Walker Percy - The Last Gentleman

After he had transacted his oil-lease business with his uncle, the telephone rang. It was the deputy sheriff in Shut Off. It seemed a little “trailer” had been stolen by a bunch of niggers and outside agitators and that papers and books in the name of Williston Bibb Barrett had been found therein. Did Mr. Fannin know anything about it? If he did and if it was his property or his kin’s, he might reclaim the same by coming down to Shut Off and picking it up.

The uncle held the phone and told his nephew.

“What happened to the, ah, Negroes and the outside agitators?” asked the latter calmly.

Nothing, it seemed. They were there, at this moment, in Shut Off. It needed but a word from Mr. Fannin to give the lie to their crazy story that they had borrowed the trailer from his kinsman and the lot of them would be thrown in jail, if not into the dungeon at Fort Ste. Marie.

“The dungeon. So that’s it,” said the nephew, relieved despite himself. “And what if the story is confirmed?” he asked his uncle.

Then they’d be packed off in twenty minutes on the next bus to Memphis.

“Confirm the story,” said the nephew. “And tell him I’ll be there in an hour to pick up my camper.” He wanted his friends free, clear of danger, but free and clear of him too, gone, by the time he reached Shut Off.

After bidding his uncle and Merriam farewell — who were only waiting for him to leave to set off with the dogs in the De Soto — he struck out for the old landing, where he retrieved his boat and drifted a mile or so to the meadows, which presently separated the river from Shut Off. So it came to be called Shut Off: many years ago one of the meanderings of the river had jumped the neck of a peninsula and shut the landing off from the river.

The boy and the man ate breakfast in the dining car Savannah. The waiter braced his thigh against the table while he laid the pitted nickel-silver knives and forks. The water in the heavy glass carafe moved up and down without leaving a drop, as if water and glass were quits through usage.

A man came down the aisle and stood talking to his father, folding and unfolding his morning paper.

“It’s a bitter thing, Ed. Bitter as gar broth.”

“I know it is, Oscar. Son, I want you to meet Senator Oscar Underwood. Oscar, this is my son Bill.”

He arose to shake hands and then did not know whether to stand or sit.

“Bill,” the senator told him, “when you grow up, decide what you want to do according to your lights. Then do it. That’s all there is to it.”

“Yes sir,” he said, feeling confident he could do that.

“Senator Underwood did just that, son, and at great cost to himself,” said his father.

“Yes sir.”

He awoke, remembering what Senator Underwood looked like, even the vein on his hand which jumped back and forth across a tendon when he folded and unfolded the fresh newspaper.

Dear God, he thought, pacing his five-foot aisle, I’m slipping again. I can’t have met Senator Underwood, or could I? Was it I and my father or he and his father? How do I know what he looked like? What did he look like? I must find out.

Stooping, he caught sight of a forest of oil derricks. He dressed and went outside. The camper was parked in the gravel plaza of a truckers’ stop. In the café he learned that he was in Longview, Texas. While he waited for his breakfast, he read from Sutter’s notebook:

You’re wrong about Rita, Val. She saved my life and she meant no harm to Kitty — though that does not answer your charge. I had left the old ruined South for the transcending Southwest. But there transcendence failed me and Rita picked me up for the bum I was and fed and clothed me.

The day before I left home I stood in a lewd wood by the golf links. My insurance had been canceled and I could not hospitalize patients or even treat them at home save at my own risk. The wood was the lewd wood of my youth where lovers used to come and leave Merry Widow tins and where I dreamed the lewd dreams of youth. Therefrom I spied Jackie Randolph towing her cart up number 7 fairway sans caddy and sans partner. Invited her into the woods and spoke into her ear. She looked at her watch and said she had 20 minutes before her bridge luncheon. She spread her golf towel on the pine needles, kept her spiked shoes on, and cursed in my ear.

The innocence of Mexican country women.

That evening my father gave me $100,000 for not smoking until I was 21.

Looked in J.A.M.A. classifieds, found job in Santa Fe clinic, telephoned them my credentials (which were ever good), was accepted on spot, packed my Edsel and was on my way. Clinic dreary — found my true vocation at Sangre de Cristo guest ranch.

Genius loci of Western desert did not materialize. Had hoped for free-floating sense of geographical transcendence, that special dislocatedness and purity of the Southwest which attracted Doc Holliday and Robert Oppenheimer, one a concrete Valdosta man who had had a bellyful of the concrete, the other the luckiest of all abstract men: who achieved the high watermark of the 20th century, which is to say: the device conceived in a locus of pure transcendence, which in turn worked the maximum effect upon the sphere of immanence, the world. (Both men, notice, developed weapons in the desert, the former a specially built sawed-off shotgun which he carried by a string around his neck.)

It didn’t work. I found myself treating senior citizens for post-retirement anomie and lady dudes for sore rears and nameless longings. I took my money and bought a ranch, moved out and in a month’s time was struck flat by an acute depression, laid out flat in the desert and assaulted by 10,000 devils, not the little black fellows of St. Anthony but wanton teen-agers who swung from the bedpost and made gestures.

I stopped eating. Rita found me (she was looking for volunteer MD’s for her little Indians), toted me back to her cozy house in Tesuque, fed me, clothed me, bucked me up, and stood for no nonsense. She saved my life and I married her to stay alive. We had a good time. We ate the pure fruit of transcendence. She is not, like me, a pornographer. She believes in “love” like you, though a different kind. She “falls in love.” She fell in love with me because I needed her, and then with Kitty because she thought I didn’t need her and because Kitty seemed to, with that Gretel-lost-in-the-woods look of hers. Now Kitty is “in love” with someone and Rita is up the creek. I told her to forget all that stuff, e.g., “love,” and come on back with me to the Southwest, where we didn’t have a bad time. But she is still angry with me. I forgive her sins but she doesn’t mine. Hers: like all secular saints, she canonizes herself. Even her sins are meritorious. Her concern for Kitty gets put down as “broadening her horizons” or “saving her from the racists.” And all she really wanted for Jamie was that he should get Barrett out of the way. She got extremely angry when I suggested it, though I told her it wasn’t so bad, that she was no more guilty than everyone else. Eh, Val? You want to know the only thing I really held against her? A small thing but it got under my skin. It was an expression she used with her transcendent friends: she would tell them she and I were “good in bed.” I am an old-fashioned Alabama pornographer and do not like forward expressions in a woman.

Feeling unusually elated — then I am Kitty’s “someone”!—he stopped at the public library in Longview and looked up Senator Oscar W. Underwood in the Columbia Encyclopedia. The senator died in 1929, ten years before the engineer’s birth. When he asked the librarian where he might find a picture of Senator Underwood, she looked at him twice and said she didn’t know.