The Moviegoer - Walker Percy [34]
“Grow old along with me.
The best is yet to be,” says Sharon.
“That’s right.”
Mr. Sartalamaccia has become restless; he works his hat behind him. His fingernails are large and almost filled with white moons. “Your father didn’t build it. Judge Anse was the one that built it.”
“Is that right? You knew them? I didn’t know you—”
Mr. Sartalamaccia tells it forlornly, without looking up—knowing no more than the facts pure and simple and hardly believing that we don’t know. Everybody knows. “I built it for him.”
“How did you know him?”
“I didn’t. One morning before Christmas I was just about finished with my store over there and Judge Anse come in and started talking to me. He said—uh—” Mr. Sartalamaccia smiles a secret little smile and his head sinks even lower as he makes bold to recall the very words. “—what’s your name? Yes: what’s your name? I told him. He said—uh: you built this store? I said, yessir. We talked. So he looked at me and he said—uh: I’m going tell you what I want you to do. He writes this check. He said—uh: Here’s a check for a thousand dollars. I want you to build me a lodge and come on, I’ll show you where. So I said, all right. So he said—uh—” Mr. Sartalamaccia waits until the words, the very words, speak themselves—“Let’s go, Vince, like him and me, we were going to have us a big time. He never saw me before in his life and he walks in my store and writes me a check on the Canal Bank for a thousand dollars. And he didn’t come back for six weeks.”
“Did he like the lodge?”
“I mean he liked it.”
“I see.” I see. There was such a time and there were such men (and Mr. Sartalamaccia smiles to remember it), men who could say to other men, here do this, and have it done and done with pleasure and remembered with pleasure. “Have you always been here?”
“Me?” Mr. Sartalamaccia looks up for the first time. “I had only been here three weeks! Since November.”
“Where are you from?”
“I was raised in Ensley, near Birmingham, but in nineteen thirty-two times was so hard I started moving around. I visited forty-six states, all but Washington and Oregon, just looking around and I never went hungry. In nineteen thirty four I come to stay with my brother in Violet and started trapping.”
It turns out that Mr. Sartalamaccia is a contractor and owns the housing development next door. He has done well and he wants my duck club for an addition. I ask about the houses.
“You want to see one?”
We follow him along a hog trail to a raw field full of pretty little flat-topped houses. He must show us one abuilding. I take pleasure in watching him run a thumb over the sawn edges of the sheathing. Sharon does not mind. She stands foursquare, eyes rolled back a little, showing white. She is sleepy-eyed and frumpy; she looks like snapshots of Ava Gardner when she was a high school girl in North Carolina.
“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.