Walker Percy - The Last Gentleman

Soap opera is overtly decent and covertly lewd. The American theater is overtly lewd and covertly homosexual. I am overtly heterosexual and overtly lewd. I am therefore the only sincere American.

Last night Lamar Thigpen called me un-American. That is a lie. I am more American than he is because I elect the lewdness which he practices covertly. I unite in myself the new American lewdness with the old American cheerfulness. All I lack is Christianity. If I were a Christian as well as being lewd and cheerful, I’d be the new Johnny Appleseed.

My God, what is all this stuff, thought the poor bemused shivering engineer and with a sob flung out of the cab and began running up and down and swinging his arms to keep warm when a great pain took him at the back of his head so suddenly that he almost fainted. He sat on a picnic bench and felt his skull. It had a sticky lump the size of a hamburger. “Oh, where is this place?” he groaned aloud, hoping that if he heard a question he might answer it. “Where am I bound and what is my name?” When no answer came, he reached for his wallet. But even before his hand arrived, he had felt the ominous airiness and thinness of fabric of his back pocket. It was empty and the flap unbuttoned. Jumping up, he began to slap his pockets as quickly as possible (to surprise the wallet ere it could lose itself). He searched the camper. Beyond a doubt the wallet was gone, lost or stolen. But there was $34.32 in his forward pocket. A textbook in the cabin disclosed what he seemed to know as soon as he saw it, his name.

Spying through the wax myrtles a big-shield US 87, he consulted his map. At least I am on course, he thought, noticing the penciled line. But hold! Something tugged at him, as unfinished and urgent a piece of business as leaving the bathtub running. There was something that had to be attended to RIGHT NOW. But what? He knocked his poor throbbing head on the steering wheel, but it was no use. The thing was too much in the front of his mind to be remembered, too close to be taken hold of, like the last wrenching moment of a dream.

No wonder he was confused. He had forgotten Kitty and left her at the university and now remembered nothing more than that he had forgotten. There was only the nameless tug pulling him back. But he had also forgotten what Sutter told him the night before— come find me —and recorded only the huge tug forward in the opposite direction. He shrugged: well, I’m not going back because I’ve been there.

There was nothing to do but go about his business. Taking care to remove the ignition key, he locked himself in the camper and lit the hot-water heater. After a shower in the tiny slot of the stall, he shaved carefully, took three aspirins for his headache, and two spansules for his dislocation. Then donning his Macy’s slacks and Brooks Brothers shirt whose collar ran up into his hair, making him all of a piece, so to speak, and restoring his old Princeton puissance (for strangely he had forgotten the Vaughts and even the Y.M.C.A. and remembered Princeton), he cooked and ate a great bowl of minute grits and a quarter pound of slab bacon.

When he started up the camper and backed out of the myrtle thicket and went his way down US 87, the G.M.C. faltered and looked back of its shoulder like a horse leaving the barn. “Not that way! — that’s where I came from,” said the rider angrily and kicked the beast in the flank.

For several hours he cruised south on 87, choosing this route as a consequence of the penciled line on the Esso map. He did not dare examine the contents of his pockets, for fear he would not recognize what he found there, or for fear rather that, confronted with positive proof of himself, he still would not know and would lose the tenuous connection he had. He was like a man shot in the bowels: he didn’t dare look down.

It was a frosty morn. The old corn shucks hung like frozen rags. A killdeer went crying down a freshly turned row, its chevroned wing elbowing along the greasy disced-up gobbets of earth. The smell of it, the rimy mucous cold in his nostrils, and the blast of engine-warm truck air at his feet put him in mind of something — of hunting! of snot drying in your nose and the hot protein reek of fresh-killed quail.

In the late morning he slowed and, keeping a finger on the map, turned off the highway onto a scraped gravel road which ran for miles through a sparse woodland of post oaks and spindly pines infected with tumors. Once he passed through a town which had a narrow courthouse and an old boarded-up hotel on the square. There were still wrecks of rocking chairs on the gallery. Either I have been here before, he thought, perhaps with my father while he was trying a case, or else it was he with his father and he told me about it.

Beyond the town he stopped at the foot of a hill. A tall blackish building with fluted iron columns stood on top. He looked for a sign, but there was only an old tin arrow pointing north to: Chillicothe Business College, Chillicothe, Ohio, 892 miles. Halfway up the hill he stopped again and made out the letters on the pediment: Phillips Academy. Why, I know this place, he thought. Either I went to school here or my father did. It was one of the old-style country academies which had thirty or forty pupils and two or three teachers. Dr. so-and-so who taught Greek and Colonel so-and-so who taught military science. But perhaps it is only a déjà vu. But there is a way of finding out, considered the canny engineer. If he had really been here before, he should be able to recall something and then verify his recollection. Whereas a déjà vu only confers the semblance of memory. He put his forehead on the steering wheel and pondered. It seemed that there was a concrete slab, a court of sorts, behind the school.

But if there ever had been, there was not now. When he drove up the bill, he was disappointed to find instead a raw settlement of surplus army buildings, Quonset huts, and one geodesic dome, stretching out into the piney woods, each building fed by a silver butane sphere. It looked like a lunar installation. There was no one around, but at last he found a woman dressed in black, feeding entrails to a hawk in a chicken coop. She looked familiar. He eyed her, wondering whether he knew her.

“Aren’t you—” he asked.

“Valentine Vaught,” she said, continuing to feed the hawk. “How are you, Bill?”

“Not too good,” he said, watching to see how she saw him. From his breast pocket he took Sutter’s casebook and made a note of her name.

“Is that Sutter’s?” she asked, but made no move to take it.

“I suppose it is,” he said warily, “do you want it?”

“I’ve heard it all before, dear,” she said dryly. “When he gets drunk he writes me letters. We always argued. Only I’ve stopped.”

Tell me what is tugging at me, he wanted to say, but asked instead: “Isn’t this old Phillips Academy?”

“Yes, it used to be. Did you go to school here?”

“No, it was my father. Or perhaps grandfather. Wasn’t there at one time a tennis court over there or maybe an outdoor basketball court?”

“Not that I know of. I have a message for you.”

“What?”

“Sutter and Jamie were here. They said I was to tell you they were headed for Santa Fe.”

She seemed to expect him. Had he been on his way here? He took out the map. Who had marked the route?

“Sutter and Jamie,” he repeated. Again it came over him, the terrific claim upon him, the tug of memory so strong that he broke into a sweat. “I’ve got to go,” he muttered.

“To find Jamie?” she asked.

“I suppose,” he said uneasily. But instead of leaving, he watched her. It came to him for the second time that he didn’t like her, particularly her absorption with the hawk. It was a chicken hawk with an old rusty shoulder and a black nostril. She attended to the hawk with a buzzing antic manner which irritated him. It scandalized him slightly, like the Pope making a fuss over a canary. He was afraid she might call the hawk by some such name as Saint Blaise.