Walker Percy - The Thanatos Syndrome

“I will!”

“Don’t worry, Dr. More!” cries Mrs. Cheney, taking hold of the towel.

“Meanwhile, drink this, Coach,” I tell him, holding the towel against his head. “Vergil, fix him a glass of additive.”

“Molar strength?” asks Vergil, still looking into his eyebrows.

“Right. Mrs. Cheney, twist the towel as hard as you can and he’ll be fine. The bleeding has about stopped.”

“I will!” cries Mrs. Cheney, twisting.

“Drink this, Coach.” I hand him the glass with my free hand.

“You’re sure?” asks the Coach, pressing the knot while Mrs. Cheney twists the towel. She is also pulling. Now his head is against her breast.

“I’m sure.”

“I’ll drink it if you say so.”

“I say so. Vergil?”

“Yes, Doc?”

“Give a glass to Mr. Brunette.”

“No problem.” He fills a glass and sets it on the table in front of Mr. Brunette.

Mr. Brunette looks at it. “Let me just say this,” he says, pushing up the bridge of his Harold Lloyd specs.

“All right.”

“First, you’re right about these people,” nodding toward Van Dorn. “Accordingly, let me make sure the photos are safe. I’ll just put them back in the file where they belong and where the proper authorities can find them.” He scoops up the photos in a businesslike way and starts for the staircase.

“I think you’d better bring those back, Mr. Brunette. How’re you doing, Coach?”

“I’m going to be fine, Doctor, since you said I would.”

“Keep twisting, Mrs. Cheney.”

“I am, Doctor!”

“There’s a balcony up there and an outside staircase,” says Vergil, taking notice for the first time.

“I really think you’d better come down, Mr. Brunette.” But he’s halfway up and gaining speed. He’s as nimble and youthful in his specs as Harold Lloyd and — do I imagine it? — grinning a wolfish little grin.

The uncle looks at me. I shrug and nod, but do not touch myself. Before I can think what has happened, the uncle has picked up the shotgun and shot him. I find that I am saying it to myself: The uncle has shot Mr. Brunette with a 12-gauge shotgun held at the hip. The room roars and whitens, percussion seeming to pass beyond the bounds of noise into white, the white-out silent and deafening until it comes back not as a loud noise but like thunder racketing around and dying away after a thunderclap.

My ears are ringing. Mrs. Brunette opens her mouth. I think I hear her say, no doubt shout, to everyone as if calling them to witness, “He’s killed my husband!”

Everyone is gazing at Mr. Brunette. The ringing seems to be in the room itself. Mr. Brunette, blown against the far rail, comes spinning down the staircase, as swiftly and silently as a message in a tube, hands still on the rails, specs knocked awry but not off.

“Uncle Hugh,” I say, but cannot hear my voice. Uncle Hugh has shot Mr. Brunette with a 12-gauge shotgun from the hip.

The room is filled with a familiar cordite Super-X smell I haven’t smelled for years.

Mrs. Brunette covers her ears and says something again. Mrs. Cheney does not let go of the towel but pulls Coach’s head close to hers, twisting the towel harder than ever.

“Don’t worry about a thing,” says the uncle beside me, and slaps at the seat of his pants. “I brushed him off right here is all. With number eight.” He turns to show me, again slapping at his pants.

Mr. Brunette is struggling to get up. He gets up. It is true. The seat of Mr. Brunette’s Italian drape suit, which is slack around the hips, has been shot out. There is no blood.

“But I mean, Uncle Hugh, even so, number-eight birdshot.”

“Wasn’t birdshot!” says the uncle triumphantly, lunging past me back to his post at the door, right shoulder leading. “Not even number ten. What that was what they call a granular load, little bitty specks of rubber like pepper, like if you wanted to run off some old hound dogs without hurting them. You remember, I told you I don’t like to hurt a good dog.”

“Yes.”

“Here, I’ll show you the shell.”

“That’s all right.”

“Please help us, Doctor,” says Mrs. Brunette, who has got Mr. Brunette to the couch, where he is kneeling, head in her lap.

“Certainly,” I say. “Now let him lie across you, like that.”

I examine him. The seat of his charcoal silk trousers has been shot away along with the bottom inch or so of his coattail. The exposed sky-blue jockey shorts of a tight-fitting stretch nylon are by and large intact, save for a dozen or so dark striae, as if they had been heavily scored by a Marks-A-Lot. Several of the scorings have ripped nylon and skin, and there is some oozing of blood,

Mr. Brunette adjusts his glasses, feels behind him, looks at his fingers. “My God,” he says evenly, but not badly frightened.

“Don’t worry. We’ll fix you up.” I turn to Vergil, who is picking up the photographs. “Would you see if you can find a washcloth and dampen it with soap and water. Uncle Hugh, lend me your knife.”

They do. I cut off the back of Mr. Brunette’s jockey shorts, using the uncle’s Bowie knife, which is honed down to a sliver of steel, clean him up, and instruct Mrs. Brunette to apply pressure to the two lacerations. Mr. Brunette is lying across her lap. She does so but in a curious manner, holding out one hand, face turned away, as if she were controlling a fractious child.

Van Dorn, I notice, is sitting back on the sofa, drumming his fingers on the cane armrest and by turns nodding and shaking his head. “Oh boy,” he murmurs to no one in particular.

“Vergil, give everybody a glass of additive. There’s a stack right there.” The “glasses” are Styrofoam, Big Mac’s jumbo size.

“Molar?” asks Vergil.

“Molar.”

“All right.”

“Very good. Drink up, everybody.”

“Oh boy,” says Van Dorn, shaking his head and murmuring something.

“What was that, Van?”

“I was just saying that I abhor violence of any kind.”

“Right.”

“The whole point of conflict resolution is to accomplish one’s objective without violence. Conflict resolution by means of violence is a contradiction in terms.”

“That’s true. Drink up, folks.”

Van Dorn is nodding over his drink. “Tom,” he says in his old, fine-eyed, musing way, “can you assure us that the pharmacological effect of these heavy ions is reversible.”

“I have every reason to believe it is.”

A final nod, as if the old scientific camaraderie had been reestablished between us.

“The bottom-line question, Tom.”

“Yes?”

“Knowing your respect as a physician for the Hippocratic oath, I put you on the spot and ask you if any harmful pharmacological effect can occur?”

“None that you would not want.”

“Done!” he says in his old “Buck” Van Dorn style, and drains the glass as if he were chugalugging beer back in the fraternity house.

Mrs. Brunette drinks and helps Mr. Brunette to drink, holding his glass.

Mrs. Cheney, still twisting the towel on Coach’s head, leans toward me, her pleasant face gone solemn.

“Mrs. Cheney, you can let go now,” I tell her. “He won’t bleed.” She accepts the glass from Vergil. Coach keeps his head on her breast.

“Dr. More, you and I have been friends for many a year, haven’t we?”

“Yes, we have, Mrs. Cheney.”

“You’re a fine doctor and a fine man.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Cheney.”

“I knew your first wife and your second wife, and both of them were just as nice as they could be. Lovely people. Many’s the night when you trusted me with your children of both ladies and yourself.”

“That’s true.”