Lancelot by Walker Percy Page B

with some such Southern Western shoot-out ultimatum as “Now listen here, you son of a bitch. I don’t know which one of you is bothering Ellis but I’m holding you responsible and if one hair of a Buell head is harmed, I’m going to shoot your ass off for you,” and so forth and so forth. I put a stop to it all right, but in a manner more suited to Southern complexities and realities than the simple dreams of the sixties, when there were only good people and bad people. I went to see the Grand Kleagle all right, who was none other than J. B. Jenkins, a big dumb boy who played offensive tackle with me in both high school and college. He was as big and dumb and as good a tackle as can be, managing even to flunk out of a state school later, no small achievement in those days, and had ever since operated not a Gulf Oil service station but a Gulf Coast Oil service station. He was a good family man, believed in Jesus Christ, America, the Southern way of life, hated Communists and liberals, and was not altogether wrong on any count. At any rate, all I said to him in the sweltering galvanized tin shack of his Gulf Coast Oil station was: “Now, J.B., I want you to do me a favor.” “What’s that, Lance, old buddy?” “You know what I want. I want you to lay off Ellis and his church.” “Now, goddamn, Lance, you know as well as I do ain’t nothing but a bunch of Jew Communists out there stirring up the niggers.” “Will you take my word for something, J.B.?” “You know I will.” “I swear to you there’s no Jews or Communists out there and I will swear to you that Ellis is a good Godfearing Baptist like you and you have nothing to fear from him.” “Yeah, but he is one more uppity nigger.” “Yeah, but he’s my nigger, J.B. He’s been working for us for forty years and you know that.” “Well, that’s true. Well, all right. Lance. Don’t worry about nothing. Lets us have a drink.” So we had a drink of straight three-dollar whiskey in that 110-degree iron shack. Sweat sprang off our heads like halos. And that was that.
    Ah well. Like I told you, real life is more complicated and ambiguous than in the movies. Ellis Buell was grateful. Ellis Buell had seen too much TV and Gunsmoke. “You should have seen Mr. Lance call that white trash out.” And so forth.
    His son Elgin was a different matter. Actually Elgin was the only one who didn’t care much one way or the other about such matters. Like Archimedes he was more interested, exclusively interested, in writing out his formulae and would not have cared or even noticed whether it was a Kluxer or a Roman soldier who lifted his hand against him.
    Elgin. I do believe, would do what I asked, not out of gratitude (a very bad emotion as both he and I knew), but because he liked me and felt sorry for me. Unlike him I had been unable to escape into the simple complexities of science. All he had to do was solve the mystery of the universe, which may be difficult but is not as difficult as living an ordinary life.
    I had counted too on my request intriguing him as a kind of mathematical game, which it was. It did.
    Did it ever occur to you that after we went to college we never touched each other? Do you remember walking down Bourbon Street behind two Russian sailors who were holding hands? Do you remember sleeping in a motel bed in Jackson, Mississippi, with a whore between us? Why was it all right for us to simultaneously assault the poor whore between us but never once touch each other? Who is crazy, we or the Russians?
    Ah, you touch my shoulder. Do you know that I am embarrassed?
    Oh, Christ, there is something wrong with my mind. I’ve drawn a blank again. It’s a little frightening. I could use a drink. Everybody talks about the horrors of drink, which are real enough, but not about its beauties. Your God gave us wine, didn’t he, and threw