Lancelot

vanquished). A propeller on a tower blew rain on the south wing of Belle Isle, whitening the live oaks, and the thunder machine thundered, a huge stretch of sheet metal with a motor and a padded eccentric cam. They were trying it out. A scene in the movie required a hurricane. The propeller roared like a B-29, wind and rain lashed Belle Isle, the live oaks turned inside out, Spanish moss tore loose, the sheet metal thundered. But on the other side of the pigeonnier the sun shone serenely.
    Margot had told me about it but I didn’t pay much attention. The movie was about some people who seek shelter in the great house during a hurricane, a young Cajun trapper, a black sharecropper, a white sharecropper, A Christlike hippy, a Klan type, a beautiful half-caste but also half-wit swamp girl, a degenerate river rat, the son and daughter of the house, even though there are no sharecroppers or Cajuns or even a swamp hereabouts and river rats disappeared with the fish in the Mississippi years ago. And I don’t even know what a “half-caste swamp girl” is. I am still unclear about the plot. The Negro sharecropper and the redneck’s father, who seem at first to hate each other, form an unlikely alliance to protect the women of the house against rapists of both races. With the help of the Christlike hippy, white and black discover their common humanity. There was something too about the master of the house trying to steal the sharecropper’s land, which has oil under it. My only contribution to the story discussions was to point out that the land could not belong to the sharecropper if he was a sharecropper.
    The five o’clock whistle at Ethyl blew. I put the book down face up on my desk. It was the plantation desk Margot had given me, built high so a planter in a hurry could write a check standing up. I don’t think those fellows ever sat down and wrote a letter or read a book. She had the legs cut off to make an ordinary desk. My eyes fell off the print to a piece of paper beside the book. I remember everything! I even remember the passage in the Chandler novel. Marlowe was looking for a man named Goodwin. He walked into a house in a canyon between Glendale and Pasadena. An English bungalow! in Pasadena! Don’t you like that? A pleasant incongruity absolutely congruous in Los Angeles. Goodwin was living there alone. Where could Goodwin have come from? I was trying to imagine Goodwin’s childhood, Goodwin twelve years old in Fort Wayne before his parents moved to California. Try to imagine someone in Los Angeles with a childhood. Inside the house Goodwin was dead, a bullet through his forehead. My eye slid off his name—I remember it because his first name was Lancelot like mine—onto the paper next to it. It was my daughter’s application to a horse camp in West Texas. Margot had filled it in and left it for me to sign. Siobhan I thought was too young for a horse camp—yes, my daughter is named Siobhan. My wife Margot was born Mary Margaret Reilly of Odessa, Texas, so our daughter was named Siobhan. This was a special Montessori horse camp and Margot insisted (“I was raised on a ranch in West Texas and I am not about to have her miss it”). I didn’t like the idea of her fooling with horses, great stupid iron-headed beasts, but I always gave in to Margot. I reached for the pen to sign the application and the medical waiver and my eye slid over the page to the letter O. No, it was not the letter O but the number 0, cipher, zero. It was her blood type, I-0. I read the medical examination. At the least the camp people were careful. In case a child got kicked in an artery, they had her blood type. I-0.
    I was looking at it idly. The thunder machine stopped. My head felt a little giddy but not unpleasant, as if I were dislocated and weightless in space—sliding instantaneously from an English bungalow in a Los Angeles canyon to an artificial hurricane to an absolutely still cool clear day in Louisiana. Once in a while an empty sugar-cane truck rumbled down the River Road.
    Then it was that the worm of interest turned somewhere near the base of my spine. Curious. What was curious? The star dot was slightly out of place. But what was out of place here? I didn’t know yet. Or did I? At any rate, I found myself climbing the iron staircase to the pigeon roost proper. There I kept my regular office equipment, file cabinets, typewriter, and so forth, which