Last Gentleman and The Second Coming

by Walker Percy

  “Oh yes suh.”

  “Tell her I got hurt at the college, got hit in the head, and had a relapse. She’ll understand. Tell her I’ve been sick but I feel better.”

  “Yes suh. I’ll sho tell her. Sick?” David, aiming for the famous Negro sympathy, hit instead on a hooting incredulity. David, David, thought the engineer, shaking his head, what is going to happen to you? You ain’t white nor black nor nothing.

  “I’m better now. Tell her I’ll call her.”

  “Yes suh.”

  “Goodbye, David.”

  “Goodbye, Mist’ Billy!” cried David, stifling his hilarity. He reached Mr. Vaught at Confederate Chevrolet.

  “Billy boy!” cried the old fellow. “You still at school?”

  “Sir? Well, no sir. I—”

  “You all right, boy?”

  “Yes sir. That is, I was hurt—”

  “How bad is it down there now?”

  “Down here?”

  “How did you get out? They didn’t want to let Kitty leave. I had to go get her myself last night. Why, they kept them down in the basement of the sorority house all night. Man, they got the army in there.”

  “Yes sir,” said the engineer, understanding not a single word save only that some larger catastrophe had occurred and that in the commotion his own lapse had been set at nought, remitted.

  “You sure you all right?”

  “I was knocked out but I got away the next morning,” said the engineer carefully. “Now I’m on my way to find—” He faltered.

  “Jamie. Good.”

  “Yes. Jamie. Sir,” he began again. This one thing he clearly perceived: the ruckus on the campus dispensed him and he might say what he pleased.

  “Yes?”

  “Sir, please listen carefully. Something has happened that I think you should know about and will wish to do something about.”

  “If you think so, I’ll do it.”

  “Yes sir. You see, Kitty’s check has been lost or stolen, the check for one hundred thousand dollars.”

  “What’s that?” Mr. Vaught’s voice sounded as if he had crept into the receiver. All foolishness aside: this was money, Chevrolets.

  The engineer had perceived that he could set forth any facts whatever, however outrageous, and that they would be attended to, acted upon and not held against him.

  “My suggestion is that you stop payment, if it is possible.”

  “It is possible,” said the old man, his voice pitched at perfect neutrality. The engineer could hear him riffling through the phone book as he looked up the bank’s number.

  “It was endorsed over to me, if that is any help.”

  “It was endorsed over to you,” repeated the other as if he were taking it down. Very well then, it is understood this time, what with one thing and another, that it is for you to tell me and for me to listen. This time.

  “I tried to reach Kitty but couldn’t. Tell her that I’ll call her.”

  “I’ll tell her.”

  “Tell her I’ll be back.”

  “You’ll be back.”

  After he hung up, he sat gazing at the old jail and thinking about his kinsman, the high sheriff. Next to the phone booth was the Dew Drop Inn, a rounded corner of streaked concrete and glass brick, a place he knew well. It belonged to a Negro named Sweet Evening Breeze who was said to be effeminate. As he left and came opposite the open door, the sound came: psssst!—not four feet from his ear.

  “Eh,” he said, pausing and frowning. “Is that you, Breeze?”

  “Barrett!”

  “What?” He turned, blinking. A pair of eyes gazed at him from the interior darkness.

  “Come in, Barrett.”

  “Thank you all the same, but—”

  Hands were laid on him and he was yanked inside. By the same motion a shutter of memory was tripped: it was not so much that he remembered as that, once shoved out of the wings and onto stage, he could then trot through his part perfectly well.

  “Mr. Aiken,” he said courteously, shaking hands with his old friend, the pseudo-Negro.

  “Come in, come in, come in. Listen, I don’t in the least blame you—” began the other.

  “Please allow me to explain,” said the engineer, blinking around at the watery darkness which smelted of sweet beer and hosed-down concrete—there were others present but he could not yet make them out. “The truth is that when I saw you yesterday I did not place you. As you may recall, I spoke to you last summer of my nervous condition and its accompanying symptom of amnesia. Then yesterday, or the day before, I received a blow on the head—”

  “Listen,” cried the pseudo-Negro. “Yes, right! You have no idea how glad I am to see you. Oh, boy. God knows you have to be careful!”

  “No, you don’t understand—”

  “Don’t worry about it,” said the pseudo-Negro.

  The engineer shrugged. “What you say, Breeze?” He caught sight of the proprietor, a chunky shark-skinned Negro who still wore a cap made of a nylon stocking rolled and knotted.

  “All right now,” said Breeze, shaking hands but sucking his teeth, not quite looking at him. He could tell that Breeze remembered him but did not know what to make of his being here. Breeze knew him from the days when he, the engineer, used to cut through the alley behind the Dew Drop on his way to the country club to caddy for his father.

  “Where’s Mort?” asked the engineer, who began to accommodate to the gloom.

  “Mort couldn’t make it,” said the pseudo-Negro in a voice heavy with grievance, and introduced him to his new friends. There were two men, a Negro and a white man, and a white woman. The men, he understood from the pseudo-Negro’s buzzing excitement, were celebrities, and indeed even to the engineer, who did not keep up with current events, they looked familiar. The white man, who sat in a booth with a beautiful sullen untidy girl all black hair and white face and black sweater, was an actor. Though he was dressed like a tramp, he wore a stern haughty expression. A single baleful glance he shot at the engineer and did not look at him again and did not offer his hand at the introduction.

  “This is the Merle you spoke of?” the actor asked the pseudo-Negro, indicating the engineer with a splendid one-millimeter theatrical inclination of his head.

  “Merle?” repeated the puzzled engineer. “My name is not Merle.” Though the rudeness and haughtiness of the actor made him angry at first, the engineer was soon absorbed in the other’s mannerisms and his remarkable way of living from one moment to the next. This he accomplished by a certain inclination of his head and a hitching around of his shoulder while he fiddled with a swizzle stick, and a gravity of expression which was aware of itself as gravity. His lips fitted together in a rich conscious union. The sentient engineer, who had been having trouble with his expression today, now felt his own lips come together in a triumphant fit. Perhaps he should be an actor!

  “You’re here for the festival, the, ah, morality play,” said the engineer to demonstrate his returning memory.

  “Yes,” said the pseudo-Negro. “Do you know the sheriff here?”

  “Yes,” said the engineer. They were standing at the bar under a ballroom globe which reflected watery specters of sunlight from the glass bricks. The pseudo-Negro introduced him to the other celebrity, a playwright, a slender pop-eyed Negro who was all but swallowed up by a Bulldog Drummond trenchcoat and who, unlike his white companion, greeted the engineer amiably and in fact regarded him with an intense curiosity. For once the engineer felt as powerful and white-hot a radar beam leveled at him as he leveled at others. This fellow was not one to be trifled with. He had done the impossible!—kept his ancient Negro radar intact and added to it a white edginess and restiveness. He fidgeted around and came on at you like a proper Yankee but unlike a Yankee had this great ear which he swung round at you. Already he was onto the engineer: that here too was another odd one, a Southerner who had crossed up his wires and was something betwixt and between. He drank his beer and looked at the engineer sidewa
ys. Where the actor was all self playing itself and triumphantly succeeding, coinciding with itself, the playwright was all eyes and ears and not in the least mindful of himself—if he had been, he wouldn’t have had his trenchcoat collar turned up in great flaps around his cheeks. The Negro was preposterous-looking, but he didn’t care if he was. The actor did care. As for the poor engineer, tuning in both, which was he, actor or playwright?

  “You really did not remember him, did you?” the Negro asked the engineer.

  “No, that’s right.”

  “He’s not conning you, Forney,” the playwright told the pseudo-Negro.

  “I knew that,” cried the pseudo-Negro. “Barrett and I are old shipmates. Aren’t we?”

  “That’s right.”

  “We went through the Philadelphia thing together, didn’t we?”

  “Yes.” It seemed to the engineer that the pseudo-Negro said “Philadelphia” as if it were a trophy, one of a number of campaign ribbons, though to the best of the engineer’s recollection the only campaign which had occurred was his getting hit on the nose by an irate housewife from Haddon Heights, New Jersey.

  “Do you think you could prevail upon the local fuzz to do something for you?” the pseudo-Negro asked him.

  “What?”

  “Let Bugs out of jail.”

  “Bugs?”

  “Bugs Flieger. They put him in jail last night after the festival, and our information is he’s been beaten up. Did you know Mona over there is Bugs’s sister?”

  “Bugs Flieger,” mused the engineer.

  The actor and the white girl looked at each other, the former popping his jaw muscles like Spencer Tracy.

  “Tell—ah—Merle here,” said the actor, hollowing out his throat, “that Bugs Flieger plays the guitar a little.”

  “Merle?” asked the mystified engineer, looking around at the others. “Is he talking to me? Why does he call me Merle?”

  “You really never heard of Flieger, have you?” asked the playwright.

  “No. I have been quite preoccupied lately. I never watch television,” said the engineer.

  “Television,” said the girl. “Jesus Christ.”

  “What have you been preoccupied with?” the playwright asked him.

  “I have recently returned to the South from New York, where I felt quite dislocated as a consequence of a nervous condition,” replied the engineer, who always told the truth. “Only to find upon my return that I was no less dislocated here.”

  “I haven’t been well myself,” said the playwright as amiably as ever and not in the least sarcastically. “I am a very shaky man.”

  “Could you speak to the sheriff?” the pseudo-Negro asked him.

  “Sure.”

  Breeze brought more beer and they all sat in the round booth at the corner under the glass bricks.

  “Baby, are you really from around here?” the playwright asked the engineer.

  “Ask Breeze.” The engineer scowled. Why couldn’t these people call him by his name?

  But when the playwright turned to Breeze the latter only nodded and shrugged. Breeze, the engineer perceived, was extremely nervous. His, the engineer’s, presence, disconcerted him. He didn’t know what footing to get on with the engineer, the old one, the old ironic Ithaca style: “Hey, Will, where you going?” “Going to caddy.” “How come your daddy pays you five dollars a round?” “He don’t pay no five dollars”—or the solemn fierce footing of the others. But finally Breeze said absently and to no one and from no footing at all: “This here’s Will Barrett, Lawyer Barrett’s boy. Lawyer Barrett help many a one.” But it was more than that, the engineer then saw, something else was making Breeze nervous. He kept opening the door a crack and looking out. He was scared to death.

  But the pseudo-Negro wanted to talk about more serious matters. He asked the others some interview-type questions about racial subjects, all the while snapping pictures (only the engineer noticed) from his tie-clasp camera.

  “It’s a moral issue,” said the actor, breaking the swizzle stick between his fingers, breaking it the way actors break swizzle sticks and pencils. The pseudo-Negro explained that the actor had flown in from Hollywood with Mona his companion to assist in the present drive at great cost to himself, both financially and emotionally, the latter because he was embroiled in a distressing custody suit in the course of which his wife had broken into his bedroom and pulled Mona’s hair.

  “Of course it’s a moral issue,” said the playwright. Now the engineer remembered seeing one of his plays with Midge Auchincloss. It was about an artist who has gone stale, lost his creative powers, until he musters the courage to face the truth within himself, which is his love for his wife’s younger brother. He puts a merciful end to the joyless uncreative marriage in favor of a more meaningful relationship with his friend. The last scene shows the lovers standing in a window of the artist’s Left Bank apartment looking up at the gleaming towers of Sacre-Coeur. “There has been a loss of the holy in the world,” said the youth. “Yes, we must recover it,” replies the artist. “It has fallen to us to recover the holy.” “It has been a long time since I was at Mass,” says the youth, looking at the church. “Let’s have our own Mass,” replies the artist as softly as Pelleas and, stretching forth a shy hand, touches the youth’s golden hair.

  Sweet Evening Breeze, the engineer noticed, was growing more nervous by the minute. His skin turned grayer and more sharklike and he had fallen into a complicated way of snapping his fingers. Once, after peering through the cracked door, he called the pseudo-Negro aside.

  “Breeze says the fuzz is on its way over here,” the pseudo-Negro told them gravely.

  “How do you know?” the playwright asked Breeze.

  “I know.”

  “How do they know we’re here?”

  “Ask Merle,” said the actor.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said the pseudo-Negro, frowning. “I pulled him in here, remember. Barrett’s all right.”

  “The man done pass by here twice,” said Breeze, rattling off a drumroll of fingersnaps. “The next time he’s coming in.”

  “How do you know?” asked the pseudo-Negro with his lively reporter’s eye.

  “I knows, that’s all.”

  “Wonderful,” said the playwright. The playwright’s joy, the engineer perceived, came from seeing life unfold in the same absurd dramatic way as a Broadway play—it was incredible that the one should be like the other after all.

  “Bill,” said the pseudo-Negro earnestly. “We’ve got to get Mona out of here. You know what will happen to her?”

  The engineer reflected a moment. “Do you all want to leave town?”

  “Yes. Our business here is finished except for Bugs.”

  “What about your Chevrolet?”

  “They picked it up an hour ago.”

  “Why not get on a bus?”

  “That’s where they got Bugs, at the bus station.”

  “Here they come,” said Breeze.

  Sure enough, there was a hammering at the door. “Here’s what you do,” said the engineer suddenly. Upside down as always, he could think only when thinking was impossible. It was when thinking was expected of one that he couldn’t think. “Take my camper. Here.” He quickly drew a sketch of the highway and the old river road. “It’s over the levee here. I’ll talk to the police. Go out the back door. You drive,” he said to Mona, handing her the key. The actor was watching him with a fine gray eye. “The others can ride in the back.” The hammering became deafening. “Now if I don’t meet you at the levee,” shouted the engineer, “go to my uncle’s in Louisiana. Cross the bridge at Vicksburg. Mr. Fannin Barrett of Shut Off. I’ll meet you there.” From his breast pocket he took out a sheaf of road maps, selected a Conoco state map, made an X, and wrote a name and gave it to Mona. “Who are they?” he asked Breeze, who stood rooted at the heaving door.

  “That’s Mist’ Ross and Mist’ Gover,” said Breeze eagerly, as if he were already smoothing t
hings over with the police.

  “Do you know them, Merle?” asked the actor, with a new appraising glint in his eye.

  “Yes.”

  “How are they?”

  “Gover’s all right.”

  “Open the door, Breeze.” The voice came through the door.

  “Yes suh.”

  “No, hold it—” began the engineer.

  “The man said unlock it.” It was too late. The doorway was first flooded by sunlight, then darkened by uniforms.

  “What do you say, Beans. Ellis,” said the engineer, coming toward them.

  “Where’s the poontang?” asked Beans Ross, a strong, tall, fat man with a handsome tanned face and green-tinted sunglasses such as highway police wear, though he was only a town deputy.

  “This is Will Barrett, Beans,” said the engineer, holding out his hand. “Mister Ed’s boy.”

  “What,” said Beans, shoving his glasses onto his forehead. He even took the other’s hand and there was for a split second a chance of peace between them. “What the hell are you doing here?” Beans took from his pocket a small blackjack as soft and worn as skin.

  “I’ll explain, but meanwhile there is no reason to hit Breeze.” He knew at once what Beans meant to do.

  “All right, Breeze,” said Beans in a routine voice, not looking at him.

  Sweet Evening Breeze, knowing what was expected of him, doffed his stocking cap and presented the crown of his head. Hardly watching but with a quick outward flick of his wrist, Beans hit Breeze on the forehead with the blackjack. Breeze fell down.

  “Goddamn it, Beans,” said the engineer. “That’s no way to act.”

  “You got something to say about it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where’s the poontang?” asked Beans, and with a gesture at once fond and conspiratorial—enlisting: him—and contemptuous, he leaned across and snapped his middle finger on the engineer’s fly.

  “Augh,” grunted the engineer, bowing slightly and seeming to remember something. Had this happened to him as a boy, getting snapped on the fly? The humiliation was familiar.

  “Don’t do that, Beans,” said Ellis Gover, coming between them and shaking his head. “This is a real good old boy.”