Walker Percy - The Last Gentleman

“Reckon he’s going to get all his money out and go on back off up there?” said Spicer CoCo.

“I notice he got his box-back coat on. I think he be here for a while, ” said Ben Huger.

He had to grin and fool with them, fend them off, while he asked the teller about the check. “Doris,” he said to the pretty plump brunette, remembering her before he could forget, “can I stop payment on a certified check?”

She gave him a form to fill in. “Hello, Will. It’s good to see you.”

“Just fine.” He scratched his head. “No, ah— You see, it’s not my check and it’s not on this bank. It was a check endorsed to me. I — it was misplaced.” He hoped he didn’t have to tell the amount.

“Then have the payer make a stop-payment order,” she said, gazing at him with an expression both lively and absent-minded. “How long ago did you lose it?”

“I don’t remember — ah, two days.”

“Same old Will.”

“What?”

“You haven’t changed a bit.”

“I haven’t?” he said, pleased to hear it. “I thought I was worse.” I’ll call Poppy then, he said to himself and fell to wondering: how strange that they seem to know me and that I never supposed they could have, and perhaps that was my mistake.

“You know why he taking his money out,” said Spicer.

“No, why is that?” asked Ben.

The two were standing behind him, snapping their fingers and popping their knees back and forth inside their trousers. They were talking in a certain broad style which was used in Ithaca jokingly; it was something like Negro talk but not the same.

“He on his way to the game Saddy. You can tell he come on into town to get his money — look, he done took off his regular walking shoes which he hid under a bridge and done put on his town slippers”—pointing down to the engineer’s suede oxfords.

“That had slipped my notice,” said Ben. “But look how he still th’ows his foot out like Cary Middlecoff, like he fixin’ to hit a long ball. ”

“He come over here to draw his money out and make a bet on the game and take our money because he thinks we don’t know they number one.”

“What are you talking about,” cried the engineer, laughing and shaking his head, all but overcome by an irritable sort of happiness — and all the while trying to tell Doris Mascagni about his savings account. “Yall are number one on the U.P.,” he told them, turning around nervously.

“What you say there, Will.” They shook hands with him, still-casting an eye about in the oblique Ithaca style.

What good fellows they were, he thought, as Doris counted out his money. Why did I ever go away? Ben Huger detained him and told a story about a man who bought a golf-playing gorilla. The gorilla had been taught to play golf by the smartest trainer in the world. This man who bought the gorilla was also a hard-luck gambler but for once he seemed to have hit on a sure thing. Because when he took the gorilla out to a driving range and handed him a driver and a basket of balls, each ball flew straight down the middle for five hundred yards. So he entered the gorilla in the Masters at Augusta. On the first tee, a par five hole, the gorilla followed Nicklaus and Palmer. He addressed his ball with assurance and drove the green four hundred and ninety yards away. Great day in the morning, thought the gambler, who was acting as the gorilla’s caddy, I got it made this time for sure. Already he had plans for the P.G.A. and the British Open after collecting his fifty thousand in first prize money. But when the threesome reached the green and the gambler handed the gorilla his putter to sink the one-footer, the gorilla took the same full, perfected swing and drove the ball another four hundred and ninety yards. Then—

Here’s what I’ll do, thought the engineer who was sweating profusely and was fairly beside himself with irritable delight. I’ll come back here and farm Hampton, my grandfather’s old place, long since reclaimed by the cockleburs, and live this same sweet life with these splendid fellows.

“You gon’ be home for a while, Will?” they asked him.

“For a while,” he said vaguely and left them, glad to escape this dread delight.

Hardly aware that he did so, he took Kemper Street, a narrow decrepit boulevard which ran as string to the bow of the river. It still had its dusty old crape myrtles and chinaberries and horse troughs and an occasional tile marker set in the sidewalk: Travelers Bicycle Club 1903. The street changed to a Negro district. The old frame houses gave way to concrete nightclubs and shotgun cottages, some of which were converted to tiny churches by tacking on two square towers and covering the whole with brick paper. He sat on a trough which was choked with dry leaves and still exhaled the faint sunny tart smell of summer, and studied the Esso map, peering closely at the Gulf Coast, New Orleans, Houston, and points west. It came over him suddenly that he didn’t live anywhere and had no address. As he began to go through his pockets he spied a new outdoor phone in a yellow plastic shell — and remembered Kitty. Lining up quarters and dimes on the steel shelf, he gazed down Kemper to the old city jail at the corner of Vincennes. Here on the top step stood his great-uncle the sheriff, or high sheriff, as the Negroes called him, on a summer night in 1928.

The telephone was ringing in the purple castle beside the golf links and under the rosy temple of Juno.

The sheriff put his hands in his back pockets so that the skirt of his coat cleared his pistol butt. “I respectfully ask yall to go on back to your homes and your families. There will be no violence here tonight because I’m going to kill the first sapsucker who puts his foot on that bottom step. Yall go on now. Go ahead on.”

“Hello.” It was David.

“Hello. David.”

“Yes suh.” He would be standing in the narrow hall between the pantry and the big front hall, the receiver held as loosely in his hand as if it had fallen into the crotch of a small tree.

“This is, ah, Will Barrett.” It sounded strange because they didn’t, the Negroes, know him by a name.

“Who? Yes suh! Mist’ Billy!” David, feeling summoned, cast about for the right response — was it surprise? joy? — and hit instead on a keening bogus cheeriness, then, seeing it as such, lapsed into hilarity: “ Ts-ts-ts. ”

“Is Miss Kitty there?”

“No suh. She been gone.”

“Where?” His heart sank. She and Rita had gone to Spain.

“School.”

“Oh yes.” Today was Monday. He reflected.

“Yes suh,” mused David, politely giving shape and form to the silence. “I notice the little bitty Spite was gone when I got here. And I got here on time.”

“Is anyone else there?”

“Nobody but Miss Rita.”

“Never mind. Give Miss Kitty a message.”

“Oh yes suh.”

“Tell her I got hurt at the college, got hit in the head, and had a relapse. She’ll understand. Tell her I’ve been sick but I feel better.”

“Yes suh. I’ll sho tell her. Sick? ” David, aiming for the famous Negro sympathy, hit instead on a hooting incredulity. David, David, thought the engineer, shaking his head, what is going to happen to you? You ain’t white nor black nor nothing.

“I’m better now. Tell her I’ll call her.”

“Yes suh.”

“Goodbye, David.”

“Goodbye, Mist’ Billy!” cried David, stifling his hilarity. He reached Mr. Vaught at Confederate Chevrolet.

“Billy boy!” cried the old fellow. “You still at school?”

“Sir? Well, no sir. I—”

“You all right, boy?”

“Yes sir. That is, I was hurt—”

“How bad is it down there now?”