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

“Now pour out the neck and fill it up from Doc’s bottle there.”

Collecting the carbine — the flask is empty — I stand in the doorway a minute, gathering my wits when: thunk ka-POW! Splinters fly from the jamb three inches from my nose. I sit down beside the Colonel.

“Why, that son of a bitch is trying to kill us all!” I say.

“Like I told you!” cries the Colonel.

“Unh unh tch,” says Elzee, not unhappily. “Those some tumble folks over there.”

“That fellow’s been after me for three days,” I mutter.

“It sho looks like it Doc,” murmurs Elzee sympathetically and hands the Colonel the spiked Seven-Up.

“What do you know about them, Elzee?” I ask, looking at him sharply. “Who all’s down there?”

“I don’t know, Doc, but they some mean niggers, don’t you worry about that,” says Elzee proudly.

“You mean there’s more than one?”

“Bound to be.”

“Or is there just one?”

“I just seen one pass by and I didn’t know him.”

I look at him in disgust “Elzee, you don’t know what in the hell you’re talking about.”

“That Elzee’s a good boy, though,” says the Colonel, who feels a lot better after taking a drink. “Aren’t you, boy?”

“Yes suh! I been knowing the Colonel here!”

“Oh shut up,” I say disgustedly to both. Between the two of them they’ve struck up an ancient spurious friendship and I’ve had enough of both. Let me out of here. I look at the clubhouse through the crack. The sun is out. The fairways sparkle with raindrops. Pennants fly over the pavilions set up for the Pro-Am tournament, but not a soul is in sight. The legend of the banner, Jesus Christ Greatest Pro of Them All, can’t quite be read from this distance.

There must be a way of getting behind the sniper.

A drainage ditch runs from the higher ground behind the stable toward the clubhouse road and angles off across two fairways before it enters the strip of woods along the bayou.

“Elzee, how deep is that dredge ditch over by the tree there?”

“That grudge ditch at least ten feet deep, Doc!” cries Elzee.

Shouldering my carbine, I bid farewell to the drunk Colonel and the obliging Elzee.

The ditch crosses the road under a cattle guard directly in front of the guardhouse. The danger here is thirty feet of open ground between the door and the ditch. There’s a better way. The north window of the guardhouse lets into a grove of live oaks whose thick foliage droops at the margins, the heavy limbs propped like elbows on the ground. The ditch skirts the far perimeter of the grove. Though the distance is a good hundred feet, at least ninety feet of it is covered by the grove.

Drop from the window, three long steps and dive for the grove. No shot. Once inside the oak, the going is good. The ground is still dry. It is like walking across a circus tent, the dusty twilight space sparkling with chinks of sunlight in the shifting canopy.

Elzee lied as usual. The ditch is no more than five feet deep, but it is dry and unchoked and walkable at a stoop. The worst part is near the cattle guard, where it rises to within two feet of the bars. Through the briars on hands and knees, cradling the carbine in my elbows Ecuador-style.

It takes ten minutes to reach the woods.

Once again in deep shade and walking is possible, through little bare swales and hollows studded with cypress knees, all the while angling gradually toward the water and diverging from the raised shell road. My objective is the marina some two hundred feet upstream from the clubhouse. My face, elbows, and knees are scratched, but I don’t feel bad.

Aiming for a point on the bayou where, as I recall, the bank curves out and anchors the downstream end of the docks.

A piece of luck: a gleam of white directly ahead. It is fresh white sand deposited under willows that run out in a towhead. Here is both cover and footing where I expected muck.

My knees make musical rubs in the sharp cool shearing sand, which is wet only on top. Not bad: I missed the end of the marina by no more than a few yards, hitting the lower docks at the fourth slip. This end of the dock is unroofed and low-lying, designed for skiffs and canoes. A reef of alligator grass runs in front of the slips. Mullet jump. Gold dust drifts on the black water. The bayou is brimming from a south wind. Upstream, yachts and power boats drift in their moorings. Sunlight shatters like quicksilver against their square sterns.

I lie at the edge of the willows and watch. Three hundred yards upstream, at a point, two men are pole-fishing in the outside curve. A peaceful sight — but here’s an oddity. Their caps are the long-billed mesh-crowned kind Midwesterners wear, pulled low, shadowing their faces; but they fish Negro-style from the bank out, poles flat Something wrong here: Michiganders don’t fish like that and Negroes don’t wear caps like that.

From their spot on the outer curve I calculate that they command two reaches of the bayou.

The next-but-last slip was a child’s pirogue of warped plywood. It is unlocked and dry. Next to it floats a locked canoe with a paddle.

Reach the pirogue, keeping lower than the alligator grass, and slip downstream lying on my back and paddling with both hands. Now past the reef of grass but under cover of the cyrilla and birch, which, caving and undermined, slant toward the water. A smell of roots and fresh-sloughed earth.

Once round the bend and out of sight of the fishermen, it is safe enough to sit up and paddle straight to the water entrance at the rear of the clubhouse — but now! Downstream now, at the next point, sit another brace of fishermen, faces shaded, poles flat out!

Did they see me? Hardly, because I’m already behind the Humble yacht tied the length of the club dock and standing off just enough, two feet to let me slip between. I can’t see the fantail above me where white-coated waiters would ordinarily be serving up frozen drinks to Humble bigshots. But today there is no sound but the slap of water. The yacht I reason, must be empty because the ports are closed and the air-conditioning is silent The cabins must be like ovens. Turning now into the dark boathouse that runs under the ground-level floor of the clubhouse.

Wedging the pirogue between the dock and the high water, I climb up, keeping an eye peeled for the fishermen. But the yacht blocks the entire boathouse. Anyhow, it is too dark to be seen under here.

Up the concrete service stairs, little used at best but which ascend, I know, into a kind of pantry between the kitchen and the men’s bar. (I was on the Building Committee.) If the sniper is still in the pro shop and the rest of the building is empty, it should be possible to slide open the panel at the rear of the bar where golfers in the pro shop are served, so saving the floors from their spikes (my sole contribution to the Building Committee).

Silence, the keeping of it, is the problem. The door at the top of the stairs is open a crack. I stand on the landing listening. The kitchen sounds empty. It roars with silence and ticks away like any kitchen in the morning. No motors run. A bird hops on the roof.

Will the door creak? Yes. But it can be opened silently, I discover, by warping it open, pushing high with one hand and pulling low with the other. The pantry is dark, darker than the Bayou Bar because the window in the swinging door makes a faint gray diamond. I look through, first from one side then the other, using the obliquest possible angle without touching the door. The bar is empty, but the far door into the main hall is open. The Portuguese fishnet droops from the ceiling, its glass floats gleaming like soap bubbles in the dim light.

Test the swinging door for creaking. No creaks up to ten inches. Ten inches is enough.