Lancelot

I would be impressed. You could almost make a believer out of me.
    In times when nobody is interested in God, what would happen if you could prove the existence of sin, pure and simple? Wouldn’t that be a windfall for you? A new proof of God’s existence! If there is such a thing as sin, evil, a living malignant force, there must be a God!
    I’m serious. When was the last time you saw a sin? Oh, you’ve seen quite a few? Well, I haven’t, not lately. I mean a pure unadulterated sin. You’re not going to tell me that some poor miserable slob of a man who beats up his own child has committed a sin?
    You don’t look impressed. Yes, you know me too well. I was only joking. Well, half joking.
    But joking aside. I must explain my second discovery. After I walked out of the dark parlor, where no one ever sat, and quietly out the front door. I took a different route to my pigeonnier. A tiny event but significant. Because it was only when I did this that I realized that I had taken exactly the same route for months, even years. I had actually made a path. My life had fallen into such a rut that it was possible to set one’s watch (Suellen told me this) when I walked out the front door at night. It must be two minutes to ten because he likes to get there just in time to turn on the ten o’clock news. News of what? What did I expect to happen? What did I want to happen?
    No. First, I paid a visit to Siobhan and Tex. who talked about runny babbits.
    â€œI liked the bunny rabbits,” said Siobhan, hugging my neck.
    â€œYou like those runny babbits!” cried Tex, still holding out his hands for her and, thinking he’d made a joke, kept on repeating it: “I told you you’d like those runny babbits!”
    Tex got on her nerves, in fact bored the hell out of her. It was almost as if he knew it and wanted to, enjoyed the mindlessness of runny babbits.
    Siobhan escaped both of us, squatted under the TV livid in the phosphorescent light, her cloudy blue eyes not even then quite focused on the big-eyed cartoon animals.
    Tex, of course, got on his next favorite subject, not chivvying Siobhan with his bad jokes but chivvying me for my neglectful ways. He couldn’t get over the fact that I had allowed Margot to rebuild the old burned wing of Belle Isle over a gas well even though it had been capped.
    For the tenth time he upbraided me in his fond jabbing inattentive way. Was it his wealth, I often wondered, which gave him license to be such a pain, a prodding tunnel-visioned unheeding bore, or had he gotten rich because he was such a pain?
    Yet he was a friendly-seeming pleasant-looking fellow with his big-nosed Indian-brown face, slicked-down black-dyed hair, liver-spotted muscular arms. At first sight one might take him for a golf pro, an old seasoned, whiskey-cured sun-drenched Sam Snead—until one noticed that he was not, that his way of standing around hands on hips was not like a golfer at all but the way an oilfield roughneck stands slouched at his alert ease, waits his moment while great machinery hums, heavy pipes swing, chains clank. Yes, that was it, that was his happiness and unhappiness: idleness can be happy only if the machinery is running and one looks on with a presiding interest, comforted as only machinery, one’s own machinery, can comfort. His sudden riches had stunned him. In the silence of wealth he felt deprived, deafened, and so he must reach out, grab, poke, drive Siobhan crazy.
    â€œWhen are you going to cement that well in?”
    â€œThere’s nothing left down there but a little marsh gas, Tex.”
    â€œHow you get by with having a Christmas tree under your house beats me.” He can’t or won’t listen.
    â€œIt was put there before the state law was passed. Anyhow, it’s only a small shallow well.”
    â€œIt still has two hundred pounds of pressure.”
    â€œChrist, no. Thirty pounds at the outside.”
    â€œâ€”two hundred pounds in rotten wartime black pipe.”
    Christ, you stupid Texas bastard, why don’t you listen?
    â€œIt’s got to be sealed,” Tex droned on. “A Christmas tree won’t do it. The only way to seal a well is to cement it.”
    â€œI know.”
    â€œHow in hell can Maggie seal a producing well and build a house over it?”
    On he went, poking me like poking Siobhan, poking and not listening, not even listening to himself. His fond unhappy eyes