The Masters of Atlantis

by Charles Portis

  This was enough for Golescu. He packed his bag in haste and returned at once to Sacramento and his greenhouse, explaining to his wife, June, and their often divorced daughter, Ronelle, back home again herself, that it had all been a trick, a ruse to make him show his head, a scheme engineered by Popper and the Gnomon Society to humiliate him once again, so late in life, to frighten him and show that he, Cezar Golescu, was still under their eye. They wanted to silence him. They wanted him to shut up about Mu and stop showing the seal. Their tentacles were everywhere. Moaler was one of them and no doubt Churton too. They never slept. Nothing was hidden from the Gnomon host. They were capable of anything—fraud, slander, vandalism, murder, a criminal assault on Ronelle, anything at all. They would rip your tongue out. They knew no law but their Master’s decrees and his mad whims.

  Bulldog White did not give up so easily. He called the state capitol again and again but could raise no one beyond the switchboard operator. It was the holiday season, she told him, and the office workers were sometimes away from their desks on these festive days. The telephone approach, he decided, was unsatisfactory. Moaler was in his Arkansas duck blind and Churton was incommunicado, hiding behind his wife. All the secretaries at the capitol seemed to be caroling. He gathered his papers and put on his down-filled vest, his blue parka, his blue muffler, his blue knit cap and his rubber overshoes and went out into the springlike weather.

  First to a newspaper office, where he thought he might get some straight answers. What he did not know, for all his years in public life, was that newspapers do not welcome direct, unsolicited communication from the public, that they hide their street addresses and telephone numbers in dark corners of inside pages, when indeed the information is printed at all, that they make onerous demands of letter writers so as to discourage the traffic and that they treat as pests those citizens who walk in off the streets with inquiries, or even with news.

  The newspaper people took White quickly in tow and put him in a small holding room for troublesome callers and told him to wait. He waited. They checked on him at long intervals through a peephole, until it became clear that he was not going to leave without a poke or two from the cattle prod. An adolescent sports reporter was sent in to deal with him. The boy knew nothing about Popper or the Churton hearing. He had no idea who Lamar Jimmerson was or where he might be located. The newspaper files were not open to the public; he did know that. “Look,” he said, taking White’s elbow and guiding him to the door. “Why don’t you take this up with your preacher? Here’s a complimentary copy of today’s paper for you.”

  “Are you trying to tell me that Popper is still not in custody?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He’s taken a powder again?”

  “I just don’t know, sir.”

  “You don’t know much, if I may say so.”

  “No, sir. Right this way.”

  Pharris White found himself out on the street again. He wandered about town in a thoughtful mood, turning over in his head the major allegations he had brought against the Gnomon Society in his brief. It was a solid piece of work. It was watertight. A passerby, taking him for an old bundled-up street vendor, asked to buy a paper. White accepted the man’s coin and allowed him to take the paper without understanding the transaction.

  After lunch he went to the capitol grounds. He walked the corridors and tunnels of the state buildings, a round blue figure on the prowl. He looked in on jolly office parties. Slabs of fruitcake were thrust at him and he was directed here and there. Late in the afternoon he managed to corner a woman who worked on the Senate clerical staff. She agreed to listen to him.

  “I can give you a few minutes,” she said. “Let’s go to Room 61-B, where we won’t be bothered.”

  She took him to another isolation cell, barren but for a wooden table and two molded plastic chairs. She ushered him quickly to his seat and said he need not take off his big coat or his mukluks.

  This time he was determined to establish his credentials early and fully. He showed the woman his certificate of merit from the postal union, awarded for three years of perfect attendance at union meetings. He showed her his Gnomon card, laminated in plastic, the ghostly VOID still just visible, and his FBI ring and a letter of guarded praise from the Attorney General and some newspaper clippings in which his name appeared. He presented her with a photograph of himself in his magistrate’s robe, a chubby monk in black, standing before a wall of law books all of identical size and binding, and extending, the viewer could only guess how far, beyond the borders of the photograph in every direction. He signed it: “Best wishes to a fine woman from Judge Pharris White.”

  Then down to business. He laid out before her on the bare table the brief he had drawn up against the Gnomon Society, Jimmerson, Popper et al., along with the yellowing warrant for Popper’s arrest he had carried about for so long.

  “It’s all here,” he said. “Chapter and verse, going back to 1942. Jimmerson’s misfeasance and Popper’s crimes against the people. Get Popper and you’ve got Jimmerson. Bag one and you bag the other. You may object that Popper is only the front man, and up to a point I can agree with you, but I think you may underestimate how much the old man has always relied on Popper. I also have here Jimmerson’s ceremonial baton. His so-called Rod of Correction. Look at it. A little rod you couldn’t correct a dwarf with. It will make an interesting exhibit.”

  The woman informed him that these names meant nothing to her and that in any event the Churton hearing was concluded.

  “What you must do is separate them,” White went on. “First put Popper away and then get Jimmerson on the stand and sweat him. Drag him out of his palace, impound his bank accounts, seize all his secret books and then sweat him good. Trip him up and catch him out. Ask him about his women and his financial intrigues. Ask him about those perforated white shoes he had on in Washington in June of 1942, the kind barbers used to wear. He’s an old man and can be easily confused and made to weep and blubber by a good lawyer. Nobody knows how old he really is. You see me as an old man but Jimmerson was already an old man when I was a young man. Even then he was high-handed and arbitrary. It’s Master Lamar Jimmerson, you see, who has ultimate control over the Gnomon secrets and I can tell you from personal experience, madam, that there is nothing fair about the way he exercises that control. The lower and middle ranks of the Society get nothing but crumbs. All the real stuff is held back for a privileged few at the top. This is not well understood by the public.”

  The woman informed him that no more testimony was being taken by the Churton Committee. No more appointments were being made for meetings with committee members. No transcript of the hearing was available and she was unable to give him the addresses of Mr. Jimmerson and Mr. Popper. She herself was not empowered to take depositions. She would, however, be pleased to pass these documents along to the senators for their consideration.

  “Turn it all over to you? Here? The Rod too?”

  “I will see that they get it, sir.”

  “I was given to understand that I might serve this warrant personally.”

  “I will see that it gets in the proper hands.”

  “I’m not sure you appreciate how strong this material is. How comprehensive.”

  “I will bring it to the chairman’s personal attention.”

  “Do you question my integrity?”

  “No, sir.”

  “It doesn’t disturb you to know that these two men are continuing to make improper use of their secret knowledge?”

  “We would have to get back to you on that, sir.”

  He had not foreseen this, that his vengeance would be wreaked at an administrative level in Room 61-B, in chambers as it were, with the judge on the wrong side of the table, appearing as humble petitioner with cap in hand. He knew he could not expect from the law a hasty determination. He knew, none better, that the law was largely a matter of papers drifting leisurely about on top of heavy tables in dismal rooms like this, but
still the proposal had caught him off guard. Could the woman be trusted? She seemed to be efficient. She was clean. They had not been bothered here in this room. She had been truthful about that.

  He pushed himself back into the plastic chair. This chair, the guest chair, was tilted slightly forward and waxed, so that the sitter could maintain his seat in it only through a constant bracing effort of the legs. The weaker the legs, the shorter the visit.

  “I won’t be here tomorrow,” the woman said. “Or the rest of the week. Of course, you can always mail it to us if you like. It’s up to you.”

  But it wasn’t up to him. His knees were quivering and he was sliding forward again. He felt the papers slipping from beneath his fingertips. The woman was pulling them across the table ever so slowly, her eyes elsewhere. She was disarming him. Pharris White surrendered them without another word, so forceful was the woman’s will in this special room of hers. She thanked him on behalf of Senator Churton for his “valuable input.” When he was gone she took an express elevator to the basement and went to a closet and dropped the brief and the crumbling warrant into a deep box where letters, telegrams, books, tracts, poems, manifestos and other supplementary reading matter were stored, soon to go up the flue. She kept the brass rod, to be placed with the other little loose treasures in her desk drawer, and went back to her party.

  MR. JIMMERSON and Sir Sydney Hen sat on the beach looking out at the Gulf of Mexico. They sat in deck chairs, not talking much, with their toes burrowing idly in the sand. They looked at the water but they did not plunge into it. There were woolly clouds overhead. A breeze came off the whitecaps, fresh but not sharp, nothing at all to the December blast off Lake Michigan. Many years ago the two Masters of Gnomonry had gazed thus in dumb wonder at another enclosed sea, with the cries of sea birds all around them.

  Mr. Jimmerson said, “I am a swimmer but I am not a strong swimmer.”

  Hen said, “I don’t fear the water but I do respect the water.”

  Hen had lost some of his fire. With his floppy hat and his chalky white face and his sunken eyes and his lipstick he looked like an old villain from a cowboy movie of the 1920s. There was froth in one corner of his mouth. Laughing now made him foam a little.

  Once again Mr. Jimmerson said, “You’re looking well, Sydney.”

  “Thank you, Lamar, I quite agree. I feel good too. I seem to expand when Christmas comes round. I bloom at this time of year like the poinsettia.”

  “With the solstice.”

  “Yes.”

  “So many of them. The years have flown.”

  “I quite agree. Night is gathering.”

  “But I would have known you in a vast crowd of old men.”

  “You were always alert, Lamar. It’s true enough, though, I haven’t let myself go. Laughing keeps me young and fit. Oh, one says that, but no, my real secret is eating things in season. Grapes, melons, exquisite plums that drop to the touch. Vine-ripened tomatoes, blood red, right at their peak, and avocados just as they come in. When nuts come in I eat nuts, and a lot of nuts, and when nuts are out of season I never touch them.”

  “A regiment of old men.”

  “My dear fellow, you were always on the qui vive.”

  “It was all so long ago, Sydney. The World War was just—”

  “Ages. Who would have guessed then that our old bones would one day be cast up on this Texas littoral? Not I.”

  “But you know, it doesn’t seem so long ago.”

  “My dear boy, yesterday.”

  This was the same Sydney Hen who had once called Mr. Jimmerson “a toad with no jewel in his head” and his followers “a cabal of ribbon clerks,” and yet not the same. It was a new, agreeable Hen. He had come to La Coma for a visit from Saltillo, Mexico, his current home, traveling by second-class bus with his current companions, the Gluters, Whit and Adele. He used his Christmas money from sister Fanny to pay for the trip.

  So it had come at last, the reunion of the two Masters, and it had all been arranged so simply, through the good offices of the Gluters and Mr. Morehead Moaler, and brought off with so little fuss, given the historic nature of the event and Hen’s love for ceremony.

  The Gluters, whose present job it was to make a flutter around Sir Sydney, had been in the counseling profession in California before retiring to Mexico. They were not culture-bound, they said, but rather citizens of the world. They were people oriented. They preened themselves over their handling of this Hen-Jimmerson affair, to Babcock’s annoyance.

  Whit Gluter, with his operatic laugh, hearty and unconvincing, said, “It was all so easy!” and Adele Gluter, striking a pose in her long peasant skirt, fists on hips, said, “Why didn’t somebody think of this before, for crying out loud!”

  Babcock explained to them that the pace of these things could not be forced. There was no occasion for boasting. The Gnomonic Cycle came around in its own good time, Gluters or no Gluters. As it happened, a new cycle was beginning, and consequently here were the two Masters, face to face again. It was not an occasion for crowing.

  The formal meeting, with its promise of drama, took place in Mr. Moaler’s trailer. The silver bowl was the centerpiece. Resting on a tripod, it was filled with alcohol, which was set afire. Hen wore a white gown with a red rose embroidered on one sleeve and a strange red animal on the other. It was some fierce heraldic beast clawing its way upward. Mr. Jimmerson’s gown was unadorned and a bit tight. Each man wore his Poma, as did Mr. Moaler, newly proclaimed Judge of the East and Companion of Pythagoras. There was no embrace, only a fraternal handshake across the blazing bowl, and the two Masters found little to say to one another at first, but neither was there any unpleasantness.

  The solemn Babcock, the indifferent Maceo, the beaming and nodding Mr. Moaler and the grinning Gluters, Adele and Whit, all stood back a little way in respect, and the better to behold the scene, and would have stood farther back had the trailer walls allowed. They applauded the handshake. Whit Gluter took photographs.

  Popper knew nothing of these events. He lay in a hospital bed in San Antonio with a plastic tube in his nose. Esteban had dozed off at the wheel on the long drive back from Austin and the van had smashed into a guardrail. Popper, troubled by a dream about dancing white rats, woke for an instant in midair as he was flung from his bunk, only to be knocked cold in the fall. He cracked some ribs. Esteban walked away with cuts on his knees and a little blood running down into his socks.

  The days passed. Hen extended his visit. He and Mr. Jimmerson got on better and better. Here on the beach they had even enjoyed a laugh together. They were waiting for the cloud cover to break and night to come. Mr. Jimmerson wanted to show Hen the stars. You couldn’t see them from Burnette, only the moon, and the morning star now and then, because of the overpowering glow of Chicago, but here each night the whole staggering business was arrayed overhead in icy clarity. He was pleased with the thought of starlight from deep space striking his bare head after so long a journey, of his skull as the apex of countless triangles of stellar rays. In his moist brain, at the point of decussation, where the rays crossed, who could say what seething processes were going on. The starry spectacle was a common enough sight in the highlands of Mexico, and even more glorious, but Hen, now so agreeable, made no mention of it as he joined in the spirit of the outing. They would sit here together and ponder the two immensities of sea and sky.

  More fishermen passed by them, tramping across the sand with rods and buckets, heading in for the day. Hen nudged Mr. Jimmerson and again they laughed. The laugh was on the fishermen. Earlier in the afternoon a noisy party of these surf casters had walked heedlessly by, passing within inches of the magisterial feet, but taking no notice. Hen said, “The silly billies don’t even know who we are. They think we’re just two old turtles out here sunning ourselves.” Then he and Mr. Jimmerson could not help but laugh at the innocence of those men who would never know of their close brush with the two world Masters.

  The two Masters did not go t
o the beach every night to look at the stars and strain to hear the Pythagorean music, so very hard to pick up over the sloshing noises of the Gulf, and all but impossible if the wind was up—if the wind was up you could pack it in for the night, as far as listening to the music of the crystalline spheres went—and Mr. Moaler did not go to the beach at all. The sand sticking to his wheelchair tires, the salt spray smearing his eyeglasses—this was not for him. What Mr. Moaler enjoyed was a good long game of dominoes, a series of games, with a little chat along the way about Atlantis or the Three Secret Teachers or how ancient peoples might have moved their big blocks of stone around, though not so much chat as to interfere with the flow of play. He liked steady play, with a short break at 10:15 P.M. to catch the weather report on television, and a longer one at around 1 A.M. for coffee and banana pudding. Mr. Moaler did not have cymbals on his wheelchair but he did have a bicycle bell, a thumb bell, and when he rang it three times play was ended for the night.

  Hen and Mr. Jimmerson regarded all such games as a waste of time and of one’s vital powers but Mr. Moaler was, after all, their host, and so they agreed to humor him and sit in on a few of these sessions. As their play improved, as they became quicker at adding up the little white spots and more adept at sliding the bones around, their resistance gave way and they came to look forward to these games. They too became keen on dominoes, on the variation called Fives or Sniff. Mr. Jimmerson said he didn’t know what he had been missing. Hen said, “I think Pythagoras would approve. He tells us that everything is numbers and this is certainly true of Sniff!” Soon they stopped going to the beach. Almost every night the three elderly men could be found in the trailer, playing dominoes and talking until the early hours, with Babcock or Whit Gluter or one of Mr. Moaler’s local friends making a fourth at the table.