands, as if the aspirin were going to hurt.
“Now look behind the seat and bring me the whisky.”
She pours me a thumping drink into a paper cup, also from the Guatemalan bag. The aspirin goes down in the burning. I offer her the bottle.
“I swear I believe I will.” She drinks, with hardly a face, hand pressed to the middle of her breastbone. We pull on my shirt by stages.
But the MG! We think of her at the same time. What if she suffered a concussion? But she starts immediately, roaring her defiance of the green Ford.
I forget my whisky bottle and when I get out to pick it up, I nearly fall down. She is right there to catch me, Rory. I put both my arms around her.
“Come on now, son, put your weight on me.”
“I will. You’re just about the sweetest girl I ever knew.”
“Ne’mind that. You come on here, big buddy.”
“I’m coming. Where’re we going?”
“You sit over here.”
“Can you drive?”
“You just tell me where to go.”
“We’ll get some beer, then go to Ship Island.”
“In this car?”
“In a boat.”
“Where is it?”
“There.” Beyond the waters of the sound stretches a long blue smudge of pines.
The boat ride is not what I expected. I had hoped for an empty boat this time of year, a deserted deck where we might stretch out in the sun. Instead we are packed in like sardines. We find ourselves sitting bolt upright on a bench in the one little cabin surrounded by at least a hundred children. It is, we learn, a 4-H excursion from Leake County, Mississippi. A dozen men and women who look like Baptist deacons and deaconesses, red-skinned, gap-toothed, friendly—decent folk they are—are in charge. We sit drenched in the smell of upcountry Mississippi, the smell of warm white skins under boiled cotton underwear. How white they are, these farm children, milk white. No sign of sun here, no red necks; not pale are they but white,