Walker Percy - Love in the Ruins - The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World

“For Christ’s sake.”

“What say, Doc?” Victor, who is slightly deaf, cups an ear.

“You kill me.”

“How’s that?”

“Here’re you complaining about me and acting like you and Leroy Ledbetter are sharing the good life. Hell, Leroy Ledbetter, your fellow Baptist, wants no part of you. And one reason you’re living in this pigpen is that Leroy is on the council and has turned down housing five times.”

“That’s the truth!” says Victor, laughing. “And it’s pitiful.”

“You think it’s funny?”

My only firm conclusion after twenty years of psychiatry: nothing is crazier than life. Here is a Baptist deacon telling me, a Catholic, to relax and enjoy festivals. Here’s a black Southerner making common cause — against me! — with a white Southerner who wouldn’t give him the time of day.

That’s nothing. Once I was commiserating with a patient, an old man, a Jewish refugee from the Nazis — he’d got out with his skin but lost his family to Auschwitz — so I said something conventional against the Germans. The old fellow bristled like a Prussian and put me down hard and spoke of the superiority of German universities, German science, German music, German philosophy. My God, do you suppose the German Jews would have gone along with Hitler if he had let them? Nothing is quite like it’s cracked up to be. And nobody is crazier than people.

“It would be funny if it wasn’t so pitiful,” says Victor. He looks at me from the corner of his eye. Something has occurred to him. “Do you think you could speak to Mr. Leroy?”

“About what?”

“About — Never mind. It’s too late.”

“Victor, what in the hell is going on?”

He is shaking his head. “It’s so pitiful. You would think people with that much in common would want to save what they have.”

“Are you talking about you and Leroy?”

“Now everything’s got to go and everybody loses.”

I rise unsteadily. “Everybody?”

Victor jumps up, takes my arm. “Not you, Doc. All you got to do is move in with your mama. She’ll do for you.”

Victor takes me as far as the Little Napoleon. There I make a mistake, a small one with small consequences but a mistake nevertheless, which I’d ordinarily not have made. But it has been a strange day. Hanging on to Victor, I did not let him go until we were inside. I should have either dismissed him outside or held on to him longer. As it was, letting go Victor when the bar was within reach, I let go a second too early, so that Leroy Ledbetter, turning toward me in the same second, did not see me let go but saw Victor just beside me and so registered a violation. Not even that: a borderline violation because Victor was not even at the bar but still a step away. What with his white attendant’s clothes and if he had been a step closer to me, it would have been clear that he was attending me in some capacity or other. A step or two in the other direction and he’d have been past the end of the bar and in the loading traffic where Negroes often pass carrying sacks of oysters, Cokes, and such. As it was, he seemed to be standing, if not at the bar, then one step too close and Leroy, turning, saw him in the split second before Victor started to leave, Victor in the act of backing up when Leroy said as his eyes went past him, said not even quite to Victor, “The window’s there,” nodding toward the service window opening into the alley; even then giving Victor the benefit of the doubt and not even allowing the possibility that Victor was coming to the bar for a drink, but the possibility only that he had come to buy his flat pint of muscatel and for some reason had not known or had forgotten about the service window. In the same second that he speaks, Leroy knows better, for in that second Victor steps back and turns toward me and I can see that Leroy sees that Victor is with me, sees it even before I can say, too late, “Thank you, Victor, for helping me up the hill,” and signifies his error by a pass of his rag across the bar, a ritual glance past Victor at the storm cloud above the saloon door, a swinging back of his eyes past Victor and a saying in Victor’s direction, “Looks like we going to get it yet,” said almost to Victor but not quite because it had not been quite a violation so did not quite warrant a correction thereof. Victor nods, not quite acknowledging because total acknowledgment is not called for, withholding perhaps 20 percent acknowledgment (2 percent too much?). He leaves by the side door.

A near breach, an insignificant incident. A stranger observing the incident would not have been aware that anything had happened at all, much less that in the space of two seconds there had occurred a three-cornered transaction entailing an assignment of zones, a near infraction of zoning, a calling attention to the infraction, a triple simultaneous perception of the mistake, a correction thereof, and an acknowledgment of that — a minor breach with no consequences other than these: an artery beats for a second in Leroy’s temple, there is a stiffness about Victor’s back as he leaves, and there comes in my throat a metallic taste.

It is not even worth mentioning even though Victor withholds perhaps 2 percent of the acknowledgment that was due and his back is 2 percent stiffer than it might be.

“What’s wrong with you, Tom?”

“I’m all right now. It was hot in the Hollow. I got dizzy.”

He gives me my toddy. I peel an egg.

“Is that your lunch? No wonder you fainted. And you a doctor.”

I look at the mirror. Behind the bar towers a mahogany piece, a miniature cathedral, an altarpiece, an intricate business of shelves for bottles, cupboards, stained-glass windows, and a huge mirror whose silvering is blighted with an advancing pox, clusters of vacuoles, expanding naughts. Most of the customers of the Little Napoleon have long since removed to the lounges of the suburbs, the nifty refrigerated windowless sealed-up Muzaked hideaways, leaving stranded here a small band of regulars and old-timers, some of whom have sat here in the same peaceable gloom open to the same twilight over the same swinging doors that swung their way straight through Prohibition and saw Kingfish Huey P. Long promise to make every man a king on the courthouse lawn across the street. Next door Gone with the Wind had its final run at the old Majestic Theater.

The vines are sprouting here in earnest. A huge wisteria with a tree-size trunk holds the Little Napoleon like a rock in a root. The building strains and creaks in its grip.

The storm is closer, the sun gone, and it is darker than dusk. The martins are skimming in from the swamp, sliding down the dark glassy sky like flecks of soot. Soon the bullbats will be thrumming.

Leroy Ledbetter stands by companionably. Like me he is seventh-generation Anglo-Saxon American, but unlike me he is Protestant, countrified, sweet-natured. He’s the sort of fellow, don’t you know, who if you run in a ditch or have a flat tire shows up to help you.

We were partners and owners of the old Paradise Bowling Lanes until the riot five years ago. In fact, the riot started when Leroy wouldn’t let a bushy-haired Bantu couple from Tougaloo College have an alley. I wasn’t there at the time. When Leroy told me about it later, an artery beat at his temple and the same metallic taste came in my throat. If I had been there…. But on the other hand, was I glad that I had not been there?

“Lucky I had my learner ready,” Leroy told me.

“Your learner?” Then I saw his forearm flex and his big fist clench. “You mean you—”

“The only way to learn them is upside the head.”

“You mean you—?” The taste in my mouth was like brass.

Where did the terror come from? Not from the violence; violence gives release from terror. Not from Leroy’s wrongness, for if he were altogether wrong, an evil man, the matter would be simple and no cause for terror. No, it came from Leroy’s goodness, that he is a decent, sweet-natured man who would help you if you needed help, go out of his way and bind up a stranger’s wounds. No, the terror comes from the goodness and what lies beneath, some fault in the soul’s terrain so deep that all is well on top, evil grins like good, but something shears and tears deep down and the very ground stirs beneath one’s feet.