by Walker Percy
“What’s that, Chief?” asks Ellen quickly. Did I say it aloud? She blushes and tugs at my arm. “Come on now!” At the same time I feel a pinprick in my other arm. Max has given me a shot through my coat sleeve.
“You’re going to get a good night’s sleep. Ellen will take you home. I’ll drop in on you tomorrow morning.” He holds my hand affectionately. I see him look at the scars on my wrist. “Take care of yourself now.”
“I feel fine, Max.” I do. I can still hear music.
“Let’s go out through the tunnel, Chief. My car is in the back.”
I say goodbye to the Director, but he is engrossed with a young medical student. It is Carruthers Calhoun, scion of an old-line Southern family, a handsome peach-faced lad.
“Wasn’t it Socrates,” the Director is saying, a friendly arm flung across the boy’s shoulders, “who said: A fair woman is a lovely thing, truth lovelier still, but a fair youth is the fairest of all?”
“No sir,” replies Carruthers, who graduated from Sewanee with a classical education. “That was Juvenal and he didn’t quite say that.”
JULY FOURTH
On the way to meet Moira at Howard
Johnson’s
8:30 A.M. / JULY 4
ONLY THREE HOURS’ SLEEP AFTER MY NIGHT CALL TO THE love couple with the diarrheic infant in the swamp.
A cold shower and a breakfast of warm Tang-vodka-duck-eggs-Tabasco and I’m back to normal, which is to say tolerably depressed and terrified.
At the first flicker of morning terror I remember the modified lapsometer and fetching it from my bag, an odd-looking thing with its snout-like attachment, give myself a light brain massage.
Terror gone! Instantly exhilarated! The rip and race of violins. By no means drunk, clairvoyant rather, prescient, musical, at once abstracted, seeing things according to their essences, and at the same time poised for the day’s adventure in the wide world, I achieve a noble evacuation and go forth, large bowel clear as a bell. Clay lies still but blood’s a rover.
A hot still gold-green Fourth of July. Not a breath stirs. No squirrels scrabble in the dogwoods, no jaybirds fret in the sycamores.
Cutting now through the “new” 18, which is really the old since the construction of the Cypress Garden 36. Hm. Something is amiss. The Fourth of July and not a soul on the links. What with the Pro-Am using Cypress Garden, the “new” 18 ought to be jammed!
Weeds sprout in the fairways. Blackberries flourish in the rough. Rain shelters are green leafy caves.
Someone is following me. Clink-clink. I stop and listen. Not a sound. Start and there it is again: clink-clink, clink-clink, the sound a caddy makes when he’s humping it off the tee to get down to the dogleg in time for the drive, hand held over the clubs to keep them quiet but one or two blades slap together clink-clink.
But there’s no one in sight.
Now comes the sound of—firecrackers? Coming from the direction of the school.
There is a roaring and crackling in the dogleg of number 5. Rounding the salient of woods and all of a sudden knowing what it is before I see it, I see it: the Bledsoe Spanish-mission house burning from the inside. The fire is a cheerful uproarious blaze going like sixty at every window, twenty windows and twenty roaring hearths, fat pine joists popping sociably and not a soul in sight No fire department, no spectators, nothing but the bustling commerce of flames in the still sunlight.
I watch from the green cave of a shelter. Yonder in the streaked stucco house dwelled the childless Bledsoes for thirty years while golf balls caromed off the walls, broke the windows and rooftiles, ricocheted around the patio.
The house roars and crackles busily in the silence. Flames lick out the iron grills and up the blackened stucco.
Into these very woods came I as a boy while the house was a-building, picked up triangles of new copper flashing, scraps of aluminum, freshly sawn blocks of two-by-fours—man’s excellent geometries wrought from God’s somewhat lumpish handiwork. Here amid the interesting carpenter’s litter, I caressed the glossy copper, smelled the heart pine, thought impure thoughts and defiled myself in the skeletal bathroom above the stuffed stumps of plumbing, a thirteen-year-old’s lonesome leaping love on a still summer afternoon.
My chest is buzzing. Ach, a heart attack for sure! Clutching at my shirt, I shrink into the corner. For sure it is calcium dislodged and rattling like dice in my heart’s pitiful artery. Poor Thomas! Dead at forty-five of a coronary! Not at all unusual either, especially in Knothead circles here in Paradise: many a good Christian and loving father, family man, and churchgoer has kicked off in his thirties. A vice clamps under my sternum and with it comes belated contrition. God, don’t let me die. I haven’t lived, and there’s the summer ahead and music and science and girls—No. No girls! No more lewd thoughts! No more lusting after my neighbors’ wives and daughters! No hankering after strange women! No more humbug! No more great vaulting lewd daytime longings, no whispering into pretty ears, no more assignations in closets, no more friendly bumping of nurses from behind, no more night adventures in bunkers and sand traps, no more inviting Texas girls out into the gloaming: “I am Thomas More. You are lovely and I love you. I have a heart full of love. Could we go out into the gloaming?” No more.
My chest buzzes away.
Clutching at my shirt in a great greasy cold sweat, I encounter it, the buzzing box. Whew! Well. It is not my heart after all but my Anser-Phone calling me, clipped to my shirt pocket and devised just for the purpose of reaching docs out on the golf links.
Whew. Lying back and closing my eyes, I let it buzz. If it wasn’t a heart attack, it’s enough to give you one.
It is Ellen Oglethorpe. Switch off the buzzer and move around to a shady quarter of the green cave to escape the heat of the fire.
Now resting in the corner and listening to Ellen and giving myself another brain massage. I could use an Early Times too.
“What is it, Ellen?”
“Oh, Chief, where have you been? I’ve been out of my mind! You just don’t know. Where’ve you been all night?” Comes the tiny insectile voice, an angry cricket in my pocket.
“What’s the trouble?”
“You’ve got to get down here right away, Chief.”
“Where are you?”
“At the office.”
“It’s the Fourth of July and I have an engagement.”
“Engagement my foot. You mean a date. You’re not fooling me.”
“O.K., I’m not fooling you.”
“I know who you have a date with and where, don’t worry about that.”
“All right, I won’t.”
“Chief—”
“Ellen, listen to me, I want you to call the fire department and send them out to Paradise. The Bledsoe house is on fire.”
“Are you kidding?”
“Eh? I can hardly hear you.” I incline my ear to my bosom.
“They’re not taking calls out there, not the police or anybody. That’s why I was so worried about you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“There’s some sort of disturbance out there. Riffraff from the swamp, I believe.”
“Nonsense. There’s not a soul here.”
“Everybody out there has moved into town. It’s an armed camp here, Chief. You wouldn’t believe it.”
“What happened?”
“It started with the atrocity last night—right where you are. At the Bledsoes’.”
“Atrocity?”
“Mrs. Bledsoe was killed with that barbecue thing. Mr. Bledsoe has disappeared. No doubt he’s dead too. The work of madmen.”
Mrs. Bledsoe. Skewered with P.T.’s kebab skewer.
“Chief, you better get out of there!”
“There’s no one here,” I say absently.
“Oh, and we’ve got a roomful of patients.”
“On the Fourth of July?”
“Your new assistant is treating them.”
“Who? Speak up, Ellen, I can’
t hear you.”
“I can’t talk any louder, Chief. I’m hiding in the EEG room. I said Dr. Immelmann has a roomful of patients and some very strange patients, I must say.”
“Dr. Immelmann! What the hell is he doing there?”
“Treating patients with your lapsometer. He said you would understand, that it was part of your partnership agreement. But, Chief, there’s something wrong here.”
“What?”
“They’re fighting. In your waiting room and in the street.”
“Who’s fighting?”
“Mr. Ledbetter and Mr. Tennis got in a fight, and—”
“Let me speak to Art Immelmann.”
“He just left. I can see him going down the street.”
“All right, Ellen, here’s what you do. Are the lapsometers still there?”
“Well, only half of them. And only because I hid them.”
“Where did you hide them?”
“In a crate of Bayonne-rayon training members.”
“Good girl. Now here’s what you do. Take the crate to your car. Lock it in the trunk. Go home. I’ll get back to you later.”
“When?”
“Shortly. I have something to attend to first.”
“Don’t think I don’t know what it is.”
“All right I won’t.”
Ellen begins to scold. I unclip the Anser-Phone and hang it in the rafters among the dirt-daubers. While Ellen buzzes away, I take a small knock of Early Times and administer a plus-four Sodium jolt to Brodmann 11, the zone of the musical-erotic.
Waltzing now to Wine, Women and Song while Ellen Oglethorpe chirrups away in the rafters, a tiny angry Presbyterian cricket.
“Chief,” says the insectile voice. “You’re not living up to the best that’s in you.”
“The best? Isn’t happiness better than misery?”
“Because the best that’s in you is so fine.”
“Thank you.” From the edge of the woods comes a winey smell where the fire’s heat strikes the scuppernongs.
“People like that, Chief, are not worthy of you.”
“People like what?” People pronounced by Ellen in that tone has a feminine gender. Female people.
“You know who I mean.”
“I’m not sure. Who?”
“People like that Miss Schaffner and Miss Rhoades.”
“Are you jealous?’
“Don’t flatter yourself, Doctor.”
“Very well.” I’m waltzing.
Wien Wien, du du allein
“Oh, Chief. Are you drinking?”
I must be singing out loud.
“Goodbye, Ellen. Go home and sit tight until you hear from me.”
I turn off the cricket in the rafters and snap the Anser-Phone in a side pocket, away from my heart.
Again the popping of firecrackers. The sound comes from the south. Taking cover in the gloom of the pines, I look between the trunks down number 5 fairway, 475 yards, par five. Beyond the green are the flat buildings of the private school. The firecrackers come from there. The grounds are deserted, but a spark of fire appears at a window, then a crack. Is somebody shooting? Two yellow school buses are parked in front. Now comes a regular fusillade, sparkings at every window, then a sputtering like a string of Chinese crackers. People run for the buses, majorettes and pom-pom girls for the first bus, their silver uniforms glittering in the sun. The moms bring up the rear, hustling along, one hand clamped to their hats, the other swinging big tote bags. A police car pulls ahead, the buses follow, a motorcycle brings up the rear. As soon as the little cavalcade disappears, the firing stops.
Was it fireworks or were people inside the building directing covering fire at an unseen enemy?
2
At Howard Johnson’s.
Moira gives me a passionate kiss tasting of Coppertone. She is sunbathing beside the scummy pool. Her perfect little body, clad in an old-fashioned two-piece bikini, lies prone on a plastic recliner. Though her shoulder straps have been slipped down, she makes much of her modesty, clutching bra to breast as, I perceive, she imagines girls used to in the old days.
“A kiss for the champ,” she says.
“For who?”
“You beat Buddy.”
“Oh.”
“Poor Buddy. Wow, what a bombshell you dropped. Total chaos. Did you plan it that way?”
“Chaos?”
“In The Pit, stupid.”
“Yes, The Pit. Yes. No, I didn’t plan it exactly that way.” I notice that she has a dimple at each corner of her sacrum, each whorled by down.
“I heard the Director tell Dr. Stryker to sign you up and keep you here at any cost.”
“What do you think that meant?”
“Before Harvard or M.I.T. grab you, silly.”
“I’m not so sure. What was going on over there when you left this morning?”
“Quiet as a tomb. Everyone’s gone to the beaches.”
The golden down on her forearm is surprisingly thick. I turn her arm over and kiss the sweet salty fossa where the blood beats like a thrush’s throat.
Spying two snakes beside the pool, I pick up a section of vacuum hose and run around the apron and chase them off, and sing Louisiana Lou to hear the echoes from the quadrangle.
“Are you going to take the job, Tom?” asks Moira, sitting up. The lounge leaves a pattern of diamonds on the front of her thighs.
“What job? Oh. Well, I’m afraid there’s going to be some trouble around here. You’re sure you didn’t notice anything unusual this morning?”
“Unusual? No. I did meet that funny little man who was helping you yesterday.”
“Helping me?”
“Helping you pass out your props. Wow, how did you do it?”
“He wasn’t helping me. He was—never mind. What was he doing this morning?”
“Nothing. He passed me carrying a box.”
“How big?”
“Yay big.”
I frown. Ordinarily I don’t like girls who say yay big.
The box. Oh my. Terror flickers. I take a drink.
“He was very polite, knew my name and all. In fact, he sent his regards to you. How did he know I was going to see you? Did you tell him?”
“Certainly not.”
“Rub some of this on me, Tommy.” She hands me the ancient Pompeian phial of Coppertone.
“O.K. But you realize you can’t go in the pool.”
“Ugh,” she says, looking at the pool. “I can’t. What’ll I do?”
“I’ll show you. But let me rub you first.”
Foreseeing everything, I had earlier made an excuse and hopped up to the room, cranked up the generator and turned on the air-conditioner.
Now, when Moira’s had enough of the sweat and the grease and the heat, I lead her by the hand to the balcony. From the blistering white heat of the concrete we come into a dim cool grotto. Fogs of cold air blow from the shuddering tin-lizzy of an air-conditioner. The yellow bed lamp shines down on fresh sheets. A record player plays ancient Mantovani music—not exactly my favorite, but Moira considers Mantovani “classical.”
Moira claps her hands and hugs me.
“Oh lovely lovely lovely! How perfect! Whose room?”
“Ours,” I say, humming There’s a Small Hotel with a Wishing Well.
“You mean you fixed it up like this?”
“Sure. Remember the way it was?”
“My heavens. Sheets even. Air-conditioner. Why did you do it?”
“For love. All for love. Let me show you this.”
I show her the “shower”: a pistol-grip nozzle screwed onto two hundred feet of garden hose hooked at the other end to the spigot in the Esso station grease-rack next door.
“And soap! And towels! Go away, I’m taking my shower now.”
“O.K. But let me do this.” I turn on the nozzle to get rid of two hundred feet of hot water.
While Moira showers, I lie on the bed and look at The Laughing Cavalier and th
e Maryland hunt scene in the wallpaper. Mantovani plays, the shower runs, Moira sings. I mix a toddy and let it stand on my chest and think of Doris, my dead wife who ran off to Cozumel with a heathen Englishman.
Doris and I used to travel the highways in the old Auto Age before Samantha was born, roar seven hundred miles a day along the great interstates to some glittering lost motel twinkling away in the twilight set down in the green hills of Tennessee or out in haunted New Mexico, swim in the pool, take steaming baths, mix many toddies, eat huge steaks, run back to the room, fall upon each other laughing and hollering, and afterwards lie dreaming in one another’s arms watching late-show Japanese science-fiction movies way out yonder in the lost yucca flats of Nevada.
Sunday mornings I’d leave her and go to mass. Now here was the strangest exercise of all! Leaving the coordinate of the motel at the intersection of the interstates, leaving the motel with standard doors and carpets and plumbing, leaving the interstates extending infinitely in all directions, abscissa and ordinate, descending through a moonscape countryside to a—town! Where people had been living all these years, and to some forlorn little Catholic church up a side street just in time for the ten-thirty mass, stepping up on the porch as if I had been doing it every Sunday for the past twenty years, and here comes the stove-up bemused priest with his cup (what am I doing out here? says his dazed expression) upon whose head hands had been laid and upon this other head other hands and so on, for here off I-51 I touched the thread in the labyrinth, and the priest announced the turkey raffle and Wednesday bingo and preached the Gospel and fed me Christ—
—Back to the motel then, exhilarated by—what? by eating Christ or by the secret discovery of the singular thread in this the unlikeliest of places, this geometry of Holiday Inns and interstates? back to lie with Doris all rosy-fleshed and creased of cheek and slack and heavy-limbed with sleep, cracking one eye and opening her arms and smiling.
“My God, what is it you do in church?”
What she didn’t understand, she being spiritual and seeing religion as spirit, was that it took religion to save me from the spirit world, from orbiting the earth like Lucifer and the angels, that it took nothing less than touching the thread off the misty interstates and eating Christ himself to make me mortal man again and let me inhabit my own flesh and love her in the morning.