The Masters of Atlantis

by Charles Portis

  Golescu was wearing brown knit gloves with the finger ends cut off, gardener style, the better to feel things and take their measure. His exposed fingertips were a larval white. He tapped them together and stared at June. Her pug nose did not come up to his leptorhine ideal of female beauty but in other ways she pleased him. A long woodpecker nose and heavy legs—“the big hocks,” as he put it—these were the qualities that Golescu first looked for in a woman. June met his appraising gaze with her own.

  “I want these women out of here,” he said, and wheeled about and left.

  Popper turned up his hands. “My apologies. What more can I say? You see how it is. The man is loco. I know we must appear ridiculous to you, living here like this, like wild beasts in this Mato Grosso, but you get deeper and deeper into a hole and you don’t know quite how to get out. Anyway, our party pooper is gone and let’s say no more about him.”

  June said, “What about his soup?”

  “Don’t worry about him. He keeps coconut cookies in his room. I’ve seen them. You’ll never believe me when I tell you what he has on his wall up there. Diplomas? A favorite poem in a frame? Some bathing beauty? Not on your life. Give up? It’s a picture of his king.”

  “You haven’t eaten anything, Austin.”

  “Nothing? Are you sure?”

  “You look gray. I’ll heat up those livers. It won’t take a minute.”

  “No, no. To tell you the truth I’m a little queasy. Just a spoon or two of ice cream maybe.”

  He ate a bowl of snow ice cream and then pulled some blankets about his shoulders and curled up on the cot and fell asleep again, facing the wall.

  Twilight came early to Hogandale, when the sun dropped below the peak of Puerco Mountain. June lighted the kerosene lamp. Mrs. Mack announced that she had had quite enough of ranch life and was ready to go. June was about ready too, but outside it was growing dark and sleet was rattling against the windows. She knew nothing about the bus schedule and she had no intention of walking back up the hill unescorted. She tried to rouse Popper. The more she shook him, the more he contracted into a ball-like form, presenting a smaller and smaller surface to the attack.

  June took the lamp and boldly made her way through the bagweed and up the stairs. The banister glistened with hoarfrost. She found Golescu’s room and spoke to him through the locked door. He said nothing. She explained the situation, that Austin was in a deep sleep, out for the night apparently, and that she and her mother wished to return home. Could he not help them? There was a scrabbling movement within the room but there came no reply. Sobs and hysterics, she decided, would avail her nothing with this man, a tough foreigner of some kind, not likely to be moved by female tears. She stood there and considered how best to flush him. Cajolery? Money? Warm food?

  The door opened and the professor appeared before her with one hand casually at rest in a coat pocket. The cap was gone and in its place there sat an alpine hat. He had changed his work clothes too and was now wearing a belted woolen suit and dotted bow tie. The buzzard feather was in the breast pocket. He wore glasses with perfectly round black frames. General Tojo himself had no glasses that were any rounder.

  “How would you like to go to the pictures with Golescu?” he said.

  Surprisingly enough, he knew when the buses ran, and he escorted the Macks all the way back to Rollo. They arrived in time to catch the last show at the Majestic. He knew his way about town and had in fact been to this theater two or three times before.

  Popper had told June that nothing would get the professor out of the house, but there was one thing and that was a Jeanette MacDonald movie. He seldom missed one. Cut off as he was from the world, he still managed to stay current on the coming attractions in Rollo by way of movie calendars that were delivered by hand each month over the entire county, even to the old Taggert house. When a new calendar came, he circled any notice of a film starring Miss MacDonald and laid his travel plans accordingly.

  On this night, of course, any picture would do. He had not had such a soft armful as June Mack at his side in a very long time, and the show itself and its featured players were a matter of indifference to him.

  As luck would have it, there was a musical cartoon of the kind he liked, with some toys coming to life in a toy shop after the toy maker had gone to bed. He hummed along with the singing dolls. The feature was good too, a murder mystery with a circus setting, in which an escaped gorilla figured as a red herring. It was not June’s kind of picture. She liked the ones with big city nightclub scenes, with perky cigarette girls in their cute outfits, and dark sleek men who whispered orders to henchmen, and pale ladies in white satin gowns who drank highballs and took calls on white telephones. The selected short subject was puzzling to Golescu. It was all about a luxurious rest home in California for retired movie stars, a beautiful estate set in rolling hills, with cottages and swimming pools and all the latest medical equipment. Nothing was too good for the Hollywood old-timers who had worn themselves out with their antics before the camera. When it was over the lights came up and ushers appeared at a quick march to collect money for the home in cardboard buckets. Each of the Macks gave a dime. Golescu dropped in a penny. America, so far from the Danube, was a strange land and he was still not clear as to the nature and extent of his duties here. Among other things, it seemed, he was expected to help Errol Flynn with his retirement plans.

  At the close of the program the moviegoers shuffled out and paused in the lobby to put on their heavy coats and think over some of the things they had seen. Golescu looked into their faces. “Where are the Red Indians?” he said. “For months I am living in the West and I am seeing no Amerinds.”

  June said, “I think they live in Arizona, don’t they, Mom?”

  “You got me.”

  “Arizona or New Mexico, one. Wait a minute. I forgot about Thomas. He’s some kind of Indian.”

  “I am anxious to see the solemn old chiefs in their round hats,” said Golescu. “Their squaws and papooses. Those noble faces are from Mu. I am most anxious to measure their heads.”

  At Mack house, after Mrs. Mack had said good night and gone to her room, the professor sat on the sofa with June and showed her his membership cards from various secret brotherhoods. Then some tricks. He wrote with both hands. He balanced a glass of water on his forehead, tossed three nickels into the air and caught them on the back of one hand. He drove two nails with a hammer in each hand. June offered him some squares of fudge. He declined. He brought out his cylinder seal and told her a little about Kikku and the burial customs of Mu. But he went through all this in a mechanical way, with none of the old Golescu brio, and after a time fell silent.

  June ventured a thought. “Do you want to know what I think, Cezar? I think you must have some secret sorrow in your life.”

  He admitted that his work was not going well and that life in the old Taggert house was grim. Hogandale was worse than Mount Grobny. He didn’t know how much longer he could tolerate Popper’s drinking and his insults. The man was a lunatic. He had once been at the very top of the Gnomon Society, a trusted keeper of the secret knowledge of Atlantis, and was now a raving drunk. You never knew what was going on in his head, what he might say next, or even what his raucous bird might say.

  “But you and Austin are alike in some ways,” said June. “No, it’s true. Do you want to know what I’ve noticed? I’ve noticed that neither one of you ever laughs. Austin has a wonderful smile but that’s as far as it goes. And you never even smile.”

  “So, you expect me to cackle, do you? My dear girl, Romanians are known all over the world for their hilarity. I love nothing better than to laugh but my life it is not a joke. Or it is a joke if you like but not a good one. I am engaged in serious work and how can I do it properly when I am living in an icehouse with a crazy man and eating garbage? Such conditions. Yes, and I am half crazy myself from inhaling mercury fumes. How can I laugh? Much better I was living in Mu fifty thousand years ago.”

  Follo
wing these remarks there was a lull, a highly charged calm, and then with no warning the professor sprang. He threw his arms around June and buried his face in her stiff and tawny wavelets and called her his “little mole” and his “tulip.”

  June was taken by surprise. From cultivated men she expected more chat, a longer stalking period, as with Austin, who had sat on this same sofa and pawed her a little in an absentminded way, and pecked her on the cheek, but never making a decisive move. Perhaps he had held back out of wariness, sensing the steady gaze of Mother Mack on the back of his neck, she with one inflamed eyeball pressed to a door crack and her teeth bared in a rictus from the painful effort to see and hear everything. Or from a failure of nerve, or concern about the difference in their ages. Or from a simple lack of ardor. Whatever his reasons, Popper had been much too slow off the mark to suit June and had thereby forfeited his chance.

  ON MONDAY morning Popper awoke in a tangle of blankets. He lay there and turned matters over in his head. Why could not their production of gold be further facilitated by nature? Get some bugs to eat the bagweed. Then feed the bugs to frogs and the frogs in turn to snakes. At each step of the pyramid there would be a greater accretion of gold, and at the apex, serpents of gold, their scales glittering with the stuff. He must present the idea to Cezar.

  He also resolved to stop drinking and to ask June Mack to marry him.

  “Today’s the day, Squanto.”

  He got up and for the first time in months went through his Gnomonic breathing exercises. One could fall off the Jimmerson Spiral but one could also swing back aboard. He boiled some eggs, a long business at this altitude, and made coffee with the same water. He ate two eggs and left two for Cezar. On one he idly scrawled, Help. Captive. Gypsy caravan. Cezar wasn’t such a bad fellow. A pouting little pedant and much too full of himself but a man of some substance for all that. What was their production of gold anyway? He must ask Cezar.

  “Watch this,” he said to the bird, and went about collecting bottles and pouring rum down the sink. Renunciation was not only exhilarating, it was easy.

  Squanto was resting in the sunken crown of an old felt hat. His head was pulled down into his shoulders and his neck feathers were fluffed out against the cold drafts. He had the crazed look of a setting hen. Popper spoke words of assurance to him. Spring was just around the corner. June would suffuse their dreary lives with sunshine. Her very name gave promise of it.

  There was a lot to be said for the ladies, he told the unblinking bird, apart from their physical charms. They were loyal. Hard workers. They were on the whole a civilizing force and had made good fathers and useful citizens out of many a slavering brute. Women were brave too and not the least bit squeamish about the corruptions of the flesh. If anything they were attracted to that muck. All those nurses. At the same time you must keep them in check or they would drive you crazy. They would presume and push. They were contentious, unreasonable, expensive, randomly vicious and would demand far too much of your attention. There was nothing meaner than a mean woman. With their gabble and nagging they could give you a preview of Hell. But that was the worst of it and there was much to be said for them.

  As he was leaving, Popper paused in the doorway and said, “Just a little longer, Squanto. Hogandale is not such a bad place. We’ll look back on all this later and have a good laugh together.”

  He took the noon bus to Rollo and went directly to the barbershop in the basement of the Hotel Rollo. There in a back room he had a shower bath, a long steamy pounding, while his suit was being pressed and his shoes shined. Then a shave with hot towels. On the way out, with his burnished cheeks glowing like apples, he stopped in the bar for a short beer, which hardly counted as a drink. The bartender said a man had been looking for him.

  “Who was it?”

  “I don’t know. There was something of the bill collector about him. I told him nothing.”

  “Good work.”

  Popper had the bar to himself. He ordered another beer and took it to the table by the big bay window. He looked out on the town of Rollo with goodwill. Seeing the post office, he was tempted again to send a postcard to Mr. Jimmerson. How thrilled the Master would be to get a Poppergram out of the blue. But the time for that had not come. Outside the courthouse he saw a deputy sheriff in Sam Browne belt reading something. No doubt a writ of some kind. A short man stood beside him, waiting. He wore a fedora and long brown overcoat that brushed the tops of his shoes. No doubt a lawyer, about to swoop.

  It was true, the man was a lawyer, but he was also Special Agent Pharris White, and the deputy was reading, not a writ of attachment, but an FBI sitrep, or situation report, which ran: Popper, Austin. Age unknown. Origins obscure. Position and momentum uncertain. Disguise impenetrable. Tracks dim. Sightings nil. Early apprehension doubtful. The reading done, the deputy and the short man got into a green Ford sedan and drove away. Popper did not recognize White and made nothing much of the scene, now so neatly concluded.

  He moved on to the Blue Hole, greeting the regulars with his usual “Keep’em flying!” They cringed on their stools from the sunlight that came streaming through the open doorway, and they too reported that a man had been looking for him. The fellow’s manner had put them off. He seemed to think he was the cock of the walk, if not the bull of the woods, and the barflies had told him nothing. “Good work,” said Popper, and he bought a round and took a short rum himself so as not to put a damper on the occasion. June Mack had not yet come on duty.

  Just as he settled in at the bar, Popper heard a familiar voice. He turned and saw Cezar Golescu, not where he should have been, at the old Taggert house wolfing down eggs, but here in the Blue Hole, back there in a dark booth having a glass of wine against the teachings of the Koran and talking to some crew-cut Indio.

  “Cezar!”

  “Yes, I saw you come in, Popper, but I can’t talk to you now. I am engaged in private business.”

  “What in the world are you doing here? In your belted suit?”

  “A private matter. I will be with you shortly.”

  Popper went back to the booth. “This won’t wait, I have something that will make you sit up. Have you thought of using bugs to help process our stuff?”

  “Yes, I have. No bug known to science will eat B.W. Bugs are not on my agenda today. If you don’t mind, this is private business.”

  “Then I will leave you to it.”

  “Please do.”

  Popper returned to the bar and Golescu resumed his lecture to Thomas, the Ute Indian. Thomas drove a coal delivery truck. He was a man about sixty years old with close-cropped gray hair. No consumptive oriental type with flat face and thin limbs, he was a big strapping Plains Indian with fierce Armenoid features. He had just finished eating fifteen dollars worth of fried oysters, the house specialty, and was now smoking a cigar and drinking a mixture of beer and tomato juice. Golescu was paying.

  On the table between them the professor had spread out his many membership cards for Thomas to see. He had already taken measurements of Thomas’s skull and was now going through the epic tale of Mu once again, of how, after the cataclysm, a handful of survivors had been left perched on rocks in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the water lapping at their feet, and how from that remnant Thomas and all his red brothers had sprung.

  Thomas had understood most of this the first time around. He found it only a little less convincing than the story of how his people had hopped from rock to rock across the Bering Strait, at low tide, but he still couldn’t see how it affected him personally, or his coal route, and had said little in response.

  “Yes, I am sitting here face to face with a living, breathing fossil,” said the professor. “I have dreamed of this moment. You, Thomas, are nothing less than a degraded Muvian.”

  Thomas said nothing. Golescu tried another approach. “Just for the moment let us forget the rest and look at the two languages and how they so nicely correspond.” He spread his fingers and pushed them together in an int
erlocking way to give an example of correspondence. “Like that. See? It is amazing how the language of Mu and your own tongue, the Uto-Aztecan tongue—not your physical tongue, of course—” Here Golescu pointed to his own tongue with jabbing motions, and shook his head no.

  “Did I hear you right? Did you call me degraded?”

  “Please, no, a scientific term. There is no offense. ‘Devolved,’ if you like. I myself am a degraded Roman. I boast of it. Does that surprise you? I know you have heard of the great Roman Empire. Those were my people, Thomas. Did you think I was a Slav or a Goth? What a funny joke. My people came to Dacia under Trajan’s Roman Eagle. I am more Roman than Mussolini, who pretends he is restoring the Empire. Is my name not Cezar? What the hell kind of name is Benito? Mexican? Names are important. I will tell you that if Remus had killed Romulus then the Roman Empire would have been the Reman Empire and the Catholic peoples would go on their pilgrimages to the eternal city of Reme and I myself would be a degraded Reman. But all that is by the way and my point is simply this, that each of us has a noble heritage. And yet what is mine compared to yours? Nothing. Agriculture, metallurgy, bathrooms, celestial navigation, radios, typewriters—all these things your people of Mu invented many years ago. And your calendar! So accurate! Like a fine watch of seventeen jewels!”

  June arrived, wearing loose, pajamalike trousers that were gathered in at the ankles. Popper moved to meet her at the door. He took her hand but before he could speak she said, “Austin! You look so nice! You’ve heard the news, then? It sure gets around fast in Rollo these days.”

  “What news is that?”

  “Cezar and I have an understanding.”

  “A what?”

  “We are seeing each other now. You were so silly last night. Cezar took me home and we fell in love right there on Bantry Street.”

  “Cezar Golescu took you home?”

  “Yes, and shame on me, I let him get fresh. It was like lightning hit us, Austin.”