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

“You crazy fool! Get off me! You’re killing me!”

“Shut up. Somebody is trying to kill us.”

Moira becomes quiet and small and hot, like a small boy at the bottom of pile-on. Craning up, I can see the hole in the lip of the cooler basin but not through the top hole. The second shot did not ricochet. It is possible to calculate that the shot came into the arcade at an angle and from a higher place. No doubt from a balcony room across the pool. Perhaps directly opposite the room where Ellen is.

My feet feel exposed, as if they were sticking off the end of a bed. My arms tremble from the effort of keeping my weight off Moira.

The third shot does not come.

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” I tell her, still covering her. “I think we can squeeze around behind the ice-maker and come out beyond the line of fire. You go first.”

Moira nods, dumb, and begins to tremble. She has just realized what has happened.

“Now!”

I follow her. We wait between Coke machine and ice-maker.

“Now!”

We break for the far end of the arcade and the rear of the motel.

Out to the weedy easement where my water hose runs from the Esso station. The elderberry is shoulder high. We keep low and follow the hose. It turns up the wall to the bathroom window.

It is an easy climb up the panel of simulated wrought-iron and fairly safe behind the huge Esso oval.

“I’ll go up first,” I tell Moira, “take a look around and signal you.”

I climb in the window and run for my revolver in the closet without even looking at Ellen, who is shouting something from the bed.

“Bolt the door, Ellen.”

Back to the bathroom to cover Moira, who is looking straight up from the elderberries, mouth open. I beckon her up.

Turn off the air-conditioner.

We three sit on the floor of the dressing room. No sound outside. Moira begins to whisper to Ellen, telling her what happened. I am thinking. Already it is hotter.

“He’s going to kill us all,” says Ellen presently. She sits cross-legged like a campfire girl, tugs her skirt over her knees. “It must be a madman.”

“A very very sick person,” says Moira, frowning.

They’re wrong. It’s worse, I’m thinking. It’s probably a Bantu from the swamp, out to kill me and take the girls. It comes over me: why, the son of a bitch is out to kill me and take the girls!

Presently the girls relax. I stand at the front window and watch the opposite balcony.

Does the curtain move?

But there is nothing to be seen, no rifle barrel.

Ellen is leafing through a directory of nationwide Howard Johnson motels. Moira is clicking her steely thumbnail against a fingernail.

Whup! Something about the revolver looks wrong. I spin the cylinder. Something is wrong. It’s not loaded. Heart sinks. What to do? Fetch my carbine. But that means leaving the girls. Then I’ll have to take the sniper with me.

I think of something.

“Where is your car parked, Ellen?”

“Beyond the restaurant.”

“Next to the fence?”

“Yes.”

“All right. Listen, girls. We can’t stay here like this — with him out there. Not for days or weeks.”

“Weeks!” cries Ellen. “What do you mean?’

“Here’s what we’re going to do. Who can shoot a pistol?”

“Not me,” says Moira.

Ellen takes the empty revolver. It’ll make them feel better.

“It’s cocked and off safety. Shoot anybody who tries to get in. If it’s me, I’ll whistle like a towhee. Like this. Now lock the bathroom window behind me. I’ll have to undo the hose.”

“What do you have in mind, Chief?” asks Ellen, all business. She’s my girl Friday again. She’s also one up on Moira.

“I’m going to get my carbine. I also have to check on my mother. Truthfully I don’t think anybody’s going to bother you here. I’m going to make a lot of noise just in case somebody’s still hanging around, and I think he’ll follow me. He’s been following me for days. Ellen, let’s check the Anser-Phones. Well stay in touch. See what you can find out about what’s going on. Sorry about the air-conditioner, but I think it’s going to rain.”

The girls look solemn. I take a drink of Early Times and fill my flask.

A simple matter to follow the weedy easement past the ice-cream restaurant to Ellen’s neat little Toyota electric parked between a rusted hulk of a Cadillac and a broken-back vine-clad Pontiac. No bullet holes in the windows.

Head out straight across the plaza making as big a show as possible, stomping the carriage bell and zigzagging the tiller — you sit sideways and work a tiller and scud along like a catboat. Ellen’s car is both Japanese and Presbyterian, thrifty, tidy, efficient, chaste. As a matter of fact, Ellen was born in Japan of Georgia Presbyterian missionaries.

No one follows. Then double back, circle old Saint Michael’s, bang the Bermuda bell — and head out for the pines.

Someone should follow me.

Now wait at the fork behind the bicycle shed where the kids parked their bikes and caught the school bus. One road winds up the ridge, the other along the links to the clubhouse. It is beginning to rain a little. Big dusty drops splash on the windshield.

Here he comes.

Here comes something anyhow. Rubber treads hum on the wet asphalt. He pauses at the fork. A pang: did I leave tracks? No. He goes past slowly, taking the country-club road, a big Cushman golf cart clumsily armored with scraps of sheet-iron wired to the body and tied under the surrey fringe. The driver can’t be seen. It noses along the links like a beetle and disappears in the pines.

There is no one in sight except a picaninny scraping up soybean meal on number 8 green.

Why not take the ridge road and drive straight to my house?

I do it, meeting nobody, enter at the service gate and dive out of sight under a great clump of azaleas. Then up through the plantation of sumac that used to be the lawn, to the lower “woods” door. It is the rear lower-level door to the new wing Doris added after ten years of married life had canceled the old.

It occurs to me that I have not entered the house through this door since Doris left. I squeeze past the door jammed by wistaria. It is like entering a strange house.

The green gloom inside smells of old hammocks and ping-pong nets. Here is the “hunt” room, Doris’s idea, fitted out with gun cabinet, copper sink, bar, freezer, billiard table, life-size stereo-V, easy chairs, Audubon prints. Doris envisioned me coming here after epic hunts with hale hunting companions, eviscerating the bloody little carcasses of birds in the sink, pouring sixteen-year-old bourbon in the heavy Abercrombie field-and-stream glasses and settling down with my pipe and friends and my pointer bitch for a long winter evening of man talk and football-watching. Of course I never came here, never owned a pointer bitch, had no use for friends, and instead of hunting took to hanging around Paradise Bowling Lanes and drinking Dixie beer with my partner, Leroy Ledbetter.

The carbine is still in the cabinet. But before leaving I’d better go topside and check the terrain. At the top of a spiral stair is Doris’s room, a kind of gazebo attached to the house at one of its eight sides. An airy confection of spidery white iron, a fretwork of ice cream, it floats like a tree house in the whispering crowns of the longleaf pines. A sun-ray breaks through a rift of cloud and sheds a queer gold light that catches the raindrops on the screen.

Here sat Doris with Alistair and his friend Martyn whom, I confess, I liked to hear Alistair address not as he did, with the swallowed n, Mart’n , but with the decent British aspirate Mar-tyn . Even liked hearing him address me with his tidy rounded o , not as we would say, Täm, but T?m: “I say, T?m, what about mixing me one of your absolutely smashing gin fizzes? There’s a good chap?” Where’s a good chap? I would ask but liked his English nevertheless, mine having got loosed, broadened, slurred over, somewhere along the banks of the Ohio or back in the bourbon hills of Kentucky, and so would fix gin fizzes for him and Martyn.