The Last Gentleman (44 page)

But no sooner had the engineer sat down than the patient opened his eyes and spoke to him quite naturally.

“What are you doing in these parts?” Though he was fairly goggling with fever, Jamie kept his soldierly way of lying abed. He lounged like a wounded man, pushed down his thigh, made a grimace.

“Looking for you and Sutter.”

“Well, you found me. What do you want?”

“Nothing,” said the engineer as wryly as the other. He rose. “I'll be seeing you.”

Jamie laughed and made him sit down. “What's the matter with your leg?” the engineer asked.

“Got the rheumatiz.”

Jamie began to speak fondly of Sutter, catching his breath now and then in his new warrior style. “You ought to see that rascal,” said Jamie, shaking his head.

The engineer listened smilingly as Jamie told of Sutter's guest ranch whose cottages had such names as O.K. Corral and Boot Hill. Sutter lived at Doc's. “Though it's called a guest ranch, it's really a way station for grass widows. Ol' Sutter is busy as a one-armed paperhanger.”

“I imagine,” said the engineer fondly and gloomily. Jamie, he saw, had just got onto the trick of tolerating adults in their foibles.“Where is this place?”

“On the road to Albuquerque. It's the biggest guest ranch in the world. Have you seen him?”

“Yes.” The engineer told of coming upon Sutter just after he bought two fifths of Two Natural. “Does he still drink bad whiskey?”

“Oh Christ,” whispered Jamie joyfully and began to thrash his legs as of old.

After a while the youth began to sweat and, quite as abruptly as he had waked up, collapsed and fell back in the hot hollow of his pillow. Dear God, I stayed too long, thought the engineer, but as he arose to leave, one hand detained him with a weak deprecatory wave.

“What,” said the engineer, smiling.

But there was no reply, save the hand moving over the covers, as tentative as a Ouija. For a long ten seconds he stood so, stooped slightly and hearkening. The hand stopped. No doubt he is asleep, thought the engineer, sighing with relief. Then he noticed that the soft mound of a vein in Jamie's neck was going at it hammer and tongs.

Frankly alarmed now, he began turning on switches and pressing buttons, all the while keeping a wary eye on the sick youth. How easy was it to die? When no one came—damn, what is this place?—he rushed out into the corridor and went careening off the walls toward the nurses' station. There sat a hefty blonde with a bald forehead which curved up under a brassy cone of hair. She looked like Queen Bess. She was making notes in a chart.

“Excuse me, nurse,” said the courteous engineer, when she did not look up.

She did not seem to hear, though he was not five feet away.

“Excuse me,” he said loudly, but nodding and smiling to deprecate his boldness when she did look.

She did not look! She went on making notes in violet ink.

He caught sight of himself in a convex mirror, placed at a corner to show the hall, standing like a pupil at teacher's desk. He frowned and opened the gate of the station and walked in. She turned a baleful lizard eye upon him. Then her eye traveled down and came to rest upon—his hand! He was touching the metal cover of a chart. Despite himself he blushed and removed his hand: teacher had caught him doing a bad thing with his hand. She went back to her work.

“Nurse,” he said in a strangled voice. “Kindly come at once to room three-two-two. The patient is having an attack.”

Still she did not answer! He had clenched his fist—at least he could hit her, lay her out cold—when at last she screwed cap to pen and with every appearance of ignoring him still and going about her business got up and brushed past him. He followed, sweating with rage—if she doesn't go to Jamie I am going to strike her. And even when she did turn into Jamie's room, she managed to convey that her going had nothing to do with his summons. She was still on business of her own.

No matter! She was with him now, taking his pulse. As the visitor watched through the doorway, Jamie's head turned wearily in the hot socket of his pillow. Whew! The bolus of hatred subsided in his throat. He forgave her. And now, instead of fearing that Jamie might die, he made light of it. It was, after all, only a sore throat.

And in fact when he returned in the afternoon, Jamie felt better. The visitor brought a deck of cards and they played gin in the cheerful yellow sunlight. Death seemed out of the question. How can anyone play a six of clubs one minute and die the next? Sick as he was, Jamie asked to be cranked up straight and now sat like a very old man, weaving a bit as the artery socked away at his head.

For the next few days they played cards morning and afternoon. Sutter came at night. It was understood that the universe was contracted to enclose the two young men. If it can be kept so, Jamie as good as said and the visitor agreed, a small sunny corner where we can play a game and undertake small tasks, nothing very serious can go amiss. For the first time the engineer understood how men can spend a week playing poker, women a lifetime at bridge. The game was the thing. One became impatient with non-game happenings—a nurse coming in to empty the urinal. Time disposed itself in short tolerable stretches between the bright beads of the games. The score itself, toted up and announced, had the cheerful workaday effect of a small tidy business.

It came to be understood too that one was at the other's service and that any service could be required. As it sometimes happens between two young men, a kind of daredevil bargain was struck in which the very outrageousness of a request is itself grounds for obeying.

“Go out and buy me a quart of Monarch applesauce,” said Jamie at the end of a game.

“All right.”

Sutter came later in the evening. He was both affable and nervous and told them half jokingly of his two new patients, “noble intelligent women who still read Lawrence and still believed in the dark gods of the blood, why make a god of it, that was the Methodist in him, anyhow can you imagine anyone still reading Lawrence out here
now,
” etc. How uneasy and talkative Sutter had become! It suddenly dawned on the engineer that Sutter, strange as it seemed, could not stand the sickroom. A hospital, of all places, made him nervous. Jamie, he noticed too, became irritable because Sutter's coming broke the golden circle of the card games. They both wished Sutter would leave. And when Jamie frowned and picked up the deck of cards, Sutter took the hint and did leave. He made a sign to the engineer, who followed him to the solarium.

“Again I can't tell you how glad I am you're here,” he said, placing his feet carefully inside the black and white tiles. The hospital was old and well preserved. It looked like an army hospital from the days of Walter Reed. “He doesn't want to see me and there is no one else. Or was.”

The engineer looked at him curiously. “I thought that was what you and he wanted.”

“I didn't want him to be—sunk. I thought he might do better, though I was afraid of this all along—” Sutter trailed off.

“Isn't he sunk?”

“Your showing up has meant a great deal,” said Sutter hurriedly and looked at his watch.

“What's the matter with him? Why does he have those spells?”

“Heart block,” said Sutter absently. “With some right-sided failure and pulmonary edema. And you see, he can't read for long. His retina is infiltrated. You can read to him.”

“What do you mean, heart block? Is that serious?”

Sutter shrugged. “Do you mean will he die today or next week?” He eyed the other. “Can you take a pulse?”

“I suppose so.”

“I can't get a private nurse. If you are here when he has a syncope, take his pulse. It will almost certainly start up in a few seconds. Now I've got—”

“Wait. Good God. What are you talking about?”

“If then his pulse is steady, O.K. If it is fibrillating, call the resident.”

“Good God, what do you mean, fibrillating?”

‘Try to nod your head in time with his pulse. If you can't, he's fibrillating.”

“Wait.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Sutter eyed him and, shoving his hands in his pockets, began to step off the tiles in an absent-minded hopscotch. With his Curlee pants down around his hips and his long-waisted shirt, Sutter looked like Lucky Lindy in the 1930's, standing in a propeller wash.

“I tell you what you do,” said Sutter.

“What,” said the engineer gloomily.

“Call Val. Tell her how sick Jamie is. He likes Val and wants to see her but doesn't want to send for her himself.”

“Why don't you—” began the engineer.

“No, I tell you what you do,” said Sutter, drawing him close in an odd little bantering confidence. “Call Rita.”

“Rita,” repeated the puzzled engineer.

“Yes, call Rita and Val and tell them to keep it to themselves and come on out.” He held the younger man by the arm in an awkward little burlesque of Lamar Thigpen's old-buddy style.

“Why don't you call them: after all, you're the brother of one and the—”

“Because I'm like Jamie. I don't want to be the one to call either.”

“I'm sorry. Jamie asked me not to call them. He trusts me.”

“Then you've got nothing to worry about,” said Sutter, his eyes going vacant

“But—”

But Sutter was already on his way.

8
.

With Sutter gone, it was possible to restore the golden circle of games. Jamie was dizzy and short of breath but not uncomfortable. His illness was the sort which allows one to draw in closer to oneself. Already Jamie had discovered the small privileges and warmths of invalidism. It was not a bad thing to lie back and blink at the cards lined up on the bed table, heave up on one elbow to make a play, flop down again in simple weariness. He wrapped himself snugly in his fever like a scarf. The next afternoon the engineer sat beside the bed in the sunny corner, which smelled of old wax and honorable ether. Outside in the still air, yellow as butter, the flat mathematical leaves of the aspens danced a Brownian dance in the sunlight, blown by a still, molecular wind. Jamie would play a card and talk, gaze at a point just beside the engineer's head where, it seemed, some privileged and arcane perception might be hit upon between them. Presently he fell back in the socket of his pillow and closed his eyes.

“Do me a favor.”

“All right.”

“Go get me a copy of
Treasure Island
and a box of soda crackers.”

“All right,” said the engineer, rising.

The youth explained that he had been thinking about the scene where Jim steals the dinghy and drifts offshore, lying down so he won't be seen, all the while eating soda crackers and looking at the sky.

“Also go by the post office and see if there's any mail in general delivery.”

“Right.”

But when he returned with the crackers and a swollen fusty library copy of
Treasure Island
showing hairy Ben Gunn on the frontispiece, Jamie had forgotten about it.

“There was no mail?”

“No.”

“I tell you what let's do.”

“What?”

“Call old Val.”

“All right.”

“Tell her I've got a crow to pick with her.”

“All right. Do you want to see any of your family?”

“No. And I don't want to see her either. Just give her a message.”

“All right.”

“Ask her what happened to the book about entropy.”

“Entropy? Then you correspond?”

“Oh, sure. Give her a hard time about the book. She promised to send it to me. Tell her I think she lost heart in the argument. She claims there is a historical movement in the direction of negative entrophy. But so what? You know.”

“Yes.”

The youth's eyes sought his and again drifted away to the point in the air where the two of them found delicate unspoken agreement and made common cause against Val's arguments.

“There's a phone booth downstairs, but let's finish the game.”

They didn't finish the game. Jamie went out of his head with fever, though it was a minute before the engineer realized it.

“Get me a line,” exclaimed the youth in an odd chipper voice.

“What? All right,” said the other, rising again. He thought Jamie meant make a phone call: get a long-distance line.

“A line, a lion,” Jamie called to him at the door.

“A lion?”

“Ly-in.”

Then he perceived that the youth was out of his head and was hearing words according to some fashion of his own.

“I will.”

He waited until Jamie closed his eyes and, returning to the bed, pressed the buzzer. This time someone came quickly, a pleasant little brunette student nurse who took Jamie's temperature and went off, but not too anxiously he was pleased to observe, to get the resident. Jamie was not dying then.

Perhaps he'd better call somebody though. Beyond a doubt Jamie was sick as a dog and also beyond a doubt Sutter had, in his own fashion, decamped. It was the inconsequence and unprovidedness of Jamie's illness which distressed him most. For the first time he saw how it might be possible for large numbers of people to die, as they die in China or Bombay, without anybody paying much attention.

As he passed the nurses' station, slapping his pockets for change, he met the eyes of the disagreeable blonde. Her malevolent expression startled him. Her bulging eye was glossy with dislike. She hated his guts! Amazing.

Thoughtfully he stacked money on the metal shelf of the phone booth. As the wires went clicking away to the East, he gazed through the open door and out into the disjunct afternoon with its simple spectrum-yellow and its flattened distances. Was it possible to call Alabama from here?

No. The line was busy.

He tried for half an hour and gave up.

When he returned to the room the pleasant student was giving Jamie an alcohol rub. Afterward the patient sat up in his right mind and began to read
Treasure Island
and eat soda crackers.