Last Gentleman and The Second Coming

by Walker Percy

  I say: Very good, very good talk, but it is after all only that, that is the kind of talk we have between us.

  The bar turned in his head, synapses gave way, and he slept ten hours dreamlessly and without spansules.

  Still no sign of the Trav-L-Aire the next morning, but after a great steaming breakfast of brains and eggs and apple rings served in front of the Zenith. (Captain Kangaroo: Uncle Fannin and Merriam cackled like maniacs at the doings of Captain K. and Mr. Greenjeans, and the engineer wondered, how is it that uncle and servant, who were solid 3-D persons, true denizens of this misty Natchez Trace country, should be transported by these sad gags from Madison Avenue? But they were transported. They were merry as could be, and he, the engineer, guessed that was all right: more power to Captain K.)

  After he had transacted his oil-lease business with his uncle, the telephone rang. It was the deputy sheriff in Shut Off. It seemed a little “trailer” had been stolen by a bunch of niggers and outside agitators and that papers and books in the name of Williston Bibb Barrett had been found therein. Did Mr. Fannin know anything about it? If he did and if it was his property or his kin’s, he might reclaim the same by coming down to Shut Off and picking it up.

  The uncle held the phone and told his nephew.

  “What happened to the, ah, Negroes and the outside agitators?” asked the latter calmly.

  Nothing, it seemed. They were there, at this moment, in Shut Off. It needed but a word from Mr. Fannin to give the lie to their crazy story that they had borrowed the trailer from his kinsman and the lot of them would be thrown in jail, if not into the dungeon at Fort Ste. Marie.

  “The dungeon. So that’s it,” said the nephew, relieved despite himself. “And what if the story is confirmed?” he asked his uncle.

  Then they’d be packed off in twenty minutes on the next bus to Memphis.

  “Confirm the story,” said the nephew. “And tell him I’ll be there in an hour to pick up my camper.” He wanted his friends free, clear of danger, but free and clear of him too, gone, by the time he reached Shut Off.

  After bidding his uncle and Merriam farewell—who were only waiting for him to leave to set off with the dogs in the De Soto—he struck out for the old landing, where he retrieved his boat and drifted a mile or so to the meadows, which presently separated the river from Shut Off. So it came to be called Shut Off: many years ago one of the meanderings of the river had jumped the neck of a peninsula and shut the landing off from the river.

  5.

  The boy and the man ate breakfast in the dining car Savannah. The waiter braced his thigh against the table while he laid the pitted nickel-silver knives and forks. The water in the heavy glass carafe moved up and down without leaving a drop, as if water and glass were quits through usage.

  A man came down the aisle and stood talking to his father, folding and unfolding his morning paper.

  “It’s a bitter thing, Ed. Bitter as gar broth.”

  “I know it is, Oscar. Son, I want you to meet Senator Oscar Underwood. Oscar, this is my son Bill.”

  He arose to shake hands and then did not know whether to stand or sit.

  “Bill,” the senator told him, “when you grow up, decide what you want to do according to your lights. Then do it. That’s all there is to it.”

  “Yes sir,” he said, feeling confident he could do that.

  “Senator Underwood did just that, son, and at great cost to himself,” said his father.

  “Yes sir.”

  He awoke, remembering what Senator Underwood looked like, even the vein on his hand which jumped back and forth across a tendon when he folded and unfolded the fresh newspaper.

  Dear God, he thought, pacing his five-foot aisle, I’m slipping again. I can’t have met Senator Underwood, or could I? Was it I and my father or he and his father? How do I know what he looked like? What did he look like? I must find out.

  Stooping, he caught sight of a forest of oil derricks. He dressed and went outside. The camper was parked in the gravel plaza of a truckers’ stop. In the café he learned that he was in Longview, Texas. While he waited for his breakfast, he read from Sutter’s notebook:

  You’re wrong about Rita, Val. She saved my life and she meant no harm to Kitty—though that does not answer your charge. I had left the old ruined South for the transcending Southwest. But there transcendence failed me and Rita picked me up for the bum I was and fed and clothed me.

  The day before I left home I stood in a lewd wood by the golf links. My insurance had been canceled and I could not hospitalize patients or even treat them at home save at my own risk. The wood was the lewd wood of my youth where lovers used to come and leave Merry Widow tins and where I dreamed the lewd dreams of youth. Therefrom I spied Jackie Randolph towing her cart up number 7 fairway sans caddy and sans partner. Invited her into the woods and spoke into her ear. She looked at her watch and said she had 20 minutes before her bridge luncheon. She spread her golf towel on the pine needles, kept her spiked shoes on, and cursed in my ear.

  The innocence of Mexican country women.

  That evening my father gave me $100,000 for not smoking until I was 21.

  Looked in J.A.M.A. classifieds, found job in Santa Fe clinic, telephoned them my credentials (which were ever good), was accepted on spot, packed my Edsel and was on my way. Clinic dreary—found my true vocation at Sangre de Cristo guest ranch.

  Genius loci of Western desert did not materialize. Had hoped for free-floating sense of geographical transcendence, that special dislocatedness and purity of the Southwest which attracted Doc Holliday and Robert Oppenheimer, one a concrete Valdosta man who had had a bellyful of the concrete, the other the luckiest of all abstract men: who achieved the high watermark of the 20th century, which is to say: the device conceived in a locus of pure transcendence, which in turn worked the maximum effect upon the sphere of immanence, the world. (Both men, notice, developed weapons in the desert, the former a specially built sawed-off shotgun which he carried by a string around his neck.)

  It didn’t work. I found myself treating senior citizens for post-retirement anomie and lady dudes for sore rears and nameless longings. I took my money and bought a ranch, moved out and in a month’s time was struck flat by an acute depression, laid out flat in the desert and assaulted by 10,000 devils, not the little black fellows of St. Anthony but wanton teen-agers who swung from the bedpost and made gestures.

  I stopped eating. Rita found me (she was looking for volunteer MD’s for her little Indians), toted me back to her cozy house in Tesuque, fed me, clothed me, bucked me up, and stood for no nonsense. She saved my life and I married her to stay alive. We had a good time. We ate the pure fruit of transcendence. She is not, like me, a pornographer. She believes in “love” like you, though a different kind. She “falls in love.” She fell in love with me because I needed her, and then with Kitty because she thought I didn’t need her and because Kitty seemed to, with that Gretel-lost-in-the-woods look of hers. Now Kitty is “in love” with someone and Rita is up the creek. I told her to forget all that stuff, e.g., “love,” and come on back with me to the Southwest, where we didn’t have a bad time. But she is still angry with me. I forgive her sins but she doesn’t mine. Hers: like all secular saints, she canonizes herself. Even her sins are meritorious. Her concern for Kitty gets put down as “broadening her horizons” or “saving her from the racists.” And all she really wanted for Jamie was that he should get Barrett out of the way. She got extremely angry when I suggested it, though I told her it wasn’t so bad, that she was no more guilty than everyone else. Eh, Val? You want to know the only thing I really held against her? A small thing but it got under my skin. It was an expression she used with her transcendent friends: she would tell them she and I were “good in bed.” I am an old-fashioned Alabama pornographer and do not like forward expressions in a woman.

  Feeling unusually elated—then I am Kitty’s “someone”!—he stopped at the public library in Longview and looked up Senator Oscar W.
Underwood in the Columbia Encyclopedia. The senator died in 1929, ten years before the engineer’s birth. When he asked the librarian where he might find a picture of Senator Underwood, she looked at him twice and said she didn’t know.

  The same evening he called Kitty from a Dallas trailer park. To his vast relief, she sounded mainly solicitous for him. She had even supposed that he had been hurt and suffered another attack of “amnesia”—which he saw that she saw as a thing outside him, a magic medical entity, a dragon that might overtake him at any moment. Fortunately too, the events occurring that night on the campus were themselves so violent that his own lapse seemed minor.

  “Oh, honey, I thought you’d been killed,” cried Kitty.

  “No.”

  “I couldn’t have met you anyway. They herded us down into the basement and wouldn’t let us leave till Sunday afternoon.”

  “Sunday afternoon,” said the engineer vaguely.

  “Are you all right?” asked Kitty anxiously when he fell silent.

  “Yes. I’m going on now to find, ah, Jamie.”

  “I know. We’re counting on you.”

  “I wish you were here with me.”

  “Me too.”

  All of a sudden he did. Love pangs entered his heart and melted his loin and his life seemed simple. The thing to do—why couldn’t he remember it?—was to marry Kitty and get a job and live an ordinary life, play golf like other people.

  “We will be married.”

  “Oh yes, darling. Just between you and I, Myra is going to take the Mickle house off the market till you get back.”

  “Between you and me,” he said absently, “the Mickle house?” Oh my. He’d forgotten Cap’n Andy and his lookout over the doleful plain.

  “You two big dopes come on back here where you belong.”

  “Who?”

  “You and Jamie.”

  “Oh yes. We will.”

  “You shouldn’t have done it.”

  “Done what?”

  “Told Poppy to stop payment of my dowry.”

  “Somebody stole it.”

  “Then you’ll still accept it?”

  “Sure.”

  “He wrote me another one.”

  “Good.”

  But his foreboding returned as soon as he hung up. He lay abed stiff as a poker, feet sticking up, listening to patriotic programs. When at last he did fall asleep, he woke almost immediately and with a violent start. He peeped out of the window to see what might be amiss. Evil low-flying clouds reflected a red furnace-glow from the city. Lower still, from the very treetops, he fancied he could hear a ravening singing sound. Wasting no time, he uncoupled his umbilical connections with dread Dallas, roared out onto the freeways, and by sun-up was leveled out at eighty-five and straight for the Panhandle.

  Past Amarillo the next day and up a black tundra-like country with snow fences and lonesome shacks to Raton Pass. He stopped for gas at an ancient Humble station, a hut set down in a moraine of oil cans and shredded fan belts and ruptured inner tubes. The wind came howling down from Colorado, roaring down the railroad cut like a freight train. There was a meniscus of snow on the black mountainside. The attendant wore an old sheepskin coat and was as slanty-eyed as a Chinaman. Later the engineer thought: why he is an Indian. He steered the Trav-L-Aire out onto a level stretch of tundra, locked himself in, and slept for twenty hours.

  When he woke, it was very cold. He lit the propane panel ray and, as he waited for the cabin to warm, caught sight of his own name in Sutter’s casebook.

  Barrett: His trouble is he wants to know what his trouble is. His “trouble,” he thinks, is a disorder of such a character that if only he can locate the right expert with the right psychology, the disorder can be set right and he can go about his business.

  That is to say: he wishes to cling to his transcendence and to locate a fellow transcender (e.g., me) who will tell him how to traffic with immanence (e.g., “environment,” “groups,” “experience,” etc.) in such a way that he will be happy. Therefore I will tell him nothing. For even if I were “right,” his posture is self-defeating.

  (Southern transcenders are the worst of all—for they hate the old bloody immanence of the South. Southerners outdo their teachers, just as the Chinese Marxists outdo the Soviets. Did you ever talk to a female Freudian Georgia social worker? Freud would be horrified.)

  Yes, Barrett has caught a whiff of the transcendent trap and has got the wind up. But what can one tell him? What can you tell him, Val?

  Even if you were right. Let us say you were right: that man is a wayfarer (i.e., not transcending being nor immanent being but wayfarer) who therefore stands in the way of hearing a piece of news which is of the utmost importance to him (i.e., his salvation) and which he had better attend to. So you say to him: Look, Barrett, your trouble is due not to a disorder of your organism but to the human condition, that you do well to be afraid and you do well to forget everything which does not pertain to your salvation. That is to say, your amnesia is not a symptom. So you say: Here is the piece of news you have been waiting for, and you tell him. What does Barrett do? He attends in that eager flattering way of his and at the end of it he might even say yes! But he will receive the news from his high seat of transcendence as one more item of psychology, throw it into his immanent meat-grinder, and wait to see if he feels better. He told me he’s in favor of the World’s Great Religions. What are you going to do about that?

  I am not in favor of any such thing. We are doomed to the transcendence of abstraction and I choose the only reentry into the world which remains to us. What is better then than the beauty and the exaltation of the practice of transcendence (science and art) and of the delectation of immanence, the beauty and the exaltation of lewd love? What is better than this: one works hard during the day in the front line and with the comradeship of science and at night one goes to La Fonda, where one encounters a stranger, a handsome woman. We drink, we two handsome thirty-five-year-olds, she dark-eyed, shadowy of cheek, wistful in her own transcendence. We dance. The guitar makes the heart soar. We eat hearty. Under the table a gentle pressure of the knee. One speaks into her ear at some length. “Let’s go.” “But we ordered dinner.” “We can come back.” “All right.” The blood sings with voluptuousness and tenderness.

  Rita says I do not love anyone. That is not true. I love all women. How lovable they are, all of them, our lovely lonely bemused American women. What darlings. Let any one of them enter a room and my heart melts. You say there is something better. Ich warte.

  Where he probably goes wrong, mused the engineer sleepily, is in the extremity of his alternatives: God and not-God, getting under women’s dresses and blowing your brains out. Whereas and in fact my problem is how to live from one ordinary minute to the next on a Wednesday afternoon.

  Has not this been the case with all “religious” people?

  6.

  Down, down into the sunny yellow canyon of the Rio Grande, down through the piney slopes to the ocher cliffs and the red clay bottoms. He stopped to see the famous river. When he came out of a fugue, he was in some ways like a sailor, horny and simple-minded, and with an itch to wander and see the sights, the famous places, take them in, dig every detail. But what a piddling little creek it was! A far cry from the Big Muddy: the trickle of whitish alkali water looked like the run-off from a construction site. Beside him a gold aspen rattled like foil in the sunlight. But there was no wind. He moved closer. A single leaf danced on its pedicle, mysteriously dispensed from energy laws.

  Another Indian at a Phillips 66 station in Santa Fe directed him to Rancho la Merced, which he, the Indian, knew by name but not by owner. It meant leaving the highway south of the city and bumping across the desert, through scrubby junipers and fragrant piñon, up and down arroyos. Four times he had to dismount to open cattle gates.

  Rancho Merced was something more than he expected. The building was not large but its lowness made it look far-flung. One almost looked down upon it: you
got down into it like a sports car and with the same expectation of the chthonic dividends of living close to the ground. The windows, set in foot-thick ’dobe walls, were open. He knocked. No one answered. There were tire tracks but no car. He walked around the house. Above the piñon arose an ugly galvanized cistern and a Sears windmill. Though its tail was not folded, it did not turn. It was three o’clock.

  He sat down under the cistern and sniffed a handful of soil. The silence was disjunct. It ran concurrently with one and did not flow from the past. Each passing second was packaged in cottony silence. It had no antecedents. Here was three o’clock but it was not like three o’clock in Mississippi. In Mississippi it is always Wednesday afternoon, or perhaps Thursday. The country there is peopled, a handful of soil strikes a pang to the heart, dêjà vus fly up like a shower of sparks. Even in the Southern wilderness there is ever the sense of someone close by, watching from the woods. Here one was not watched. There was no one. The silence hushed everything up, the small trees were separated by a geometry of silence. The sky was empty map space. Yonder at Albuquerque forty miles away a mountain reared up like your hand in front of your face.

  This is the locus of pure possibility, he thought, his neck prickling. What a man can be the next minute bears no relation to what he is or what he was the minute before.

  The front door was unlocked. He stooped down into the house. For thirty seconds he stood blinking in the cool cellarlike darkness. The windows opened into the bright hush of the desert. He listened: the silence changed. It became a presiding and penultimate silence like the heavy orchestral tacet before a final chord. His heart began to pound. Presently it came to him: what is missing are the small hums and clicks of household motors. He went into the kitchen. The refrigerator was empty and the hot-water tank was cold but there were four cans of Chef Boy-ar-dee spaghetti on the shelf. In the bedroom the bedclothes were tied up and ready for the laundry, a pile on each bed. There was no sign of clothes or suitcases. A year-old Life magazine had been left on the bureau. He spotted Sutter’s script running around all four edges of the Winston ad on the back cover. He held it eagerly to the light—could it be a message to him? a clue to Sutter’s whereabouts?—peering intently and turning it slowly as he read. Sutter’s hand was worse than usual.