Walker Percy - The Last Gentleman

He folded the Esso map into the casebook and went down to the camper. Reading Sutter’s casebook had a strange effect upon him. His mind, instead of occupying itself with such subjects as “American women” and “science” and “sexuality,” turned with relief to the most practical matters. He drove into a filling station and while the motor was being serviced studied the Esso map, calculating almost instantly and clairvoyantly the distance to Jackson, New Orleans, and Shreveport. When the attendant brought over the dip stick, exhibiting its coating of good green Uniflow, slightly low, he savored the hot sane smell of the oil and felt in his own muscles the spring of the long sliver of steel.

Sure enough, just over the saddle of the farthest ridge, the last wrinkle of the Appalachians, which overlooked a raw new golf links and a snowfield of marble-chip rooftops of five hundred G.E. Gold Medallion Homes, he found the mailbox and driveway. Up the rocky slope swarmed the sturdy G.M.C., shouldering like a badger, and plunged into a thicket of rhododendron. Thick meaty leaves swept along the aluminum hull of his ship and slapped shut behind him. He took a turn in the woods but there was no sign of Kitty. While he waited for her, he lay in Jamie’s bunk and again studied the map he had found in Sutter’s apartment. Sutter’s casebook disturbed him; there were no clues here. But the map, with its intersecting lines and tiny airplanes and crossed daggers marking battlefields, was reassuring. It told him where to go.

The towhees whistled in the rhododendron and presently the branches thrashed. There stood Kitty in the doorway with light and air going round her arm.

“Oh, I’m glad to see you,” he cried, leaping up and grabbing her, hardly able to believe his good fortune. “You are here!” And here she was, big as life, smelling of dry goods and brand-new chemical blue jeans. They were not quite right, the jeans, too new and too tight in the thigh and too neatly rolled at the cuff, like a Macy’s girl bound for the Catskills, but it only made his heart leap all the more. He laughed and embraced her, held her charms in his arms.

“Whoa now,” she cried flushing.

“Eh?”

“Get the game on the radio.”

“Game?”

“Tennessee is ahead.”

“Right,” he said and turned the game on but instead of listening told her: “Now. I can tell you that I feel very good about the future. I see now that while I was living with your family I was trying too hard to adapt myself to my environment and to score on interpersonal relationships.”

“Darling,” said Kitty, once again her old rough-and-ready and good-looking Wellesley self.

“Anyhow, here’s what we’ll do,” said he, holding her on his lap and patting her. “We’ll strike out for Ithaca and pick up my money, then we’ll cross the mighty Mississippi and see my uncle, who lives near the town of Shut Off, Louisiana, transact another small piece of business, get married, and head west, locate Jamie in either Rita’s house in Tesuque or Sutter’s ranch near Santa Fe, and thereafter live in Albuquerque or perhaps Santa Fe, park the camper in an arroyo or dry wash and attend the University of New Mexico since there is bound to be such a place, and make ourselves available to Jamie in whatever way he likes. We might live at Sutter’s old ranch and in the evenings sit, the three of us, and watch the little yellow birds fly down from the mountains. I don’t mind telling you that I set great store by this move, for which I thank Jamie, and that I am happier than I can tell you to see that you are with me.”

Kitty, however, seemed abstracted and was trying to hear the radio. But no, she changed her mind, and grabbing him, took him by her warm heavy hand and yanked him out of the Trav-L-Aire. The next thing he knew, she was showing him a house and grounds in the bustling style of a real-estate agent. “Myra gave me the key. Do you know she told me she would let me work for her! She makes piles of money.” It was a regular rockhouse cantilevered out over the ridge and into the treetops. She unlocked the door.

“What is this place?” he asked, wringing out his ear. The red and blue lines of the Esso map were still glimmering on his retina and he was in no mood for houses. But they were already inside and she was showing him the waxed paving stones and the fireplace and the view of the doleful foothills and the snowfield of G.E. Gold Medallion Homes.

“This is the Mickle place. Myra has it listed for thirty-seven five but she’ll let it go to the family for thirty-two. Isn’t it lovely? Look at the stone of this fireplace.”

“Thirty-seven five,” said the engineer vaguely.

“Thirty-seven thousand five hundred dollars. In the summer you can’t see that subdivision at all.”

She took him outside to a ferny dell and a plashy little brook with a rustic bridge. When she walked with him, she slipped her hand behind him and inside his belt in a friendly conjugal style, as one sees the old folks do, John Anderson my jo John.

“Do you mean you want to come back here and live?” he asked her at last, looking around at the ferny Episcopal woods and the doleful view and thinking of feeding the chickadees for the next forty years.

“Not before we find Jamie,” she cried. “Come on.” She yanked him toward the Trav-L-Aire. “Wait till I get my hands on that sorry Jamie.” But again she changed her mind. “Oh. I forgot to show you the foc’sle, as Cap’n Mickle used to call it, which is built into the cliff under the ‘bridge.’ It is soundproof and womanproof, even the doorknob pulls out, the very place for an old growl bear like you — you can pull the hole in after you for all I care.”

“No, thanks. Let’s be on our way,” said the engineer, eyeing the Episcopal ivy which seemed to be twining itself around his ankles.

“Old Cap’n Andy,” said Kitty, shaking her head fondly. “He was a bit eccentric but a dear. He used to stroll up and down the bridge, as he called it, with his telescope under his arm and peer out at the horizon and cry ‘Ahoy there!’”

“Is that right,” said the engineer gloomily, already seeing himself as a crusty but lovable eccentric who spied through his telescope at the buzzards and crows which circled above this doleful plain. “Come on,” he said, now also eyeing her covertly. She was fond and ferocious and indulgent. It was as if they had been married five years. Ahoy there. He had to get out of here. But there would be the devil’s own time, he saw clearly, in hemming her up in a dry wash in New Mexico. She was house-minded.

But he did get her in the camper at last and down they roared, down the last slope of the Appalachians, which was tilted into the autumn sun, down through the sourwood and the three-fingered sassafras.

“How much money do you have?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Somewhere around fifteen thousand — after I transact my business.” A thought cheered him up. “Not nearly enough to buy Cap’n Andy’s house, as good a bargain as it is.”

“Will you take care of this for me?”

The Esso map was open on the dash. Squarely across old Arkansas it fell, the check, or cheque it looked more like, machine-printed, certified, punched, computed, red-inked, hatched up rough as a cheese grater. The engineer nearly ran off the mountain. A little army of red Gothic noughts marched clean to Oklahoma, leaning into the wind. It looked familiar. Had he seen it before?

“You have seen it before. Remember?”

“Yes,” said the engineer. “What’s it for?”

“My dowry, crazy. Turn it over.”

He pulled up at a G.E. model home — what’s wrong with one of these — they were much more cheerful than that buzzard’s roost up on the ridge, and read aloud the lavender script: “For deposit only, to the account of Williston Bibb Barrett.”