Walker Percy - The Last Gentleman

“How did you find me?” Sutter asked him. Unlike most thin men, he sat in such a way as to emphasize his thinness, craned his neck and hugged his narrow chest.

“I found a map in your room with the route traced on it. I remembered the name of the ranch. An Indian told me where it was. There was no one at the ranch, so I waited in the plaza. There was also this in your room.” He handed the casebook to Sutter. “I thought you might have forgotten it.”

Sutter glanced at the casebook without taking it. “I didn’t forget it.”

“I have pondered it deeply.”

“It is of no importance. Everything in it is either wrong or irrelevant. Throw it away.”

“It seems to be intended for your sister Val.”

“It isn’t.” After a moment Sutter looked at him. “Why did you come out here?”

The engineer passed a hand across his eyes. “I — think you asked me, didn’t you? I also came out to see Jamie. The family want him to come home,” he said, remembering it for the first time as he spoke. “Or at least to know where he is.”

“They know where he is.”

“They do? How?”

“I called them last night. I spoke to Kitty.”

“What did she say?” asked the engineer uneasily, and unconsciously hugged himself across the chest as if he too were a thin man.

“For one thing, she said you were coming. I’ve been expecting you.”

The engineer told Sutter about his fugue. “Even now I am not too clear about things,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “But I knew that I had business here.”

“What kind of business?”

He frowned. “As I told you: that I was to see you, as well as find Jamie.” He waited, hoping the other would tell him something, but Sutter was silent. The engineer happened to look down and caught sight of the two bottles in the Rexall bag. It was a bourbon called Two Natural. The cork showed a pair of dice rolling a lucky seven. “How is Jamie? Where is he?”

“Jamie is very sick.”

“Did you tell Kitty?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Jamie doesn’t want them to come out.”

“How sick is he?”

“He got a sore throat driving out.”

“That’s not so bad, is it?”

“It wouldn’t be if he had any leucocytes.”

“I see.”

“The strep also lit up an old rheumatic lesion.”

“You mean in his heart?” asked the engineer, arming himself against the dread sweetness of bad news.

But Sutter merely grunted and went on driving the Edsel in his old-fashioned sporty style, forefinger curled around the spoke of the steering wheel, left elbow propped on the sill. Presently the Edsel stopped in a shady street of tall Victorian houses which flanked a rambling frame building.

“Is he in the hospital?” he asked Sutter.

“Yes,” said Sutter, but made no move to get out. Instead he hung fire politely, inclined sooty-eyed and civil over the wheel as if he were waiting on the engineer.

The engineer blinked. “Is Jamie in there?”

Sutter nodded and sat back with a sigh. “I’m very glad you’re here,” he said tapping the wheel.

“Do you wish me—”

“Go on in and see him. I have to go to work. I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

“Where do you work?”

“At a guest ranch,” said Sutter absently. “It’s something like being a ship’s doctor. It’s only temporary, until—” He shrugged. “Jamie and I ran out of groceries.”

When he got out, Sutter called him back.

“I forgot to tell you about the purpura.”

“Purpura?”

“Like bruises. It’s a new development, not particularly serious in itself but somewhat disconcerting. I thought it might bother you if you didn’t know.”

“Thank you.” Don’t worry, thought the engineer confidently. It won’t bother me.

But the purpura upset him badly. Jamie’s face was covered with splotches of horrid color like oil slicks. It was as if a deep fetor, a swamp decay, had come to the surface. Speaking to him meant straining a bit as if one had to peer this way and that to see him through an evil garden of flowers.

It was an odd, unfitting business anyhow, Jamie being here. Jamie was as sick as he could be, yet he lay in a room off the street, so to speak. Could one be truly sick without proper notice and an accounting? The door was wide open and anyone could walk in. Yet no one did. He was alone. Should not some official cognizance be taken of his illness, some authorized person interposed between visitor and patient? One had only to ask the room number downstairs and walk up. The engineer could not get over the feeling that Jamie was not properly sick.

The patient was asleep. For some minutes the visitor stood about uncertainly, smiling warily, then, becoming alarmed, leaned closer to the sickbed. A sour heat radiated from the hollow of the pillow. In the triangle of Jamie’s neck, a large vein pulsed in a complex rhythm. Jamie was not noticeably thinner. In fact, a deposit of new tissue, or perhaps dropsical fluid, had occurred under his skin. His face, always puddingish and ill-defined, had gone even more out of focus.

But no sooner had the engineer sat down than the patient opened his eyes and spoke to him quite naturally.

“What are you doing in these parts?” Though he was fairly goggling with fever, Jamie kept his soldierly way of lying abed. He lounged like a wounded man, pushed down his thigh, made a grimace.

“Looking for you and Sutter.”

“Well, you found me. What do you want?”

“Nothing,” said the engineer as wryly as the other. He rose. “I’ll be seeing you.”

Jamie laughed and made him sit down. “What’s the matter with your leg?” the engineer asked.

“Got the rheumatiz.”

Jamie began to speak fondly of Sutter, catching his breath now and then in his new warrior style. “You ought to see that rascal,” said Jamie, shaking his head.

The engineer listened smilingly as Jamie told of Sutter’s guest ranch whose cottages had such names as O.K. Corral and Boot Hill. Sutter lived at Doc’s. “Though it’s called a guest ranch, it’s really a way station for grass widows. Ol’ Sutter is busy as a one-armed paperhanger.”

“I imagine,” said the engineer fondly and gloomily. Jamie, he saw, had just got onto the trick of tolerating adults in their foibles.“Where is this place?”

“On the road to Albuquerque. It’s the biggest guest ranch in the world. Have you seen him?”

“Yes.” The engineer told of coming upon Sutter just after he bought two fifths of Two Natural. “Does he still drink bad whiskey?”

“Oh Christ,” whispered Jamie joyfully and began to thrash his legs as of old.

After a while the youth began to sweat and, quite as abruptly as he had waked up, collapsed and fell back in the hot hollow of his pillow. Dear God, I stayed too long, thought the engineer, but as he arose to leave, one hand detained him with a weak deprecatory wave.

“What,” said the engineer, smiling.

But there was no reply, save the hand moving over the covers, as tentative as a Ouija. For a long ten seconds he stood so, stooped slightly and hearkening. The hand stopped. No doubt he is asleep, thought the engineer, sighing with relief. Then he noticed that the soft mound of a vein in Jamie’s neck was going at it hammer and tongs.

Frankly alarmed now, he began turning on switches and pressing buttons, all the while keeping a wary eye on the sick youth. How easy was it to die? When no one came — damn, what is this place? — he rushed out into the corridor and went careening off the walls toward the nurses’ station. There sat a hefty blonde with a bald forehead which curved up under a brassy cone of hair. She looked like Queen Bess. She was making notes in a chart.