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

“Don’t tell me the sand is not burning!” cries Charley, dashing tears from his eyes with thumb and forefinger. “Look!”

Fortunately a brisk breeze from the north is blowing the smoke straight out to the swamp.

“Mercer, do you have a bullhorn in your car?” I ask the state trooper.

“What do you want with a bullhorn, Doc?” asks Mercer in the easy yet wary tone of an experienced policeman who is both at his ease in an emergency and prepared for any foolishness from spectators.

“I’ve got to warn these people about the smoke. Will you help me clear the area?”

“Why do you want to do that?” asks Mercer, inclining his head toward me carefully.

“Because it contains noxious sodium particles, and if the wind should shift, we could have a disaster on our hands.”

“We have oxygen in case of smoke inhalation, Doc.” Mercer looks at me sideways. He is wondering if I am drunk.

Stifling an impulse to recite the symptoms of Heavy Sodium fallout, I adopt the acceptable attitude of friend-of-policeman encountering policeman on duty and accordingly line up alongside him.

“Things pretty quiet this evening, Mercer?”

“More or less.”

“Any other ah emergencies?”

The trooper shrugs. “An incident at the Center. A little civil disorder at the club.”

“Haven’t the Bantus taken over Paradise?”

Mercer clears his throat and cocks his head in disapproval. There: I’ve done it again.

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“What would you say?”

“There have been reports of vandalism at the old clubhouse, some shots fired, and a house or two burned on the old 18 and out on the bluff.” Mercer’s cheek is set against me. Only our long acquaintanceship draws an answer from him. Do we really have to talk, Doc?

I sigh. “One more question, Mercer, and I’ll let you alone. Is there any news about the President and Vice-President?”

“News?” asks Mercer, cheek stiff.

“I mean, have there been any attempts on their— Have any incidents occurred?”

Mercer’s eyes slide around to me, past me, to the carbine, which I had forgotten. It is crossing his mind: what is nutty Doc doing with a gun and do you suppose he’s a big enough fool to — no. But didn’t Dr. Carl Weiss, another brilliant unstable doctor, shoot Huey Long?

“Not that I’ve heard. Been hunting rabbits, Doc?”

“Yes.”

“With a thirty ought six?”

“As a matter of fact, a sniper has been shooting at me the last couple of days.”

“Is that right!” says Mercer in a sociable singsong and swings his arms. “I’m telling you the truth unh unh unh!”—as if snipers were but one more trial of these troubled times.

Max Gottlieb, Ken Stryker, Colley Wilkes, and Mark Habeeb, all but Habeeb still wearing their white coats, stand leaning over the fence, their hands in their pockets. They have the holiday air of hard-working scientists who have been distracted from their researches and lean on windowsills to watch a street accident.

They gaze down at Charley Parker, who is still watering the bunker. Charley is conferring with a member of Cliff Barrow’s evangelistic team on one side and an Amvet on the other. The former wears a Jesus-Christ-Greatest-Pro armband, the latter an American flag stuck in his overseas cap.

The scientists greet me affably and go on with their talk. Not far behind them Moon Mullins and Dr. Billy Matthews stand silently. The sight of them makes me uneasy.

“The cross and the flag,” Ken Stryker is saying.

Colley nods. “A nice example of core values and symbol systems coming to the aid of economics.”

“The most potent appraisive signs in our semiotic,” says Dr. Mark Habeeb.

Colley asks him: “Do you know Ted’s work in sign reversal in Gorilla gorilla malignans ? You take a killer ape who responds aggressively to the purple rump patch of a baboon. He can be reconditioned by using lysergin-B to respond to the same sign without aggression, with affection, in fact.”

“Peace!” says Habeeb, laughing. “Maybe we could use electrodes here, Max.” He nods toward the trio in the bunker.

But Max only shrugs. His mind is elsewhere.

“Right, Tom?” Habeeb turns to me.

“I couldn’t say.”

“Come on, Tom.” Habeeb persists, nodding to the crowd. “You’re perceptive.”

“Perceptive? I perceive you are suffering from angelism,” I say absently.

“Cut it out, ha ha. I was talking about the behavior over there.”

“I was talking about you.”

“Me?”

“You’re abstracting and withholding judgment.”

“I’m a scientist. We don’t judge behavior, we observe it.”

“That’s not enough.” I stagger a bit. “Blow hold or cot.”

“Eh? How’s that?”

“I mean blow hot or cold but not—” The road map, I notice, is breaking up again. Stretches of highway come loose, float across the sky.

“Are you all right?” asks Mark, taking my arm.

“Tom?” Max comes close on the other side, puts his arm around me.

What good fellows.

“I’m all right, Max. But it’s happened.”

“What’s happened?”

“You know damn well.”

“I’m not quite sure—”

“This.” I point to the smoking sand.

“Colley thinks it’s a fire in the sulfur dome.”

“It’s a slow sodium reaction and you know it.”

“Oh.” Max drops his arm.

“And you know the danger, Max.”

“What danger?”

“My God, after what happened in The Pit, how can you ask?”

At the mention of The Pit, the other three smile at me with the greatest good humor and affection.

Ken laughs out loud. “That was something — the best of the year! Did you see the Old Man carrying on, ha ha!” They all laugh at the recollection, all but Gottlieb. Colley pays me a rare, for him, compliment. “You something else, Tom.”

“What are you talking about?”

“What you did in The Pit, to old Buddy, to everybody!”

“And just what do you think I did?” I ask the four of them. “Max?”

Max’s face is in shadow.

“Well, Max?”

“You always did have a gift for hypnotherapy, Tom.”

“For Christ’s sake, do you think I hypnotized them?”

“You take four hundred overworked dexed-up strung-out students at the end of the year—” Max breaks off.

“And what about my invention?”

“I thought it was an extremely effective objective correlative,” says Ken warmly.

“Objective correlative my ass.” I turn to Max. “Max, I’m putting it to you. If you don’t help me clear this area immediately, I am holding you responsible.”

“Tell me first, Tom. Have you reached a decision about coming back to A-4?”

“As a patient?”

“Patient-therapist.”

“We’ll talk about it, Max. But don’t you see what is happening right here?”

“I see what is happening to you.” Max is looking at my carbine, at my clothes gummed with pine resin, smeared with lipstick.

“Charley, listen to me. There is something dreadfully wrong.”

“You’re damn right there’s something wrong. The Pro-Am is screwed up and we’ll probably lose the Camellia Open next year. And the goddamn sand is still on fire.”

“Moon, maybe you and Dr. Billy Matthews could help me. Unless we act now, the consequences could be nationwide and it will be too late.”

“The consequences are already nationwide and it is already too late,” says Dr. Matthews, shouldering between us. He is a tall heavy bald youngish man with shoulders and arms grown powerful from manipulating spinal columns in his chiropractic. His thick glasses are fitted with flip-up sun lenses, which are flipped up.

“What do you mean?” I ask fearfully. Has my lapsometer caused mischief in other places?