Lancelot

Margot didn’t like downstairs where she liked to think of me as Jeff Davis writing his memoirs. Not having much to do over the years, I’d kept perfect records of what little I had done. Would you believe that I became meticulous? I’d have made a good C.P.A. Better a good C.P.A. than a half-assed lawyer. There in the file cabinet I found what I had not until that moment quite realized I was looking for: my medical discharge from the army. Sir Lancelot, as you called me, Percival, discharged from the army not bloody and victorious and battered by Sir Turquine but with persistent diarrhea. The army gave me the shits and couldn’t cure me. Three months in Walter Reed, the best doctors in the world, twenty thousand dollars worth of medical care, and they couldn’t cure the simple shits. So I came home to Louisiana, in August, sat in the rocking chair on the gallery of Belle Isle, downed a great slug of bourbon, and watched the river boats. Sweat popped out on my head and I felt fine.
    Ah, here it was. My blood type. IV-AB. Again the worm of interest turned in my spine. I sat down in my metal swivel chair at my metal desk in the pigeon roost. It took Fluker two weeks to shovel out 150 years of pigeon shit, scrape the walls, and reveal what Margot was after, the slave brick of the walls and the three-inch cypress floor, not only not rotted but preserved, waxed by guano.
    The sun was setting behind the levee and shafts of rosy light from the glazed pigeonholes pierced the dim roost like laser beams.
    I began writing formulae on a pad of yellow legal foolscap. Isn’t it a fact that blood types are hereditary and that when the genes or chromosomes split, the A goes one way, the B the other, but never the A and B together?
    There was an unknown in the equation. I did not know Margot’s blood type, but did I have to? Let Margot’s gene equal X. My gene had to be A or B. Two equations were possible.
    X + A = O
    X + B = O
    The equations do not solve. X does not have a value. My blood type and Siobhan’s blood type did not compute.
    So I telephoned my cousin Royal in New Orleans. You remember him. Royal Bonderman Lamar? No? You know, Raw Raw, little bitty towheaded sapsucker from Clinton, Kappa Sig, trip manager for the team the last year? Used to stand around at dances, hands in his gabardines, grinning like an idiot, stuff between his teeth? Yes? Actually he was smart as hell, is now an excellent surgeon, makes three hundred thousand a year.
    I put the question hypothetically.
    â€œYou got a paternity case?” asked Royal. “I thought all you did was look after Margot’s money and help niggers.”
    â€œThat’s what I’m doing.” The worm of interest was turning. I remember listening for something in his voice, a note of superiority. In college I was the big shot, Phi Beta Kappa and halfback, and Royal carried the water bucket. Ever since, downhill all the way for me and up for him. While I was sitting under the levee sweating in my seersuckers, musing and drinking, he invented a heart valve. So I listened for the note of superiority which God knows he was entitled to. It wasn’t there. Same Royal, simply cheerful, grinning over the phone, stuff between his teeth.
    â€œYou mean you got a nigger paternity suit? I never heard of such a thing.”
    â€œJust tell me. Royal.”
    â€œTell you what? Oh.” He was still the same Royal in a way. agreeable and willing. The horsing around and even the “nigger” business was not quite as it sounded though, but part of a new broad manner he’d hit upon, found possible, just as he’d found it possible to be grave and loving at weddings in the family and even unsmiling, put his arm around a niece, and, not quite as tall as she, kiss her and wish her every happiness and mean it. Not even the “nigger” business was as it sounded because he operated on blacks and whites alike and didn’t call them niggers or even by their first names and sat them down together in his waiting room and did more for them than I did. He outdid me in the race thing. He did more and talked less.
    â€œNo. A type IV-AB cannot beget a type O no matter who or what the mama is.”
    â€œI see.”
    â€œWhat you got is a nig—”
    â€œI know, I know.”
    â€œâ€”ger in the woodpile.”
    â€œI know.”
    The thunder machine started up again.
    â€œMy God, what’s that,