Lancelot

drinking Dixie beer and reminiscing about other hurricanes. Even householders of low-lying houses left home happily, headed for motels in the Mississippi hills. Ordinarily bored police rode happily up and down country roads and bayous warning people to evacuate.
    I too made certain preparations. I made a shopping list but, unlike other shoppers, I first discarded certain objects before purchasing others. Assembling the video cameras, tape deck, tapes, recorder, amplifier—some $4,500 worth—I packed the lot in a Gladstone bag and at nightfall hauled it over the levee to a skiff locked to a cypress in the batture, rowed out two hundred yards, and dropped the bag in the channel. When I regained the batture I was half a mile downstream but it was easy rowing back in dead water.
    Only then did I make my shopping list. Besides the usual hurricane items it contained:
    1 18" Stillson wrench
    4 10' sections Gerona plastic pipe, 3" diameter
    4 3" sleeves
    1 90° elbow
    1 45° elbow
    1 3" nipple (foot long)
    1 3" to 1" reducer
    1 lb. sealing PBC cmpd
    1roll duct tape
    2kerosene lamps
    1 gal. kerosene
    During the filming and before I went to the hardware store, I visited Tex and Siobhan. They were getting on each other’s nerves worse than ever. They both got on my nerves. Siobhan clung to me and beat me in the ribs with her fist. It was necessary to do something about Siobhan. It had been necessary for some time. The difference was that now it was possible to do something.
    Siobhan loved music and took lessons on the old French spinet. Tex promised to buy her a new “pinana.”
    â€œI’m going to buy you the biggest Steinway grand pinana in New Orleans. You gon play the new pinana for Tex?”
    â€œNo,” she said, not looking at Tex but clinging to my thigh with a fierce scissors grip of her thin legs and beating me fretfully. “Is he really going to buy me a piano?”
    â€œAbsotively, posalutely!” cried Tex.
    Then I had a piece of luck. In his boring, repetitive way he began to come at me, jabbing me the way Siobhan beat me with her fist, jabbing with things he had said so often before he didn’t even listen himself.
    â€œI’m telling you, boy, you better change that old black pipe under the house. That stuff rots like wood. I smelled a gas leak yesterday.”
    â€œHow could you smell it? There’s no captan in it. Methane has no smell.”
    â€œI smelled it!”
    He didn’t smell it. He wasn’t listening to himself. He didn’t even know he said he smelled it.
    â€œI’m going to the hardware store now. Now listen to me, Tex. Here’s what I want you to do.”
    For the first time he was startled to attention by my tone, as if somebody had jostled him and he had waked from a long boring dream. He was listening! I was going to tell him what to do. He knew this and knew he was going to do it.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œFor a long time you’ve wanted to take Siobhan to Odessa to visit your folks.”
    â€œSho,” he said, listening.
    â€œI want her out of here tonight. This is a bad storm. Both of you get going now. I mean now. You can either drive to New Orleans and fly to Texas or drive all the way, but leave within the hour.”
    It was the best I could do: Siobhan, I do believe the old bastard meant well, I only hope he didn’t drive you crazy or bore you to death.
    â€œWe’d rather drive, wouldn’t we, Siobhan? We’ll play count animals. I’ll count moocows and minnie cats and you count down hogs and twobit horses.”
    â€œNo fair!” said Siobhan, but she did let go of me and go to Tex. She liked the idea of a trip. “There are more cats and cows than hound dogs and quarter horses.”
    They were going and that was that. Here is an incidental discovery: If you tell somebody what to do, they will do it. All you have to do is know what to do. Because nobody else knows.
    The film company was shooting the last scene before the hurricane. The set was the front gallery of Belle Isle. It was the only remaining scene which could not be shot in Burbank. Following the scene, the crew planned to pack up their station wagons and go home.
    It was not a long scene but it required many takes. In the scene the sharecropper, played by Elgin, and the sheriff, played by the actor who looked like Pat Hingle, come to Belle Isle accompanied by the Christlike hippy stranger, played by Dana, who has