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

“I know.”

“What are we going to do?” asks Ellen, wringing her hands. “Just look.”

Below us the pit writhes like a den of vipers. Now and then an arm is raised, fist clenched, to fall in a blow. Bare legs are upended.

“Listen.” I whisper in Ellen’s ear. “While I am talking to Art, take the rest of the lapsometers in the carton and put them in your car. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“O.K., Chief. But are you leaving?”

“I have to collect all the loose ones.”

“I’m not leaving without you!”

“You son of a bitch,” I tell Art. “What did you pull this stunt for?”

“I am not a son of a bitch,” says Art, looking puzzled. “Take it easy, Doc.” As usual he has no sense of distance, comes too close, and blows Sen-Sen in my face.

“I told you specifically to leave my lapsometers alone.”

“How are we going to run a pilot on your hardware without using your hardware?”

“Pilot! Is this what you call a pilot?”

“Doc, we can’t go national until we test the interactions in a pilot. That’s boilerplate, Doc.”

“Boilerplate my ass. Goddamn it don’t you know the dangers of what you’re doing? We’re sitting on a dome of Heavy Salt, the President is coming tomorrow, and what do you do? Turn loose my lapsometers cranked up to ten plus.”

“Doc, does this look political to you?” He nods at the lovers and fist-fighters. “This is not political. It is a test of your hypotheses about vagal rage and abstract lust as you of all people should know. And as for the dangers of a chain reaction, there’s no Heavy Salt within three miles of here.”

“We’re through, Art. I’m canceling the contract.”

“You’ll be right as rain tomorrow, Doc. Just remember: music, love, and the dream of summer.”

Max Gottlieb and Ellen hold me tight, one at each elbow.

“Let’s go home, fella,” says Max. “You’ve been great.”

“Wait a minute. I’m needed here, Max.”

“He’s right, Chief. You’re worn out.”

“I’m not leaving until I collect all the lapsometers.”

“I’ll get them for you,” says Max. “You go home and get a good night’s sleep. Or better still, go back to A-4.”

“Damn it, Max, don’t you realize what’s happening?”

“I’m afraid I do. Your device has triggered a mass hysteria. Like the St. Vitus’s dance in the Middle Ages. These are strange times.”

“Listen to me, Max. Number one, my lapsometer works. You saw it. Number two, it has fallen into the wrong hands. Number three, the effect here is mainly erotic but it could just as easily have been political. Number four, the President and Vice-President will be in this area tomorrow. Number five, there are plans to kidnap you and hold you prisoner in the Honey Island wilderness. Number six, we’re sitting on the biggest Heavy Salt dome in North America.”

“Oh boy,” says Max to Ellen.

Ellen frowns. She is loyal to me.

“I believe you, Chief. But if what you say is true, you’re going to need all your strength tomorrow.”

“That’s true. But I feel fine right now.” How lovely you are, Ellen. Perspiration glitters like diamonds in the down of her short upper lip.

“What’s that, Chief?” asks Ellen quickly. Did I say it aloud? She blushes and tugs at my arm. “Come on now!” At the same time I feel a pinprick in my other arm. Max has given me a shot through my coat sleeve.

“You’re going to get a good night’s sleep. Ellen will take you home. I’ll drop in on you tomorrow morning.” He holds my hand affectionately. I see him look at the scars on my wrist. “Take care of yourself now.”

“I feel fine, Max.” I do. I can still hear music.

“Let’s go out through the tunnel, Chief. My car is in the back.”

I say goodbye to the Director, but he is engrossed with a young medical student. It is Carruthers Calhoun, scion of an old-line Southern family, a handsome peach-faced lad.

“Wasn’t it Socrates,” the Director is saying, a friendly arm flung across the boy’s shoulders, “who said: A fair woman is a lovely thing, truth lovelier still, but a fair youth is the fairest of all?”

“No sir,” replies Carruthers, who graduated from Sewanee with a classical education. “That was Juvenal and he didn’t quite say that.”

ONLY THREE HOURS’ SLEEP AFTER MY NIGHT CALL TO THE love couple with the diarrheic infant in the swamp.

A cold shower and a breakfast of warm Tang-vodka-duck-eggs-Tabasco and I’m back to normal, which is to say tolerably depressed and terrified.

At the first flicker of morning terror I remember the modified lapsometer and fetching it from my bag, an odd-looking thing with its snout-like attachment, give myself a light brain massage.

Terror gone! Instantly exhilarated! The rip and race of violins. By no means drunk, clairvoyant rather, prescient, musical, at once abstracted, seeing things according to their essences, and at the same time poised for the day’s adventure in the wide world, I achieve a noble evacuation and go forth, large bowel clear as a bell. Clay lies still but blood’s a rover.

A hot still gold-green Fourth of July. Not a breath stirs. No squirrels scrabble in the dogwoods, no jaybirds fret in the sycamores.

Cutting now through the “new” 18, which is really the old since the construction of the Cypress Garden 36. Hm. Something is amiss. The Fourth of July and not a soul on the links. What with the Pro-Am using Cypress Garden, the “new” 18 ought to be jammed!

Weeds sprout in the fairways. Blackberries flourish in the rough. Rain shelters are green leafy caves.

Someone is following me. Clink-clink. I stop and listen. Not a sound. Start and there it is again: clink-clink, clink-clink , the sound a caddy makes when he’s humping it off the tee to get down to the dogleg in time for the drive, hand held over the clubs to keep them quiet but one or two blades slap together clink-clink.

But there’s no one in sight.

Now comes the sound of — firecrackers? Coming from the direction of the school.

There is a roaring and crackling in the dogleg of number 5. Rounding the salient of woods and all of a sudden knowing what it is before I see it, I see it: the Bledsoe Spanish-mission house burning from the inside. The fire is a cheerful uproarious blaze going like sixty at every window, twenty windows and twenty roaring hearths, fat pine joists popping sociably and not a soul in sight No fire department, no spectators, nothing but the bustling commerce of flames in the still sunlight.

I watch from the green cave of a shelter. Yonder in the streaked stucco house dwelled the childless Bledsoes for thirty years while golf balls caromed off the walls, broke the windows and rooftiles, ricocheted around the patio.

The house roars and crackles busily in the silence. Flames lick out the iron grills and up the blackened stucco.

Into these very woods came I as a boy while the house was a-building, picked up triangles of new copper flashing, scraps of aluminum, freshly sawn blocks of two-by-fours — man’s excellent geometries wrought from God’s somewhat lumpish handiwork. Here amid the interesting carpenter’s litter, I caressed the glossy copper, smelled the heart pine, thought impure thoughts and defiled myself in the skeletal bathroom above the stuffed stumps of plumbing, a thirteen-year-old’s lonesome leaping love on a still summer afternoon.

My chest is buzzing. Ach, a heart attack for sure! Clutching at my shirt, I shrink into the corner. For sure it is calcium dislodged and rattling like dice in my heart’s pitiful artery. Poor Thomas! Dead at forty-five of a coronary! Not at all unusual either, especially in Knothead circles here in Paradise: many a good Christian and loving father, family man, and churchgoer has kicked off in his thirties. A vice clamps under my sternum and with it comes belated contrition. God, don’t let me die. I haven’t lived, and there’s the summer ahead and music and science and girls — No. No girls! No more lewd thoughts! No more lusting after my neighbors’ wives and daughters! No hankering after strange women! No more humbug! No more great vaulting lewd daytime longings, no whispering into pretty ears, no more assignations in closets, no more friendly bumping of nurses from behind, no more night adventures in bunkers and sand traps, no more inviting Texas girls out into the gloaming: “I am Thomas More. You are lovely and I love you. I have a heart full of love. Could we go out into the gloaming?” No more.