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

Hit the starter button for a second just for the feel of it. Urr , it goes, the very sound of an old Dodge starting up on a winter morning.

Get ready then. Resisting an impulse to cross myself, I press the button.

Urr-urr-urr and then BRRRRRROOM.

On goes the twelve-cylinder motor, God bless General Motors.

On goes the light.

On goes the air-conditioner compressor and blower.

On goes the carillon—

— a shriek of sound. The carillon resumes in the middle of the phrase of O Little Town of Bethlehem it left off five years ago on Christmas Eve:

… how still I see thee lie.

I find myself running around the office with Saint Michael’s sword, heart thumping wildly. The sound and the lights are panicking. The sound is an alarm, up go the lights and here’s the burglar, me, caught in the act. The thing to do is get out of here, I tell myself, loping around the Alps. The hot air is moving out.

Thinking now: do this, pocket the screws, hop into the intake vent and pull the grill into place after me. If they see no screws, they won’t notice.

It’s tight in here, but a few feet along and I’m in a cloaca of ducts converging from the church. The air, thundering toward the 100-ton Frigiking (I was on the Building Committee), is already cooler.

Suddenly it comes over me that I am, for the moment, completely safe. Why not lie down in this dark cool place, an alpine pass howling with mountain gales, and take a little nap? Indulgeas locum refrigerii : refrigeration must be one of the attributes of heaven.

Now forty or fifty feet along and able to stand up. A cave of winds, black as the womb, but I’m against the unit, a great purring beast encased in metal filter mesh.

Press the panel to my right. Here I calculate is the garage. Metal bends and a chink of light opens. Daylight, moreover. At least the garage door is open. Try to see something. Cannot. Try to hear something. Nothing but the roar of the blower and compressor and soaring above, the piercing obligato of White Christmas :

May your days be merry and bright …

Feel along the edge of the panel. It is fastened by sheet-metal screws, one every three or four inches and screwed in from the outside. Discard Saint Michael’s sword. Try pushing one corner loose. No good.

Nothing for it then but to lie down, shoulders braced against the opposite panel (this panel against concrete), wait for the final major chord of White Christmas , and kick with both feet.

Out she goes with a heart-stopping clatter, metal against concrete, metal against car metal — now I know they’ll find me — and out I come feet-first, born again, ejected into the hot bright perilous world — tumbling somehow forward until I am wedged between the inner wall and the bumper of Monsignor Schleifkopf’s burnt-out Buick, a hulk of rusted metal and moldering upholstery. Mushrooms flourish in the channel between bumper and grill. A fern sprouts upside down from the crankcase.

The music, I tell myself, comes from the silo at the other end of the church and nobody will come here.

Wait and watch a minute. I have a cockroach’s view under the Buick.

The broad three-car garage opens onto the plaza. Still not a soul in sight! How can this be with such a racket? A very loud noise needs tending to. Someone should do something about it and no doubt will. An unattended din is a fearsome thing.

The July sun blazes, the tar in the plaza bubbles, the green growth atop the storefronts shimmers and there is sky under it like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

The Drummer Boy,

rumpa-pum-pum,

thunders its artillery and echoes from the giant screen of the Joy Drive-In.

The questions are: Is there a guard posted at the rear of the rectory? If so, did he and the guard at the front of the rectory head for the silo when the sound commenced? My hope is that the Bantus do not know where the control panel is and will assume that the source of the mischief is in the church.

Creeping now past the Buick, to the far wall and along it to the slight jut that frames the door now levered up along the ceiling. Slowly work around jut — still no one in the entire plaza — and around the outside corner of the garage: yes, here is the concrete screen ending flush with the garage door and—

— Jerk back almost before I see him, shutting my eyes against him in a magic gesture to make me invisible to him, jerking back around the corner and clear around the jut into the garage, and there in the dark corner I consult my retina’s image of him: the same Bantu guard in the same dirty kwunghali —then he must have heard the clatter of my exit — six feet away and back turned, face in profile and Sten gun pointed at the four speakers: they’re the villains!

It is strange but, belatedly, indeed only now as I consult the image of him, I recognize him. It is Ely, who was bag-boy at the A & P for forty years. What a transformation! He’s turned into a tough hombre. Forty years a favorite at the A & P, toting bags to cars for housewives, saluting the tips, now he looks as if he’d just as soon stitch me with Sten gun as not.

I need his gun, I need him out of the way, so I need a weapon of my own. The Buick’s trunk is open, lock pried, tire swiped. I crane over the tail fin looking for a lug wrench. No lug wrench, nothing but Monsignor Schleifkopf’s moldering golf bag grown up in fennel and bladderwort, pockets ripped, clubs all gone, no, all but one, an ancient putter passed over perhaps five years ago for its age and decrepitude even then.

It is possible to reach the club without exposing myself past the jut.

Round yon virgin mother and child …

The putter has a lead blade and a hickory handle. Test it for heft.

Inch around ell.

He’s closer, within range. He’s still looking back toward the silo. It is a simple matter, surely, to take one step and hit him, with the heel of the putter taking care not to kill him. Then step.

Sorry, Ely — and aim for the occiput, the hardest skull plate, a glancing blow at that. But I take too much care and he’s moved suddenly, closer, and it’s a bad blow and the shaft shudders like shanking a ball. Staggering less from hurt than from surprise and outrage, he’s already swinging around toward me and I see the Sten muzzle swinging as slowly as a ship’s boom and I’m shrinking into the inner corner of the jut and touching the steel of the door mechanism as if we were playing a game and it were base: safe! You can’t shoot me now! But he is going to shoot me, I can see. It’s a matter of getting the gun around.

We are looking at each other. I notice that he is going bald the way some Negroes go bald, his high studious umber forehead shading off into hair of the same color, and that he has a mustache like Duke Ellington of old with a carefully tended gap in the middle. We are looking at each other, I knowing him and he me and he even signifying as much but his only care is getting the Sten around, his face all screwed up with the effort, and I see all of a sudden that all he’s thinking about is whether he’s going to do it right, that he’s exactly like a middle-aged British home guard who patrols Brighton beach against a possible Nazi and sure enough here comes a Nazi. My God, he’s thinking, IT has happened! Here’s the real thing! Here’s a Nazi in the flesh! Will I do right? Why is everything moving in slow motion?

He is shooting, too soon! — and I am flinching and touching base, no fair! The steel is ringing like a hammer on boilerplate. He’s got me. But as I open my eyes, he’s swinging away. How did he miss me or did he or, better, still, how did bullets hit the outside of the steel I-beam at my elbow?