by Walker Percy
“You mean the guerrillas have gotten that far?”
“No, Chief. It’s the town people fighting the federal people. Not two miles from here. And Chief,” says Ellen, lowering her voice. “You better do something about your so-called friend.”
“Friend? Who’s that?”
“Miss S. She’s getting a little hysterical.”
“Where is she?” I ask in alarm.
“In the bathroom. I never saw anybody go to the bathroom so much.”
“Hm. Have you seen anybody around there?”
“Not a soul. But, Chief, I think you better get over here. Things are coming unstuck.”
“I’m tied up just now. Perhaps later. I was wondering—”
“Yes?”
“Perhaps the best thing for you to do would be to get back to town.”
“Chief, you’ve got my car!”
“So I have.” What did I do with it? Oh yes, gave it to Mother.
“Anyhow, there’s fighting between here and town.”
“Well, sit tight.”
“All right. But it’s so hot here.”
“Here too. But don’t make any noise.”
“Very well, Chief.”
“Over.”
“Over and out.”
My eyes have accommodated to the gloom. Rocking back in Monsignor Schleifkopf’s executive chair, I survey the room. Evidently it has been used by the Bantus. A couple of ceremonial garlic necklaces hang from the hat-rack. A Coleman gas stove sits on the coin counter. Baby Ruth wrappers and used TV dinners litter the wall-to-wall carpet; shreds of collard greens bestrew the desk.
Behind me the door of the walk-in vault swings open. In one corner stands a stack of boxes full of Sunday envelopes exactly as they stood years ago when I used to attend Holy Name meetings here. Good rough fellows they were, the Holy Name men. We’d meet once a month and mumble gruff embarrassed prayers for the intentions of the Holy Father and so that we might leave off swearing and using the name of our dear Lord in vain and uttering foulness in general.
The four walls are hung with huge Kodacolor murals of Monsignor Schleifkopf’s native Alps. Tiny villages are strung out along narrow green valleys. Great snowy peaks indent a perfect cobalt sky. In the foreground rises a rude roadside crucifix.
I am sweating profusely and breathing through my mouth. I am losing water and there is no water here. They had better turn me loose soon. Or I had better get out.
The room swims in a watery heat. A thin tatter of cloud flies from one alp. Ice crystals. Hot as it is, though, and bad as I feel, my eye wanders around the room appraising its construction. The rectory was built, I remember, early in the Ecuadorian wars, when there were bomb scares and a lot of talk about shelters. The rectory was to serve as a bomb shelter in case of attack. It is windowless and double-walled and equipped with back-up electrical systems. Yes, I recall some restiveness in the congregation about the cost of the generator, which was the latest type and heaviest duty—the sort that could run indefinitely without a human soul to service it. Samantha liked to imagine it humming away for thirty years after everyone was dead. Yes, I remember the sight of Monsignor Schleifkopf presiding over the control panel with that special proprietorship priests develop for things they don’t own. Here was an oddity: that in the latter days when laymen owned everything they didn’t care much for anything, yet some priests who owned little or nothing developed ferocious attachments for ordinary objects—I once knew a monk who owned nothing, had given it all away for Christ, yet coveted the monastery typewriter with a jealous love, flew into rages when another monk touched it.
The Alps swim in the heat. My tongue swells and cleaves to my palate. Stale hot bourbon breath whistles in my nose.
Monsignor Schleifkopf used to hover over the panel, one hand caressing the metal, the other snapping switches like a bomber pilot… .
The control panel. Wait. I close my eyes and try to think. Sweat begins to drip through my eyebrows. I remember. It is in the walk-in vault behind me. Here Monsignor Schleifkopf kept the valuables, gold chalices, patens, the Sunday collection, bingo money, and yes, even the daily gleanings of the poor box after the drugheads from the swamp began to break into it.
I feel my way inside. The vault door is open but it opens toward the glass bricks and it is dark inside. The panel was in the tiny foyer, wasn’t it? I stumble over a bingo squirrel-cage. Feel the walls. Yes, here it is: rows of switches in a console of satiny metal, switches for lights, air-conditioning, electronic carillon. Some are up, some are down. Is up on? I close my eyes and try to remember (I was on the Building Committee). What time of day was the rectory evacuated? The Christmas Eve riots started in the afternoon and the Monsignor barely got away with his skin—that night.
Panting and sweating in the dark. Somewhere in my head two ideas grope for each other but it is too hot to … I return to the chair and look at the alp and the banner of ice crystals. The panorama of the high alpine valley is spoiled by a large metal grill set in the wall beside the roadside crucifix. It is the main intake vent of the air-conditioner.
I look at it, sweat, pant, and sock my forehead, trying to think what it is I already know.
Well but of course.
At least it is a chance. And the chance must be taken. I’ve got to get out of here.
Think.
The compressor is in the garage. The return duct therefore must run along the wall past the vault, past the kitchen whose inside wall is, must be, continuous with the back wall of the garage. Yes. I was on the Building Committee.
Sitting on the floor. A bit cooler here. I feel the metal frame of the grill. Phillips screws. Hm, a dime is no good. Look around. Yonder is Saint Michael on a pedestal, a somewhat prissy bronze archangel dressed to the nines, berobed like Queen Victoria but holding a proper bronze sword. Which I know is loose in his hand because I used to fiddle with it during the Holy Name meetings.
Slide it out of the bronze hand, a foot-long papercutter and, as I had recalled, dull. Dull enough to turn a Phillips screw.
The grill out and set down carefully on the rug, I stick my head in the duct. Plenty of room to crawl. Close my eyes and try to remember whether the compressor stands against the back wall of the garage or a ways out. It better be the latter. Also: does the jut of the garage from the side of the rectory clear the corner so that it is visible from the front of the church, where, behind the concrete screen, a guard is almost certain to be stationed? I can’t remember.
Back to the console in the vestibule of the vault. The problem is to create a diversion, sufficient noise to cover my exit in the garage, where I’ll have to kick out a panel and make a racket. The trouble is I don’t know how many Bantu guards are here or where they’re stationed. Is there only the one in front?
Feel the switches again. Some are up, some down, but which position is on? Here’s the emergency starter button. Monsignor Schleifkopf—God bless him for his love of manufactured things, their gear and tackle and trim, good Buicks, Arnold Palmer irons—bought the best nickel-cadmium battery money could buy, a $500 job with a self-charging feature guaranteed for ten years.
The four speaker electronic carillon sits atop the silo tower a good two hundred yards from here and even farther from the garage. If I could start the carillon, it would create a commotion and the guards would, surely, look for the trouble where the sound was and not here. But which is the carillon switch? No telling. The only thing to do is take a chance and throw all switches up—surely up is on—and turn all knobs to the right.
Flip all switches up.
Hit the starter button for a second just for the feel of it. Urr, it goes, the very sound of an old Dodge starting up on a winter morning.
Get ready then. Resisting an impulse to cross myself, I press the button.
Urr-urr-urr and then BRRRRRROOM.
On goes the twelve-cylinder motor, God bless General Motors.
On goes the light.
On goes the air-conditioner
compressor and blower.
On goes the carillon—
—a shriek of sound. The carillon resumes in the middle of the phrase of O Little Town of Bethlehem it left off five years ago on Christmas Eve:
… how still I see thee lie.
I find myself running around the office with Saint Michael’s sword, heart thumping wildly. The sound and the lights are panicking. The sound is an alarm, up go the lights and here’s the burglar, me, caught in the act. The thing to do is get out of here, I tell myself, loping around the Alps. The hot air is moving out.
Thinking now: do this, pocket the screws, hop into the intake vent and pull the grill into place after me. If they see no screws, they won’t notice.
It’s tight in here, but a few feet along and I’m in a cloaca of ducts converging from the church. The air, thundering toward the 100-ton Frigiking (I was on the Building Committee), is already cooler.
Suddenly it comes over me that I am, for the moment, completely safe. Why not lie down in this dark cool place, an alpine pass howling with mountain gales, and take a little nap? Indulgeas locum refrigerii: refrigeration must be one of the attributes of heaven.
Now forty or fifty feet along and able to stand up. A cave of winds, black as the womb, but I’m against the unit, a great purring beast encased in metal filter mesh.
Press the panel to my right. Here I calculate is the garage. Metal bends and a chink of light opens. Daylight, moreover. At least the garage door is open. Try to see something. Cannot. Try to hear something. Nothing but the roar of the blower and compressor and soaring above, the piercing obligato of White Christmas:
May your days be merry and bright …
Feel along the edge of the panel. It is fastened by sheet-metal screws, one every three or four inches and screwed in from the outside. Discard Saint Michael’s sword. Try pushing one corner loose. No good.
Nothing for it then but to lie down, shoulders braced against the opposite panel (this panel against concrete), wait for the final major chord of White Christmas, and kick with both feet.
Out she goes with a heart-stopping clatter, metal against concrete, metal against car metal—now I know they’ll find me—and out I come feet-first, born again, ejected into the hot bright perilous world—tumbling somehow forward until I am wedged between the inner wall and the bumper of Monsignor Schleifkopf’s burnt-out Buick, a hulk of rusted metal and moldering upholstery. Mushrooms flourish in the channel between bumper and grill. A fern sprouts upside down from the crankcase.
The music, I tell myself, comes from the silo at the other end of the church and nobody will come here.
Wait and watch a minute. I have a cockroach’s view under the Buick.
The broad three-car garage opens onto the plaza. Still not a soul in sight! How can this be with such a racket? A very loud noise needs tending to. Someone should do something about it and no doubt will. An unattended din is a fearsome thing.
The July sun blazes, the tar in the plaza bubbles, the green growth atop the storefronts shimmers and there is sky under it like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
The Drummer Boy,
rumpa-pum-pum,
thunders its artillery and echoes from the giant screen of the Joy Drive-In.
The questions are: Is there a guard posted at the rear of the rectory? If so, did he and the guard at the front of the rectory head for the silo when the sound commenced? My hope is that the Bantus do not know where the control panel is and will assume that the source of the mischief is in the church.
Creeping now past the Buick, to the far wall and along it to the slight jut that frames the door now levered up along the ceiling. Slowly work around jut—still no one in the entire plaza—and around the outside corner of the garage: yes, here is the concrete screen ending flush with the garage door and—
—Jerk back almost before I see him, shutting my eyes against him in a magic gesture to make me invisible to him, jerking back around the corner and clear around the jut into the garage, and there in the dark corner I consult my retina’s image of him: the same Bantu guard in the same dirty kwunghali—then he must have heard the clatter of my exit—six feet away and back turned, face in profile and Sten gun pointed at the four speakers: they’re the villains!
It is strange but, belatedly, indeed only now as I consult the image of him, I recognize him. It is Ely, who was bag-boy at the A & P for forty years. What a transformation! He’s turned into a tough hombre. Forty years a favorite at the A & P, toting bags to cars for housewives, saluting the tips, now he looks as if he’d just as soon stitch me with Sten gun as not.
I need his gun, I need him out of the way, so I need a weapon of my own. The Buick’s trunk is open, lock pried, tire swiped. I crane over the tail fin looking for a lug wrench. No lug wrench, nothing but Monsignor Schleifkopf’s moldering golf bag grown up in fennel and bladderwort, pockets ripped, clubs all gone, no, all but one, an ancient putter passed over perhaps five years ago for its age and decrepitude even then.
It is possible to reach the club without exposing myself past the jut.
Round yon virgin mother and child …
The putter has a lead blade and a hickory handle. Test it for heft.
Inch around ell.
He’s closer, within range. He’s still looking back toward the silo. It is a simple matter, surely, to take one step and hit him, with the heel of the putter taking care not to kill him. Then step.
Sorry, Ely—and aim for the occiput, the hardest skull plate, a glancing blow at that. But I take too much care and he’s moved suddenly, closer, and it’s a bad blow and the shaft shudders like shanking a ball. Staggering less from hurt than from surprise and outrage, he’s already swinging around toward me and I see the Sten muzzle swinging as slowly as a ship’s boom and I’m shrinking into the inner corner of the jut and touching the steel of the door mechanism as if we were playing a game and it were base: safe! You can’t shoot me now! But he is going to shoot me, I can see. It’s a matter of getting the gun around.
We are looking at each other. I notice that he is going bald the way some Negroes go bald, his high studious umber forehead shading off into hair of the same color, and that he has a mustache like Duke Ellington of old with a carefully tended gap in the middle. We are looking at each other, I knowing him and he me and he even signifying as much but his only care is getting the Sten around, his face all screwed up with the effort, and I see all of a sudden that all he’s thinking about is whether he’s going to do it right, that he’s exactly like a middle-aged British home guard who patrols Brighton beach against a possible Nazi and sure enough here comes a Nazi. My God, he’s thinking, IT has happened! Here’s the real thing! Here’s a Nazi in the flesh! Will I do right? Why is everything moving in slow motion?
He is shooting, too soon!—and I am flinching and touching base, no fair! The steel is ringing like a hammer on boilerplate. He’s got me. But as I open my eyes, he’s swinging away. How did he miss me or did he or, better, still, how did bullets hit the outside of the steel I-beam at my elbow?
Who is shooting? He’s not.
“Wait!” I’m yelling, having caught no more than one glimpse of the sorrel rump prancing sideways. “Don’t shoot him! It’s Ely!”—swinging the putter sideways and backhanded and not having time to aim and so of course catching Ely properly on the parietal skull, the Sten swinging away now and down and Ely going down and around with it.
I drag him into the garage and test his pulse and pupils. He’s all right. I still haven’t had time to look at Lola, who comes in leading the sorrel and holstering her automatic in her jeans.
“You almost killed Ely,” I tell her.
“Why, you damn fool, he was trying to kill you!”
“I know. Thank you. How did you know I was here?”
“Yellow Rose and I were watching from over there.” She nods toward the Joy Drive-In. “We saw you come crashing through the wall. Crazy Tom Tom! What would you do without Lola?”
“
I don’t know. Let’s get out of here.” We have to yell to be heard above the racket of the carillon with its guaranteed five-mile radius at top volume.
We three kings of Orient are
“What is all that?” asks Lola, making a face.
“Christmas carols.”
“Oh,” says Lola, accepting it, July or not. “Where’re we going?”
“Back over there. Where’s the horse?”
Yellow Rose has wandered off. Lola gives an ear-splitting whistle through her fingers and here comes the mare, stirrups flying. I hop up.
Lola jumps up behind me and gives me a big hug. “Oh Tommy, I was so worried about you!”
“Keep worrying.”
The nearest cover is the Drive-In with its tower of a screen and its speaker-posts gone to jungle, but a good two hundred yards of open plaza intervene, most of it clearly visible from the front of the church. How many Bantus are left?
We light out, my legs swinging free, for the stirrups are too short, past the concrete screen enclosing the cloister. Swallows nesting in the fenestrae take alarm and flutter up by the hundreds.
Many swallows but no shots, no outcries and no Bantus. Are they all in church trying to figure out what started the carillon?
The first Noel
The angels did sing …
Breathlessly we fetch up behind lianas of possum grape, which festoon the giant Pan-a-Vision screen.
“You like to fell off,” says Lola, reverting to Tyler Texas talk.
Half off, I slide down. The noble girl faces me, arms as they say akimbo, breast heaving, color high in her cheek.
“What now?”
I explain that we’d best make our way to the motel, that indeed there is nowhere else to go.
“Wow!” says Lola, but as quickly frowns. “What about Rose?”
I shrug. “We can’t take Rose any farther.”
“Don’t worry!” She loosens the girth and gives the mare a slap across the rump. “Back to Tara! She’ll go home. We’ll follow shortly, won’t we, Tom?”
