The Thanatos Syndrome

by Walker Percy

  “Heard what?” I say, thinking about Belle Ame. “How much farther to Belle Ame, Uncle?”

  “Not all that far. Well, you know right here is where the old river used to come in. Right here. You know the Raccourci Cut happened one night during a June rise just like this. All it takes is one little trickle across the neck, then another little rise, a little more water, and before you know it, here comes the whole river piling across and ain’t nothing in the world is going to stop it, not the U.S. engineers, nothing. If this river wants to go, it’s going to go. Look out! The old river is still over there, you know, about twenty miles of the old river still looping around Raccourci Island, right there, blocked off, right across that neck where the swamp is. You can walk across to it in ten minutes. What happened was this. The night the river decided to come down the Chute, a stern-wheeler was working up the old river. They had a river pilot of course, and he was cussing. I mean, what with the fog and the rain and him fighting the current, he couldn’t see bee-idly. It was taking him all night. Then he noticed the water was getting low. He began scraping over sandbars. He’d run aground. And he’d cuss. He didn’t know the river had already made the cut across the neck and he was stranded. And he’d back off and head upriver and he’d run aground again. And he cussed. He couldn’t get out. He cussed the river, the boat, the captain. He swore an oath. He swore: ‘I swear by Jesus Christ I hope this son-of-a-bitching boat never gets out of this goddamn river.’ And he never did. What he didn’t know was that he was sealed off—the river had already come busting down the Chute. He couldn’t get out. But the thing is, they couldn’t find the boat. So they thought it had sunk in the storm. They never did find that boat. But I’m here to tell you that there’s people, people I know, who have seen that boat in the old river on a foggy night during the June rise.”

  “Have you seen it, Mr. Hugh?” Vergil asks him.

  “I’ve heard it!” the uncle shouts. “And so has many another. Vergil, his daddy, and I heard it! We was camping out right over there across the slough by Moon Lake and the Old River and you could hear that sapsucker beating up the river through the fog, that old stern-wheel slapping the water like whang whang whang. Vergil Senior claimed he could even hear the pilot cursing. But we heard it!”

  “I’ve heard that story,” says Vergil behind him and talking to me past him. “It’s part of the folklore of the river. You can hear the same story up and down the river wherever there’s been a cutoff. In fact, I’ve heard the same story from Mr. Clemens.”

  Don’t argue, Vergil.

  “What I’m telling you is, I heard it,” says the uncle, still talking to me. They argue through me. I half listen. Here’s a switch. Here’s Vergil, the scientist, skeptic, the new logical positivist, and here’s the uncle, defender of old legends, ghost ships, specters.

  Let it alone, Vergil.

  “The thing is,” says Vergil, “either that steamboat is there or it isn’t. If it is there, then how come nobody has seen it in daylight or seen the wreck? If it was there and it sank, there would be some sign of it—the Old River is no more than twenty feet deep anywhere. The pilot house would be sticking out. It all reminds me a little bit of modern UFO sightings.”

  “I’m here to tell you I heard that sucker,” cries the uncle.

  “Okay. Let me ask you both something.” I’m not interested in hearing them try to upstage each other and don’t like Vergil patronizing the uncle by talking about Mr. Clemens. To get them off it, I ask them where New Roads is, knowing it is off to the west and that we all have relatives there.

  “You see right over there, over that cypress,” says Vergil, his paddle coming out of the water. “That’s False River and just past it is New Roads and over there is Chevron Parlange Number One, the most famous gas well in history, twenty thousand feet, the discovery well of the whole Tuscaloosa Trend, came in August of ’77, a hundred and forty thousand cubic feet per second, that’s a million dollars a day. So big, in fact, it blew out.”

  “You talking about Miss Lucy Parlange’s place,” says the uncle. “And it couldn’t have happened to a nicer lady.”

  “My auntee lives there too,” says Vergil. “She still lives in the same little house on False River. But she had a piece of land over by Parlange when they hit that big well. My auntee leased her place for a hundred thousand.”

  “That old Parlange house been in the same family for two hundred and fifty years,” says the uncle. “Through thick and thin. They never gave up.”

  “My auntee neither,” says Vergil.

  They tell stories about the big oil strike at False River, who got rich, how money ruined some.

  “Blood will tell ever’ time,” says the uncle. “You take the Parlanges. They were aristocrats when they didn’t have it, and when they got it, it made no difference.”

  “My auntee too,” says Vergil. “She raised my daddy when his mamma got consumption and had to go to Greenwell Spring.”

  “How far is it?” I ask him.

  “What?” asks the uncle.

  “Belle Ame?”

  “Around the bend. Watch out for the old oil fields and the tank farm.”

  We’re back in the current, booming along past the great Tunica Swamp.

  There is a double sun. The second sun reflects from a monolith mirror. It is the great glass pyramid of Fedville downriver. Beyond, in its shadow, the Grand Mer cooling tower looms as dark and spectral as the uncle’s ghost ship.

  We smell the old oil field before we see it. The loess hills have dropped away and the levee begins. Beyond are the tops of the tanks, which over the straight line of the levee gleam like steel marbles in a box. The scaffolding of the refinery, which used to hum and blaze away like the Ruhr Valley, is now gaunt and dark.

  We ease into dead water behind a towhead of cottonwoods and there it is, the landing as fancy as ever it was in the great days of steamboats, three-tiered with heavy lashed piling, tire-bumpered, a heavy winched-up gangplank suspended in midair, ready for lowering onto the Robert E. Lee. A cotton bale stands at each end of the upper dock. The river laps over the lowest level and we slide right in.

  “Upend it over that pile, out of sight, keep it quiet and we’ll have a look,” I tell Vergil.

  There’s a gazebo atop the levee with a booth where I reckon tickets are sold to tourists on the Plantation Parade. We sit on a bench inside the gazebo, in shadow and behind the booth.

  Except for a man riding a gang mower, the grounds of Belle Ame are empty. The quarters, garçonnières, and carriage houses are dark. But there are movements at a window. The oaks look as dense and lobuled as green cabbages. Their shadows are short. Except for two lit carriage lanterns, the great house seems deserted. The soccer fields and tennis courts are empty. The flag hangs limply from its pole. A door slams. A black woman, long-skirted, kerchiefed, comes out on the upper gallery with a bucket and a mop. We sit for a while.

  The uncle breaks the breech of his Purdy, sniffs it, closes it with a click.

  Presently the uncle says to Vergil, “What are we waiting for?”

  They’ve made up.

  “What we waiting for, Doc?” Vergil asks me.

  “Just to have a look. What time is it?” I feel fixed-eyed.

  “Ten-forty.”

  “Good.” I am silent.

  Vergil and the uncle look at each other.

  “I want to see classes change. It should be at eleven.”

  At eleven the plantation bell rings, a solid peal of heavy metal. Classes change. Most of the children change from one room in the quarters to another. Some come and go from the rear of the big house. Nobody enters or leaves the garçonnière.

  As we gaze, the dark green of the oaks seems to grow even darker, even though the sun is shining brightly. Then the dark whitens, just as if you had closed your eyes, the retinal image reversing, light going dark, dark light.

  Vergil is watching me without expression, thumbnail touching his teeth.

  “Well,” s
ays the uncle, opening and closing the shotgun.

  “Let’s go over there.” I nod toward the garçonnière. “I think you better leave the shotgun here, Uncle Hugh.”

  “You think I’m going to leave a five-thousand-dollar Purdy out here for any white trash that comes along?” He snaps the breech a last time and hikes out.

  We look at him. With his oversize hunting coat flapping around his knees, duck cap hugging his narrow skull, flaps down, seeming to sidle as he walks, one foot slinging, the barrel of the shotgun in the crook of his arm, he looks as loony as Ichabod Crane.

  4. WE STOP IN THE SHADOW of an oak near the garçonnière. There is a movement in the window. It is a woman, standing, arms folded, looking out, but not at us. She seems to be smiling, but perhaps it is a shadow. No, it is Mrs. Cheney. I recognize the heavy dark eyebrows, rimless glasses, oval face still young-looking despite the heavy iron-colored hair pulled down tight.

  Presently she turns away.

  Several minutes pass. The uncle is as still as if we were in a duck blind. Vergil is watching me.

  “Let’s go over here.” I move closer, into the shadow of the porch. Now we can see what Mrs. Cheney is doing. She is standing, arms still folded under her breasts, watching a boy playing cards on the floor. She is still smiling. She is often described as having a “sweet face” and she does. She has always been a sitter hereabouts, babysitter, sitter for old people. She is one of those women who have no other qualification than pleasantness and reliability. She used to sit with Meg and Tommy. Her best feature is her skin, which is like satin, smooth and dusky as a gypsy’s. She has gained some weight. Her forearms under her breasts are still firm-fleshed, but there is a groove along the bone separating the swell of pale underflesh pressed against her body from the dark outer arm.

  “Well?” says Vergil, still watching me. He is worried about me, my silence. Do I know what I’m doing?

  “Let’s go say hello to Mrs. Cheney. Uncle, you’re going to have to leave the shotgun by the door.”

  “There is no way—” he begins.

  “Put it behind that sweet olive. You don’t want to frighten Mrs. Cheney.”

  We knock and go in. Mrs. Cheney looks up, smiling. She seems no more than mildly surprised.

  “Dr. More!”

  “Hello, Mrs. Cheney. You know my uncle, Hugh Bob Lipscomb, and Vergil Bon, Claude’s father.”

  “I surely do, and that’s a fine boy. Hugh, that bluebird never came back. Hugh made me a bluebird box,” she explains to me.

  “That was a while ago,” says the uncle, eyes somewhat rolled back. He’s embarrassed and feels obliged to explain. “She had a bluebird nesting in her paper tube. I gave her the box but told her it would be better not to mess with the bird that season. But something ran it off.”

  “Is that right?”

  “I first knew Mrs. Cheney when she used to sit with Lucy,” the uncle explains to Vergil.

  “They were all lovely people,” says Mrs. Cheney. “All of y’all.” Mrs. Cheney is nodding and smiling, eyeglasses flashing, as if nothing could be more natural than that the three of us should have appeared at this very moment.

  While we talk, we are gazing down at the child. He is a boy, seven or eight. He looks familiar. He is picking up playing cards which are scattered face down on the floor. He is a very serious little boy, very thin, dressed in khaki pants and matching shirt like a school uniform. His narrow little butt waggles as he crawls around picking up cards. When he picks up four cards, hardly looking at them, he stacks them awkwardly against his chest and makes a separate pile.

  “Ricky, you speak to these nice gentlemen.”

  “Aren’t you Ricky Comeaux?” I ask him. Ricky doesn’t speak, but he sits around to see us, large head balanced on the delicate stem of his neck. Finally he nods.

  “What game are you playing, Ricky?” I ask him.

  Mrs. Cheney answers for him. “Concentration. Y’all remember. I put all the cards on the floor face up. He takes one look. Then I turn them face down. You know. Then you’re supposed to pick them up by pairs. You make mistakes, but you begin to remember where the cards are.”

  “I remember that,” says the uncle.

  “You know what Ricky does?” He picks them up by fours and in order, you know, four aces first, deuces, and so forth. And he doesn’t make mistakes.”

  “I got to see that,” says the uncle, eyes still somewhat rolled back.

  “Do you want to see him do it, Dr. More?” Mrs. Cheney asks me.

  “Yes.”

  Vergil looks at me: Why are we watching this child play cards?

  Mrs. Cheney shuffles the cards expertly. Now she is on her hands and knees putting the cards down face up. She is agile and quick. A stretch of firm dusky thigh shows above the old- fashioned stockings secured in a tight roll above her knee. Ricky watches her but does not appear to be concentrating on the cards.

  “Where are the others?” I ask Mrs. Cheney.

  “Who? Oh, the children. Some are in class, some in rec. They’re all over at Belle Ame.”

  “What are they doing in rec?”

  “Oh, some watch the picture show, some play in the attic.”

  “Why isn’t Ricky with them?”

  “Ricky just came last week. He’s still in our little boot camp, getting strong on vitamins in mind and body so he can join the teams. And he’s doing so well!”

  “We came to pick up Claude Bon. Do you know where he is?”

  “Pick him up? What a shame! He’s one of our stars. What a fine big boy. He’s probably watching the movies or playing sardines.”

  “Where do they have the movies?”

  Mrs. Cheney doesn’t mind telling me. “They show the regular movies for the children in the ballroom and the staff watches the videos up there.”

  “You mean upstairs here?”

  “You know, they take videos of the children and the staff sees them to check on their progress, you know, like home movies.” Mrs. Cheney has turned the cards face down and now stands up, face flushed. “All right, Ricky.”

  Ricky starts picking up cards, first four aces, shows them to us in his perfunctory way, stacks them against his stomach, then four deuces.

  “Well, I be dog,” says the uncle. “That’s the smartest thing I ever saw.”

  “Where does he get his vitamins, Mrs. Cheney?” I ask.

  “Right there.” She nods to the bank of water coolers. “They all do. It’s enriched Abita Springs water, for little growing brains and strong little bodies. You can see what it does.”

  “Enriched by what?”

  “Vitamins and all. You know, Doctor.”

  “How much do they drink?”

  “Eight glasses a day. And I mean eight, not seven.”

  Ricky picks up four sixes, shows them, stacks them.

  “Do you drink it too?”

  “Me? Lord, Doc, what’s the use? It’s too late for me. We are too old and beat-up.”

  “Why, you’re a fine-looking woman,” says the uncle, his face keen, and begins blowing a few soft duck calls through his fingers.

  Is Mrs. Cheney winking at me?

  “Mrs. Cheney, call the big house and get Claude. Ask for Dr. Van Dorn or whoever, but I want Claude. Now.”

  “What, and interrupt sardines up in the attic. They would have a fit.”

  “I see. I’ll tell you what, Mrs. Cheney,” I say, changing my voice.

  “What’s that, Doctor?”

  “I want you to go over to the big house and find Claude Bon and bring him back here.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t do that, Doc!” cries Mrs. Cheney.

  “Why not?”

  “I’m not supposed to leave Ricky.”

  “We’ll look after him.”

  “No, I’m not allowed to do that.”

  “Mrs. Cheney, get going. Now.”

  Both Vergil and the uncle look at me when my voice changes.

  “All right, Doctor!” says Mrs. Cheney, smile go
ne, but not angry so much as resigned. “As long as you take the responsibility.”

  “I take it.”

  “It may take a while to find him.”

  “I’m sure you’ll manage.”

  “All right!” Her voice is minatory, but she leaves.

  “How can you talk that way to Mrs. Cheney?” the uncle asks me. “I mean she’s one fine-looking woman.”

  I don’t answer. We are watching Ricky pick up cards. Vergil is frowning.

  “If that ain’t the damnedest thing I ever saw,” says the uncle. “That boy ain’t even concentrating.”

  “He doesn’t have to,” I say. Somehow it is difficult to take my eyes from the back of Ricky’s slender neck.

  Ricky picks up kings, shows them, sits around cross-legged, evens up the cards against his chest to make a neat deck.

  “Ricky.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Come over here and sit by me.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Ricky sits on the plastic sofa close to me, legs sticking straight out. He’s got a seven-year-old’s guarded affection: You may be all right, I think you are, but— He hands me the deck, looking up, big head doddering a little. I flip through the deck, showing Vergil and the uncle. “That’s very good, Ricky. Say, Vergil—”

  “Yes, Doc.”

  “You notice anything unusual about the water fountains?”

  “There’s that tube coming down from the ceiling behind the drinking fountains.”

  “Yeah. It’s clamped off with a hemostat, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’ll tell you what let’s do. You listening, Uncle?”

  “Sho I’m listening. But you tell me how in the hell that boy did that. I don’t think he knows himself, do you, Ricky?”

  Ricky looks up at me but doesn’t reply.

  “Vergil, you go upstairs and take a look around. Look for the source of whatever is coming down that tube. Look for tapes, video cassettes, photos, transparencies, anything like that. Books, comics, and such.”

  “Okay.” He starts for the iron stairs.

  I look at my watch. “I think we’ve got about five minutes. Mrs. Cheney will bring Claude, all right, but the others will be coming too. Ricky and I are going to talk a little bit, maybe play a card game. Uncle, I think it would be a good idea for you to stand outside. When you see the others coming, give a couple of knocks, okay?”