Walker Percy - The Last Gentleman

“Down here?”

“How did you get out? They didn’t want to let Kitty leave. I had to go get her myself last night. Why, they kept them down in the basement of the sorority house all night. Man, they got the army in there.”

“Yes sir,” said the engineer, understanding not a single word save only that some larger catastrophe had occurred and that in the commotion his own lapse had been set at nought, remitted.

“You sure you all right?”

“I was knocked out but I got away the next morning,” said the engineer carefully. “Now I’m on my way to find—” He faltered.

“Jamie. Good.”

“Yes. Jamie. Sir,” he began again. This one thing he clearly perceived: the ruckus on the campus dispensed him and he might say what he pleased.

“Yes?”

“Sir, please listen carefully. Something has happened that I think you should know about and will wish to do something about.”

“If you think so, I’ll do it.”

“Yes sir. You see, Kitty’s check has been lost or stolen, the check for one hundred thousand dollars.”

“What’s that?” Mr. Vaught’s voice sounded as if he had crept into the receiver. All foolishness aside: this was money, Chevrolets.

The engineer had perceived that he could set forth any facts whatever, however outrageous, and that they would be attended to, acted upon and not held against him.

“My suggestion is that you stop payment, if it is possible.”

“It is possible,” said the old man, his voice pitched at perfect neutrality. The engineer could hear him riffling through the phone book as he looked up the bank’s number.

“It was endorsed over to me, if that is any help.”

“It was endorsed over to you,” repeated the other as if he were taking it down. Very well then, it is understood this time, what with one thing and another, that it is for you to tell me and for me to listen. This time.

“I tried to reach Kitty but couldn’t. Tell her that I’ll call her.”

“I’ll tell her.”

“Tell her I’ll be back.”

“You’ll be back.”

After he hung up, he sat gazing at the old jail and thinking about his kinsman, the high sheriff. Next to the phone booth was the Dew Drop Inn, a rounded comer of streaked concrete and glass brick, a place he knew well. It belonged to a Negro named Sweet Evening Breeze who was said to be effeminate. As he left and came opposite the open door, the sound came: psssst! — not four feet from his ear.

“Eh,” he said, pausing and frowning. “Is that you, Breeze?”

“Barrett!”

“What?” He turned, blinking. A pair of eyes gazed at him from the interior darkness.

“Come in, Barrett.”

“Thank you all the same, but—”

Hands were laid on him and he was yanked inside. By the same motion a shutter of memory was tripped: it was not so much that he remembered as that, once shoved out of the wings and onto stage, he could then trot through his part perfectly well.

“Mr. Aiken,” he said courteously, shaking hands with his old friend, the pseudo-Negro.

“Come in, come in, come in. Listen, I don’t in the least blame you—” began the other.

“Please allow me to explain,” said the engineer, blinking around at the watery darkness which smelted of sweet beer and hosed-down concrete — there were others present but he could not yet make them out. “The truth is that when I saw you yesterday I did not place you. As you may recall, I spoke to you last summer of my nervous condition and its accompanying symptom of amnesia. Then yesterday, or the day before, I received a blow on the head—”

“Listen,” cried the pseudo-Negro. “Yes, right! You have no idea how glad I am to see you. Oh, boy. God knows you have to be careful!”

“No, you don’t understand—”

“Don’t worry about it,” said the pseudo-Negro.

The engineer shrugged. “What you say, Breeze?” He caught sight of the proprietor, a chunky shark-skinned Negro who still wore a cap made of a nylon stocking rolled and knotted.

“All right now,” said Breeze, shaking hands but sucking his teeth, not quite looking at him. He could tell that Breeze remembered him but did not know what to make of his being here. Breeze knew him from the days when he, the engineer, used to cut through the alley behind the Dew Drop on his way to the country club to caddy for his father.

“Where’s Mort?” asked the engineer, who began to accommodate to the gloom.

“Mort couldn’t make it,” said the pseudo-Negro in a voice heavy with grievance, and introduced him to his new friends. There were two men, a Negro and a white man, and a white woman. The men, he understood from the pseudo-Negro’s buzzing excitement, were celebrities, and indeed even to the engineer, who did not keep up with current events, they looked familiar. The white man, who sat in a booth with a beautiful sullen untidy girl all black hair and white face and black sweater, was an actor. Though he was dressed like a tramp, he wore a stern haughty expression. A single baleful glance he shot at the engineer and did not look at him again and did not offer his hand at the introduction.

“This is the Merle you spoke of?” the actor asked the pseudo-Negro, indicating the engineer with a splendid one-millimeter theatrical inclination of his head.

“Merle?” repeated the puzzled engineer. “My name is not Merle.” Though the rudeness and haughtiness of the actor made him angry at first, the engineer was soon absorbed in the other’s mannerisms and his remarkable way of living from one moment to the next. This he accomplished by a certain inclination of his head and a hitching around of his shoulder while he fiddled with a swizzle stick, and a gravity of expression which was aware of itself as gravity. His lips fitted together in a rich conscious union. The sentient engineer, who had been having trouble with his expression today, now felt his own lips come together in a triumphant fit. Perhaps he should be an actor!

“You’re here for the festival, the, ah, morality play,” said the engineer to demonstrate his returning memory.

“Yes,” said the pseudo-Negro. “Do you know the sheriff here?”

“Yes,” said the engineer. They were standing at the bar under a ballroom globe which reflected watery specters of sunlight from the glass bricks. The pseudo-Negro introduced him to the other celebrity, a playwright, a slender pop-eyed Negro who was all but swallowed up by a Bulldog Drummond trenchcoat and who, unlike his white companion, greeted the engineer amiably and in fact regarded him with an intense curiosity. For once the engineer felt as powerful and white-hot a radar beam leveled at him as he leveled at others. This fellow was not one to be trifled with. He had done the impossible! — kept his ancient Negro radar intact and added to it a white edginess and restiveness. He fidgeted around and came on at you like a proper Yankee but unlike a Yankee had this great ear which he swung round at you. Already he was onto the engineer: that here too was another odd one, a Southerner who had crossed up his wires and was something betwixt and between. He drank his beer and looked at the engineer sideways. Where the actor was all self playing itself and triumphantly succeeding, coinciding with itself, the playwright was all eyes and ears and not in the least mindful of himself — if he had been, he wouldn’t have had his trenchcoat collar turned up in great flaps around his cheeks. The Negro was preposterous-looking, but he didn’t care if he was. The actor did care. As for the poor engineer, tuning in both, which was he, actor or playwright?

“You really did not remember him, did you?” the Negro asked the engineer.

“No, that’s right.”