The Moviegoer

opens softly and my mother comes out on the dock with a casting rod. She props the rod against the rail, puts down a wax-paper bundle, scratches both arms under the sleeves and looks about her, yawning. “Hinh-honh,” she says in a yawn-sigh as wan and white as the morning. Her blouse is one of Roy’s army shirts and not much too big for her large breasts. She wears blue Keds and ladies’ denims with a flyless front pulled high over her bulky hips. With her baseball cap pressed down over her wiry hair she looks like the women you see fishing from highway bridges.
    Mother undoes the bundle, takes out a scout knife and pries loose the frozen shrimp. She chops off neat pink cubes, slides them along the rail with her blade, stopping now and then to jiggle her nose and clear her throat with the old music. To make sure of having room, she goes out to the end of the dock, lays back her arm to measure, and casts in a big looping straight-arm swing, a clumsy yet practiced movement that ends with her wrist bent in, in a womanish angle. The reel sings and the lead sails far and wide with its gyrating shrimp and lands with hardly a splash in the light etherish water. Mother holds still for a second, listening intently as if she meant to learn what the fishes thought of it, and reels in slowly, twitching the rod from time to time.
    I pull on my pants and walk out barefoot on the dock. The sun has cleared the savannah but it is still a cool milky world. Only the silvery wood is warm and raspy underfoot.
    â€œIsn’t it mighty early for you!” Her voice is a tinkle over the water.
    My mother is easy and affectionate with me. Now we may speak together. It is the early morning and our isolation in the great white marsh.
    â€œCan I fix you some breakfast?”
    â€œNo’m. I’m not hungry.” Our voices go ringing around the empty room of the morning.
    Still she puts me off. I am only doing a little fishing and it is like any other day, she as much as says to me, so let us not make anything remarkable out of it. She veers away from intimacy. I marvel at her sure instinct for the ordinary. But perhaps she knows what she is doing.
    â€œI wish I had known you were going to get up so early,” she says indignantly. “You could have gone over to the Rigolets with Roy and Kinsey. The reds are running.”
    â€œI saw them.”
    â€œWhy didn’t you go!”—in the ultimate measure of astonishment.
    â€œYou know I don’t like to fish.”
    â€œI had another rod!”
    â€œIt’s just as well.”
    â€œThat’s true,” she says after a while. “You never did. You’re just like your father.” She gives me a swift look, which is unusual for her. “I noticed last night how much you favor him.” She casts again and again holds still.
    â€œHe didn’t like to fish?”
    â€œHe thought he did!”
    I stretch out at full length, prop my head on a two-by-four. It is possible to squint into the rising sun and at the same time see my mother spangled in rainbows. A crab spider has built his web across a finger of the bayou and the strands seem to spin in the sunlight.
    â€œBut he didn’t really?”
    â€œUnh un—” she says, dragging it out to make up for her inattention. Every now and then she wedges the rod between her stomach and the rail and gives her nose a good wringing.
    â€œWhy didn’t he?”
    â€œBecause he didn’t. He would say he did. And once he did! I remember one day we went down Little Bayou Sara. He had been sick and Dr Wills told him to work in the morning and take off in the afternoons and take up fishing or an interesting hobby. It was the prettiest day, I remember, and we found a hole under a fallen willow—a good place for sac au lait if ever I saw one. So I said, go ahead, drop your line right there. Through the tree? he said. He thought it was a lot of humbug—he wasn’t much of a fisherman; Dr Wills and Judge Anse were big hunters and fishermen and he pretended he liked it but he didn’t. So I said, go ahead, right down through the leaves—that’s the way you catch sac au lait. I be John Brown if he didn’t pull up the fattest finest sac au lait you ever saw. He couldn’t believe his eyes. Oh he got himself all wound up about it. Now isn’t this an ideal spot, he would say over and over again, and: Look at such and such a tree over there,