Last Gentleman and The Second Coming

by Walker Percy

  Water dripped on one side of the chamber and filled a saucer of stone. Good! It would be uncomfortable and unnecessary to die of thirst. It was quite comfortable sitting against the curving wall. Head high, he found a dry alcove for the flashlight. Next to it he stood the four fresh batteries. Emptying his pockets of Placidyl capsules, he carefully lined them up on the floor and counted them. Ninety-six. The roll of aluminum foil fitted on the shelf. He could piss down the chimney but feces must be deposited on a square of foil, packaged, and put away, else he’d foul his own den. What had the tiger done?

  He smiled. Here I am, he thought, folding his arms and nodding and smiling. Now. Now we’ll see.

  Who else but a madman could sit in a pod of rock under a thousand feet of mountain and feel better than he had felt in years, feel so good that he smiled again and snapped his fingers as if he had made a discovery? I’ve got you both, he said aloud, God-seekers and suicides, I’ve got you all, God, Jews, Christians, unbelievers, Romans, Jutes, Angles, Saxons, Yankees, rebs, blacks, tigers. At last at last at last. It took me a lifetime, but I’ve got you by the short hairs now. One of you has to cough it up. There is no way I cannot find out.

  Even if worst comes to worst, he thought with a smile, to suicide, it will turn out well. My suicide will represent progress in the history of suicide. Unlike my father’s, it will be done in good faith, logically, neatly, and unobtrusively, unobtrusive even to the Prudential Insurance Company. Moreover, I shall arrange to be found.

  What is more, it will advance knowledge.

  His plan was simple: wait. The elegance of it pleased him. As cheerfully as a puttering scientist who hits on a simple, elegant experiment which will, must, yield a clear yes or no, he set about his calculations. The trick was to devise a single wait which would force one of two answers, not more, not less. If a yes, then to be able to leave and act on the yes. If a no, then to act on the no and at the same time euchre the Prudential Insurance Company out of the money he felt coming to him, to leave Sutter one million richer, and so to be found with the Placidyl gone from the floor of the cave but gone also from his blood. Lewis would find him eventually—

  —Ah, to make doubly sure, drop a note down the chimney. He did: Help! he wrote. With tiger, fifty feet above. He frowned. That’s confusing. They might not know which tiger. He wrote another note. I’m fifty feet above this place and can’t move. I think I’ve had a small stroke or an arterial spasm.

  Vance Battle had told him about arterial spasms. They could mimic a stroke yet an autopsy would show nothing.

  The second note he folded and dropped down the shaft.

  Ninety-six capsules. Three a day could give him tranquillity for thirty-two days. Then he’d be too weak to move anyhow and yet live long enough to get rid of the drug.

  This way everybody wins. God, if he exists, is not affronted. If he doesn’t, Sutter gets the one million.

  There will be plenty of time for asking God—that is called prayer!—between knockout drops. I am no hero! to sit here for a month and starve without a drug is too much of a bore to consider.

  Speak, God, or be silent. And if you’re silent, I’ll understand that.

  O ye mystics who go out in the desert and see visions, o ye old men who dream dreams, who believes you?

  O ye suicides who go not so gently into that good nothing, you can’t tell me either. But I’ve beat you both. In either case I’ll know.

  Speak, God, and let me know if the Jews are a sign and the Last Days are at hand.

  If the Last Days are at hand, one shall know what to do. I shall go to Megiddo with Sutter and wait for the Stranger from the East.

  If you do not speak and the Jews are not a sign, then that too is an answer of sorts. It means that what is at hand are not the Last Days but only the last days, my last days, a minor event, to be sure, but an event of importance to me.

  2

  Unfortunately for the poor man awaiting the Last Days and raving away at God and man in the bowels of Sourwood Mountain directly below thousands of normal folk playing golf and antiquing and barbecuing and simply enjoying the fall colors—for on the following day at the height of his lunacy the cloud blew away and the beautiful days of Indian summer began, the mountains glowed like rubies and amethysts, and leafers were out in force—unfortunately things can go wrong with an experiment most carefully designed by a sane scientist. A clear yes or no answer may not be forthcoming, after all. The answer may be a muddy maybe. In the case of Will Barrett, what went wrong could hardly be traced to God or man, Jews or whomever, but rather to a cause at once humiliating and comical: a toothache. So in the end not only did he not get a clear answer to his peculiar question, not a yes or a no or even a maybe—he could not even ask the question. How does one ask a question, either a profound question or a lunatic question, with such a pain in an upper canine that every heartbeat feels like a hot ice pick shoved straight up into the brain? The toothache was so bad it made him sick. He vomited.

  There is one sure cure for cosmic explorations, grandiose ideas about God, man, death, suicide, and such—and that is nausea. I defy a man afflicted with nausea to give a single thought to these vast subjects. A nauseated man is a sober man. A nauseated man is a disinterested man.

  What does a nauseated person care about the Last Days?

  Whether it was God’s doing or ordinary mortal frailty, one cannot be sure. What happened in any event, happened after seven or eight days.

  It began well enough.

  He swallowed three capsules. A complex comfort took root in his stomach and flowed along his spine and into his throat. A simple chemical taste, both bitter and reassuring, rose at the back of his tongue. He fancied it was the taste of the cave. He lay down happily in a hollow of rock and closed his eyes.

  Now came a different taste and smell. The smell of a warm Negro cabin in the winter, the walls papered by layers of the rotogravure section of the Atlanta Constitution thick as quilt and everywhere the close clean smell of coal oil and cornbread and Octagon soap. When he had knocked, the woman had come to the screen door and looked at the blood on his face. She opened the door without a word. The boy John Washington whom his father had cursed was standing behind her, his eyes so big that white showed all around his irises.

  Will Barrett, feeling the same dead calm and certainty he had felt when he knelt beside the man:

  “I need some help. My father has been hurt in an accident. I would appreciate it, Mrs. Washington, if you would send your son John to get the sheriff.”

  The woman’s steady eyes flicked only once as he spoke. Not taking her eyes from him when he finished, she told the boy: “John, you go get High Sheriff Thompson,” and to him after John took off: “You come on over here, boy, and I’ll wash your face.” He, following her and thinking of nothing in particular except the smell of newspaper and coal oil. “You gon be all right.” On his cheek he felt the wet rag in gentle but firm wipes like his mother washing his face.

  Thirty-two thousand years ago the tiger had come here to die. Why? Had he grown old and lain down in darkness? Had she come here wounded or to whelp and died instead?

  Thirty-one thousand nine hundred years later, some country boys dressed in butternut found a good place to make gunpowder, in Lost Cove and in the very cave where the saltpeter was mined.

  “They gon find us in here sure’n hell.”

  “No, they ain’t,” said the sergeant.

  “I heard they was coming up the valley.”

  “Let them come. We got the magazine mined. They can come right on and get their asses blown back to New York.”

  “Then how we gon get out?”

  “I know another way out,” said the sergeant, who didn’t seem to care much one way or the other beyond a flicker of pleasure in having it both ways, escaping from the intruders and blowing up the same intruders.

  He became his father. He was walking down Sunset Boulevard. Here came Chester Morris in a blue Packard convertible. He was weari
ng a straw katy.

  After that, Ross Alexander killed himself.

  After that, he was standing smiling and nodding in Lower Pyne at Princeton, his hands thrust in his pockets in a certain way.

  Lindbergh shook hands with his grandfather and Eddie Stinson at the airport.

  Bobby Jones and Richard Halliburton and Johnny Mercer and Johnny Mack Brown came to dinner. D’Lo served Bobby Jones from the wrong side but Jones, a gentleman, didn’t let on that anything was wrong. What are you doing down here in the cold cold ground, massa?

  I don’t know, D’Lo. He turned to his father. What am I doing down here under the earth with you, old mole?

  Because there is no other place for you.

  The hell there isn’t.

  Name one.

  Atlanta?

  No.

  San Francisco?

  No.

  New Orleans?

  No.

  Santa Fe?

  No.

  Back home?

  No.

  Linwood in the beautiful fall?

  No.

  Israel?

  No.

  Portofino?

  No.

  La Jolla?

  No.

  Aix?

  No.

  Nantucket?

  No.

  Georgia?

  No.

  What’s wrong with these places?

  They’re all closed down.

  There must be a place.

  After the Spring Regatta picnic at the Northport Beach Club and during the award ceremony when he received his cup, walking up to get it, feet toed in, pants high and dry, right shoulder moving forward with right foot as if he had lived in Long Island all his life, he had caught the eye of Martha Stookey, only daughter and only offspring of Bryan A. Stookey, who owned Stookey Tidewater, which leased a fair portion of the continental shelf and whose business the firm had been after for years. The Lester Lanin orchestra was playing in the pavilion, but nobody was dancing. Martha, who was not good-looking to begin with, had made a mistake. She had come dressed for a tea dance or maybe a garden party. She wore a big round off-the-face hat. Everyone else wore sports clothes or swimsuits.

  Even in the shadow of the hat, he could see that her face was blotched with unhappiness.

  Why did God make ugly girls? It is hard to say. That was God’s affair. But one thing he, Will Barrett, could do was make ugly girls happy. Then was that why God made ugly girls? So that selfish people like Will Barrett could make them happy and feel less selfish, do two things at once? No, three things. Make money too.

  He asked her to dance. Her hand, when he took it, was cold and trembling. She was a good dancer. Other people began to dance. He enjoyed dancing with her. She smiled. She was not ugly. Old man Peabody was looking at him. The look said: That’s my boy.

  Later, when the firm got the Tidewater business, Mr. Peabody said to him: “I’m putting you in charge of Trusts and Testaments. That includes widows and green goods.”

  The man found him sitting at a table on a little peninsula in a lake in the lobby of the Peachtree Plaza hotel. The lobby was a hundred feet high. Vines as big as snakes grew up and grew down like lianas. A waterfall fell a hundred feet. He was waiting for the first session of an ecumenical council on race relations. When he moved to Carolina, he thought for a while it would be a good idea to help out the South “in the area of race relations.”

  The man, who looked something like him except that he had a mustache and wore a white linen suit with vest, shook his hand and made a grimace. He was an Atlanta lawyer.

  “Well, the jury found you guilty as charged.”

  “Guilty of what?” Jesus, they found me out. Guilty!

  “Oh, you know. Pandering and whorishness in the practice of law. But don’t feel bad.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s only for a year and at a minimal security place in Arizona. A very pleasant place, they tell me. Here’s your bus ticket.”

  As he entered the gate of the correctional facility, which was nestled in the desert foothills under the Ghost Range, he met John Ehrlichman coming out.

  “What was it like, John?”

  “Not bad, though there is no substitute for freedom. I had a clean cell, good food. My job was to read the dials in the boiler room from midnight to six. I wrote a book.”

  “It sounds like a good place. You’re looking fine, John.”

  “You don’t, Will. What have you been doing?”

  “I was sitting in the lobby of the Peachtree Plaza hotel when—”

  “That’s amazing. It just so happens that I am on my way to the Peachtree Plaza, where I am going to push my book at a meeting of American Booksellers.”

  “Good luck, John.”

  “That’s the way it goes. But this is not a bad place.”

  Ehrlichman was right. It was not a bad place.

  Roosevelt was elected shortly after he was born. Roosevelt grinned. Roosevelt was elected again. Roosevelt grinned. Roosevelt was elected again. Will Barrett had never known another President. He was sick of Roosevelt’s grin.

  Years passed. He woke many times. The cave was companionable. The living rock was warm and dry. There were times when the ceiling of the cave seemed to open to the sky. As he gazed up, the darkness turned bright. Yet he always knew this couldn’t be so. He smiled at himself.

  The war came. His father was happy. Most people seemed happy. Fifty million people were killed. People dreamed of peace. Peace came. His father became unhappy. Most people seemed unhappy.

  The boy lay prone in the Georgia swamp, watchful and silent, unwounded cheek pressed against the ground, the Sterlingworth shotgun cradled in his arms. Ground fog lay straight as milk, filling the hollows between the pin oaks.

  So this is how it is, the boy thought, grim and exultant. This is one of the secrets nobody tells you. There are two secrets to life nobody tells you: screwing and dying. What they tell you about is love and the hereafter. Maybe they are right. But it is screwing and dying you have to deal with. What they don’t tell you is how good screwing is and how bad it is to grow old, get sick, and die. Very well.

  He and his daughter Leslie were going home after Marion’s funeral. Yamaiuchi drove the Rolls. The back of his head was as sleek as a seal. He looked like Sammy Lee, the small muscular Olympic diver. Will Barrett was watching the bare winter woods. Why do woods have a certain look after funerals? He and Marion had gazed at dozens of woods after dozens of funerals in North Carolina. He remembered going home after his father’s funeral. When the limousine stopped at the railroad crossing on Theobald Street, a nondescript place he had passed a hundred times walking home from school, he noticed that this place had a different look, an air of suspension, of pause and hiatus, like the policeman at the cemetery who stood still in front of the stopped traffic. This was the same place where he had thought about Ethel Rosenblum and fallen down.

  Leslie’s granny glasses clashed as she folded the stems. Clearing her throat, she turned toward him. She crossed her legs. The panty hose whispered. Her face with its hazed eyes and thin handsome lips had the expression of Barbara Stanwyck in that part of the movie where she tells everybody off.

  “Let me tell you something, Poppy.”

  “Okay.” It is evident that she is not only going to tell me something but also tell me off in that sense in which some people conceive it to be an act of courage to ignore convention and usage and get it all up front as the saying goes (God, I hope she doesn’t say, let’s let it all hang out).

  “Poppy, let me say this.”

  “Okay.”

  “You and Mom—God knows I love you both, but you blew it. You both blew it.”

  “We did?”

  “You better believe it. You both blew it.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Neither of you was ever honest with the other—or with yourself.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Not once in your entire married life
were you and Mom ever honest with each other. Yet I am grateful to you because I have learned from it.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You should at least have admitted to each other what your marriage was based on. Then who knows, something might have come out of it, something creative. I’ve discovered that the hard way: lying to yourself makes it impossible to be creative in a relationship.”

  “How were we dishonest?”

  “You never once admitted to each other or to yourselves why you married.”

  “Why did we marry?”

  “You married Mom to get the Peabody fortune. Mom married you—I would like to say you were a catch and I guess you were—mainly to get married. Now that’s not a bad basis for a relationship—the French have been doing it for years—as long as you admit it. Mom could not conceive the future without marriage. Fortunately times have changed.”

  “I see.”

  “Jason and I level. We believe that only if people level is there a chance of a relationship.”

  “I see.”

  What he saw was Marion holding his hand, laughing and running, half dragged, up the slope from the rocky beach, her gray eyes under the wide unplucked brows full on him, never leaving him, and he: he with the sweet pang at his heart—pang for what? for the pleasure she took in him? for the pleasure he took in giving her pleasure? for the vulnerability of her which he vowed to protect? her: gawky, ungood-looking (Waal now, Will, she ain’t exactly a queen, is she? his fraternity brothers might say) yet handsome and direct through the eyes and mouth. Or was it the bittersweetness of the sudden bargain he struck with himself during this very run up the slope, that he would marry her not because she was rich and decent and he could make her happy, but because his life had come to such a pass that he could at least do this, take an action just for the mystery of it, an action which couldn’t be bad and might even be a great good. Why not marry her? Mightn’t one as well marry as not marry?