Walker Percy - The Last Gentleman

“I see.”

“Now I have to go see Sutter.”

“Yes ma’am.”

He began nodding in ancient Protestant fuddlement and irony, not knowing whether to bow, shake hands, or look down his nose. But it didn’t matter. She had left without noticing.

Jamie was not in the apartment. There were voices in the room next door. That would be Sutter and Val, he calculated, and perhaps Jamie. The old itch for omniscience came upon him — lost as he was in his own potentiality, having come home to the South only to discover that not even his own homelessness was at home here — but he resisted the impulse to eavesdrop. I will not overhear nor will I oversee, he said, and instead threw a dozen combination punches, for henceforth I shall be what I am no matter how potential I am. Whereupon he dismounted the telescope through which he and Jamie had studied the behavior of golfers who hooked their drives from number 5 tee into the creek. Some cheated. It was with a specific, though unidentified pleasure that one watched the expressions of the men who stood musing and benign and Kiwanian while one busy foot nudged the ball out of the water.

He lay on the bed, feet sticking straight up, and broke out in a cold sweat. What day is this, he wondered, what month, and he jumped up to get his Gulf calendar card from his wallet. The voices in the next room murmured away. A chair scraped back. The vacuum of his own potentiality howled about him and sucked him toward the closet. He began to lean. Another few seconds, and he was holed up as snug as an Englishman in Somerset, closet door closed behind him, Val-Pak on his back like a chasuble.

The hole commanded perhaps a 100 degree view of Sutter’s room. It was furnished in rancho style with a maple couch and chair with wagonwheel arms. There were pictures of famous moments of medical history: First Use of Anesthesia, Dr. Lister Vaccinates, Tapping Ascites. Mrs. Vaught, he remembered, had fixed up the room for Sutter when he was in school.

Sutter was sitting in the wagonwheel chair, idly brandishing an automatic pistol, aiming it here and there, laying the muzzle against his cheek. Val was leaving: he caught no more than a flurry of black skirt and a shoe of cracked leather. At close range Sutter did not look so youthful. His olive skin had a yellowish cast. The high color of his cheeks resolved into a network of venules. His fingertips were wrinkled and stained by chemicals.

“—found him in New York,” Val was saying. “He’s Ed Barrett’s son. Have you met him?”

“I saw him in the garden.” Sutter aimed the pistol at something over the engineer’s head.

“What did you think of him?”

Sutter shrugged. “You know. He is—” His free hand, held forth like a blade, moved back and forth across the vertical.

“Yes,” said Val.

“—nice,” ended Sutter with six overtones in his voice, “you know.”

“Yes.”

My God, thought the closeted Englishman, they already knew what he was, agreed on it, and communicated their complex agreement with hardly a word!

“Put that thing up,” said Val.

“Why?”

“Some day you’re going to blow your fool head off — by accident.”

“That would offend you more than if I did it deliberately, wouldn’t it?”

“And it would please you, wouldn’t it, to die absurdly?”

The engineer heard no more. He had become extremely agitated, whether by their reference to him or by the sight of the pistol, he could not have said, but he left the closet and paced up and down the bedroom. He took his pulse: 110. A door closed and the stairs creaked under a heavy step. For some minutes he stood listening. A car started below. He went to the window. It was a Volkswagen microbus painted a schoolbus yellow and stained with red dust.

He had already started for the door, blood pounding in his ears, when the shot rang out. It was less a noise than a heavy concussion. Lint flew off the wall like a rug whipped by a broom. His ears rang. Now, hardly knowing how he came here, he found himself standing, heart pounding in his throat, outside Sutter’s door on the tiny landing. Even now, half out of his mind, his first thought was of the proprieties. It had seemed better to go to Sutter’s outside door than directly through the kitchenette, which with the closet separated the apartments. And now, standing at the door, knuckles upraised, he hesitated. Does one knock after a shot. With a sob of dismay, dismay less for Sutter than himself, he burst into the room.

The wagonwheel chair was empty. He went lunging about.

“You must be Barrett.”

Sutter stood at a card table, almost behind the door, cleaning the pistol with a flannel disk soaked in gun oil.

“Excuse me,” said the reeling engineer. “I thought I heard a noise.”

“Yes.”

“It sounded like a shot.”

“Yes.”

He waited but Sutter said no more.

“Did the pistol go off accidentally?”

“No. I shot him.”

“Him?” The engineer suddenly feared to turn around.

Sutter was nodding to the wall. There hung yet another medical picture, this of The Old Arab Physician. The engineer had not seen it because his peephole was some four inches below the frame. Moving closer, he noticed that the Arab, who was ministering to some urchins with phials and flasks, was badly shot up. Only then did it come over him that his peephole was an outlying miss in the pattern of bullet holes.

“Why him?” asked the engineer, who characteristically, having narrowly escaped being shot, dispatched like Polonius behind the arras, had become quite calm.

“Don’t you know who that is?”

“No.”

‘That’s Abou Ben Adhem.”

The engineer shook his head impatiently. “Now that I’m here I’d like to ask you—”

“See the poem? There in a few short, badly written lines is compressed the sum and total of all the meretricious bullshit of the Western world. And lo! Ben Adhem’s name led all the rest Why did it lead all the rest?”

“I don’t know,” said the engineer. His eyes were fixed vacantly on the dismantled gun barrel. The fruity steel smell of Hoppe’s gun oil put him in mind of something, but he couldn’t think what.

“There it is,” said Sutter, loading the clip, “the entire melancholy procession of disasters. First God; then a man who is extremely pleased with himself for serving man for man’s sake and leaving God out of it; then in the end God himself turned into a capricious sentimental Jean Hersholt or perhaps Judge Lee Cobb who is at first outraged by Abou’s effrontery and then thinks better of it: by heaven, says he, here is a stout fellow when you come to think of it to serve his fellow man with no thanks to me, and so God swallows his pride and packs off the angel to give Abou the good news — the new gospel. Do you know who did the West in?”

“No.”

“It wasn’t Marx or immorality or the Communists or the atheists or any of those fellows. It was Leigh Hunt.”

“Who?” repeated the engineer absently, eyes glued forever to the Colt Woodsman.

“If I were a Christian, I shouldn’t hesitate to identify the Anti-Christ. Leigh Hunt.”

“Leigh Hunt,” said the engineer, rubbing his eyes.

“I’m glad you came down with Jimmy,” said Sutter. “Come sit over here.”

“Yes sir.” Still not quite able to rouse himself, he allowed Sutter to lead him to the wagonwheel chair. But before he could sit down, Sutter turned him into the light from the window.

“What’s the matter with you?”

“I feel all right now. I was quite nervous a few minutes ago. I’ve had a nervous condition for some time.” He told Sutter about his amnesia.

“I know. Jimmy told me. Are you going into a fugue now?”