The Moviegoer

chain-and-bar clasp. When Lonnie gets dressed up, he looks like a little redneck come to a wedding.
    â€œDo you want to renew your subscriptions?”
    â€œI might. How many points do you have?”
    â€œA hundred and fourteen.”
    â€œDoesn’t that make you first?”
    â€œYes, but it doesn’t mean I’ll stay first.”
    â€œHow much?”
    â€œTwelve dollars, but you don’t have to renew.”
    The clouds roll up from Chandeleur Island. They hardly seem to move, but their shadows come racing across the grass like a dark wind. Lonnie has trouble looking at me. He tries to even his eyes with mine and this sets his head weaving. I sit up.
    Lonnie takes the money in his pronged fingers and sets about putting it into his wallet, a bulky affair with an album of plastic envelopes filled with holy cards.
    â€œWhat is first prize this year?”
    â€œA Zenith Trans-World.”
    â€œBut you have a radio.”
    â€œStandard band.” Lonnie gazes at me. The blue stare holds converse, has its sentences and periods. “If I get the Zenith, I won’t miss television so much.”
    â€œI would reconsider that. You get a great deal of pleasure from television.”
    Lonnie appears to reconsider. But he is really enjoying the talk. A smile plays at the corner of his mouth. Lonnie’s monotonous speech gives him an advantage, the same advantage foreigners have: his words are not worn out. It is like a code tapped through a wall. Sometimes he asks me straight out: do you love me? and it is possible to tap back: yes, I love you.
    â€œMoreover, I do not think you should fast,” I tell him.
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œYou’ve had pneumonia twice in the past year. It would not be good for you. I doubt if your confessor would allow it. Ask him.”
    â€œHe is allowing it.”
    â€œOn what grounds?”
    â€œTo conquer an habitual disposition.” Lonnie uses the peculiar idiom of the catechism in ordinary speech. Once he told me I needn’t worry about some piece of foolishness he heard me tell Linda, since it was not a malicious lie but rather a “jocose lie.”
    â€œWhat disposition is that?”
    â€œA disposition to envy.”
    â€œEnvy who?”
    â€œDuval.”
    â€œDuval is dead.”
    â€œYes. But envy is not merely sorrow at another’s good fortune: it is also joy at another’s misfortune.”
    â€œAre you still worried about that? You accused yourself and received absolution, didn’t you?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œThen don’t be scrupulous.”
    â€œI’m not scrupulous.”
    â€œThen what’s the trouble?”
    â€œI’m still glad he’s dead.”
    â€œWhy shouldn’t you be? He sees God face to face and you don’t.”
    Lonnie grins at me with the liveliest sense of our complicity: let them ski all they want to. We have something better. His expression is complex. He knows that I have entered the argument as a game played by his rules and he knows that I know it, but he does not mind.
    â€œJack, do you remember the time Duval went to the field meet in Jackson and won first in American history and the next day made all-state guard?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œI hoped he would lose.”
    â€œThat’s not hurting Duval.”
    â€œIt is hurting me. You know what capital sin does to the life of the soul.”
    â€œYes. Still and all I would not fast. Instead I would concentrate on the Eucharist. It seems a more positive thing to do.”
    â€œThat is true.” Again the blue eyes engage mine in lively converse, looking, looking away, and looking again. “But Eucharist is a sacrament of the living.”
    â€œYou don’t wish to live?”
    â€œOh sure!” he says laughing, willing, wishing even, to lose the argument so that I will be sure to have as much fun as he.
    It is a day for clouds. The clouds come sailing by, swelled out like clippers. The creamy vapor boils up into great thundering ranges and steep valleys of cloud. A green snake swims under the dock. I can see the sutures between the plates of its flat skull. It glides through the water without a ripple, stops mysteriously and nods against a piling.
    â€œJack?”
    â€œYes?”
    â€œAre we going for a ride?”
    For Lonnie our Sundays together have a program. First we talk, usually on a religious subject; then we take a ride; then he asks me to