Read Online The Moviegoer by Walker Percy - Free Book Online Page B

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 blows on the river. Overhead a motor labors. Mercer thinks he has to bear down on the waxer—I have noticed that Negroes do not have an affection for motors. “Pardon,” says Kate, rising abruptly and leaving. The little Yankee word serves her well: she leaves in disguise. A water pipe sings and stops with a knock. When Kate returns, she cranes around and smacks her arm cowboy style. The light glimmers in the courtyard and the empty house above us roars like a seashell.
    â€œDoes this mean you’re not going to marry Walter?”
    â€œProbably not,” says Kate, yawning at a great rate.
    â€œAre you going to see him tonight?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œWhy don’t you come with me?”
    â€œNo,” she says, smacking her arm. “I’ll stay here.”
    7
    SHE COMES UP SO quietly that I think at first it is the Negro boy who wheels the cans of shells into the street and from time to time spreads the whole oysters into the shaved ice. The oyster bar is between the restaurant and the kitchen, a kind of areaway through which waitresses pass. A yellow bulb hangs from the rafters but the service door is open and the areaway is filled with the darkness of the evening.
    Kate drums her fingers on the zinc bar and gazes abstractedly as the Negro sweeps oyster grime along the tile floor. The opener begins to set oysters before her.
    â€œI can’t go to Lejiers and I can’t marry Walter.”
    I drink beer and watch her.
    â€œI didn’t tell you the truth. It’s bad.”
    â€œThis very moment?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œDo you want to stay here or go outside?”
    â€œTell me,” she says, abstracted. A stranger, seeing her, would notice nothing wrong.
    â€œDo you want me to call Merle?”
    â€œNo. The other.”
    The “other” is a way we found of getting through it before. It has to do with her becoming something of a small boy and my not paying much attention to her. She eats a brown cock oyster, as cold and briny as the sea. She is not so bad. I have seen her worse.
    â€œWe’ll go over to St Charles and watch the parade. Then there’s a movie I want to see.”
    She nods and presently begins to notice the waitresses, watching with her lips parted and drying, like a boy who has come into a place with his father or brother and so is given leave to see without being seen.
    We are in time for the downtown swing of Neptune. The crowd has already moved from the lake side to the river side of St Charles. It is quite dark now. The streetlights make golden spaces inside the wet leaves of the live oaks. A south wind carries the smell of coffee from the Tchoupitoulas docks. Mounted police shoulder the crowd over the curb. To the dark neutral ground come Negroes from Louisiana Avenue and Claiborne; some Negro men carry children astride their necks to see over the crowd.
    Here is the public service truck with its tower, measuring the clearance under the oak limbs and cutting some wet drooping branches. We wait to see the flambeaux bearers and now here they come, a vanguard of half a dozen extraordinary Negroes dressed in dirty Ku Klux Klan robes, each bearing aloft a brace of pink and white flares. The flambeaux create a sensation. The bearers stride swiftly along the very edge of the crowd, showering sparks on everyone. They look angrily at each other to keep abreast, their fierce black faces peeping sidewise from their soiled hoods. Kate laughs at them. The Negro onlookers find them funny, but their bold manner, their contemptuous treatment of the crowd, excites them too. “Ah now!” they cry. “Look at him! Ain’t he something though!”
    The floats rumble along under the leaves. Some fathers have brought ladders with orange crates, big enough for three