Masters of Atlantis

by Charles Portis

  Such conditions made it hard for Babcock to concentrate on his studies. Work on the new autobiography had bogged down. He had trouble finding essential papers and books. These materials were now all jumbled up outside in a big pile with the Temple furnishings. There was no place to store the stuff and it remained on the ground where it had been dumped, and heaped up into a mound about eight feet high, and covered, after a fashion, with clear plastic sheets. The sheets were anchored all around with rocks and books but they had a way of blowing loose in the night and flapping feebly over the summit of the Temple goods. It was a pyre awaiting the torch.

  Teresita’s trailer, the smallest of the Moaler fleet, was dark and quiet and would have been ideal for Gnomonic study but for the Gluters, who had been assigned sleeping quarters there. The old lady, Teresita, kept to herself, licking her trading stamps and sticking them into booklets. She went out in the morning to feed her two geese and to sweep the ground outside her door, this last business being almost involuntary. Something in her Mexican blood drove her, sick or well, to make those choppy broom strokes against the hard bare earth. In the evening she fed her geese again and tended her two flower beds, enclosed within two car tires. She glowered at Babcock but asked no questions. He found he could work in her trailer tolerably well, until the Gluters moved in. After that there was no peace.

  A guest bed was available but the Gluters chose to sleep on the floor of Teresita’s little sitting room, on straw mats that they carried about with them, rolling them out at night and rolling them up again in the morning and stowing them away in their ancient suitcase. The Gluters were drawn to the floor. All their counseling sessions, they said, were conducted with everyone sitting cross-legged on the floor. In the afternoon there was more of this tatami rolling, when they had their naps, followed by sitting-up exercises. Adele directed the calisthenics. All through the day they were in and out of the trailer, with Adele’s pigtail bouncing, and in and out of their big suitcase, forever buckling and unbuckling, with Whit, in a snarl of belts, trying hard to please but often getting things wrong.

  It was an old black leather suitcase of crinkled finish, on each side of which was painted, with little skill, their name, thus: “THE GLUTERS,” in a green enamel that did not quite match the fine patina on the hinges and fittings. Babcock wondered about the quotation marks. Decorative strokes? Mere flourishes? Perhaps theirs was a stage name. Wasn’t Whit an actor? The bag did have a kind of backstage look to it. Or a pen name. Or perhaps this was just a handy way of setting themselves apart from ordinary Gluters, a way of saying that in all of Gluterdom they were the Gluters, or perhaps the enclosure was to emphasize the team aspect, to indicate that “THE GLUTERS” were not quite the same thing as the Gluters, that together they were an entity different from, and greater than the raw sum of Whit and Adele, or it might be that the name was a professional tag expressive of their work, a new word they had coined, a new infinitive, to gluter, or to glute, descriptive of some new social malady they had defined or some new clinical technique they had pioneered, as in their mass Glutering sessions or their breakthrough treatment of Glutered wives or their controversial Glute therapy. The Gluters were only too ready to discuss their personal affairs and no doubt would have been happy to explain the significance of the quotation marks, had they been asked, but Babcock said nothing. He was not one to pry.

  The Gluters annoyed him in many ways, not least with their insinuations that Hen stood just a bit higher in rank than Mr. Jimmerson. They dared to speak to the Master in a familiar way. They presumed to comment freely on the Telluric Currents, or on anything else. A nuisance, then, these Gluters, but Babcock could not in fairness blame them for the present state of things here at the new Temple, where nothing was going forward.

  The Master never looked anything up these days and he kept putting off work on the new book. He seldom spoke of the Lag. There was little mention of Pletho. His only interests seemed to be dominoes and his afternoon cone of soft ice cream and the nightly weather news on television—the actual weather did not interest him, just the news. Each day more papers blew away from the Gnomon pile, lost forever, so many papers that the blizzard was remarked on by golfers out on the links who found strange pages stuck to their legs, and by other residents of La Coma, a town notable for its blowing paper.

  No, the blame lay with Hen. It was Hen who had put a chill on things with his shrugs and smiles. Gnomon talk bored him. He professed not to understand the Jimmerson Lag. He treated these matters in a jocular, dismissive way and could not be engaged in serious discussion of any subject other than that of fresh fruit and goat’s milk. He said over and over again that he no longer bothered to write books or, a much greater release, read them. “So very tiresome,” he said. “Such rubbish. Even the best of them are not very good. Far too many people expelling gas in public these days. Don’t you agree, Morehead?” He seemed to suggest that Lamar Jimmerson and others would do well to follow his example.

  With so little to do, Babcock took to lingering in bed under heavy medication, sunk in waves of smoke and accordion music that never died. And even there, in his own bed, he could not get away from Whit Gluter and his lank wife, Adele. There was an intercom system that connected all the trailers in the Moaler compound, and Adele used it frequently. She came on at all hours in a hissing blast of static, calling for Whit, telling Whit to report in, asking if anyone had seen Whit, passing on urgent messages for Whit. And, likely as not, Whit would be there, in the bunkhouse trailer, though he did not always respond to the calls. He would be talking to Ed or Lázaro or, at bedside, to Babcock, telling of the Gluter travels in Mexico—so many miles by bus, so many by train, exact figures, the bargain meals, the bargain rooms, the colorful villages, their names.

  Whit’s delivery was clear, for he had once been a movie actor before he married Adele and became a counselor, specializing in portrayals of informers, touts, pickpockets, eavesdroppers, treacherous clerks and the like, city sneaks of one stripe or another. He was a friendly fellow with a ready laugh, as became a counselor, but with his dark moods too. One morning, in a lull between bus stories, he began to squirm and dart his eyes about as he lapsed for a moment into one of his weasel screen roles. He said, “Uh, look here, have you been making eyes at Adele?”

  Babcock could not have been more surprised had Whit suddenly burst into song. “No, of course not. What gave you that idea?”

  “This, uh, note. Adele found it in her tatami.”

  Babcock read the note, which ran:Adell

  I could go for you baby in a big way. How about it? Burn this.

  Maurice

  “I didn’t write this note, Whit. You can see that’s not my handwriting.”

  “Well, I didn’t know. I couldn’t be sure. I wouldn’t want you to think you could break our marriage up.”

  Later that same day Adele herself came by. She came to take Whit away for his nap. It was time to roll out the mats again. She stared at Babcock, already at rest. She stood over him, gathering her thoughts, then said, “You have no business looking down your nose at us. Oh, I know what you’ve been thinking. I’m not dumb. I know what you’ve been saying. The Gluters are silly. The Gluters are not refined people. I know what you’ve been saying behind our backs. You think I haven’t heard it all before? From people like you? The Gluter woman is a hussy. Adele walks with too confident a stride. Even my gait is found offensive. Adele this and Adele that. Her hair. Her clothes. Whit is foolish. The Gluters are vulgar. Whit is henpecked. The Gluters could do with a bath. Well, what do you know about it? You know nothing whatever about our professional standing. How many radio talk shows have you been on, Mr. Know-it-all? You know nothing about the hundreds of interesting articles we have written or the thousands of successful encounter sessions we have conducted, helping people to expand and grow in many different directions and live their lives to the fullest, or even what personal goals we may have set for ourselves this year. Yes, and I’ve caught you ogling me, and
let me tell you something, mister, you can just put those ideas right out of your head. I’ve told Whit about it and I’ve also complained to Sir Sydney. You think Whit is henpecked? It might surprise you to know that Whit sometimes spanks me with one of his sandals. How do you like that, Mr. Babcock? So you can just keep your love letters to yourself, thank you. No, we will not have an affair. You will never hold me in your arms. You and I, Mr. Babcock, will never go stepping out together and I want you to get that through your head once and for all. If you think you’re going to break our marriage up you’ve got another think coming.”

  This was Adele, roused. Babcock said nothing.

  WHIT’S PHOTOGRAPHS of the reunion turned out to be dark splotches. There was to be a reenactment of the Masters’ handshake, to be captured this time on fresh film, before the big dinner on Christmas day.

  Popper came rolling in the day before Christmas, in a wheelchair. The chair was a windfall. His roommate at the hospital, an old man, had died, and Popper had bought the man’s chair from the distraught widow. He gave her five dollars and said he would take it off her hands. There was nothing wrong with his legs, he could walk well enough, but he liked the idea of making an entrance on high spoked wheels. He would come home wounded in action. Esteban would push him up the ramp and into the trailer, and there he would sit hub to hub with Mr. Moaler, with a knitted shawl over his knees and his hands formally composed in his lap.

  So he arrived, to warm greetings from Mr. Jimmerson and Mr. Moaler. They plied him with questions about his injuries but showed only mild interest in his account of the Senate hearing, now such a remote event. Popper, sensitive to his audience, cut short the account, saying that the senators, after hearing the truth of the matter, had given him a unanimous vote of thanks for bringing Mr. Jimmerson to Texas.

  “Junior had scared the fool out of everybody with a lot of wild tales about us. People were fainting. Women passing out and children crying. Well, Big Boy had to eat those words. You can bet I set the record straight, and pretty fast too. On the day I left Austin the Christmas shoppers on the streets were talking of nothing else but Lamar Jimmerson and how he had been misunderstood.”

  “And what did Junior say?”

  “Junior didn’t know what to say, Mr. Moaler.”

  Mr. Moaler smiled at the picture in his head of his son, the big fellow, checked and sputtering. “And what repercussions may we expect?”

  “None. We’re clear. All is well.”

  The two wheelchairs in such narrow quarters made for a traffic problem. Popper maneuvered his chair about in a clumsy manner. “Watch out for Sweet Boy’s tail,” said Mr. Moaler. “And his paws. Watch out for my curios. Watch out for the tree.” This was the Christmas tree. All the lights on it were blue.

  Hen and Babcock were not so pleased to see Popper, nor was Popper pleased to find that Hen had taken his bed. He had been informed of Hen’s descent on La Coma but not fully informed, it being his understanding that the visit was to be a flying one of only two or three days. He was greatly surprised to find Hen still here, and, to cap it off, wallowing in his, Popper’s, sheets.

  “He hasn’t left? Sydney Hen is here now? You’re not serious!”

  “He’s back there having his lunch.”

  Popper rolled himself down the corridor to the end bedroom. Hen was in bed eating greedily from a tray, not fruits of the season but meat loaf and fried potatoes. Adele was seated beside him with pad and pencil. She was there to jot down the words that came to him in his poetic flights, these to be picked over later for gems, such as were suitable for inclusion in the new book he was putting together on the sly. Adele also had a moist towel at the ready for dabbing the tomato sauce off his fingers and chin.

  Popper looked at Hen, taking him in. The two men had never met and now they took each other in, shadows become at last sagging flesh. Hen was wearing his Caesar wig with the curly bangs, and Popper his Texas promoter wig, which was a swelling silver pompadour.

  “Hen? I’m Austin Popper.”

  “Popper. Well, well. Lo the bat with leathern wing.”

  “What do you think you’re doing here?”

  “Austin ruddy Popper. Augustine writ small. Yes, I daresay you are Popper. You look like Popper. That narrow eye.”

  “You look like some devilish old diseased monkey.”

  “Charming. But we shall just have to bear with one another’s infirmities, Popper. I with yours and you with mine.”

  “You’ve made yourself at home, I see.”

  “Oh yes, I’ve become quite fond of my room here. My little nest. A poky little room but oh so comfy. Like a snug cabin on a ship or a luxury train. Morehead is very kind. I grow tired of travel.”

  Adele said, “Should I turn to a fresh page and get this down, Sir Sydney?”

  “No, my dear, I think not.”

  “If I may dab. A red drop there.”

  “Too kind.”

  “About to fall.”

  “Most considerate.”

  Popper said, “It’s time for you to move on, Hen. Back to your hole in Mexico. You’re not welcome here. There’s no place for you here in our program. You’re in my bed. This is not your room. This is my room and I mean to have it back.”

  “Oh pooh. Do you hear that, my sweet? He makes threats from a wheelchair.”

  “What have you done with my things?”

  “I had your man take them away.”

  Popper wheeled about and went back to Mr. Jimmerson and Mr. Moaler to present his case. Mr. Jimmerson, who was thinking of turtle riding in the open sea, did not follow the complaint in all its detail but he did say that this squabbling on Christmas Eve was unseemly and that surely some sleeping arrangement satisfactory to all parties could be worked out.

  “Lamar is right,” said Mr. Moaler. “There’s plenty of room for everyone. Plenty of trailers and plenty of warm beds for everyone to lie down in. And if not, we’ll make room. Let’s not spoil our Christmas with a quarrel.”

  That night they saw Christmas come in at the dominoes table. Popper sat in on the game. He and Hen observed a wary truce. At midnight Mr. Moaler rang the thumb bell on his chair and they broke off play. There were Christmas greetings all around, followed by coffee and banana pudding and some friendly chat.

  Mr. Moaler, taking care to get a bit of banana and a bit of yellow pudding and a bit of vanilla wafer in each spoonful, said it was interesting that cattle were mentioned upwards of 140 times in the Bible, but that the domestic hen, a most useful fowl, was mentioned only twice, and the domestic cat not at all. Mr. Jimmerson said that Sydney’s recent mention of the turtle had made him think of something he had seen many years ago, and that had been much on his mind lately. It was an old newsreel showing a young man astride a swimming sea turtle. A giant turtle, with his flippers, such odd limbs, flapping smoothly away in the water. The young rider was laughing and waving at the camera. He would be quite old now and Mr. Jimmerson wondered if he retained his good humor and his gleaming teeth and his love for water sports. He wondered where the fellow might be today. Probably gumming his food well inland, said Hen. He went on to say that the domestic dog came in for a good deal of unfavorable mention in the Bible. Popper said that so far tonight no mention at all had been made of the deer, and yet his antlers, shed and regenerated once a year, were thought to be the fastest-growing of all animal substances.

  They stayed up for the late weather report—“Winds light and variable”—and exchanged another round of good wishes. “Let’s all look our best tomorrow,” said Mr. Moaler, with a curious smile. “That is, later today. I have a little something in mind. An interesting announcement to make. Let’s all look our best.”

  With that they turned in. Popper slept on the plastic couch, in the blue glow of the Christmas tree.

  Adele, who had away of getting wind of things, came on the intercom early in the morning to say that everyone was to wear his good clothes to the dinner today. She repeated the message at intervals, some
times adding, “Let’s keep to schedule.”

  Lázaro was up early too, basting the turkeys, as was Maceo, who had charge of cakes and pies. Teresita prepared the gumbo. This dish, a soup dense with shrimps and hairy and mucilaginous pods of okra, was a Moaler tradition on Christmas morning. Whit loaded his camera, in a darkened bathroom this time.

  Popper had Esteban take him out for a drive in the van. He wanted to get away from Adele’s voice and all the bustle. On sharp turns the right front tire rubbed against the crumpled fender. They cruised the residential streets and watched with delight the little children wobbling along on their new Christmas bikes and skates. They went to Brownsville and looked over Mr. Moaler’s downtown parking lots. No revenue today, no cars, but still the recorded message played endlessly over a loudspeaker, warning those who would park there without paying that their cars would most certainly be towed away, at any hour of the day or night, Sundays and holidays not excepted, at great expense to the trespassers.