The Moviegoer - Walker Percy [66]
It is the first time she has spoken of her capsules. My simplemindedness serves her well.
“You know what happened then? What did Sam say? Never mind. Did you see Merle? No? Hm. What happened was the most trivial thing imaginable, nothing grand at all, though I would like to think it was. I took six or eight capsules altogether. I knew that wouldn’t kill me. My Lord, I didn’t want to die—not at that moment. I only wanted to—break out, or off, off dead center—Listen. Isn’t it true that the only happy men are wounded men? Admit it! Isn’t that the truth?” She breaks off and goes off into a fit of yawning. “I felt so queer. Everything seemed so—no ’count somehow, you know?” She swings her foot and hums a little tune. “To tell you the truth, I can’t remember too well. How strange. I’ve always remembered every little thing.”
“—and you spoke to me for the first time of your messianic hopes?” Sam smiles at my aunt. In Feliciana we used to speculate on the new messiah, the scientist-philosopher-mystic who would come striding through the ruins with the Gita in one hand and a Geiger counter in the other. But today Sam miscalculates. My aunt says nothing. The thumbnail goes on combing the lion’s mane.
Dinner over, Uncle Oscar waits in the dining room until the others have left, then seizes his scrotum and gives his leg a good shake.
I rise unsteadily, sleepy all at once to the point of drunkenness.
“Wait.” Kate takes my arm urgently in both hands. “I am going with you.”
“All right. But first I think I’ll take a little nap on the porch.”
“I mean to Chicago.”
“Chicago?”
“Yes. Do you mind if I go?”
“No.”
“When are you leaving?”
“Tomorrow morning.”
“Could you change it to tonight and get two tickets on the train?”
“Why the train?” I begin to realize how little I have slept during the past week.
“I’ll tell you what. You go lie down and I’ll take care of it.”
“All right.”
“After Chicago do you think there is a possibility we might take a trip out west and stay for a while in some little town like Modesto or Fresno?”
“It is possible.”
“I’ll fix everything.” She sounds very happy. “Do you have any money?”
“Yes.”
“Give it to me.”
It is a matter for astonishment, I think drowsily in the hammock, that Kate should act with such dispatch—out she came, heels popping, arm in arm with her stepmother, snapped her purse and with Sam looking on, somewhat gloomily it struck me, off she went in her stiff little Plymouth—and then I think why. It is trains. When it comes to a trip, to the plain business of going, just stepping up into the Pullman and gliding out of town of an evening, she is as swift and remorseless as Delia Street.
Now later, on Prytania, Uncle Oscar hands Aunt Edna into the station wagon—they are bound for their Patio-by-candlelight tour—and goes huffing around to his door, rared back and with one hand pressed into his side. Sam tiptoes to the screen. “Well now look ahere, Brother Andy. Ain’t that the Kingfish and Madame Queen? Sho ’tis.”
In this vertigo of exhaustion, laughter must be guarded against like retching.
“Brother Andy, is you getting much?”
“No.” My stomach further obliges Sam with a last despairing heave. Oh Lord.
Later there seems to come into my hand—and with it some instructions from Sam of which there is no more to be remembered than that they were delivered in the tone of one of my aunt’s grand therapeutic schemes—a squarish bottle, warmed by Sam’s body and known to my fingers through the ridge of glass left by the mold and the apothecary symbol oz or […] or […][1].
2
Sure enough, three hours later we are rocking along an uneven roadbed through the heart of the Ponchitoula swamp.
No sooner do we open the heavy door of Sieur Iberville and enter the steel corridor with its gelid hush and the stray voices from open compartments and the dark smell of going high in the nostrils