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

Giggles. I wait. Silence. Throats are cleared. Could I be mistaken?

Again the Director stirs restlessly. Our crude theatrics don’t bother him as much as my silence.

“Doctor,” he begins patiently and coughs his fruity cough. “Please get on with it.”

Helga uncrosses her thighs.

“Doctor, I really think that unless—” says the Director, eyes bulging with alarm.

“I see Christmas,” says Buddy, peering up Helga’s dress.

“What’s that?” asks the Director, leaning forward.

“I see Christmas.”

“What did he say?” the Director asks Max, cupping an ear.

Max shrugs.

“Nurse!” cries the Director sternly. “This is too much. Remove the patient. What’s wrong with that woman?” he asks Max, for now Winnie Gunn is standing transfixed at the tunnel entrance. Try as she might, she can’t tear her eyes from Buddy Brown, who has swung around to face her.

“Nothing wrong with Winnie,” Buddy tells me, winking and giving me an elbow in the ribs. “You know what they say about the great white whale: thar she blows, but not the first night out.”

“Eh?” says the Director.

“Not so loud,” I tell Buddy uneasily. It is not clear how much the students, who are gaping and shushing each other, can hear.

But Buddy pays no attention. He flexes his elbow in a vulgar Cajun gesture, forearm straight up. “ Voilà! Eh, Winnie?”

Uproar among the students. The doctors blink at each other. Only Art Immelmann sees nothing amiss. Somehow, even though I don’t watch him, his every movement makes itself known to me. He hawks and swallows and adjusts his uncomfortable right-dressed pants leg. Now he steps through the swinging doors and drags in a carton. My lapsometers! How did he get hold of them?

“Look at the leg on that woman,” says Buddy and makes another crude Cajun gesture, common on the bayous. “ Ça va! What say, old coonass?”

“It’s all right, Buddy,” I tell him.

“I think,” says the Director, rising and looking at his watch, “that we will call it a day—”

“Sir—” I say, either so loudly or so urgently that everyone falls silent. “May I proceed with the case?”

“If only you would, Doctor!” cries the Director fervently, snatching handkerchiefs from several pockets.

The students laugh and settle back. They are telling themselves they must have heard wrong.

“Let ’em have it, little brother!” Buddy nods encouragement to me and takes a stool. “Go!”

Winnie Gunn stands stolidly behind the wheelchair, eyes rolled up.

Mr. Ives sits still as still, yet somehow twittering in his stillness. His monkey eyes snap. There is something boyish and quick about his narrow face. He is like one of those young-old engineers at Boeing who at seventy wear bow ties and tinker in their workshops.

“It is quite true that Mr. Ives has not walked or talked for a month,” I say loudly enough to be heard by Art Immelmann in the back row. “It is also true that he is afflicted by some of the pathologies listed by Dr. Brown. Dr. Brown is quite right about the atherosclerosis.”

“You old fucker,” says Buddy affectionately, giving me the Cajun arm. “Give ’em hell.”

“I deny, however, that he is paralyzed or aphasic. His pineal selfhood, as well as other cerebral centers, is intact.”

“Spare us the metaphysics, Doctor,” says the Director bluntly. “The best proof that a man can talk is hearing him talk. And walk.”

“Yes sir,” I say, nodding in admiration of the Director’s toughness. A tough old party he is, wasted by disease to his essential fiber, a coat upon a stick. “Sir, I can assure you that speech and locomotion are no problem here. What is interesting is the structure of his selfhood as it relates both to his fellow seniors in the Tampa settlement and to the scientists here.”

“No metaphysics!” says the Director, coughing. “I’m a simple man. Show me.”

“Speech! Speech!” cry the students.

I shrug. Mr. Ives could, if he wanted, have spoken without further ado. But, to make sure, I administer a light Chloride dampening to his red nucleus (whence his rage) and a moderate Sodium massage to his speech area in the prefrontal gyrus.

Mr. Ives blinks, takes out a toothpick, and begins to suck it.

“Mr. Ives, what was your occupation before you retired?”

“You know that as well as, I do, Dr. More,” says Mr. Ives, cocking his lively monkey’s head. He’s got a deep drawling voice!

“I know, but tell them.”

“I was controller at Hartford Travelers Insurance. We lived in Connecticut forty years until my wife, Myrtle, God rest her soul, died. I got restless.”

“Mr. Ives, what were you digging for down there at the Golden Years Center in Tampa?”

“You know what I was digging for.”

“The fountain of youth?”

“That’s right.”

“Did you find it?”

“I did.”

“You see!” cries Buddy, whose ionization is wearing off. He blinks and shakes himself like a spaniel.

“The fountain of youth,” says the Director in his old sour-civil style. “Why didn’t you drink some? Or, better still, bring some back with you?”

The students, spiritual pimps that they are, reassured that things are back on the track and that laughter is in order, laugh.

“Mr. Ives,” I say when the laughing subsides, “what was your avocation while you lived in Hartford?”

“Linguistics.”

“And what were you especially interested in?”

Mr. Ives blows out his cheeks. “I’ve had the hunch for the last twenty years that I could decipher the Ocala frieze.”

“What is the Ocala frieze?”

“A ceramic, an artifact discovered in the Yale dig and belonging to the proto-Creek culture. It has a row of glyphs so far undecipherable.”

“Go on.”

“I found a proto-Creek dictionary compiled by a Fray Bartolomeo who was with the original Narvaez expedition.”

“How did you happen to find it?”

“Browsing through the Franciscan files in Salamanca.”

“What were you doing there?”

“Looking for the dictionary.”

“Did that decipher the glyphs?”

“No, but it gave me the Spanish for certain key proto-Creek words.”

“But that wasn’t enough.”

“No.”

“What else did you need?”

“One or two direct pairings of glyphs and Spanish words might break the cipher.”

“Did you find such a pairing?”

“Yes.”

“In the fountain of youth?”

Mr. Ives cackles and stomps his feet on the treadles of the wheelchair. “Sure!”

“There is such a fountain?”

“Oh sure. Not the fountain of youth and not de Leon, but there was a fountain, or at least a big spring, where Narvaez parleyed with Osceononta. It was known to be in the general area of the Oneco limestone springs near Tampa. Why else would I hang around that nuthouse?”

“So you had a hunch?”

“I knew there had been a spring there, and a mound that had been bulldozed. I was poking around. It wasn’t the first time. I’ve been digging around there off and on for years.”

“Did you find anything?”

“Enough.”

“Enough for what?”

“To crack the cipher.”

“You deciphered the frieze?”

“Oh sure. Look in next month’s Annals.”

“What did you find?”

“This.” Mr. Ives hunches over and sticks his hand in his pocket.

“Could you bring it here?”

Lurching out of his chair, he comes weaving across The Pit like a jake-legged sailor and drops it in my hand, a crude coin that looks like a ten-dollar gold piece melted past its circumference.

“What is it?” I offer to help him back to his chair but he waves me off and goes weaving back. The students cheer.