Last Gentleman and The Second Coming

by Walker Percy

  Don’t be too hard on Rita. She is peeved, not perverted. (The major discovery of my practice: that there are probably no such entities as “schizophrenia” and “homosexuality,” conceived as Platonic categories, but only peevishness, revenge, spitefulness, dishonesty, fear, loneliness, lust, and despair—which is not to say we don’t need psychiatrists. You people don’t seem to be doing too well, you know.)

  The only difference between me and you is that you think that purity and life can only come from eating the body and drinking the blood of Christ. I don’t know where it comes from.

  The engineer rose unsteadily from the floor of the sunken living room, where he had been reading Sutter’s casebook, and went into the bathroom. As he urinated he gazed down at the maroon toilet seat and the black tile floor. Once, he remembered, his father had visited the home of a rich Syrian to draw up a will. “They had black sheets on the bed,” he confided to his son with a regular cackle. And in truth there seemed even now something Levantine and fancy about tampering with the decent white of bathrooms and bedsheets.

  He folded the Esso map into the casebook and went down to the camper. Reading Sutter’s casebook had a strange effect upon him. His mind, instead of occupying itself with such subjects as “American women” and “science” and “sexuality,” turned with relief to the most practical matters. He drove into a filling station and while the motor was being serviced studied the Esso map, calculating almost instantly and clairvoyantly the distance to Jackson, New Orleans, and Shreveport. When the attendant brought over the dip stick, exhibiting its coating of good green Uniflow, slightly low, he savored the hot sane smell of the oil and felt in his own muscles the spring of the long sliver of steel.

  14.

  Sure enough, just over the saddle of the farthest ridge, the last wrinkle of the Appalachians, which overlooked a raw new golf links and a snowfield of marble-chip rooftops of five hundred G.E. Gold Medallion Homes, he found the mailbox and driveway. Up the rocky slope swarmed the sturdy G.M.C., shouldering like a badger, and plunged into a thicket of rhododendron. Thick meaty leaves swept along the aluminum hull of his ship and slapped shut behind him. He took a turn in the woods but there was no sign of Kitty. While he waited for her, he lay in Jamie’s bunk and again studied the map he had found in Sutter’s apartment. Sutter’s casebook disturbed him; there were no clues here. But the map, with its intersecting lines and tiny airplanes and crossed daggers marking battlefields, was reassuring. It told him where to go.

  The towhees whistled in the rhododendron and presently the branches thrashed. There stood Kitty in the doorway with light and air going round her arm.

  “Oh, I’m glad to see you,” he cried, leaping up and grabbing her, hardly able to believe his good fortune. “You are here!” And here she was, big as life, smelling of dry goods and brand-new chemical blue jeans. They were not quite right, the jeans, too new and too tight in the thigh and too neatly rolled at the cuff, like a Macy’s girl bound for the Catskills, but it only made his heart leap all the more. He laughed and embraced her, held her charms in his arms.

  “Whoa now,” she cried flushing.

  “Eh?”

  “Get the game on the radio.”

  “Game?”

  “Tennessee is ahead.”

  “Right,” he said and turned the game on but instead of listening told her: “Now. I can tell you that I feel very good about the future. I see now that while I was living with your family I was trying too hard to adapt myself to my environment and to score on interpersonal relationships.”

  “Darling,” said Kitty, once again her old rough-and-ready and good-looking Wellesley self.

  “Anyhow, here’s what we’ll do,” said he, holding her on his lap and patting her. “We’ll strike out for Ithaca and pick up my money, then we’ll cross the mighty Mississippi and see my uncle, who lives near the town of Shut Off, Louisiana, transact another small piece of business, get married, and head west, locate Jamie in either Rita’s house in Tesuque or Sutter’s ranch near Santa Fe, and thereafter live in Albuquerque or perhaps Santa Fe, park the camper in an arroyo or dry wash and attend the University of New Mexico since there is bound to be such a place, and make ourselves available to Jamie in whatever way he likes. We might live at Sutter’s old ranch and in the evenings sit, the three of us, and watch the little yellow birds fly down from the mountains. I don’t mind telling you that I set great store by this move, for which I thank Jamie, and that I am happier than I can tell you to see that you are with me.”

  Kitty, however, seemed abstracted and was trying to hear the radio. But no, she changed her mind, and grabbing him, took him by her warm heavy hand and yanked him out of the Trav-L-Aire. The next thing he knew, she was showing him a house and grounds in the bustling style of a real-estate agent. “Myra gave me the key. Do you know she told me she would let me work for her! She makes piles of money.” It was a regular rockhouse cantilevered out over the ridge and into the treetops. She unlocked the door.

  “What is this place?” he asked, wringing out his ear. The red and blue lines of the Esso map were still glimmering on his retina and he was in no mood for houses. But they were already inside and she was showing him the waxed paving stones and the fireplace and the view of the doleful foothills and the snowfield of G.E. Gold Medallion Homes.

  “This is the Mickle place. Myra has it listed for thirty-seven five but she’ll let it go to the family for thirty-two. Isn’t it lovely? Look at the stone of this fireplace.”

  “Thirty-seven five,” said the engineer vaguely.

  “Thirty-seven thousand five hundred dollars. In the summer you can’t see that subdivision at all.”

  She took him outside to a ferny dell and a plashy little brook with a rustic bridge. When she walked with him, she slipped her hand behind him and inside his belt in a friendly conjugal style, as one sees the old folks do, John Anderson my jo John.

  “Do you mean you want to come back here and live?” he asked her at last, looking around at the ferny Episcopal woods and the doleful view and thinking of feeding the chickadees for the next forty years.

  “Not before we find Jamie,” she cried. “Come on.” She yanked him toward the Trav-L-Aire. “Wait till I get my hands on that sorry Jamie.” But again she changed her mind. “Oh. I forgot to show you the foc’sle, as Cap’n Mickle used to call it, which is built into the cliff under the ‘bridge.’ It is soundproof and womanproof, even the doorknob pulls out, the very place for an old growl bear like you—you can pull the hole in after you for all I care.”

  “No, thanks. Let’s be on our way,” said the engineer, eyeing the Episcopal ivy which seemed to be twining itself around his ankles.

  “Old Cap’n Andy,” said Kitty, shaking her head fondly. “He was a bit eccentric but a dear. He used to stroll up and down the bridge, as he called it, with his telescope under his arm and peer out at the horizon and cry ‘Ahoy there!’”

  “Is that right,” said the engineer gloomily, already seeing himself as a crusty but lovable eccentric who spied through his telescope at the buzzards and crows which circled above this doleful plain. “Come on,” he said, now also eyeing her covertly. She was fond and ferocious and indulgent. It was as if they had been married five years. Ahoy there. He had to get out of here. But there would be the devil’s own time, he saw clearly, in hemming her up in a dry wash in New Mexico. She was house-minded.

  But he did get her in the camper at last and down they roared, down the last slope of the Appalachians, which was tilted into the autumn sun, down through the sourwood and the three-fingered sassafras.

  “How much money do you have?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “Somewhere around fifteen thousand—after I transact my business.” A thought cheered him up. “Not nearly enough to buy Cap’n Andy’s house, as good a bargain as it is.”

  “Will you take care of this for me?”

  The Esso map was open on the dash. Squarely across old Arkansas it fell, the check, or cheque it l
ooked more like, machine-printed, certified, punched, computed, red-inked, hatched up rough as a cheese grater. The engineer nearly ran off the mountain. A little army of red Gothic noughts marched clean to Oklahoma, leaning into the wind. It looked familiar. Had he seen it before?

  “You have seen it before. Remember?”

  “Yes,” said the engineer. “What’s it for?”

  “My dowry, crazy. Turn it over.”

  He pulled up at a G.E. model home—what’s wrong with one of these—they were much more cheerful than that buzzard’s roost up on the ridge, and read aloud the lavender script: “For deposit only, to the account of Williston Bibb Barrett.”

  “Do you know how I got the Bibb?”

  “No.”

  “I got Jamie to peek in your wallet.”

  “What do you want me to do with it?”

  “Keep it. Hand me your wallet. I’ll put it in.”

  “All right.”

  “It’s really insurance.”

  “What kind of insurance?”

  “Against your running out on me. I know you wouldn’t steal a girl’s money. Would you?”

  “No.”

  Already the carnivorous ivy was stealing down the mountainside. Quickly he put the G.M.C. in gear and sent the Trav-L-Aire roaring down the gloomy Piedmont

  “Do we go anywhere near school?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could we stop and pick up my books?”

  “All right. But why do you want your books?”

  “We have a test in Comp Lit Wednesday.”

  “Wednesday.”

  A half hour later, as dusk fell in a particularly gloomy wood, she clapped her hand to her mouth. “Oh my Lord, we forgot about the game.”

  “Yes.”

  “Turn on the radio and see if you can get the score.”

  “All right.”

  15.

  Traffic was heavy in both directions and it was night before they reached the campus. The engineer stopped the Trav-L-Aire under a street light and cocked an ear.

  Something was wrong. Whether there was something wrong with the town or inside his own head, he could not say. But beyond a doubt, a queer greenish light flickered over the treetops. There were flat popping noises, unchambered, not like a shotgun but two-syllabled, ba-rop, ba-rop. In the next block an old car stopped and three men got out carrying shotguns and dove straight into the woods. They were not students. They looked like the men who hang around service stations in south Jackson.

  “I wonder if Tennessee won,” said Kitty. “Why are you stopping here?”

  “I think I’ll leave the camper here.” His old British wariness woke in him. He backed the camper onto a vacant lot behind a billboard.

  They separated at a fork in the campus walk, she bound for the Chi Omega house to fetch her books, he for his Theory of Large Numbers. “I’ll meet you here in ten minutes,” he told her uneasily.

  Dark figures raced past him on the paths. From somewhere close at hand came the sound of running feet, the heavy direful sound of a grown man running as hard as he can. A girl, a total stranger, appeared from nowhere and taking him by the coat sleeves thrust her face within inches of his. “Hi,” he said.

  “He’s here,” she sobbed and jerked at his clothes like a ten-year-old. “Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!” she sobbed, jerking now at his lapels.

  “Who?” he asked, looking around.

  Searching his face and not finding what she wanted, she actually cast him from her and flew on her way.

  “Who?” he asked again, but she was gone. Coming to a lamp, he took out his plastic Gulf Oil calendar card and held it up to see what day of the month it was. He had forgotten and it made him feel uneasy.

  At the Confederate monument a group of students ran toward him in ragged single file. Then he saw why. They were carrying a long flagstaff. The flag was furled—he could not tell whether it was United States or Confederate. The youth in front was a sophomore named Bubba Joe Phillips. He was known as a “con,” that is, one who knows how to make money from such campus goings-on as decorating the gym for dances. Ordinarily a smiling crinkled-haired youth, he strained forward, his eyes bulging and unseeing. He was beside himself, besotted, with either fear or fury, and did not see the engineer, though he almost ran into him.

  “What yall say,” said the engineer amiably and stepped nimbly to the side, thinking they meant to go past him and down the path whence he came. But when they came abreast of the Confederate monument they turned toward the lights and the noise. They cleared him easily but what he did not see and they did not care about was the dark flagstaff behind them, which as they turned swept out in a wider arc and yet which he nevertheless saw a split second before the brass butt caught him at the belt buckle. “Oof,” he grunted, not hurt much and even smiling. He would have sat down but for the wire fencelet, which took him by the heel and whipped him backward. He was felled, levered over, and would have killed himself if his head had struck the corner of the monument base but it struck instead the slanting face of the old pocked Vermont marble and he was sent spinning into the soft earth under an arborvitae.

  The dawn of discovery, the imminent sense of coming at last upon those secrets closest to one and therefore most inaccessible, broke over him. “But why is it—?” he asked aloud, already knocked cold but raising a forefinger nevertheless, then lay down under the dark shrubbery.

  Chapter Five

  1.

  HE AWOKE SHORTLY AFTER DAWN but not under the arborvitae. Though he never found out how he came to be here—perhaps he had awakened earlier, remembered more, crawled over, and passed out again—here he was, lying in the cab of the Trav-L-Aire, asleep on his back like a truck driver. When he sat up, his head hurt. But he started the truck and crept out into the street and, without noticing that he did so, took a certain route through the back of town. The streets were littered with broken glass. One automobile had been set afire and burned to a cinder. He drove past an army truck and a police car and straight out into the countryside.

  Presently he heard a siren. Down the highway roared the camper, careening like a runaway Conestoga, then topping a rise and spying a picnic area, swerved into it and plumb through it and dove into a copse of wax myrtle. Presently a patrol car passed, then another, sirens lapsing to a growl.

  He waited in the fragrant cave of myrtles until the sun came up and made a dapple on the good gray hood of the G.M.C. What is this place? Where am I going?—he asked himself, touching his bruised head, and, as soon as he asked himself, did not know. Noticing a map and notebook on the seat beside him, he opened the latter.

  I am the only sincere American.

  Where I disagree with you, Val, is in you people’s emphasis on sin. I do not deny, as do many of my colleagues, that sin exists. But what I see is not sinfulness but paltriness. Paltriness is the disease. This, moreover, is not a mistake you are obliged to make. You could just as easily hold out for life and having it more abundantly as hold out against sin. Your tactics are bad. Lewdness is sinful but it derives in this case not from a rebellion against God (Can you imagine such a thing nowadays—I mean, who cares?)— but from paltriness.

  Americans are not devils but they are becoming as lewd as devils. As for me, I elect lewdness over paltriness. Americans practice it with their Christianity and are paltry with both. Where your treasure is, there is your heart and there’s theirs, zwischen die Beinen.

  Americans are the most Christian of all people and also the lewdest. I am no match for them! Do you know why it is that the Russians, who are atheists, are sexually modest, whereas Americans, the most Christian of peoples, are also the lewdest?

  Main Street, U.S.A. = a million-dollar segregated church on one corner, a drugstore with dirty magazines on the other, a lewd movie on the third, and on the fourth a B-girl bar with condom dispensers in the gents’ room. Delay-your-climax cream. Even our official decency is a lewd sort of decency. Watch a soap opera on TV where everyone is decent (and als
o sad, you will notice, as sad as lewdness is sad; I am the only American who is both lewd and merry). Beyond any question, these people who sit and talk so sorrowfully and decently are fumbling with each other under the table. There is no other alternative for them.

  Soap opera is overtly decent and covertly lewd. The American theater is overtly lewd and covertly homosexual. I am overtly heterosexual and overtly lewd. I am therefore the only sincere American.

  Last night Lamar Thigpen called me un-American. That is a lie. I am more American than he is because I elect the lewdness which he practices covertly. I unite in myself the new American lewdness with the old American cheerfulness. All I lack is Christianity. If I were a Christian as well as being lewd and cheerful, I’d be the new Johnny Appleseed.

  My God, what is all this stuff, thought the poor bemused shivering engineer and with a sob flung out of the cab and began running up and down and swinging his arms to keep warm when a great pain took him at the back of his head so suddenly that he almost fainted. He sat on a picnic bench and felt his skull. It had a sticky lump the size of a hamburger. “Oh, where is this place?” he groaned aloud, hoping that if he heard a question he might answer it. “Where am I bound and what is my name?” When no answer came, he reached for his wallet. But even before his hand arrived, he had felt the ominous airiness and thinness of fabric of his back pocket. It was empty and the flap unbuttoned. Jumping up, he began to slap his pockets as quickly as possible (to surprise the wallet ere it could lose itself). He searched the camper. Beyond a doubt the wallet was gone, lost or stolen. But there was $34.32 in his forward pocket. A textbook in the cabin disclosed what he seemed to know as soon as he saw it, his name.