Walker Percy - The Last Gentleman

“Well, they’ve done it up brown this time,” she said at last, stopping at the window and rubbing her chin in the web of her thumb. “Or rather he has.”

“Who?” asked the engineer.

“Sutter,” she said, turning to face him. Kitty stood beside him as flat-footed and button-eyed as Betty Jo Jones in Ithaca Junior High. “Sutter has left and taken Jamie with him,” said Rita quietly.

“Where, Ree?” Kitty cried, but somewhat rhetorically, her eyes in her eyebrows. The surprise was for his benefit.

Rita shrugged.

“I have an idea where they might be headed,” said the engineer.

Rita rolled her eyes. “Then for pity’s sake tell us.”

“Jamie was determined to go either out west or to Val’s.”

“Then I suggest that you jump in your little truck without further ado and go get him.”

“What I can’t understand,” said the engineer absently, putting his fist to his forehead as if to cudgel his poor wits, “is why Dr. Vaught left when he did. He told me— Well, I had no idea he was planning to make a change.”

“It seems a change was made for him,” said Rita dryly.

He became aware that Kitty was woolgathering. Something had happened and she knew about it

“What change is that?” he asked.

“Sutter has been discharged from the hospital staff.” Removing her glasses, she thrust them into the deep pocket of her kimono sleeve. Her pale rough face looked naked and serious and justified, like a surgeon who comes out of the operating room and removes his mask. “It was understood that if he left, he would not be prosecuted.”

“Prosecuted for what?” Up to his usual tricks, the engineer took her import not from the words she said but from the signals. That the import was serious indeed was to be judged from her offhandedness, the license she allowed herself in small things. She lit a cigarette and with a serious sort of free-and-easiness cupped it inward to her palm like a Marine and hunkered over an imaginary campfire between the three of them.

“What were they going to prosecute him for?” asked the engineer again. Within himself he was fighting against the voluptuousness of bad news. Would the time ever come when bad was bad and good good and a man was himself and knew straight up which was which?

“Sutter,” said Rita, warming her hands at the invisible embers and stamping her feet softly, “persuaded a ward nurse to leave her patients, some of whom were desperately ill, and accompany him to an unoccupied room, which I believe is called the terminal room. There they were discovered in bed by the night supervisor, and surrounded by pictures of a certain sort. Wynne Magahee called me last night — he’s chief of medicine. He told me, he said: ‘Look, we wouldn’t care less what Sutter does with or to the nurses on his own time, but hell, Rita, when it comes to leaving sick people — and to make matters worse, somebody on the ward found out about it and is suing the hospital.’ I had to tell Wynne, ‘Wynne it is not for you to make explanations to us but rather for us—’”

Beside him, Kitty had gone as lumpish and cheeky as a chipmunk. “They were not desperately ill, Ree,” she said wearily as if it were an old argument. “It was a chronic ward.”

“Very well, they were not desperately ill,” said Rita, eyeing the engineer ironically.

Kitty’s lower lip trembled. Poor Kitty, it remained to her, one of the last, to be afflicted. “Poor Sutter,” she whispered, shaking her head. “But why in the world did he—”

“However unfortunate the situation might be,” said Rita grimly, “Sutter’s being discovered was not purely and simply a misfortune, that is to say, bad luck. As it happens, Sutter set the time for his rendezvous a few minutes before the night supervisor made her rounds.”

“Do you mean Sutter wanted to get caught, Ree?” cried Kitty.

“There are needs, my dear,” said Rita dryly, “which take precedence over this or that value system. I suspect, moreover, that our friend here knows a good deal more about the situation than we do.”

But though Kitty turned to him, he felt fretful and sore and would not answer. Anyhow he didn’t know what Rita was talking about. Instead he asked her: “When did this happen?”

“Thursday night.”

“Then when I spoke to him last night, he already knew that he had been discharged?”

“Yes. And he also knew that he and Jamie were leaving this morning.”

“But he told me I could find him if—” The engineer broke off and fell silent. Presently he asked: “Do Mr. and Mrs. Vaught know?”

“Yes.”

“What did they say?”

“Poppy threw up his hands over his head, you know, and rushed out of the room, Dolly took to the bed.”

He was silent.

“I had supposed that your responsibilities as his tutor and companion might include a reasonable concern for his life. The last time he went off with Sutter he was nearly killed.”

The hearty thrust of her malice made him want to grin. He thought of his aunts. Malice was familiar ground. It was like finding oneself amid the furniture of one’s living room. He looked at his watch. “I can leave in ten minutes. If he’s in Tyree County, I’ll be back tomorrow. If they’ve gone to New Mexico, and I think they have, it’ll take longer. I’ll look in Santa Fe and Albuquerque. Kitty?” He waited in the doorway without looking at her.

When she did not move, he looked up. The girl was stricken. She was wringing the fingers of one hand. He had never seen anyone wring his hands.

“Are you coming with me?”

“I can’t,” she said, open-mouthed and soundless like a fourteen-year-old talking past the teacher.

“Why not?”

“Bill,” said Rita, brow gone all quirky, “you can’t ask this child to travel with you. Suppose you do have to go to New Mexico.”

“We can be married in Louisiana tomorrow. My uncle lives there and can arrange it.”

She shook her head fondly. “Listen, kids. Here’s what you do. Bill, go find Jamie. Then stay with him or bring him home. In either case I guarantee this girl will come a-running as fast as her little legs will carry her. Kitty, I assure you he is coming back. Look at her, Lance Corporal.”

But he looked at Rita instead.

She was daring him! If you leave, said the fine gray eyes, you know that I know that you won’t come back. I dare you!

And Kitty: by some queer transformation the girl, his lordly lioness of a Kitty, had been turned into a twittering bird-girl with little bitty legs.

“Kitty, I have to go to my room for a minute. Then I’m leaving.”

“Wait.” Soundless as a little dove, she flew up to him, and still could not speak.

“What?” he said, smiling.

Rita linked arms with them and drew them together. “If it is of any interest to you, dearie,” she said to Kitty, “my money is on him. Lance Corporal?”

“What?” said the puzzled engineer.

“Idiot,” said Rita, giving him a dig in the ribs with her silken elbow. “The poor girl is wondering whether you are coming back.”

Then, registering as he did a fine glint of appraisal in Rita’s eye, he saw the two of them, Kitty and Billy, as doll-like figures tumbling before the magic wand of an enchantress. Nor, and here was the strangest part of it, did he really mind.

A note was clipped with a bobby pin to the ignition switch of the Trav-L-Aire.

Meet me in one hour. Go out81 —

Did she mean north or south 81?

Turn right near top of ridge —

Lord, which ridge and which side of it?

Watch for For Sale sign and Mickle mailbox —

Before or after turning off?

Pull up out of sight of the highway and wait for me. K.