Last Gentleman and The Second Coming

by Walker Percy

  Kennedy. With all the hogwash, no one has said what he was. The reason he was a great man was that his derisiveness kept pace with his brilliance and his beauty and his love of country. He is the only public man I have ever believed. This is because no man now is believable unless he is derisive. In him I saw the old eagle beauty of the United States of America. I loved him. They, the — (unreadable: bourgeois? burghers? bastards?), wanted him dead. Very well, it will serve them right because now—

  The script ran off into the brown stipple of a girl’s thigh and he could make out no more.

  He frowned, feeling suddenly put off and out of sorts. This was not what he was looking for and did him no good at all.

  Under one bed he found a book of photographs of what appeared to him to be hindoo statuary in a jungle garden. The statues were of couples locked in erotic embraces. The lovers pressed together and their blind lozenge-eyes gazed past each other. The woman’s neck arched gracefully. The man’s hand sustained the globe of her breast; his pitted stone shaft pressed against the jungle ruin of her flank.

  Outside he sat in the cab of the Trav-L-Aire and waited. The Sangre de Cristo range began to turn red. At five o’clock a breeze sprang up. The windmill creaked and presently little yellow flycatchers began to fly down from the mountain and line up on the rim of the cistern.

  Dark fell suddenly and the stars came out. They drew in and in half an hour hung as large and low as yellow lamps at a garden party. Suddenly remembering his telescope, he fetched it from the cabin and clamped it to the door of the cab like a malt tray. Now spying the square of Pegasus, he focused on a smudge in the tail and there it was, the great cold fire of Andromeda, atilt, as big as a Catherine wheel, as slow and silent in its turning, stopped, as tumult seen from far away. He shivered. I’m through with telescopes, he thought, and the vasty galaxies. What do I need with Andromeda? What I need is my ’Bama bride and my cozy camper, a match struck and the butane lit and a friendly square of light cast upon the neighbor earth, and a hot cup of Luzianne between us against the desert cold, and a warm bed and there lie dreaming in one another’s arms while old Andromeda leans through the night.

  Returning to Santa Fe, he found a snug court in the Camino Real, in a poplar grove hard by the dry bed of the Santa Fe River, and went shopping for groceries. There was no grits to be had, and he had to buy Cream of Wheat. The next morning after breakfast he telephoned every hotel, motel, clinic, and hospital in town, but no one had heard of Dr. Sutter Vaught.

  Two days later he was stamping about and hugging himself in the plaza, shivering and, for lack of anything better to do, reading the inscription on the Union monument.

  To the heroes of the Federal Army who fell at the Battle of Valverde fought with Rebels February 21, 1862

  Strangely, there occurred no stirring within him, no body English toward, the reversing of that evil day at Valverde where, but for so-and-so’s mistake, they might have gotten through to California. Then if they could have reached the ocean— But he felt only the cold.

  At ten o’clock the sun rose over the ’dobe shops and it grew warmer. Indians began to come into the plaza. They spread their jewelry and beaded belts on the hard clay and sat, with their legs stretched out, against the sunny wall. It seemed like a good idea. He found a vacant spot and stretched out his Macy’s Dacrons among the velvet pantaloons. The red Indians, their faces flat as dishes, looked at him with no expression at all. He had only just begun to read from Sutter’s casebook:

  You cite the remark Oppenheimer made about the great days of Los Alamos when the best minds of the Western world were assembled in secret and talked the night away about every subject under the sun. You say, yes they were speaking sub specie aeternitatis as men might speak anywhere and at any time, and that they did not notice that—

  when he happened to look up and catch sight of a thin man in shirtsleeves coming out of a ’dobe Rexall. He carried a paper bag upright in the crook of his arm. His shirt ballooned out behind him like a spinnaker. Without a second’s hesitation the engineer was up and on his way. But when he caught up, the thin man had already gotten into a dusty Edsel and the car was moving.

  “Sir,” said the courteous engineer, trotting along and leaning down to see the driver.

  “What?” But the Edsel kept moving.

  “Wait, sir.”

  “Are you Philip?” asked the driver.

  “Eh?” said the engineer, cupping his good ear, and for a moment was not certain he was not.

  “Are you Philip and is this the Gaza Desert?” The Edsel stopped. “Do you have something to tell me?”

  “Sir? No sir. I am Williston Barrett,” said the engineer somewhat formally.

  “I knew that, Williston,” said Sutter. “I was making a joke. Get in.”

  “Thank you.”

  The hood of the car was still stained with the hackberries and sparrow droppings of Alabama. Edsel or not, it ran with the hollow buckety sound of all old Fords.

  “How did you find me?” Sutter asked him. Unlike most thin men, he sat in such a way as to emphasize his thinness, craned his neck and hugged his narrow chest.

  “I found a map in your room with the route traced on it. I remembered the name of the ranch. An Indian told me where it was. There was no one at the ranch, so I waited in the plaza. There was also this in your room.” He handed the casebook to Sutter. “I thought you might have forgotten it.”

  Sutter glanced at the casebook without taking it. “I didn’t forget it.”

  “I have pondered it deeply.”

  “It is of no importance. Everything in it is either wrong or irrelevant. Throw it away.”

  “It seems to be intended for your sister Val.”

  “It isn’t.” After a moment Sutter looked at him. “Why did you come out here?”

  The engineer passed a hand across his eyes. “I—think you asked me, didn’t you? I also came out to see Jamie. The family want him to come home,” he said, remembering it for the first time as he spoke. “Or at least to know where he is.”

  “They know where he is.”

  “They do? How?”

  “I called them last night. I spoke to Kitty.”

  “What did she say?” asked the engineer uneasily, and unconsciously hugged himself across the chest as if he too were a thin man.

  “For one thing, she said you were coming. I’ve been expecting you.”

  The engineer told Sutter about his fugue. “Even now I am not too clear about things,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “But I knew that I had business here.”

  “What kind of business?”

  He frowned. “As I told you: that I was to see you, as well as find Jamie.” He waited, hoping the other would tell him something, but Sutter was silent. The engineer happened to look down and caught sight of the two bottles in the Rexall bag. It was a bourbon called Two Natural. The cork showed a pair of dice rolling a lucky seven. “How is Jamie? Where is he?”

  “Jamie is very sick.”

  “Did you tell Kitty?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Jamie doesn’t want them to come out.”

  “How sick is he?”

  “He got a sore throat driving out.”

  “That’s not so bad, is it?”

  “It wouldn’t be if he had any leucocytes.”

  “I see.”

  “The strep also lit up an old rheumatic lesion.”

  “You mean in his heart?” asked the engineer, arming himself against the dread sweetness of bad news.

  But Sutter merely grunted and went on driving the Edsel in his old-fashioned sporty style, forefinger curled around the spoke of the steering wheel, left elbow propped on the sill. Presently the Edsel stopped in a shady street of tall Victorian houses which flanked a rambling frame building.

  “Is he in the hospital?” he asked Sutter.

  “Yes,” said Sutter, but made no move to get out. Instead he hung fire politely, inclined sooty-eyed and civ
il over the wheel as if he were waiting on the engineer.

  The engineer blinked. “Is Jamie in there?”

  Sutter nodded and sat back with a sigh. “I’m very glad you’re here,” he said tapping the wheel.

  “Do you wish me—”

  “Go on in and see him. I have to go to work. I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

  “Where do you work?”

  “At a guest ranch,” said Sutter absently. “It’s something like being a ship’s doctor. It’s only temporary, until—” He shrugged. “Jamie and I ran out of groceries.”

  When he got out, Sutter called him back.

  “I forgot to tell you about the purpura.”

  “Purpura?”

  “Like bruises. It’s a new development, not particularly serious in itself but somewhat disconcerting. I thought it might bother you if you didn’t know.”

  “Thank you.” Don’t worry, thought the engineer confidently. It won’t bother me.

  7.

  But the purpura upset him badly. Jamie’s face was covered with splotches of horrid color like oil slicks. It was as if a deep fetor, a swamp decay, had come to the surface. Speaking to him meant straining a bit as if one had to peer this way and that to see him through an evil garden of flowers.

  It was an odd, unfitting business anyhow, Jamie being here. Jamie was as sick as he could be, yet he lay in a room off the street, so to speak. Could one be truly sick without proper notice and an accounting? The door was wide open and anyone could walk in. Yet no one did. He was alone. Should not some official cognizance be taken of his illness, some authorized person interposed between visitor and patient? One had only to ask the room number downstairs and walk up. The engineer could not get over the feeling that Jamie was not properly sick.

  The patient was asleep. For some minutes the visitor stood about uncertainly, smiling warily, then, becoming alarmed, leaned closer to the sickbed. A sour heat radiated from the hollow of the pillow. In the triangle of Jamie’s neck, a large vein pulsed in a complex rhythm. Jamie was not noticeably thinner. In fact, a deposit of new tissue, or perhaps dropsical fluid, had occurred under his skin. His face, always puddingish and ill-defined, had gone even more out of focus.

  But no sooner had the engineer sat down than the patient opened his eyes and spoke to him quite naturally.

  “What are you doing in these parts?” Though he was fairly goggling with fever, Jamie kept his soldierly way of lying abed. He lounged like a wounded man, pushed down his thigh, made a grimace.

  “Looking for you and Sutter.”

  “Well, you found me. What do you want?”

  “Nothing,” said the engineer as wryly as the other. He rose. “I’ll be seeing you.”

  Jamie laughed and made him sit down. “What’s the matter with your leg?” the engineer asked.

  “Got the rheumatiz.”

  Jamie began to speak fondly of Sutter, catching his breath now and then in his new warrior style. “You ought to see that rascal,” said Jamie, shaking his head.

  The engineer listened smilingly as Jamie told of Sutter’s guest ranch whose cottages had such names as O.K. Corral and Boot Hill. Sutter lived at Doc’s. “Though it’s called a guest ranch, it’s really a way station for grass widows. Ol’ Sutter is busy as a one-armed paperhanger.”

  “I imagine,” said the engineer fondly and gloomily. Jamie, he saw, had just got onto the trick of tolerating adults in their foibles. “Where is this place?”

  “On the road to Albuquerque. It’s the biggest guest ranch in the world. Have you seen him?”

  “Yes.” The engineer told of coming upon Sutter just after he bought two fifths of Two Natural. “Does he still drink bad whiskey?”

  “Oh Christ,” whispered Jamie joyfully and began to thrash his legs as of old.

  After a while the youth began to sweat and, quite as abruptly as he had waked up, collapsed and fell back in the hot hollow of his pillow. Dear God, I stayed too long, thought the engineer, but as he arose to leave, one hand detained him with a weak deprecatory wave.

  “What,” said the engineer, smiling.

  But there was no reply, save the hand moving over the covers, as tentative as a Ouija. For a long ten seconds he stood so, stooped slightly and hearkening. The hand stopped. No doubt he is asleep, thought the engineer, sighing with relief. Then he noticed that the soft mound of a vein in Jamie’s neck was going at it hammer and tongs.

  Frankly alarmed now, he began turning on switches and pressing buttons, all the while keeping a wary eye on the sick youth. How easy was it to die? When no one came—damn, what is this place?—he rushed out into the corridor and went careening off the walls toward the nurses’ station. There sat a hefty blonde with a bald forehead which curved up under a brassy cone of hair. She looked like Queen Bess. She was making notes in a chart.

  “Excuse me, nurse,” said the courteous engineer, when she did not look up.

  She did not seem to hear, though he was not five feet away.

  “Excuse me,” he said loudly, but nodding and smiling to deprecate his boldness when she did look.

  She did not look! She went on making notes in violet ink.

  He caught sight of himself in a convex mirror, placed at a corner to show the hall, standing like a pupil at teacher’s desk. He frowned and opened the gate of the station and walked in. She turned a baleful lizard eye upon him. Then her eye traveled down and came to rest upon—his hand! He was touching the metal cover of a chart. Despite himself he blushed and removed his hand: teacher had caught him doing a bad thing with his hand. She went back to her work.

  “Nurse,” he said in a strangled voice. “Kindly come at once to room three-two-two. The patient is having an attack.”

  Still she did not answer! He had clenched his fist—at least he could hit her, lay her out cold—when at last she screwed cap to pen and with every appearance of ignoring him still and going about her business got up and brushed past him. He followed, sweating with rage—if she doesn’t go to Jamie I am going to strike her. And even when she did turn into Jamie’s room, she managed to convey that her going had nothing to do with his summons. She was still on business of her own.

  No matter! She was with him now, taking his pulse. As the visitor watched through the doorway, Jamie’s head turned wearily in the hot socket of his pillow. Whew! The bolus of hatred subsided in his throat. He forgave her. And now, instead of fearing that Jamie might die, he made light of it. It was, after all, only a sore throat.

  And in fact when he returned in the afternoon, Jamie felt better. The visitor brought a deck of cards and they played gin in the cheerful yellow sunlight. Death seemed out of the question. How can anyone play a six of clubs one minute and die the next? Sick as he was, Jamie asked to be cranked up straight and now sat like a very old man, weaving a bit as the artery socked away at his head.

  For the next few days they played cards morning and afternoon. Sutter came at night. It was understood that the universe was contracted to enclose the two young men. If it can be kept so, Jamie as good as said and the visitor agreed, a small sunny corner where we can play a game and undertake small tasks, nothing very serious can go amiss. For the first time the engineer understood how men can spend a week playing poker, women a lifetime at bridge. The game was the thing. One became impatient with non-game happenings—a nurse coming in to empty the urinal. Time disposed itself in short tolerable stretches between the bright beads of the games. The score itself, toted up and announced, had the cheerful workaday effect of a small tidy business.

  It came to be understood too that one was at the other’s service and that any service could be required. As it sometimes happens between two young men, a kind of daredevil bargain was struck in which the very outrageousness of a request is itself grounds for obeying.

  “Go out and buy me a quart of Monarch applesauce,” said Jamie at the end of a game.

  “All right.”

  Sutter came later in the evening. He was both affable
and nervous and told them half jokingly of his two new patients, “noble intelligent women who still read Lawrence and still believed in the dark gods of the blood, why make a god of it, that was the Methodist in him, anyhow can you imagine anyone still reading Lawrence out here now,” etc. How uneasy and talkative Sutter had become! It suddenly dawned on the engineer that Sutter, strange as it seemed, could not stand the sickroom. A hospital, of all places, made him nervous. Jamie, he noticed too, became irritable because Sutter’s coming broke the golden circle of the card games. They both wished Sutter would leave. And when Jamie frowned and picked up the deck of cards, Sutter took the hint and did leave. He made a sign to the engineer, who followed him to the solarium.

  “Again I can’t tell you how glad I am you’re here,” he said, placing his feet carefully inside the black and white tiles. The hospital was old and well preserved. It looked like an army hospital from the days of Walter Reed. “He doesn’t want to see me and there is no one else. Or was.”

  The engineer looked at him curiously. “I thought that was what you and he wanted.”

  “I didn’t want him to be—sunk. I thought he might do better, though I was afraid of this all along—” Sutter trailed off.

  “Isn’t he sunk?”

  “Your showing up has meant a great deal,” said Sutter hurriedly and looked at his watch.

  “What’s the matter with him? Why does he have those spells?”

  “Heart block,” said Sutter absently. “With some right-sided failure and pulmonary edema. And you see, he can’t read for long. His retina is infiltrated. You can read to him.”