The Last Gentleman (35 page)
But he did get her in the camper at last and down they roared, down the last slope of the Appalachians, which was tilted into the autumn sun, down through the sourwood and the three-fingered sassafras.
“How much money do you have?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Somewhere around fifteen thousandâafter I transact my business.” A thought cheered him up. “Not nearly enough to buy Cap'n Andy's house, as good a bargain as it is.”
“Will you take care of this for me?”
The Esso map was open on the dash. Squarely across old Arkansas it fell, the check, or cheque it looked more like, machine-printed, certified, punched, computed, red-inked, hatched up rough as a cheese grater. The engineer nearly ran off the mountain. A little army of red Gothic noughts marched clean to Oklahoma, leaning into the wind. It looked familiar. Had he seen it before?
“You have seen it before. Remember?”
“Yes,” said the engineer. “What's it for?”
“My dowry, crazy. Turn it over.”
He pulled up at a G.E. model homeâwhat's wrong with one of theseâthey were much more cheerful than that buzzard's roost up on the ridge, and read aloud the lavender script: “For deposit only, to the account of Williston Bibb Barrett.”
“Do you know how I got the Bibb?”
“No.”
“I got Jamie to peek in your wallet.”
“What do you want me to do with it?”
“Keep it. Hand me your wallet. I'll put it in.”
“All right.”
“It's really insurance.”
“What kind of insurance?”
“Against your running out on me. I know you wouldn't steal a girl's money. Would you?”
“No.”
Already the carnivorous ivy was stealing down the mountainside. Quickly he put the G.M.C. in gear and sent the Trav-L-Aire roaring down the gloomy Piedmont
“Do we go anywhere near school?”
“Yes.”
“Could we stop and pick up my books?”
“All right. But why do you want your books?”
“We have a test in Comp Lit Wednesday.”
“Wednesday.”
A half hour later, as dusk fell in a particularly gloomy wood, she clapped her hand to her mouth. “Oh my Lord, we forgot about the game.”
“Yes.”
“Turn on the radio and see if you can get the score.”
“All right.”
15
.
Traffic was heavy in both directions and it was night before they reached the campus. The engineer stopped the Trav-L-Aire under a street light and cocked an ear.
Something was wrong. Whether there was something wrong with the town or inside his own head, he could not say. But beyond a doubt, a queer greenish light flickered over the treetops. There were flat popping noises, unchambered, not like a shotgun but two-syllabled, ba-
rop,
ba
-rop.
In the next block an old car stopped and three men got out carrying shotguns and dove straight into the woods. They were not students. They looked like the men who hang around service stations in south Jackson.
“I wonder if Tennessee won,” said Kitty. “Why are you stopping here?”
“I think I'll leave the camper here.” His old British wariness woke in him. He backed the camper onto a vacant lot behind a billboard.
They separated at a fork in the campus walk, she bound for the Chi Omega house to fetch her books, he for his
Theory of Large Numbers.
“I'll meet you here in ten minutes,” he told her uneasily.
Dark figures raced past him on the paths. From somewhere close at hand came the sound of running feet, the heavy direful sound of a grown man running as hard as he can. A girl, a total stranger, appeared from nowhere and taking him by the coat sleeves thrust her face within inches of his. “Hi,” he said.
“He's here,” she sobbed and jerked at his clothes like a ten-year-old. “Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!” she sobbed, jerking now at his lapels.
“Who?” he asked, looking around.
Searching his face and not finding what she wanted, she actually cast him from her and flew on her way.
“Who?” he asked again, but she was gone. Coming to a lamp, he took out his plastic Gulf Oil calendar card and held it up to see what day of the month it was. He had forgotten and it made him feel uneasy.
At the Confederate monument a group of students ran toward him in ragged single file. Then he saw why. They were carrying a long flagstaff. The flag was furledâhe could not tell whether it was United States or Confederate. The youth in front was a sophomore named Bubba Joe Phillips. He was known as a “con,” that is, one who knows how to make money from such campus goings-on as decorating the gym for dances. Ordinarily a smiling crinkled-haired youth, he strained forward, his eyes bulging and unseeing. He was beside himself, besotted, with either fear or fury, and did not see the engineer, though he almost ran into him.
“What yall say,” said the engineer amiably and stepped nimbly to the side, thinking they meant to go past him and down the path whence he came. But when they came abreast of the Confederate monument they turned toward the lights and the noise. They cleared him easily but what he did not see and they did not care about was the dark flagstaff behind them, which as they turned swept out in a wider arc and yet which he nevertheless saw a split second before the brass butt caught him at the belt buckle. “Oof,” he grunted, not hurt much and even smiling. He would have sat down but for the wire fencelet, which took him by the heel and whipped him backward. He was felled, levered over, and would have killed himself if his head had struck the corner of the monument base but it struck instead the slanting face of the old pocked Vermont marble and he was sent spinning into the soft earth under an arborvitae.
The dawn of discovery, the imminent sense of coming at last upon those secrets closest to one and therefore most inaccessible, broke over him. “But why is itâ?” he asked aloud, already knocked cold but raising a forefinger nevertheless, then lay down under the dark shrubbery.
1
.
HE AWOKE SHORTLY
after dawn but not under the arborvitae. Though he never found out how he came to be hereâperhaps he had awakened earlier, remembered more, crawled over, and passed out againâhere he was, lying in the cab of the Trav-L-Aire, asleep on his back like a truck driver. When he sat up, his head hurt. But he started the truck and crept out into the street and, without noticing that he did so, took a certain route through the back of town. The streets were littered with broken glass. One automobile had been set afire and burned to a cinder. He drove past an army truck and a police car and straight out into the countryside.
Presently he heard a siren. Down the highway roared the camper, careening like a runaway Conestoga, then topping a rise and spying a picnic area, swerved into it and plumb through it and dove into a copse of wax myrtle. Presently a patrol car passed, then another, sirens lapsing to a growl.
He waited in the fragrant cave of myrtles until the sun came up and made a dapple on the good gray hood of the G.M.C. What is this place? Where am I going?âhe asked himself, touching his bruised head, and, as soon as he asked himself, did not know. Noticing a map and notebook on the seat beside him, he opened the latter.
I am the only sincere American.
Where I disagree with you, Val, is in you people's emphasis on sin. I do not deny, as do many of my colleagues, that sin exists. But what I see is not sinfulness but paltriness. Paltriness is the disease. This, moreover, is not a mistake you are obliged to make. You could just as easily hold out for life and having it more abundantly as hold out against sin. Your tactics are bad. Lewdness is sinful but it derives in this case not from a rebellion against God (Can you imagine such a thing nowadaysâI mean, who cares?)â but from paltriness.
Americans are not devils but they are becoming as lewd as devils. As for me, I elect lewdness over paltriness. Americans practice it with their Christianity and are paltry with both. Where your treasure is, there is your heart and there's theirs,
zwischen die Beinen.
Americans are the most Christian of all people and also the lewdest. I am no match for them! Do you know why it is that the Russians, who are atheists, are sexually modest, whereas Americans, the most Christian of peoples, are also the lewdest?
Main Street, U.S.A. = a million-dollar segregated church on one corner, a drugstore with dirty magazines on the other, a lewd movie on the third, and on the fourth a B-girl bar with condom dispensers in the gents' room. Delay-your-climax cream. Even our official decency is a lewd sort of decency. Watch a soap opera on TV where everyone is decent (and also sad, you will notice, as sad as lewdness is sad; I am the only American who is both lewd and merry). Beyond any question, these people who sit and talk so sorrowfully and decently are fumbling with each other under the table. There is no other alternative for them.
Soap opera is overtly decent and covertly lewd. The American theater is overtly lewd and covertly homosexual. I am overtly heterosexual and overtly lewd. I am therefore the only sincere American.
Last night Lamar Thigpen called me un-American. That is a lie. I am more American than he is because I elect the lewdness which he practices covertly. I unite in myself the new American lewdness with the old American cheerfulness. All I lack is Christianity. If I were a Christian as well as being lewd and cheerful, I'd be the new Johnny Appleseed.
My God, what is all this stuff, thought the poor bemused shivering engineer and with a sob flung out of the cab and began running up and down and swinging his arms to keep warm when a great pain took him at the back of his head so suddenly that he almost fainted. He sat on a picnic bench and felt his skull. It had a sticky lump the size of a hamburger. “Oh, where is this place?” he groaned aloud, hoping that if he heard a question he might answer it. “Where am I bound and what is my name?” When no answer came, he reached for his wallet. But even before his hand arrived, he had felt the ominous airiness and thinness of fabric of his back pocket. It was empty and the flap unbuttoned. Jumping up, he began to slap his pockets as quickly as possible (to surprise the wallet ere it could lose itself). He searched the camper. Beyond a doubt the wallet was gone, lost or stolen. But there was $34.32 in his forward pocket. A textbook in the cabin disclosed what he seemed to know as soon as he saw it, his name.
Spying through the wax myrtles a big-shield US 87, he consulted his map. At least I am on course, he thought, noticing the penciled line. But hold! Something tugged at him, as unfinished and urgent a piece of business as leaving the bathtub running. There was something that had to be attended to
RIGHT NOW.
But what? He knocked his poor throbbing head on the steering wheel, but it was no use. The thing was too much in the front of his mind to be remembered, too close to be taken hold of, like the last wrenching moment of a dream.
No wonder he was confused. He had forgotten Kitty and left her at the university and now remembered nothing more than that he had forgotten. There was only the nameless tug pulling him back. But he had also forgotten what Sutter told him the night beforeâ
come find me
âand recorded only the huge tug forward in the opposite direction. He shrugged: well, I'm not going back because I've been there.
There was nothing to do but go about his business. Taking care to remove the ignition key, he locked himself in the camper and lit the hot-water heater. After a shower in the tiny slot of the stall, he shaved carefully, took three aspirins for his headache, and two spansules for his dislocation. Then donning his Macy's slacks and Brooks Brothers shirt whose collar ran up into his hair, making him all of a piece, so to speak, and restoring his old Princeton puissance (for strangely he had forgotten the Vaughts and even the Y.M.C.A. and remembered Princeton), he cooked and ate a great bowl of minute grits and a quarter pound of slab bacon.
When he started up the camper and backed out of the myrtle thicket and went his way down US 87, the G.M.C. faltered and looked back of its shoulder like a horse leaving the barn. “Not that way!âthat's where I came from,” said the rider angrily and kicked the beast in the flank.
For several hours he cruised south on 87, choosing this route as a consequence of the penciled line on the Esso map. He did not dare examine the contents of his pockets, for fear he would not recognize what he found there, or for fear rather that, confronted with positive proof of himself, he still would not know and would lose the tenuous connection he had. He was like a man shot in the bowels: he didn't dare look down.
It was a frosty morn. The old corn shucks hung like frozen rags. A killdeer went crying down a freshly turned row, its chevroned wing elbowing along the greasy disced-up gobbets of earth. The smell of it, the rimy mucous cold in his nostrils, and the blast of engine-warm truck air at his feet put him in mind of somethingâof hunting! of snot drying in your nose and the hot protein reek of fresh-killed quail.
In the late morning he slowed and, keeping a finger on the map, turned off the highway onto a scraped gravel road which ran for miles through a sparse woodland of post oaks and spindly pines infected with tumors. Once he passed through a town which had a narrow courthouse and an old boarded-up hotel on the square. There were still wrecks of rocking chairs on the gallery. Either I have been here before, he thought, perhaps with my father while he was trying a case, or else it was he with his father and he told me about it.
Beyond the town he stopped at the foot of a hill. A tall blackish building with fluted iron columns stood on top. He looked for a sign, but there was only an old tin arrow pointing north to:
Chillicothe Business College, Chillicothe, Ohio, 892 miles.
Halfway up the hill he stopped again and made out the letters on the pediment:
Phillips Academy.
Why, I know this place, he thought. Either I went to school here or my father did. It was one of the old-style country academies which had thirty or forty pupils and two or three teachers. Dr. so-and-so who taught Greek and Colonel so-and-so who taught military science. But perhaps it is only a
déjà vu.
But there is a way of finding out, considered the canny engineer. If he had really been here before, he should be able to recall something and then verify his recollection. Whereas a
déjà vu
only confers the semblance of memory. He put his forehead on the steering wheel and pondered. It seemed that there was a concrete slab, a court of sorts, behind the school.