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

“It’s a do-it-yourself medal the Spaniards struck on the spot for the occasion of the Narvaez-Osceononta parley. What they did was take one of their own medals showing a salamander on one side and scratch a proto-Creek glyph on the reverse. My hypothesis was that the glyph meant fish. It worked.”

I hand it to the Director, who holds it up. The students cheer again.

Mr. Ives watches nervously. “Be careful. There ain’t but one of them.”

The Director examines the medal intently.

“I’d just as soon have it back,” says Mr. Ives, who is afraid the Director is going to pass it around.

The latter hands it back to me. I give it to Mr. Ives.

“Mr. Ives,” says the Director. “Would you answer one question?”

“Sure.”

“Why did you behave so badly toward the other retirees, hurling imprecations at folk who surely meant you no harm and”—coughing, snatching handkerchiefs—“defecating on, what was it? Flirtation Walk?”

“Doctor,” says Mr. Ives, hunkering down in his chair, monkey eyes glittering, “how would you like it if during the most critical time of your experiments with the Skinner box that won you the Nobel Prize, you had been pestered without letup by a bunch of chickenshit Ohioans? Let’s play shuffleboard, let’s play granddaddy golf, Guys and Gals à go-go. Let’s jump in our Airstream trailers and drive two hundred miles to Key West to meet more Ohioans and once we get there talk about — our Airstream trailers? Those fellows wouldn’t let me alone.”

“Is it fair to compare the work of science to the well-deserved recreational activities of retired people?”

“Sir, are you implying that what retired people do must necessarily be something less than the work of scientists? I mean is there any reason why a retired person should not go on his own way and refuse to be importuned by a bunch of chickenshit Ohioans?”

“Excuse me.” It is Stryker, rising slowly behind the Director. “I am not a chauvinistic man. But as a graduate of Western Reserve University and a native of Toledo, I must protest the repeated references to natives of the Buck-Eye state as a ‘bunch of chickenshit Ohioans.’”

“No offense, sir,” says Mr. Ives, waving him off. “I’ve known some splendid Ohioans, But you get a bunch of retired Ohioans together in Florida — you know, they get together on the west coast to get away from the Jews in Miami. But I’ll tell you the damn truth, to me it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other.”

“Just a minute,” says Max, rising to a stoop. “I see no reason for the ethnics—”

“Where are you from?” Stryker asks Mr. Ives.

“Originally? Tennessee.”

Stryker turns to Max. “I mean Jesus Christ, Tennessee.”

“Yeah, but that’s not the point, Ken,” says Max, still aggrieved. “I still see no reason for the ethnic reference.”

“But you have no objection to his referring to us as a bunch of chickenshit Ohioans?”

“You’re missing my point.”

“Let me quote you a figure!” cries Mr. Ives to Stryker, warming to it. “Did you know that there are three thousand and fifty-one TV and radio announcers in the South, of which twenty-two hundred are from Ohio, and that every last one of these twenty-two hundred says ‘the difference between he and I’? In twenty years we’ll all be talking like that.”

But Max and Stryker, still arguing, pay no attention.

The students are both engrossed and discomfited. They chew their lips, pick their noses, fiddle with pencils, glance now at me, now at Mr. Ives. Who can tell them who’s right? Students are a shaky dogmatic lot. And the “freer” they are, the more dogmatic. At heart they’re totalitarians: they want either total dogmatic freedom or total dogmatic unfreedom, and the one thing that makes them unhappy is something in between.

Art Immelmann looks restive too. He fidgets around on the top step, hands in pockets hiking the skirts of his “bi-swing” jacket, and won’t meet my eye. Now what the devil is he doing? He has removed one of the new lapsometers from the carton and is showing it to a student.

The doctors are unhappy too. The behaviorists, I know, don’t like Mr. Ives dabbling in science. The visiting proctologists don’t like anything they see. Colley Wilkes reverts to an old Alabama posture, hunched forward, hands clasped across wide-apart knees, pants hitched up black fuzzy shins. He clucks and shakes his head. “Man, what is all this?” I imagine him saying.

Moira has emerged from the shadows and taken charge of Mr. Ives’s chair from Winnie Gunn, who is out of sight in the tunnel. Moira smiles at met.

Buddy Brown is trying to pick up the pieces of his anger but he’s still out of it He can’t make out what happened to him.

Ellen Oglethorpe is torn between her disapproval of The Pit and what seems to be my triumph. But is it a triumph? She sits disgruntled, fingers shoved up into her cheek, shooting warm mothering glances at me, stern Calvinistic glances at the rowdy students.

Lola Rhoades is not paying strict attention. She moves to her own music, lips parted, hissing Brahms. Brahms, old Brahms! We’ll sing with you yet of a summer night.

Lola fills every inch of her seat with her splendid self, her arms use both arm rests, her noble knees press against the seat in front.

“Mr. Ives, a final question.”

The Director is speaking.

“Why have you neither walked a step nor uttered a word during the past month?”

Mr. Ives scratches his head and squints up the slope. “Well sir, I’ll tell you.” He lays on the cracker style a bit much to suit me. “There is only one kind of response to those who would control your responses by throwing you in a Skinner box.”

“And what would that be?” asks the Director sourly, knowing the answer.

“To refuse to respond at all.”

“I see.” The Director turns wearily to me. “Doctor, be good enough to give us your therapeutic recommendations and we’ll wind this up.”

“Yes sir. May I have a word with the patient?”

“By all means.”

“Mr. Ives, what are your plans? I mean, if you were free to make plans.”

“I intend to go home if I ever get out of this nuthouse.”

“Where is home?”

“Sherwood, Tennessee. It’s a village in a cove of the Cumberland Plateau. My farm is called Lost Cove.”

“What are you going to do there?”

“Write a book, look at the hills, live till I die.”

The students avert their eyes.

The Director looks at his watch. “Dr. More?”

“I recommend that Mr. Ives, instead of being sent to the Separation Center in Georgia, be released immediately and furnished with transportation to Sherwood, Tennessee.”

“To Tennessee!” cries a student.

“To Tennessee! To Tennessee!” chime in both right-benchers and left-benchers.

Applause breaks out I take some comfort in it even though students are a bad lot fickle as whores, and no professor should take pleasure in their approval.

“Hold it!” cries Buddy Brown, who has pulled himself together. He strides back and forth, sailing his white coat “This may be a good show-boating, but it’s sorry damn science. Dr. More has proved he’s a good hypnotist, but as for his metaphysical machine—”

“To Tennessee!” cry the students.

Art is busy as a bee.

Some of the students, I notice, have acquired lapsometers from Art, which they wear about their necks like cameras and aim and focus at each other. Now Art Immelmann bounds up the aisle for a fresh supply. Feverishly he hands them out, squatting beside a student to explain the settings and point out skull topography. A dark circle of sweat spreads under his armpit.

A student near the top turns to the girl next to him, lifts her ponytail and places the MOQUOL muzzle on her occiput.