The Moviegoer

slowed, to feast their eyes on us. A Negro sprinkling a steep lawn under a summer house puts his hose down altogether and stands gaping. By virtue of our misfortune we have become a thing to look at and witnesses gaze at us with heavy-lidded almost seductive expressions. But almost at once they are past and those who follow see nothing untoward. The Negro picks up his hose. We are restored to the anonymity of our little car-space.
    Love is invincible. True, for a second or so the pain carried me beyond all considerations, even that of love, but for no more than a second. Already it has been put to work and is performing yeoman service, a lovely checker in a lovely game.
    â€œBut what about you?” Sharon asks, coming close. “Honey, you look awful pale.”
    â€œHe bumped my shoulder.”
    â€œLet me see.” She comes around and helps me take off my shirt, but the T-shirt is too high and I can’t raise my arm. “Wait.” She goes after her Guatemalan bag and finds some cuticle scissors and cuts the sleeve through the neck. I feel her stop.
    â€œThat’s not—”
    â€œNot what?”
    â€œNot from this wreck.”
    â€œSure.”
    â€œYou got a handkerchief?” She runs down to the beach to wet it in salt water. “Now. We better find a doctor.”
    I was shot through the shoulder—a decent wound, as decent as any ever inflicted on Rory Calhoun or Tony Curtis. After all it could have been in the buttocks or genitals—or nose. Decent except that the fragment nicked the apex of my pleura and got me a collapsed lung and a big roaring empyema. No permanent damage, however, except a frightening-looking scar in the hollow of my neck and in certain weather a tender joint.
    â€œCome on now, son, where did you get that?” Cold water runs down my side.
    â€œThat Ford.”
    â€œWhy that’s terrible!”
    â€œCan’t you tell it’s a scar?”
    â€œWhere did you get it?”
    â€œMy razor slipped.”
    â€œCome on now!”
    â€œI got it on the Chongchon River.”
    â€œIn the war?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œOh.”
    O Tony. O Rory. You never had it so good with direction. Nor even you Bill Holden, my noble Will. O ye morning stars together. Farewell forever, malaise. Farewell and good luck, green Ford and old Ohioan. May you live in Tampa happily and forever.
    And yet there are fellows I know who would have been sorry it happened, who would have had no thought for anything but their damned MG. Blessed MG.
    I am able to get out creakily and we sit on the grassy bank. My head spins. That son of a bitch really rocked my shoulder. The MG is not bad: a dented door.
    â€œAnd right exactly where you were sitting,” says Sharon holding the handkerchief to my shoulder. “And that old scoun’l didn’t even stop.” She squats in her black pants like a five year old and peers at me. “Goll—! Didn’t that hurt?”
    â€œIt was the infection that was bad.”
    â€œI’ll tell you one dang thing.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI surely wouldn’t want anybody shooting at me .”
    â€œDo you have an aspirin in your bag?”
    â€œWait.”
    When she returns, she gives me the aspirin and holds my ruined shoulder in both hands, as if the aspirin were going to hurt.
    â€œNow look behind the seat and bring me the whisky.”
    She pours me a thumping drink into a paper cup, also from the Guatemalan bag. The aspirin goes down in the burning. I offer her the bottle.
    â€œI swear I believe I will.” She drinks, with hardly a face, hand pressed to the middle of her breastbone. We pull on my shirt by stages.
    But the MG! We think of her at the same time. What if she suffered a concussion? But she starts immediately, roaring her defiance of the green Ford.
    I forget my whisky bottle and when I get out to pick it up, I nearly fall down. She is right there to catch me, Rory. I put both my arms around her.
    â€œCome on now, son, put your weight on me.”
    â€œI will. You’re just about the sweetest girl I ever knew.”
    â€œNe’mind that. You come on here, big buddy.”
    â€œI’m coming. Where’re we going?”
    â€œYou sit over here.”
    â€œCan you drive?”
    â€œYou just tell me where to go.”
    â€œWe’ll get some beer, then go to Ship Island.”
    â€œIn this car?”
    â€œIn a boat.”
    â€œWhere