Walker Percy - The Thanatos Syndrome

“How would you go about getting in there now?”

“Mist’ Hugh got an old skiff hid up in the willows by Bear Bayou here. You welcome to take it. He happy to take you. You just put into the lake here and ease up under the fence and put in here and walk half a mile on this old jeep trail, used to be a hog trail.”

“How about you?” I ask him.

“Me? I got to work. Ax Miss Lucy.”

“Ya’ll three go,” says Lucy testily. “I’ll get Uncle Hugh to be the guide. You two take a look and see if you can figure out what in the hell is going on.”

“Mist’ Hugh be happy,” says Vergil, laughing.

Lucy can’t or won’t go. She has to collect her thoughts — this is a different ball game; do you mean somebody is doing this on purpose? This calls for different queries, a different epidemiology.

“Tom,” she says, tapping her teeth, “I’m looking for effects, symptoms, a correlation between high Na-24 levels and the attendant symptoms. What are you looking for?”

“Actually it would be the abatement of symptoms — of such peculiarly human symptoms as anxiety, depression, stress, insomnia, suicidal tendencies, chemical dependence. Think of it as a regression from a stressful human existence to a peaceable animal existence.”

“That’s a big help. How in hell can I frame a question in those terms?”

“Try for cases of mindless violence — like a rogue elephant— like Mickey LaFaye shooting her horses — or a serial killer, the fellow who killed thirty Florida coeds. Theoretically the pharmacological effect of Na-24 on some cortices should produce cases of pure angelism-bestialism; that is, people who either consider themselves above conscience and the law or don’t care.”

“Hm. Then I might turn up something from criminal data banks.”

“Try it.”

She watches us, frowning thoughtfully from the great open front door of Pantherburn.

The uncle is delighted to take us. He’s got it into his head that it is some kind of fishing trip, for when we pile into my Caprice, he has a short casting rod with him.

Maggie thinks it’s a hunt and wants to go, nudges her iron head into my crotch, but is not allowed.

We take the Angola road south and at the uncle’s direction two or three turns onto gravel roads and dirt tracks, dip down out of the loess hills onto the flats of the Tunica Swamp. The willows here, often under water, still have dusty skirts from the dried mud of the spring rise.

The uncle leads the way through the willows, fishing pole trailing, right shoulder leading the way, creeper and potato vines singing and popping around his wide, sidling hips.

Bear Bayou is no more than a creek’s mouth. An old cypress skiff, hard and heavy but not waterlogged, is pulled up under bushes and, though even atop it, one can’t see it. Even so, it is locked. With surprising agility the uncle has the boat in the water in no time, hops in it, and works it around to a tiny beach.

“Uncle,” I tell him, “why don’t I row? I feel like it. You sit in the stern and tell me where to go.”

We’re in Lake Mary almost at once. What a beneficence, popping out of the bayou funky with anise and root rot into warm sunshine and open water. Believe it or not, this quiet, almost clear stretch of water, peaceable as a Wisconsin lake, was once Grand Mer, the great muddy sea where the river came booming down into a curve, carving a broad gulf from the mealy loess hills, the roiling water teeming with packets and showboats, loading cotton and indigo and offloading grand pianos, Sheraton furniture, Sheffield silver, Scots whiskey, port wine, cases of English fowling pieces, and even a book or two — Shakespeare, John Bunyan, and later Sir Walter Scott by the hundreds, Sir Walter in every plantation house as inevitable as the King James Bible and the Audubon prints; Sir Walter sending all these English-Americans to war against the Yankees as if they were the Catholic knights in Ivanhoe gone off to fight the infidel.

Now it’s empty and quiet as Lake Champlain: old canny Natty Bumppo facing me in the stern and behind me Vergil Bon, the sure-enough Hawkeye of this age, one foot in the past with his old quadroon beauty and wisdom, yet smart as Georgia Tech; the other foot in the future, a creature of the nuclear age, the best of black and white. But is he? Good as he is, the best of black or white, does he know which he is? And who am I? the last of the Mohicans? the fag end of the English Catholics here, queer birds indeed in these parts.

It feels good pulling the oars, the sun on my back.

The uncle thinks he’s going fishing. He’s telling me about his rig.

“You see this little Omega spinning reel?”

“Looks like a toy.”

“That’s right! That’s why it’s light enough to cast a fly. This little sucker cost me two hundred dollars. You see this?” Tied to the line is a crude-looking wet fly weighted with a single shot.

“What kind of a fly is that?”

“That’s a no-name fly. You want one? I’ll make you one. I showed Verge, his daddy, this, and he said you can’t cast a fly on spinning tackle and I said the shit you can’t. So I thowed it out like this — but it’s got to be this light Omega reel — and he said, Well, I be dog. He thought he knew it all about fishing.” Vergil Junior behind me is silent. The uncle and Vergil Senior were fishing companions. “You see that gum tree there that’s fallen down in the water?”

“I see it.”

“You know what’s up under there, don’t you?”

“Sac au lait.”

“You right! White perch. You know what you do, you take and hold us off with a paddle about this far out, circle the tree, and I thow this little sucker right to the edge of the leaves and let it sink. It never misses. I ain’t had nobody to do that since his daddy got sick. We’d take turns holding each other off just right. You got to have another man with the paddle. You talk about sac au lait! But you got to have two. I mean shit, it’s hard to do it by yourself. You want to hold up here a little bit and let me hold you off and you try this little sucker?”

“He goes out fishing by himself now,” says Vergil behind me. “Ever’ day.”

The uncle’s only sorrow these days, I see, is that he has no one to go hunting and fishing with.

“We can’t stop now, Uncle. Maybe later. I’d like to go later. Right now I want you to show me that substation.”

“Shitfire,” says the uncle, disappointed, “and save matches. What in hail for?”

“I just want to see it. It’s important.”

“All right,” says the uncle, pretending to be grudging but in fact glad enough to be going anywhere with anybody. “Just go on up the lake to the narrows.”

A breeze springs up. The lake sparkles. It’s good to pull the heavy skiff against the wavelets. The lake narrows. I watch the uncle for directions, and presently we duck and slide under the fence which used to cross dry land before the old blind end of the lake, fed by the rainy years, began to creep back toward the river. The river is not as low as we thought. The rise from the northern rains has begun.

The uncle goes on about his fishing with Vergil Senior in the old days and the great hunts. He decides to get irritated with Vergil Junior, who, however, has said nothing.

“I mean, shit,” says the uncle. “I can’t even get some folks to go woodcock hunting with me, even when they the one going to get the woodcock to take to their daddy, and I’m telling you it’s the best eating of all, and right here in Tunica Island is the center of all the woodcock in the world. He don’t even like to eat woodcock after we taken him with us. You know why? You remember, Vergil, when you was little I showed you the woodcock — I had just shot him and he had worms coming out of his mouth — they do that — the woodcock is not wormy, he’s been eating worms, he’s full of worms, they swallow worms whole, and when you shoot them, hell, the worms going to come out, why not. Well, this boy takes one look at the worms coming out of the woodcock and ain’t ever touched a woodcock since. Ain’t that right, Vergil?” There’s an edge in the uncle’s voice which embarrasses me.