by Walker Percy
“Leave! Why should I leave?”
“I’m afraid you’re in some danger here.”
“There’s not a soul in the neighborhood. Anyhow Euclid is here.”
“Eukie ain’t worth a damn.”
“I can’t leave. My car won’t start.” I see she’s frightened and wants to leave.
“Take my car. Or rather Ellen’s. Take Eukie with you and go to Aunt Minnie’s in town and stay there till you hear from me. Go the back way by my house.”
“All right,” says Mother distractedly, looking at her wrinkled Cloroxed fingertips. “But first I have to pass by the Paradise office and pass an act of sale.”
“Act of sale! What are you talking about?”
“Then I’m coming back and stay with Lola. Lola’s not leaving.”
Dusty Rhoades, Mother tells me, had come by earlier, argued with the two women, had an emergency call, and left.
“You mean Lola’s over there now?”
“She won’t leave! She’s a lovely girl, Tommy.”
“I know.”
“And she comes from lovely people.”
“She does?”
“She’s the girl for you. She’s a Taurus.”
“I know.”
“Ellen is not for you.”
“Ellen! Who said anything about Ellen? Last time you were worried about Moira.”
“She doesn’t come from the aristocratic Oglethorpes. I inquired. Her father was a mailman.”
“My God, Mother, what are you talking about? There were no aristocratic Oglethorpes. Please go get your things.”
My mother, who sets no store at all by our connection with Sir Thomas More, speaks often of her ancestor Sieur de Marigny, who was a rascal but also, she says, an aristocrat.
I give Eukie my father’s twelve-gauge pump gun loaded with a single twenty-five-year-old shell.
“Eukie, you ride shotgun.”
“Yes suh!” Eukie is delighted with the game.
“If anybody tries to stop Miss Marva, shoot them.”
Eukie looks at me. “Shoot them? Who I’m going to shoot?”
“I don’t know.” Euclid is sitting opposite Mother, holding the shotgun over his shoulder like a soldier. “Never mind.”
Off they go in the Toyota, facing each other across the tiller.
6
Lola, in jeans and gingham shirt, is hoeing her garden at Tara, A straight chair at the end of a row holds a .45 automatic and a cedar bucket of ice water with a dipper. Her shirttails are tied around in front leaving her waist bare. The deep channel of her spine glistens.
I lean my carbine against the chair.
“What are you planting?”
“Mustard.” Lola jumps up and gives me a big hug. “You’re so smart!”
“Smart?”
“Yesterday. I didn’t know you were a genius.”
“Genius?”
“In The Pit. Lola’s so proud of you.” She gives me another hug.
“Do you think you ought to be here by yourself? Where’s Dusty?”
“Nobody’s going to mess with Lola.”
“I see.” I fall silent.
“Did you come to see me?”
“Yes.”
“Well? State your business.”
“Yes. Well, I don’t think you ought to stay here.” It’s where she should stay that gives me pause. Lola sees this.
“And just where do you propose that I go?”
“Into town.”
She commences hoeing again. “Nobody’s running Lola off her own place. Besides, I doubt there is any danger. All I’ve seen are a few witch doctors and a couple of drug-heads.”
“There was another atrocity last night.”
“Nellie Bledsoe? I think P.T. got drunk and let her have it with the shish kebab.”
“I’ve been shot at twice in the last hour.”
“Tommy!” cries Lola, dropping the hoe. She takes my hand in her warm, cello-callused fingers. “Are you hurt?” she asks, feeling me all over for holes.
“No. He missed me.”
“Who in the world—?”
“I don’t know. I think it’s a Bantu.”
Lola slaps her thigh angrily. Eyes blazing, she places her fists on her hips, arms akimbo. She nods grimly. “That does it.”
“Does what?”
“You stay here with Lola.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“I have, ah, other responsibilities.” Such as two girls in a motel room, but I can’t tell her that.
“Such as?”
“My mother.”
“Very well.” She waits, searching my eyes. She’s waiting for me to ask her to stay with me. When I don’t, she shrugs and picks up the hoe. “Don’t worry about Lola. Lola can take care of herself.”
“Why don’t you leave?”
“I can’t leave my babies.” She nods toward the stables.
“You mean the horses? Turn them loose. They’ll be all right.”
“Besides that, I’ve just laid in one thousand New Hampshire chicks.”
“Chickens, mustard greens. What are you planning for?”
“I think we’re in for a long winter and I’m planning to stick it out here.”
“Why do you say that?”
She shrugs and mentions the possibility of civil disturbances between Knothead and Leftpapas, between black and white, etcetera. “So I think the safest place in the world is right here at Tara minding my own business.”
I nod and tell her about my fears for the immediate future, about the mishap that befell my lapsometers and the consequent dangers of a real disaster.
Lola listens intently. It is beginning to drizzle. Suddenly taking my hand in hers, warm as a horn, and picking up her gun, she leads me impulsively to the great gallery of the house, where we sit in a wooden swing hung by chains from the ceiling.
“Tommy,” she says excitedly, “isn’t it great here? Look at the rain.”
“Yes.”
“Dusty’s leaving. Let’s me and you stay here and see it through, whatever it is.”
“I’d certainly like to.”
“You know what I truly believe?”
“What?”
“When all is said and done, the only thing we can be sure of is the land. The land never lets you down.”
“That’s true,” I say, though I never did know what that meant. We look out at six acres of Saint Augustine grass through the silver rain.
The great plastered columns, artificially flaked to show patches of brickwork, remind me of Vince Marsaglia, boss of the rackets. He built Tara from what he called the “original plans,” meaning the drawing of David O. Selznick’s set designer, whose son Vince had known in Las Vegas. Once, shortly after I began to practice medicine, I was called to Tara to treat Vince for carbuncles. Feeling much better after the lancings, he and his boys sat right here on the gallery shying playing cards into a hat from at least thirty feet, which they did with extraordinary skill. I watched with unconcealed admiration, having tried unsuccessfully to perfect the same technique during four years of fraternity life. I also admired the thoroughbreds grazing in the meadow.
“You like that horse, Doc? Take him,” said Vince with uncomplicated generosity.
Now the swing moves to and fro and in an almost flat arc on its long chains. We sit holding hands and watch the curtains of silvery rain. Lola smells of the fresh earth under her fingernails and of the faint ether-like vapors of woman’s sweat.
Her cello calluses whisper in my hand. At the end of each arc I can feel her strong back thrust against the slats of the swing.
“Now here’s what we’re going to do, Tom Tom,” says Lola, ducking her head to make the swing go. “Lola’s going to fix you a big drink. Then you’re going to sit right there and Lola will play for you.”
“For how long?”
“Until the trouble is over.”
“That might take weeks—if it’s over t
hen.”
“O.K. Lola will do for you. We’ll work in the garden, and in the evenings we’ll sit here and drink and play music and watch the mad world go by. How does that sound?”
“Fine,” I say, pleased despite myself at the prospect of spending the evenings so, sipping toddies here in the swing while Lola plays Dvořák, clasping the cello between her noble knees.
“Tom Tom singing to Lola?” she asks and I become aware I am humming “Là ci darem” from Don Giovanni. My musical-erotic area, Brodmann 11, is still singing like a bird.
I pick up the 30.06. “There’s something I have to take care of first.”
Lola shoves her .45 into her jeans, “Lola will go with you.”
“No, Lola won’t.”
“I can shoot.”
Before I know what has happened, she takes out the .45 and, aiming like a man, arm extended laterally, shoots a green lizard off the column. I nearly jump out of the swing. In the bare gallery the shot is like a crack of lightning in a small valley. Thunder roars back and forth. Brick dust settles.
My ears are ringing when I stand up to leave.
“Darling Tom Tom,” whispers Lola, putting away the gun and giving me a hug, eye to eye, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip. “Come back to Tara. Lola will be waiting. Come back and put down roots with Lola.”
“All right. Now listen. If anything happens—if there is an invasion by the Bantus or if you see a peculiar yellow cloud—I want you to do exactly what I tell you.”
“Tell Lola!”
“Come to the old plaza. To Howard Johnson’s. I’ll be there. You understand?”
“O.K.,” says Lola, hugging me and giving me some hard pats on the hip. “But don’t be surprised if you see Lola sooner than you think.” She winks.
I frown. “Don’t you follow me, Lola. I forbid it, goddamn it.”
“Tom Tom act masterful with Lola? Lola like that Howard Johnson’s. Wow.” She hands me my carbine. “Come back to Tara!”
7
Colonel Ringo’s distinguished head is outlined in the window of the guardhouse at the gates of Paradise. A reassuring sight. Hm, things cannot be too bad. The Colonel’s armored Datsun is parked behind the guardhouse.
“Halt! Who goes there!” yells the Colonel from a crouch in the doorway, his revolver pointed at me.
“It’s me, Colonel!” I hold the carbine over my head.
“What’s the password? Oh, it’s you, Dr. More.” The Colonel holsters his revolver and yanks me inside. “You’re in the line of fire.”
“What is the password?”
“Lurline, but get on in here, boy.”
“What’s up, Colonel?”
Now that I take a second look, I perceive that all is not well with him. His silvery eyebrows are awry and one eye, which has been subject for years to a lateral squint, has turned out ninety degrees. His scarlet and cream uniform is streaked with sweat.
“Rounds have been coming in for the past thirty minutes.” He nods toward the shattered glass of the far window.
“Rounds? From where, Colonel?”
“From the pro shop as best as I can determine,” he says, scanning the distant clubhouse through a pair of binoculars.
“Did you notice a golf cart pass here a while ago?”
“No, but I’ve only been here half an hour. That’s why I’m here, though.”
“Why?”
“To mount a rearguard action until they could get the golf carts and swim trophies out. I’m also worried about the molasses cakes and soybean meal in the barn yonder.” He looks at his watch. “The patrol is supposed to pick me up in fifteen minutes. You better get out too.”
“Colonel, what’s going on?”
“Son, the Bantu boogers have occupied Paradise Country Club.”
“But, Colonel, I haven’t seen any Bantus.”
“Then who in hell is shooting at me, the tennis committee?” The Colonel slumps against the wall. “What’s more, they got Rudy and Al.”
Noticing that the Colonel’s hands are shaking, I offer him a drink from my flask.
“I thank you, son,” says the Colonel gratefully. “Reach me a Seven-Up behind you. They cut the wires but the box is still cold.”
The Colonel knocks back a fair portion of my pint, chases it with Seven-Up, sighs. Presently he takes my arm, cheek gone dusky with emotion. One eye drifts out.
“Doc, what is the one thing you treasure above all else?”
“Well—” I begin, taking time off to fix my own drink.
“I’ll tell you what I cherish, Doc.”
“All right,” I say, taking a drink and feeling the good hot bosky bite of the bourbon.
“The Southern womanhood right here in Paradise! Right?”
“Yes,” I reply, even though 90 percent of the women in Paradise are from the Midwest.
“And I’ll tell you something else!”
“All right.”
“We may be talking about two gentlemen who may have laid down their lives for just that.”
“Who’s that?”
“Rudy and Al!”
“What happened to them?”
“Damnedest thing you ever saw,” says the Colonel, settling down in his canvas chair and putting his good eye to a crack that commands a view of the clubhouse.
I look at my watch impatiently and then study the shattered window. Could a bullet have done it? Perhaps, but the Colonel is a bit nutty today. Taking no chances, I sit in the doorway and keep the heavy jamb between me and the clubhouse, even though the latter is a good four hundred yards distant.
The Colonel takes another drink. “I’ve never seen anything like it son, since I was with the Alabama National Guard in Ecuador.” The Colonel is from Montgomery.
As best I can piece out the Colonel’s rambling, almost incoherent account, the following events took place earlier this morning. There is no reason to doubt their accuracy. For one thing, I witnessed the beginning of the incident on the golf links this morning.
The Colonel was in charge of the security and the transportation of the corps of Christian Kaydettes to Oxford, Mississippi, for the national baton-twirling contest. The Kaydettes had put on an early show for the Pro-Am Bible breakfast, immediately thereafter embarking for Mississippi in two school buses, the first transporting the girls, the second their moms, a formidable crew of ladies who had already fallen out with each other over the merits of their daughters and had boarded the bus carrying their heavy purses in silence. (It was this boarding that I had witnessed earlier in the day.) Firecrackers (not rifles, as I had thought) had been discharged. Banners on the buses read BEAT DAYTON, Dayton, Ohio, being the incumbent champs. Colonel Ringo rode point in his armored Datsun followed by the bus carrying the Kaydettes, followed by Rudy on his Farhad Grotto motorcycle, followed by the busload of moms, each a graduate of the Paradise karate school. The rear was brought up by Al Pulaski, formerly of the Washington, D.C, police and now president of PASHA (Paradise Anglo-Saxon Heritage Association), in his police special, an armored van fitted out with a complete communications system.
Mindful of rumors, however preposterous, of a conspiracy to kidnap the entire Kaydette corps and spirit them off to the fastness of Honey Island Swamp, Colonel Ringo was careful in plotting his route to the Mississippi state line, where the little convoy was to be turned over to the Mississippi Highway Police. Ruling out the interstate as the obvious site of ambush, he selected old state highway 22. All went well until they reached the wooden bridge crossing a finger of Honey Island Swamp formed by Bootlegger Bayou. The Colonel, riding point, felt a premonition (“I learned to smell an ambush in Ecuador,” he told me). Approaching the bridge, however, he saw nothing amiss. It was not until he was halfway across and coming abreast of the draw that he saw what was wrong, saw two things simultaneously and it was hard to say which was worse: one, the cubicle of the drawbridge was occupied by a bridge-tender in an orange robe—Bantu!—two, the draw was beginning to lift. In the space of two
seconds he did three things, hit the accelerator, hit the siren to warn the buses, and began to fire his turret gun (“You got to shoot by reflex, son, and I can fire that turret gun like shooting from the hip”).
He made the draw, felt the slight jolt as he dropped an inch or so, shot up the cubicle with the turret gun and, he felt sure, got the Bantu. The girls made it too, though they were badly shaken up by the two-foot drop.
“I got ever last one of those girls to Mississippi, son,” says the Colonel, taking another drink. I watch my flask worriedly. “You talk about some scared girls—did you ever see a school bus make eighty miles an hour on a winding road? But we made it.”
“But, Colonel, what happened to the others?”
The Colonel clucks and tilts his head. “That’s the only bad part.”
Once across the bridge, he didn’t have much time to look back. But he saw enough. The Bantu bridge-tender was out of commission, dead or winged, but the draw went on lifting. Rudy, on his Farhad Grotto Harley-Davidson, saw he couldn’t make the draw and tried to stop short, braking and turning. The Colonel’s last sight of him (“a sight engraved on my memory till my dying day”) was of the orange and green bike flying through the air, Rudy still astride, and plummeting into the alligator-infested waters of Bootlegger Bayou.
The moms? The second bus stopped short of the draw, Al Pulaski in his van behind them.
“You mean the Bantus have captured the mothers?” I ask.
The Colonel looks grave. “All we can do is hope.” On the plus side, the Colonel went on to say, were two factors. Al was there with his van. And the mothers themselves, besides carrying in their heavy purses the usual pistols, Mace guns, and alarms, were mostly graduates of karate and holders of the Green Belt.
“Many a Bantu will bite the dust before they take those gals,” says the Colonel darkly.
“Well, I mean, were there any Bantus attacking? Did you see any? Maybe the bus had time to turn around and get back.”
“I didn’t see any, but we must assume the worst.”
We sit drinking in companionable silence, reflecting upon the extraordinary events of the day.
Presently the Colonel leans close and gives me a poke in the ribs. “I’ll tell you the damn truth, son.”