Walker Percy - The Last Gentleman

As it turned out, the driverspoke not of religion or mental health but of Princeton and Einstein. The placard had worked.

“There was a quality of simplicity about him,” said the driver, turning his head and not his eyes sociably toward his passenger, and launched at once into his own pet theory. It was his conviction that there was a balance in nature which was upset by man’s attempt to improve upon it.

The engineer agreed and, casting his eye about the ruinous New Jersey flats, cited an article he had read about rivers in this very neighborhood which fairly foamed with detergents and chemical wastes.

“No, no,” said the driver excitedly. He explained that he was not speaking of ordinary pollution but of a far more fundamental principle. Rather was it his conviction that man’s very best efforts to improve his environment, by air-conditioning and even by landscaping, upset a fundamental law which it took millions of years to evolve. “You take your modern office building, as tastefully done as you please. What does it do to a man to uproot him from the earth? There is the cause of your violence!”

“Yes,” said the sentient engineer, frowning thoughtfully. Something was amiss here. He couldn’t quite get hold of this bird. Something was out of kilter. It was his speech, for one thing. The driver did not speak as one might expect him to, with a certain relish and a hearkening to his own periods, as many educated Negroes speak. No, his speech was rapid and slurred, for all the world like a shaky white man’s.

Obligingly, however, the engineer, who had become giddy from hunger and his long wait, set forth his own ideas on the subject of good environments and bad environments — without mentioning the noxious particles.

“Yes!” cried the driver in his damped reedy voice. He was tiring and excited and driving badly. The passenger became nervous. If only he would ask me to drive, he groaned, as the Chevy nearly ran under a great Fruehauf trailer. “That’s your reaction to artificial environments in general! Wonderful! Don’t you see how it dovetails?”

The engineer nodded reluctantly. He did not see. Back-to-nature was the last thing he had in mind. “Except — ahem—” said he, feeling his own voice go a bit reedy. “Except I would suspect that even if one picked out the most natural surroundings he might carry his own deprivation with him.”

“Capital,” cried the driver and smote the steering wheel.

The engineer could all but feel the broad plastic knurls between his knuckles. I could make this old Junebug take off, he thought. But the driver was slowing down again, row-boating badly as he did so.

“Now isn’t this something,” he said. “Here we are, total strangers, talking like this—” He was fairly jumping out of his skin in his nervous elation.

They passed an abandoned miniature golf links, the ancient kind with asbestos greens and gutter pipes which squirt out the ball. But no sooner had they entered the countryside of middle Jersey than the driver pulled off the highway and stopped. The hitchhiker sat as pleasant as ever, hands on knees, nodding slightly, but inwardly dismayed.

“Do you mind if I ask a question?” said the driver, swinging over a sharp, well-clad knee.

“Why, no.”

“I like to know what a man’s philosophy is and I want to tell you mine.”

Uh-oh, thought the engineer gloomily. After five years of New York and Central Park and the Y.M.C.A., he had learned to be wary of philosophers.

With his Masonic ring winking fraternally, the dignified colored man leaned several degrees nearer. “I have a little confession to make to you.”

“Certainly,” said the courteous engineer, cocking a weather eye at his surroundings. All around them stretched a gloomy cattail swamp which smelled like a crankcase and from which arose singing clouds of mosquitoes. A steady stream of Fruehauf tractor-trailers rumbled past, each with a no-rider sign on the windshield.

“I’m not what you think I am,” the driver shouted above the uproar.

“You’re not,” said the pleasant, forward-facing engineer.

“What do you think I am? Tell me honestly.”

“Um. I’d guess you were a minister or perhaps a professor.”

“What race? ”

“Why, um, colored.”

“Look at this.”

To the hitchhiker’s astonishment, the driver shucked off his coat and pushed a jeweled cuff up a skinny arm.

“Ah,” said the engineer, nodding politely, though he couldn’t see much in the gathering darkness.

“Well?”

“Sir?”

“Look at that patch.”

“Then you’re not—?”

“I’m not a Negro.”

“Is that right?”

“My name is not Isham Washington.”

“No?”

“It’s Forney Aiken.”

“Is that so,” said the interested engineer. He could tell that the other expected him to be surprised, but it was not in him to be surprised because it was no more surprising to him when things did not fall out as they were supposed to than when they did.

“Does that name ring a bell?”

“It does sound familiar,” said the engineer truthfully, since his legions of déjà vus made everything sound familiar.

“Do you remember a picture story that appeared in July ’51 Redbook called ‘Death on the Expressway’?”

“I’m not sure.”

“It was reprinted by the National Safety Council, ten million copies.”

“As a matter of fact, I think I do—”

“Do you remember the fellow who interviewed Jafsie Condon in the cemetery?”

“Who?”

“Or the article in Liberty: ‘I Saw Vic Genovese’? For forty-eight hours I was the only man alive in contact with both the F.B.I. and Vic Genovese.”

“You’re Forney Aiken the—”

“The photographer.”

“Yes, I think I do,” said the engineer, nodding but still wary. This fellow could still be a philosopher. “Anyhow I certainly do appreciate the ride.” The singing hordes of mosquitoes were coming ever nearer. He wished Forney would getgoing.

“Forney,” cried the other, holding out a hand.

“Will. Will Barrett.”

The green Chevrolet resumed its journey, taking its place shakily among the Fruehauf tractors. Breathing a sigh of relief, the engineer spoke of his own small efforts in photography and took from his wallet a color snapshot of the peregrine falcon, his best.

“Tremendous,” cried the photographer, once again beside himself with delight at having fallen in with such a pleasant and ingenious young man. In return he showed his passenger a tiny candid camera concealed under his necktie whose lens looked like the jewel of a tie clasp.

It, the candid camera, was essential to his present assignment. The photographer, it turned out, was setting forth on an expedition this very afternoon, the first he had undertaken in quite awhile. It was something of a comeback, the engineer surmised. He had the shaky voice and the fitful enthusiasms of a man freshly sober.

The nature of his new project accounted for his extraordinary disguise. He wished to do a series on behind-the-scene life of the Negro. The idea had come to him in the middle of the night: why not be a Negro? To make a long story short, he had persuaded a dermatologist friend to administer an alkaloid which simulates the deposit of melanin in the skin, with the difference that the darkening effect could be neutralized by a topical cream. Therefore the white patch on his forearm. To complete the disguise, he had provided himself with the personal papers of one Isham Washington, an agent for a burial insurance firm in Pittsburgh.

This very afternoon he had left the office of his agent in New York, tonight would stop off at his house in Bucks County, and tomorrow would head south, under the “cotton curtain,” as he expressed it.