The Last Gentleman

Chapter Five

HE AWOKE SHORTLY after dawn but not under the arborvitae. Though he never found out how he came to be here — perhaps he had awakened earlier, remembered more, crawled over, and passed out again — here he was, lying in the cab of the Trav-L-Aire, asleep on his back like a truck driver. When he sat up, his head hurt. But he started the truck and crept out into the street and, without noticing that he did so, took a certain route through the back of town. The streets were littered with broken glass. One automobile had been set afire and burned to a cinder. He drove past an army truck and a police car and straight out into the countryside.

Presently he heard a siren. Down the highway roared the camper, careening like a runaway Conestoga, then topping a rise and spying a picnic area, swerved into it and plumb through it and dove into a copse of wax myrtle. Presently a patrol car passed, then another, sirens lapsing to a growl.

He waited in the fragrant cave of myrtles until the sun came up and made a dapple on the good gray hood of the G.M.C. What is this place? Where am I going? — he asked himself, touching his bruised head, and, as soon as he asked himself, did not know. Noticing a map and notebook on the seat beside him, he opened the latter.

I am the only sincere American.

Where I disagree with you, Val, is in you people’s emphasis on sin. I do not deny, as do many of my colleagues, that sin exists. But what I see is not sinfulness but paltriness. Paltriness is the disease. This, moreover, is not a mistake you are obliged to make. You could just as easily hold out for life and having it more abundantly as hold out against sin. Your tactics are bad. Lewdness is sinful but it derives in this case not from a rebellion against God (Can you imagine such a thing nowadays — I mean, who cares?)— but from paltriness.

Americans are not devils but they are becoming as lewd as devils. As for me, I elect lewdness over paltriness. Americans practice it with their Christianity and are paltry with both. Where your treasure is, there is your heart and there’s theirs, zwischen die Beinen.

Americans are the most Christian of all people and also the lewdest. I am no match for them! Do you know why it is that the Russians, who are atheists, are sexually modest, whereas Americans, the most Christian of peoples, are also the lewdest?

Main Street, U.S.A. = a million-dollar segregated church on one corner, a drugstore with dirty magazines on the other, a lewd movie on the third, and on the fourth a B-girl bar with condom dispensers in the gents’ room. Delay-your-climax cream. Even our official decency is a lewd sort of decency. Watch a soap opera on TV where everyone is decent (and also sad, you will notice, as sad as lewdness is sad; I am the only American who is both lewd and merry). Beyond any question, these people who sit and talk so sorrowfully and decently are fumbling with each other under the table. There is no other alternative for them.

Soap opera is overtly decent and covertly lewd. The American theater is overtly lewd and covertly homosexual. I am overtly heterosexual and overtly lewd. I am therefore the only sincere American.

Last night Lamar Thigpen called me un-American. That is a lie. I am more American than he is because I elect the lewdness which he practices covertly. I unite in myself the new American lewdness with the old American cheerfulness. All I lack is Christianity. If I were a Christian as well as being lewd and cheerful, I’d be the new Johnny Appleseed.

My God, what is all this stuff, thought the poor bemused shivering engineer and with a sob flung out of the cab and began running up and down and swinging his arms to keep warm when a great pain took him at the back of his head so suddenly that he almost fainted. He sat on a picnic bench and felt his skull. It had a sticky lump the size of a hamburger. “Oh, where is this place?” he groaned aloud, hoping that if he heard a question he might answer it. “Where am I bound and what is my name?” When no answer came, he reached for his wallet. But even before his hand arrived, he had felt the ominous airiness and thinness of fabric of his back pocket. It was empty and the flap unbuttoned. Jumping up, he began to slap his pockets as quickly as possible (to surprise the wallet ere it could lose itself). He searched the camper. Beyond a doubt the wallet was gone, lost or stolen. But there was $34.32 in his forward pocket. A textbook in the cabin disclosed what he seemed to know as soon as he saw it, his name.

Spying through the wax myrtles a big-shield US 87, he consulted his map. At least I am on course, he thought, noticing the penciled line. But hold! Something tugged at him, as unfinished and urgent a piece of business as leaving the bathtub running. There was something that had to be attended to RIGHT NOW. But what? He knocked his poor throbbing head on the steering wheel, but it was no use. The thing was too much in the front of his mind to be remembered, too close to be taken hold of, like the last wrenching moment of a dream.

No wonder he was confused. He had forgotten Kitty and left her at the university and now remembered nothing more than that he had forgotten. There was only the nameless tug pulling him back. But he had also forgotten what Sutter told him the night before—come find me—and recorded only the huge tug forward in the opposite direction. He shrugged: well, I’m not going back because I’ve been there.

There was nothing to do but go about his business. Taking care to remove the ignition key, he locked himself in the camper and lit the hot-water heater. After a shower in the tiny slot of the stall, he shaved carefully, took three aspirins for his headache, and two spansules for his dislocation. Then donning his Macy’s slacks and Brooks Brothers shirt whose collar ran up into his hair, making him all of a piece, so to speak, and restoring his old Princeton puissance (for strangely he had forgotten the Vaughts and even the Y.M.C.A. and remembered Princeton), he cooked and ate a great bowl of minute grits and a quarter pound of slab bacon.

When he started up the camper and backed out of the myrtle thicket and went his way down US 87, the G.M.C. faltered and looked back of its shoulder like a horse leaving the barn. “Not that way! — that’s where I came from,” said the rider angrily and kicked the beast in the flank.

For several hours he cruised south on 87, choosing this route as a consequence of the penciled line on the Esso map. He did not dare examine the contents of his pockets, for fear he would not recognize what he found there, or for fear rather that, confronted with positive proof of himself, he still would not know and would lose the tenuous connection he had. He was like a man shot in the bowels: he didn’t dare look down.

It was a frosty morn. The old corn shucks hung like frozen rags. A killdeer went crying down a freshly turned row, its chevroned wing elbowing along the greasy disced-up gobbets of earth. The smell of it, the rimy mucous cold in his nostrils, and the blast of engine-warm truck air at his feet put him in mind of something — of hunting! of snot drying in your nose and the hot protein reek of fresh-killed quail.

In the late morning he slowed and, keeping a finger on the map, turned off the highway onto a scraped gravel road which ran for miles through a sparse woodland of post oaks and spindly pines infected with tumors. Once he passed through a town which had a narrow courthouse and an old boarded-up hotel on the square. There were still wrecks of rocking chairs on the gallery. Either I have been here before, he thought, perhaps with my father while he was trying a case, or else it was he with his father and he told me about it.

Beyond the town he stopped at the foot of a hill. A tall blackish building with fluted iron columns stood on top. He looked for a sign, but there was only an old tin arrow pointing north to: Chillicothe Business College, Chillicothe, Ohio, 892 miles. Halfway up the hill he stopped again and made out the letters on the pediment: Phillips Academy. Why, I know this place, he thought. Either I went to school here or my father did. It was one of the old-style country academies which had thirty or forty pupils and two or three teachers. Dr. so-and-so who taught Greek and Colonel so-and-so who taught military science. But perhaps it is only a déjà vu. But there is a way of finding out, considered the canny engineer. If he had really been here before, he should be able to recall something and then verify his recollection. Whereas a déjà vu only confers the semblance of memory. He put his forehead on the steering wheel and pondered. It seemed that there was a concrete slab, a court of sorts, behind the school.

But if there ever had been, there was not now. When he drove up the bill, he was disappointed to find instead a raw settlement of surplus army buildings, Quonset huts, and one geodesic dome, stretching out into the piney woods, each building fed by a silver butane sphere. It looked like a lunar installation. There was no one around, but at last he found a woman dressed in black, feeding entrails to a hawk in a chicken coop. She looked familiar. He eyed her, wondering whether he knew her.

“Aren’t you—” he asked.

“Valentine Vaught,” she said, continuing to feed the hawk. “How are you, Bill?”

“Not too good,” he said, watching to see how she saw him. From his breast pocket he took Sutter’s casebook and made a note of her name.

“Is that Sutter’s?” she asked, but made no move to take it.

“I suppose it is,” he said warily, “do you want it?”

“I’ve heard it all before, dear,” she said dryly. “When he gets drunk he writes me letters. We always argued. Only I’ve stopped.”

Tell me what is tugging at me, he wanted to say, but asked instead: “Isn’t this old Phillips Academy?”

“Yes, it used to be. Did you go to school here?”

“No, it was my father. Or perhaps grandfather. Wasn’t there at one time a tennis court over there or maybe an outdoor basketball court?”

“Not that I know of. I have a message for you.”

“What?”

“Sutter and Jamie were here. They said I was to tell you they were headed for Santa Fe.”

She seemed to expect him. Had he been on his way here? He took out the map. Who had marked the route?

“Sutter and Jamie,” he repeated. Again it came over him, the terrific claim upon him, the tug of memory so strong that he broke into a sweat. “I’ve got to go,” he muttered.

“To find Jamie?” she asked.

“I suppose,” he said uneasily. But instead of leaving, he watched her. It came to him for the second time that he didn’t like her, particularly her absorption with the hawk. It was a chicken hawk with an old rusty shoulder and a black nostril. She attended to the hawk with a buzzing antic manner which irritated him. It scandalized him slightly, like the Pope making a fuss over a canary. He was afraid she might call the hawk by some such name as Saint Blaise.

“This is a wonderful work you’re doing here,” he said, remembering a little more, then added, for what reason God alone knew: “I’ve always liked Catholics.”

“I wish I could say the same,” she said, feeding a kidney to the hawk.

The task, he mused, was to give shape and substance to time itself. Time was turned on and running between them like the spools of a tape recorder. Was that not the nature of his amnesia: that all at once the little ongoing fillers of time, the throat-clearings and chair-scrapings and word-mumblings, stopped and the tape ran silent?

“At any rate, your bishop is a very courageous man,” he heard himself say even more recklessly because he didn’t know her bishop from Adam.

“I think he is chicken-hearted.”

“Well, I’ll be going,” he said, flushing angrily. Really, he had no use for this prankish perverse manner of hers. As suggestible as ever, he began to feel it take possession of him too, a buzzing glassy-eyed inwardness.

“Why are you writing everything down?” she asked, looking at him for the first time.

He frowned. “I may have told you before that I have a nervous condition which affects my memory. Anyhow I only wrote down your name.” And suddenly he remembered her religious name as well: Johnette Mary Vianney: remembered it precisely because it was difficult and barbarous. Taking note of her costume again, he reckoned she must be some sort of off-brand nun, perhaps not yet certified by the higher-ups. That’s why she did not like her bishop! — he hadn’t given her her license or whatever.

“If you catch up with Jamie,” she said, speaking again to the hawk, “give him a good shaking.”

“Why?”

“He’s feeling sorry for himself and has taken to reading Kahlil Gibran, a bad sign even in healthy people. Did you give it to him — I know Sutter wouldn’t.”

“Who? No.” Ifhe needed a good shaking, Sister, you should have given it to him. But he said: “Do you like your work here?” Without knowing that he did so, he was going through his pockets. Oh my, I’m sure I had something of great value.

“We are very poor here,” she said, watching him with interest.

He blushed. “I’m sorry to say that my wallet has been lost or stolen. I—” he began, and felt his sore occiput. “Otherwise I’d like very much to make a small contribution to your work.”

“Say a prayer for us,” she said, he thought, absently.

“Yes. Where are they now?”

“Who? Oh. The pupils don’t come on weekends.”

“Of course not,” he said heartily. He wondered whether it was Saturday or Sunday. Something else came back to him. “I’ve heard the poverty here in Tyree County is abject.”

“It’s not that so much,” she said carelessly.

“Not that? What then?”

“The children are dumb. They can’t speak.”

“Ah, they are mentally retarded — pellagra, no doubt.”

“No, I mean they’re dumb, mute. Children eleven and twelve can’t speak. It took me six months to find out why. They’re brought up in silence. Nobody at home speaks. They don’t know thirty words. They don’t know words like pencil or hawk or wallet.”

“What a rewarding experience it must be to teach them.”

“Yes, very,” she said, and not ironically, he thought.

A complex system of scoring social debts kept him from leaving. Since he couldn’t give her money, ransom himself, he had to pay her out by listening to her, since, goofy as he was, he knew two things not many people know. He knew how to listen and he knew how to get at that most secret and aggrieved enterprise upon which almost everyone is embarked. He’d give her the use of his radar.

“Is that why you came here?” he asked her. “Because of the children, I mean.”

“Why I came here,” she said vaguely. “No, that wasn’t the reason. Somebody asked me.”

“Who asked you?” he bent upon the hawk the same smiling unseeing gaze as she.

“A woman in the library at Columbia.”

“A woman in the library at Columbia asked you to come down here?”

“Not directly. That is not what she asked me at first.”

“What did she ask you at first?”

“I was writing a paper on Pareto. This nun and I shared the same cubicle in the stacks. She was doing her doctorate on John Dewey, whom she admired greatly — you know how they’ve taken up with the very ones they despised a few years ago.”

“No, I don’t,” said the engineer. His head was beginning to hurt again.

She paid no attention. “I was aware that she was eyeing me and that she had her hooks out. The strange thing was that I was not in the least surprised when she did speak.” Again she lapsed.

“What did she say?” asked the engineer as gently as Dr. Gamow.

“She said, what’s the matter with you? I said, what do you mean what’s the matter with me? She said, you look half dead.” She shook her head and fed the hawk an intricate packet of viscera.

“Yes,” said the engineer after a long minute.

“I said yes, I am half dead. She said why? I said I don’t know. She said how would you like to be alive. I said I’d like that. She said all right, come with me. That was it.”

“That was what?” asked the engineer, frowning. “What happened?”

“I went with her to her mother’s house, a hideous red brick building in Paterson, New Jersey.”

“Then what?”

“That was it. I received instruction, made a general confession, was shriven, baptized, confirmed, and made my first vows, all in the space of six weeks. They thought I was crazy. The Bishop of Newark required that I get a statement from my doctor that there was no insanity in the family. When all I’d done was take them at their word. They were mostly third-generation Irish from places like Bridgeport and Worcester, Mass. That’s what they would say: I’m from Worcester, Mass. — never Massachusetts. They called me Alabam. You know.” Again she fell silent.

“How did you get down here?”

“They asked me how I would like to work with Sister Clare in their mission down in ’Bama. I think they wanted to get rid of me. I kept telling them that I believed it all, the whole business. But try as I might, I couldn’t remember the five proofs of God’s existence on the difference between a substance and an accident. I flunked out. They didn’t know what to do with me, so they figured six months of Sister Clare down in ’Bama would cure me. Sister Clare is a harridan, mean as hell.”

“Is she here?”

“No. She had a nervous breakdown, she instead of me, as they had expected. She was sent to our rest home in Topeka. What they didn’t know was that I am mean as hell too. I outlasted her. That’s what I don’t understand, you know: that I believe the whole business: God, the Jews, Christ, the Church, grace, and the forgiveness of sins — and that I’m meaner than ever. Christ is my lord and I love him but I’m a good hater and you know what he said about that. I still hope my enemies fry in hell. What to do about that? Will God forgive me?”

“I don’t know. Why did you stay?”

“That was a fluke too.” She draped two feet of gut over the perch and the hawk cocked his eye. The engineer thought about the falcon in Central Park: I could see him better at one mile than this creature face to face. Jesus, my telescope: is it still in the camper? “I think I stayed not so much out of charity as from fascination with a linguistic phenomenon — that was my field, you know. It has to do with the children’s dumbness. When they do suddenly break into the world of language, it is something to see. They are like Adam on the First Day. What’s that? they ask me. That’s a hawk, I tell them, and they believe me. I think I recognized myself in them. They were not alive and then they are and so they’ll believe you. Their eyes fairly pop out at the Baltimore catechism (imagine). I tell them that God made them to be happy and that if they love one another and keep the commandments and receive the Sacrament, they’ll be happy now and forever. They believe me. I’m not sure anybody else does now. I have more influence than the Pope. Of course I’m not even supposed to be here, since I haven’t taken final vows. But they haven’t sent for me.”

“That certainly is interesting,” said the engineer, who was now leaving, actually setting a foot toward the camper. He had done his duty and was ready to be on his way. He had a fix on her at last. She struck him as an enthusiast of a certain sort who becomes wry as a countermeasure to her own outlandishness, like a collector of 1928 Model-T radiator caps who exhibits his trophies with a wry, rueful deprecation of their very oddness. He understood this. And was it not also the case that her offhandedness was a tactic and that she had her hooks out for him? He didn’t mind if she had, and was even prepared to put on a thoughtful expression, as much as to say: you do give me pause, Sister; that is something to think about. But he was ready to go.

He was not to escape so easily. Changing her manner completely, she became cordial and brisk and took him on the “ten-dollar tour” of her foundation. For some fifty minutes he was towed helplessly around the outbuildings scattered through the cancerous pines. More than ever, it reminded him of a lunar installation, with silvery globes supplying nourishment to each building, a place of crude and makeshift beginnings on some blasted planet. Later there remained in his poor addled memory only a blurred impression of Seven-Up machines, plastic crucifixes, and worn, gnawed-at woodwork such as is found in old gymnasiums. Life indeed, thought he. Another hour in this gloomy cancerous wood and I’d be laid out stiff as a corpse, feet sticking up.

But she would not let him go, and when for the second or third time she led him past the wooden privies and the last time opened the door of one so that he might catch a whiff of the acuteness of the need, he got the idea. With trembling fingers he thrust hand into pocket and brought forth a disorderly clutch of bills, leaving him, as he discovered later, $1.36 in silver. “A small donation for your building fund,” he murmured, blushing.

“I’ll pray for you,” she said absently. “Will you pray for me to receive sufficient grace in order not to hate the guts of some people, however much they deserve it?”

“Certainly,” said the engineer heartily, who would have consented to anything.

She took the money with only perfunctory gratitude and, slipping it skillfully into a black-leather pouch she wore at her belt, lapsed instantly into her old smiling thrumming. Papal inwardness, wherein she dispensed herself so that she might take note of God’s creatures, small objects, and such. She went back to the hawk and he left.

Down flew the Trav-L-Aire into the setting sun, down and out of the last of the ancient and impoverished South of red hills and Cardui signs and God-is-Love crosses. Down through humpy sugarloaves and loess cliffs sliced through like poundcake. Dead trees shrouded in kudzu vines reared up like old women. Down and out at last and onto the vast prodigal plain of the Delta, stretching away misty and fecund into the October haze. The land hummed and simmered in its own richness. Picking was still going on, great $25,000 McCormicks and Farmalls browsing up and down the cotton rows. Bugs zoomed and splashed amber against the windshield; the Trav-L-Aire pushed like a boat through the heavy air and the rich protein smells, now the sweet ferment of alfalfa, now the smell of cottonseed meal rich as ham in the kitchen. There had been the sense ever since leaving New York and never quite realized until now of tarrying in upland places and along intermediate slopes and way stations (My Lord, where had he stopped? Where had he spent the last month? He cudgeled his brain.) and now at last of coming sock down to the ultimate alluvial floor, the black teeming Ur-plain. He stopped the Trav-L-Aire and got out. Buzzards circled, leaning into the heavy mothering air, three, four tiers of buzzards riding round a mile-high chimney of air. A shrike, the Negro’s ghost bird, sat on a telephone wire and looked at him through its black mask. It was a heedless prodigal land, the ditches rank and befouled, weeds growing through the junk: old Maytags, Coke machines, and a Hudson Supersix pushed off into a turnrow and sprouting a crop all its own. But across the ditches and over the turnrows — here they got down to business — stretched the furrows of sifted mealy earth clean as a Japanese garden but forty miles long and going away, straight as a ruler, into the smoky distance. The cotton leaves were a dusky gray-green, as dusky as new money. Cotton wagons were on the road and the gins were humming. The little towns were squalid and rich. From the storefronts, tin roofs sagged across the sidewalk to the muddy Cadillacs. Across the road from a decaying mustard-colored I.C. depot stretched a line of great glittering harvesters and pickers parked in echelon like a squadron of Sherman tanks.

Straight across the Delta he flew and down into the tongue of the Yazoo plain to Ithaca, so named by a Virginian who admired Pericles more than Abraham and who had had his fill of the Bethels and the Shilohs of the Scotch-Irish. Yonder in the haze rose the brownish back of the Chickasaw Bluffs, and just beyond, the old wormy concrete towers of the Vicksburg battlefield.

When he stopped at Roscoe’s Servicenter, Roscoe spoke as if he had never been away.

“What you say there, Will? — ” holding nozzle to spout and all the while taking in the Trav-L-Aire, acknowledging it with a quirk of his mouth but not willing to make a fuss over it or even to speak of it directly.

“All right. What you say, Roscoe?”

“You been camping or going?”

“Camping? Oh, I’m going.”

“Do you know those niggers over there?”

“Who? No.”

“They seem to know you.”

Beyond the pumps sat a bottle-green Chevrolet, a stout old Bel Aire two-door, round as a turtle and filled with Negroes and what appeared to be a couple of Syrians. Sure enough the driver, a stately bun-headed preacher-type Negro seemed to be making signs and grimaces at him. The courteous engineer, the last man on earth to inflict a snub, nodded and smiled in turn even though he didn’t know them from Adam. Or did he? Ah, the dread tug of the past not quite remembered! Then, even as he nodded, an aching vista opened in his head and he remembered — not them but Kitty! The green Chevrolet sent his mind spinning back but there stood Kitty like a lion in the path. God in heaven, he groaned, I’ve left Kitty. Dear Jesus, he said, and began to slap his pocket again. The check for $100,000—I’ve lost it. Yet even as he groaned he was giving a final cheery nod and now he gunned the Trav-L-Aire out into traffic. Oh, my lovely strapping wealthy Chi O ’Bama bride, he thought, and gave his leaping knee a few hard socks. I must call her immediately.

But after half a dozen blocks he noticed that the green Chevrolet had drawn abreast of him on the left, the passengers on the front seat pressing back to clear a view for the driver, who was motioning frantically. “Barrett!” The Chevrolet began to yaw like a tender on the high seas. He still can’t drive, thought the engineer, even though he did not yet know that he knew the pseudo-Negro. At the same moment he caught sight of a commotion in front of the new courthouse. Pickets bearing signs were marching on one side of the street and a crowd watched from the other. Troopers directed traffic with electric batons. Somewhere to his rear, a siren growled. Having had enough of ruckuses and police sirens and especially of this particular carload of importuning Negroes, he swung the Trav-L-Aire without slowing into a lane between Club 85 and Krystal Hamburgers. The cabin swayed dangerously, dishpans clattering into the sink. The lane was a segment of the abandoned river road which turned at this very point into the lee of the levee. Not hesitating a second, the sturdy G.M.C. swarmed straight up and over the levee out onto the batture and dove into a towhead of willows.

No one followed.

He waited in the cab until the sun set in Louisiana. When it grew dark, he walked to the highway with his firkin, emerging by dead reckoning at a haunted Piggly Wiggly and a new-old Rexall, new ten years ago and persisting stupendously in his absence.

My lovely Kitty coed, he groaned even as he stocked up on grits and buttermilk and bacon, I must call her now. The thought of her living under the same roof with Son Thigpen, a glum horny key-twiddler, set him off in a spasm of jealousy. Yet it fell out, strange to say, that when he did find himself in a phone booth, he discovered he had spent all but nine cents! Oh damnable stupidity and fiendish bad luck, but what are you going to do? I’ll call her in the morning after I’ve been to the bank, where I will stop payment on the check, he told himself, and returned to the camper in a better humor than one might suppose.

After supper, as he lay in the balcony bunk listening to patriotic and religious programs, he heard a noise from the river, a mild sustained roar like a surf. He found a flashlight in the locker and went outside. Twenty feet away the willows were nodding and thrashing against the current. Flotsam and brown foam were caught in the leaves. He knelt and examined the thicker trunks. The water was high but falling. The sky was clear. He returned to his bunk and listened to Profit Research, a program which gave money tips for changing times, and read from Sutter’s notebook:

Moderately obese young colored female, circa 13

Skin: vaccination 1. thigh; stellate keloid scar under chin.

Head: massive cmpd depressed fracture right parietal and

right zygomatic arch. Brain: frank blood in subdural space, extensive laceration

right cortex; brick shards. Thorax: comminuted cmpd fractures, right ribs 1 through

8; frank blood in pleural space; extensive lacerations

RML,RLL, brick shards. Heart: neg. Abdomen: neg. Gen.: neg.

Cops report subject discovered in basement toilet of Emmanuel Baptist Church following explosion. Church tower fell on her.

But never mind the South.

It is you who concerns me. You are wrong and you deceive yourself in a more serious way. Do you know what you have managed to do? You have cancelled yourself. I can understand what you did in the beginning. You opted for the Scandalous Thing, the Wrinkle in Time, the Jew-Christ-Church business, God’s alleged intervention in history. You acted on it, left all and went away to sojourn among strangers. I can understand this even though I could never accept the propositions (1) that my salvation comes from the Jews, (2) that my salvation depends upon hearing news rather than figuring it out, (3) that I must spend eternity with Southern Baptists. But I understand what you did and even rejoiced in the scandal of it, for I do not in the least mind scandalizing the transcending scientific assholes of Berkeley and Cambridge and the artistic assholes of Taos and La Jolla.

But do you realize what you did then? You reversed your dialectic and cancelled yourself. Instead of having the courage of your scandal-giving, you began to speak of the glories of science, the beauty of art, and the dear lovely world around us! Worst of all, you even embraced, Jesus this is what tore it, the Southern businessman! The Southern businessman is the new Adam, you say, smart as a Yankee but a Christian withal and having the tragical sense, etc., etc., etc. — when the truth of it is, you were pleased because you talked the local Coca-Cola distributor into giving you a new gym.

But what you don’t know is that you are cancelled. Suppose you did reconcile them all, the whites and the niggers, Yankees and the K.K.K., scientists and Christians, where does that leave you and your Scandalous Thing? Why, cancelled out! Because it doesn’t mean anything any more, God and religion and all the rest. It doesn’t even mean anything to your fellow Christians. And you know this: that is why you are where you are, because it means something to your little Tyree dummies (and ten years from now it won’t even mean anything to them: either they’ll be Muslims and hate your guts or they’ll be middle-class and buggered like everybody else).

The reason I am more religious than you and in fact the most religious person I know: because, like you, I turned my back on the bastards and went into the desert, but unlike you I didn’t come sucking around them later.

There is something you don’t know. They are going to win without you. They are going to remake the world and go into space and they couldn’t care less whether you and God approve and sprinkle holy water on them. They’ll even let you sprinkle holy water on them and they’ll even like you because they’ll know it makes no difference any more. All you will succeed in doing is cancelling yourself. At least have the courage of your revolt.

Sutter’s notebook had the effect of loosening his synapses, like a bar turning slowly in his brain. Feeling not unpleasantly dislocated, he turned off the light and went to sleep to the sound of the lashing willows and a Spanish-language broadcast to Cuban refugees from WWL in New Orleans.

The next morning he walked the levee into Ithaca, curving into town under a great white sky. New grass, killed by the recent frost, had whitened and curled like wool. Grasshoppers started up at his feet and went stitching away. Below where the town was cradled in the long curving arm of the levee, the humpy crowns of oaks, lobules upon lobules, were broken only by steeples and the courthouse cupola. There arose to him the fitful and compassed sound of human affairs, the civil morning sounds of tolerable enterprise, the slap of lumber, a back-door slam, the chunk of an engine, and the routine shouts of a work crew: ho; ho; ho now!

Here he used to walk with his father and speak of the galaxies and of the expanding universe and take pleasure in the insignificance of man in the great lonely universe. His father would recite “Dover Beach,” setting his jaw askew and wagging’ his head like F.D.R.:

for the world which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain—

or else speak of the grandfather and the days of great deeds: “And so he looked down at him where he was sitting in his barber chair and he said to him: ‘I’m going to tell you one time you son of a bitch, and that’s all, so hear me well; if anything happens to Judge Hampton, I’m not asking any questions, I’m not calling the police, I’m coming to look for you, and when I find you I’m going to kill you.’ Nothing happened to Judge Hampton.”

Beyond the old brown roiled water, the bindings and lacings of water upon water, the Louisiana shore stretched misty and perfunctory. When he came abreast of the quarterboat of the U.S. Engineers, his knee began to leap and he sat down in the tall grass under a river beacon and had a little fit. It was not a convulsion, but his eyes twittered around under his eyeballs. He dreamed that old men sat in a circle around him, looking at him from the corners of their eyes.

“Who’s that?” he cried, jumping to his feet and brushing off his Macy’s Dacron. Someone had called to him. But there was no one and nothing but the white sky and the humpy lobuled oaks of the town.

He went down into Front Street, past the Syrian and Jewish dry goods and the Chinese grocery, and turned quickly into Market and came to the iron lion in front of the bank. It was a hollow lion with a hole between his shoulders which always smelled of pee.

Spicer CoCo and Ben Huger, two planters his own age, stood in line behind him at the teller’s window and began to kid him in the peculiar reflected style of the deep Delta.

“Reckon he’s going to get all his money out and go on back off up there?” said Spicer CoCo.

“I notice he got his box-back coat on. I think he be here for a while,” said Ben Huger.

He had to grin and fool with them, fend them off, while he asked the teller about the check. “Doris,” he said to the pretty plump brunette, remembering her before he could forget, “can I stop payment on a certified check?”

She gave him a form to fill in. “Hello, Will. It’s good to see you.”

“Just fine.” He scratched his head. “No, ah— You see, it’s not my check and it’s not on this bank. It was a check endorsed to me. I — it was misplaced.” He hoped he didn’t have to tell the amount.

“Then have the payer make a stop-payment order,” she said, gazing at him with an expression both lively and absent-minded. “How long ago did you lose it?”

“I don’t remember — ah, two days.”

“Same old Will.”

“What?”

“You haven’t changed a bit.”

“I haven’t?” he said, pleased to hear it. “I thought I was worse.” I’ll call Poppy then, he said to himself and fell to wondering: how strange that they seem to know me and that I never supposed they could have, and perhaps that was my mistake.

“You know why he taking his money out,” said Spicer.

“No, why is that?” asked Ben.

The two were standing behind him, snapping their fingers and popping their knees back and forth inside their trousers. They were talking in a certain broad style which was used in Ithaca jokingly; it was something like Negro talk but not the same.

“He on his way to the game Saddy. You can tell he come on into town to get his money — look, he done took off his regular walking shoes which he hid under a bridge and done put on his town slippers”—pointing down to the engineer’s suede oxfords.

“That had slipped my notice,” said Ben. “But look how he still th’ows his foot out like Cary Middlecoff, like he fixin’ to hit a long ball.”

“He come over here to draw his money out and make a bet on the game and take our money because he thinks we don’t know they number one.”

“What are you talking about,” cried the engineer, laughing and shaking his head, all but overcome by an irritable sort of happiness — and all the while trying to tell Doris Mascagni about his savings account. “Yall are number one on the U.P.,” he told them, turning around nervously.

“What you say there, Will.” They shook hands with him, still-casting an eye about in the oblique Ithaca style.

What good fellows they were, he thought, as Doris counted out his money. Why did I ever go away? Ben Huger detained him and told a story about a man who bought a golf-playing gorilla. The gorilla had been taught to play golf by the smartest trainer in the world. This man who bought the gorilla was also a hard-luck gambler but for once he seemed to have hit on a sure thing. Because when he took the gorilla out to a driving range and handed him a driver and a basket of balls, each ball flew straight down the middle for five hundred yards. So he entered the gorilla in the Masters at Augusta. On the first tee, a par five hole, the gorilla followed Nicklaus and Palmer. He addressed his ball with assurance and drove the green four hundred and ninety yards away. Great day in the morning, thought the gambler, who was acting as the gorilla’s caddy, I got it made this time for sure. Already he had plans for the P.G.A. and the British Open after collecting his fifty thousand in first prize money. But when the threesome reached the green and the gambler handed the gorilla his putter to sink the one-footer, the gorilla took the same full, perfected swing and drove the ball another four hundred and ninety yards. Then—

Here’s what I’ll do, thought the engineer who was sweating profusely and was fairly beside himself with irritable delight. I’ll come back here and farm Hampton, my grandfather’s old place, long since reclaimed by the cockleburs, and live this same sweet life with these splendid fellows.

“You gon’ be home for a while, Will?” they asked him.

“For a while,” he said vaguely and left them, glad to escape this dread delight.

Hardly aware that he did so, he took Kemper Street, a narrow decrepit boulevard which ran as string to the bow of the river. It still had its dusty old crape myrtles and chinaberries and horse troughs and an occasional tile marker set in the sidewalk: Travelers Bicycle Club 1903. The street changed to a Negro district. The old frame houses gave way to concrete nightclubs and shotgun cottages, some of which were converted to tiny churches by tacking on two square towers and covering the whole with brick paper. He sat on a trough which was choked with dry leaves and still exhaled the faint sunny tart smell of summer, and studied the Esso map, peering closely at the Gulf Coast, New Orleans, Houston, and points west. It came over him suddenly that he didn’t live anywhere and had no address. As he began to go through his pockets he spied a new outdoor phone in a yellow plastic shell — and remembered Kitty. Lining up quarters and dimes on the steel shelf, he gazed down Kemper to the old city jail at the corner of Vincennes. Here on the top step stood his great-uncle the sheriff, or high sheriff, as the Negroes called him, on a summer night in 1928.

The telephone was ringing in the purple castle beside the golf links and under the rosy temple of Juno.

The sheriff put his hands in his back pockets so that the skirt of his coat cleared his pistol butt. “I respectfully ask yall to go on back to your homes and your families. There will be no violence here tonight because I’m going to kill the first sapsucker who puts his foot on that bottom step. Yall go on now. Go ahead on.”

“Hello.” It was David.

“Hello. David.”

“Yes suh.” He would be standing in the narrow hall between the pantry and the big front hall, the receiver held as loosely in his hand as if it had fallen into the crotch of a small tree.

“This is, ah, Will Barrett.” It sounded strange because they didn’t, the Negroes, know him by a name.

“Who? Yes suh! Mist’ Billy!” David, feeling summoned, cast about for the right response — was it surprise? joy? — and hit instead on a keening bogus cheeriness, then, seeing it as such, lapsed into hilarity: “Ts-ts-ts.”

“Is Miss Kitty there?”

“No suh. She been gone.”

“Where?” His heart sank. She and Rita had gone to Spain.

“School.”

“Oh yes.” Today was Monday. He reflected.

“Yes suh,” mused David, politely giving shape and form to the silence. “I notice the little bitty Spite was gone when I got here. And I got here on time.”

“Is anyone else there?”

“Nobody but Miss Rita.”

“Never mind. Give Miss Kitty a message.”

“Oh yes suh.”

“Tell her I got hurt at the college, got hit in the head, and had a relapse. She’ll understand. Tell her I’ve been sick but I feel better.”

“Yes suh. I’ll sho tell her. Sick?” David, aiming for the famous Negro sympathy, hit instead on a hooting incredulity. David, David, thought the engineer, shaking his head, what is going to happen to you? You ain’t white nor black nor nothing.

“I’m better now. Tell her I’ll call her.”

“Yes suh.”

“Goodbye, David.”

“Goodbye, Mist’ Billy!” cried David, stifling his hilarity. He reached Mr. Vaught at Confederate Chevrolet.

“Billy boy!” cried the old fellow. “You still at school?”

“Sir? Well, no sir. I—”

“You all right, boy?”

“Yes sir. That is, I was hurt—”

“How bad is it down there now?”

“Down here?”

“How did you get out? They didn’t want to let Kitty leave. I had to go get her myself last night. Why, they kept them down in the basement of the sorority house all night. Man, they got the army in there.”

“Yes sir,” said the engineer, understanding not a single word save only that some larger catastrophe had occurred and that in the commotion his own lapse had been set at nought, remitted.

“You sure you all right?”

“I was knocked out but I got away the next morning,” said the engineer carefully. “Now I’m on my way to find—” He faltered.

“Jamie. Good.”

“Yes. Jamie. Sir,” he began again. This one thing he clearly perceived: the ruckus on the campus dispensed him and he might say what he pleased.

“Yes?”

“Sir, please listen carefully. Something has happened that I think you should know about and will wish to do something about.”

“If you think so, I’ll do it.”

“Yes sir. You see, Kitty’s check has been lost or stolen, the check for one hundred thousand dollars.”

“What’s that?” Mr. Vaught’s voice sounded as if he had crept into the receiver. All foolishness aside: this was money, Chevrolets.

The engineer had perceived that he could set forth any facts whatever, however outrageous, and that they would be attended to, acted upon and not held against him.

“My suggestion is that you stop payment, if it is possible.”

“It is possible,” said the old man, his voice pitched at perfect neutrality. The engineer could hear him riffling through the phone book as he looked up the bank’s number.

“It was endorsed over to me, if that is any help.”

“It was endorsed over to you,” repeated the other as if he were taking it down. Very well then, it is understood this time, what with one thing and another, that it is for you to tell me and for me to listen. This time.

“I tried to reach Kitty but couldn’t. Tell her that I’ll call her.”

“I’ll tell her.”

“Tell her I’ll be back.”

“You’ll be back.”

After he hung up, he sat gazing at the old jail and thinking about his kinsman, the high sheriff. Next to the phone booth was the Dew Drop Inn, a rounded comer of streaked concrete and glass brick, a place he knew well. It belonged to a Negro named Sweet Evening Breeze who was said to be effeminate. As he left and came opposite the open door, the sound came: psssst! — not four feet from his ear.

“Eh,” he said, pausing and frowning. “Is that you, Breeze?”

“Barrett!”

“What?” He turned, blinking. A pair of eyes gazed at him from the interior darkness.

“Come in, Barrett.”

“Thank you all the same, but—”

Hands were laid on him and he was yanked inside. By the same motion a shutter of memory was tripped: it was not so much that he remembered as that, once shoved out of the wings and onto stage, he could then trot through his part perfectly well.

“Mr. Aiken,” he said courteously, shaking hands with his old friend, the pseudo-Negro.

“Come in, come in, come in. Listen, I don’t in the least blame you—” began the other.

“Please allow me to explain,” said the engineer, blinking around at the watery darkness which smelted of sweet beer and hosed-down concrete — there were others present but he could not yet make them out. “The truth is that when I saw you yesterday I did not place you. As you may recall, I spoke to you last summer of my nervous condition and its accompanying symptom of amnesia. Then yesterday, or the day before, I received a blow on the head—”

“Listen,” cried the pseudo-Negro. “Yes, right! You have no idea how glad I am to see you. Oh, boy. God knows you have to be careful!”

“No, you don’t understand—”

“Don’t worry about it,” said the pseudo-Negro.

The engineer shrugged. “What you say, Breeze?” He caught sight of the proprietor, a chunky shark-skinned Negro who still wore a cap made of a nylon stocking rolled and knotted.

“All right now,” said Breeze, shaking hands but sucking his teeth, not quite looking at him. He could tell that Breeze remembered him but did not know what to make of his being here. Breeze knew him from the days when he, the engineer, used to cut through the alley behind the Dew Drop on his way to the country club to caddy for his father.

“Where’s Mort?” asked the engineer, who began to accommodate to the gloom.

“Mort couldn’t make it,” said the pseudo-Negro in a voice heavy with grievance, and introduced him to his new friends. There were two men, a Negro and a white man, and a white woman. The men, he understood from the pseudo-Negro’s buzzing excitement, were celebrities, and indeed even to the engineer, who did not keep up with current events, they looked familiar. The white man, who sat in a booth with a beautiful sullen untidy girl all black hair and white face and black sweater, was an actor. Though he was dressed like a tramp, he wore a stern haughty expression. A single baleful glance he shot at the engineer and did not look at him again and did not offer his hand at the introduction.

“This is the Merle you spoke of?” the actor asked the pseudo-Negro, indicating the engineer with a splendid one-millimeter theatrical inclination of his head.

“Merle?” repeated the puzzled engineer. “My name is not Merle.” Though the rudeness and haughtiness of the actor made him angry at first, the engineer was soon absorbed in the other’s mannerisms and his remarkable way of living from one moment to the next. This he accomplished by a certain inclination of his head and a hitching around of his shoulder while he fiddled with a swizzle stick, and a gravity of expression which was aware of itself as gravity. His lips fitted together in a rich conscious union. The sentient engineer, who had been having trouble with his expression today, now felt his own lips come together in a triumphant fit. Perhaps he should be an actor!

“You’re here for the festival, the, ah, morality play,” said the engineer to demonstrate his returning memory.

“Yes,” said the pseudo-Negro. “Do you know the sheriff here?”

“Yes,” said the engineer. They were standing at the bar under a ballroom globe which reflected watery specters of sunlight from the glass bricks. The pseudo-Negro introduced him to the other celebrity, a playwright, a slender pop-eyed Negro who was all but swallowed up by a Bulldog Drummond trenchcoat and who, unlike his white companion, greeted the engineer amiably and in fact regarded him with an intense curiosity. For once the engineer felt as powerful and white-hot a radar beam leveled at him as he leveled at others. This fellow was not one to be trifled with. He had done the impossible! — kept his ancient Negro radar intact and added to it a white edginess and restiveness. He fidgeted around and came on at you like a proper Yankee but unlike a Yankee had this great ear which he swung round at you. Already he was onto the engineer: that here too was another odd one, a Southerner who had crossed up his wires and was something betwixt and between. He drank his beer and looked at the engineer sideways. Where the actor was all self playing itself and triumphantly succeeding, coinciding with itself, the playwright was all eyes and ears and not in the least mindful of himself — if he had been, he wouldn’t have had his trenchcoat collar turned up in great flaps around his cheeks. The Negro was preposterous-looking, but he didn’t care if he was. The actor did care. As for the poor engineer, tuning in both, which was he, actor or playwright?

“You really did not remember him, did you?” the Negro asked the engineer.

“No, that’s right.”

“He’s not conning you, Forney,” the playwright told the pseudo-Negro.

“I knew that,” cried the pseudo-Negro. “Barrett and I are old shipmates. Aren’t we?”

“That’s right.”

“We went through the Philadelphia thing together, didn’t we?”

“Yes.” It seemed to the engineer that the pseudo-Negro said “Philadelphia” as if it were a trophy, one of a number of campaign ribbons, though to the best of the engineer’s recollection the only campaign which had occurred was his getting hit on the nose by an irate housewife from Haddon Heights, New Jersey.

“Do you think you could prevail upon the local fuzz to do something for you?” the pseudo-Negro asked him.

“What?”

“Let Bugs out of jail.”

“Bugs?”

“Bugs Flieger. They put him in jail last night after the festival, and our information is he’s been beaten up. Did you know Mona over there is Bugs’s sister?”

“Bugs Flieger,” mused the engineer.

The actor and the white girl looked at each other, the former popping his jaw muscles like Spencer Tracy.

“Tell — ah — Merle here,” said the actor, hollowing out his throat, “that Bugs Flieger plays the guitar a little.”

“Merle?” asked the mystified engineer, looking around at the others. “Is he talking to me? Why does he call me Merle?”

“You really never heard of Flieger, have you?” asked the playwright.

“No. I have been quite preoccupied lately. I never watch television,” said the engineer.

“Television,” said the girl. “Jesus Christ.”

“What have you been preoccupied with?” the playwright asked him.

“I have recently returned to the South from New York, where I felt quite dislocated as a consequence of a nervous condition,” replied the engineer, who always told the truth. “Only to find upon my return that I was no less dislocated here.”

“I haven’t been well myself,” said the playwright as amiably as ever and not in the least sarcastically. “I am a very shaky man.”

“Could you speak to the sheriff?” the pseudo-Negro asked him.

“Sure.”

Breeze brought more beer and they all sat in the round booth at the corner under the glass bricks.

“Baby, are you really from around here?” the playwright asked the engineer.

“Ask Breeze.” The engineer scowled. Why couldn’t these people call him by his name?

But when the playwright turned to Breeze the latter only nodded and shrugged. Breeze, the engineer perceived, was extremely nervous. His, the engineer’s, presence, disconcerted him. He didn’t know what footing to get on with the engineer, the old one, the old ironic Ithaca style: “Hey, Will, where you going?” “Going to caddy.” “How come your daddy pays you five dollars a round?” “He don’t pay no five dollars”—or the solemn fierce footing of the others. But finally Breeze said absently and to no one and from no footing at all: “This here’s Will Barrett, Lawyer Barrett’s boy. Lawyer Barrett help many a one.” But it was more than that, the engineer then saw, something else was making Breeze nervous. He kept opening the door a crack and looking out. He was scared to death.

But the pseudo-Negro wanted to talk about more serious matters. He asked the others some interview-type questions about racial subjects, all the while snapping pictures (only the engineer noticed) from his tie-clasp camera.

“It’s a moral issue,” said the actor, breaking the swizzle stick between his fingers, breaking it the way actors break swizzle sticks and pencils. The pseudo-Negro explained that the actor had flown in from Hollywood with Mona his companion to assist in the present drive at great cost to himself, both financially and emotionally, the latter because he was embroiled in a distressing custody suit in the course of which his wife had broken into his bedroom and pulled Mona’s hair.

“Of course it’s a moral issue,” said the playwright. Now the engineer remembered seeing one of his plays with Midge Auchincloss. It was about an artist who has gone stale, lost his creative powers, until he musters the courage to face the truth within himself, which is his love for his wife’s younger brother. He puts a merciful end to the joyless uncreative marriage in favor of a more meaningful relationship with his friend. The last scene shows the lovers standing in a window of the artist’s Left Bank apartment looking up at the gleaming towers of Sacre-Coeur. “There has been a loss of the holy in the world,” said the youth. “Yes, we must recover it,” replies the artist. “It has fallen to us to recover the holy.” “It has been a long time since I was at Mass,” says the youth, looking at the church. “Let’s have our own Mass,” replies the artist as softly as Pelleas and, stretching forth a shy hand, touches the youth’s golden hair.

Sweet Evening Breeze, the engineer noticed, was growing more nervous by the minute. His skin turned grayer and more sharklike and he had fallen into a complicated way of snapping his fingers. Once, after peering through the cracked door, he called the pseudo-Negro aside.

“Breeze says the fuzz is on its way over here,” the pseudo-Negro told them gravely.

“How do you know?” the playwright asked Breeze.

“I know.”

“How do they know we’re here?”

“Ask Merle,” said the actor.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said the pseudo-Negro, frowning. “I pulled him in here, remember. Barrett’s all right.”

“The man done pass by here twice,” said Breeze, rattling off a drumroll of fingersnaps. “The next time he’s coming in.”

“How do you know?” asked the pseudo-Negro with his lively reporter’s eye.

“I knows, that’s all.”

“Wonderful,” said the playwright. The playwright’s joy, the engineer perceived, came from seeing life unfold in the same absurd dramatic way as a Broadway play — it was incredible that the one should be like the other after all.

“Bill,” said the pseudo-Negro earnestly. “We’ve got to get Mona out of here. You know what will happen to her?”

The engineer reflected a moment. “Do you all want to leave town?”

“Yes. Our business here is finished except for Bugs.”

“What about your Chevrolet?”

“They picked it up an hour ago.”

“Why not get on a bus?”

“That’s where they got Bugs, at the bus station.”

“Here they come,” said Breeze.

Sure enough, there was a hammering at the door. “Here’s what you do,” said the engineer suddenly. Upside down as always, he could think only when thinking was impossible. It was when thinking was expected of one that he couldn’t think. “Take my camper. Here.” He quickly drew a sketch of the highway and the old river road. “It’s over the levee here. I’ll talk to the police. Go out the back door. You drive,” he said to Mona, handing her the key. The actor was watching him with a fine gray eye. “The others can ride in the back.” The hammering became deafening. “Now if I don’t meet you at the levee,” shouted the engineer, “go to my uncle’s in Louisiana. Cross the bridge at Vicksburg. Mr. Fannin Barrett of Shut Off. I’ll meet you there.” From his breast pocket he took out a sheaf of road maps, selected a Conoco state map, made an X, and wrote a name and gave it to Mona. “Who are they?” he asked Breeze, who stood rooted at the heaving door.

“That’s Mist’ Ross and Mist’ Gover,” said Breeze eagerly, as if he were already smoothing things over with the police.

“Do you know them, Merle?” asked the actor, with a new appraising glint in his eye.

“Yes.”

“How are they?”

“Gover’s all right.”

“Open the door, Breeze.” The voice came through the door.

“Yes suh.”

“No, hold it—” began the engineer.

“The man said unlock it.” It was too late. The doorway was first flooded by sunlight, then darkened by uniforms.

“What do you say, Beans. Ellis,” said the engineer, coming toward them.

“Where’s the poontang?” asked Beans Ross, a strong, tall, fat man with a handsome tanned face and green-tinted sunglasses such as highway police wear, though he was only a town deputy.

“This is Will Barrett, Beans,” said the engineer, holding out his hand. “Mister Ed’s boy.”

“What,” said Beans, shoving his glasses onto his forehead. He even took the other’s hand and there was for a split second a chance of peace between them. “What the hell are you doing here?” Beans took from his pocket a small blackjack as soft and worn as skin.

“I’ll explain, but meanwhile there is no reason to hit Breeze.” He knew at once what Beans meant to do.

“All right, Breeze,” said Beans in a routine voice, not looking at him.

Sweet Evening Breeze, knowing what was expected of him, doffed his stocking cap and presented the crown of his head. Hardly watching but with a quick outward flick of his wrist, Beans hit Breeze on the forehead with the blackjack. Breeze fell down.

“Goddamn it, Beans,” said the engineer. “That’s no way to act.”

“You got something to say about it?”

“Yes.”

“Where’s the poontang?” asked Beans, and with a gesture at once fond and conspiratorial — enlisting: him — and contemptuous, he leaned across and snapped his middle finger on the engineer’s fly.

“Augh,” grunted the engineer, bowing slightly and seeming to remember something. Had this happened to him as a boy, getting snapped on the fly? The humiliation was familiar.

“Don’t do that, Beans,” said Ellis Gover, coming between them and shaking his head. “This is a real good old boy.”

By the time the engineer’s nausea had cleared, Beans had caught sight of Mona in the booth. Without taking his eyes from her, he pulled Ellis close and began to whisper. The engineer had time to straighten himself and to brace his foot in the corner of the jamb and sill of the front door. For once in his life he had time and position and a good shot, and for once things became as clear as they used to be in the old honorable days. He hit Beans in the root of his neck as hard as he ever hit the sandbag in the West Side Y.M.C.A. Beans’s cap and glasses flew off and he sat down on the floor. “Now listen here, Ellis,” said the engineer immediately, turning to the tall, younger policeman. “Yall go ahead,” he told the others casually, waving them over Beans’s outstretched legs and out the front door. “Catch a Bluebird cab at the corner.”

“Wait a minute,” said Ellis, but he did not stop them.

“Don’t worry about it, Ellis. They haven’t done anything. They’re leaving town and that’s what you want.”

“But, shit, man,” said Ellis, who could not take his eyes from the fallen policeman. “You done hit Beans.”

“I know, but look at Breeze,” said the engineer by way of answer, and nodded to the Negro, who was laid out straight as a corpse. Standing next to Ellis, he took him by the elbow just as he used to touch him in a football huddle. Ellis was all-state halfback and the engineer, who was quarterback (not all-state), had called the plays in huddle. Ellis was a bit slow in catching the signals and the engineer used to squeeze him so, just above the elbow.

“Yeah, but hailfire, Will.”

“Listen, Ellis,” said the engineer, already moving. “You bring charges against me to clear yourself, do you understand? Tell Beans the others got in behind you. You got it?”

“Yeah, but—”

“Now give Beans a hand and tell him to come after me, O.K.?” He said this though Beans was still out cold, and giving Ellis a final huddle sort of squeeze and nod, the engineer walked quickly to the back door and out into Heck’s Alley.

“Will,” cried Ellis again, feeling that all was not well. But the other had already crossed the alley to a certain board in a fence which had been eroded into the shape of Illinois and which he knew, now fifteen years later, to swing free on a single nail, was through it and into Miss Mamie Billups’ back yard. Miss Mamie was sitting on her side porch when he stooped to pass under her satsuma tree.

“How do you do, Miss Mamie,” said the courteous engineer, bowing and putting his tie inside his coat

“Who is that?” called out the old woman sharply. Everyone used to steal her satsumas.

“This is Will Barrett, Miss Mamie.”

“Will Barrett! You come on up here, Will!”

“I can’t right now, Miss Mamie,” said the engineer, turning up Theard Street. “I’ll be right back!”

His friends waited for him but not long enough. By the time he rounded the lower curve of Milliken Bend, having walked the inner shoulder of the levee out of sight of highway and town, the Trav-L-Aire had already lumbered out of the willows and started up the levee — at an angle! The cabin teetered dangerously. He forgot to tell Mona not to do this. He covered his face with his hands: Mona, thinking to spare the G.M.C. the climb straight up, was in a fair way to turn her plumb over. When he looked up, however, the levee was clear.

It was two o’clock. He was hungry. At the levee end of Theard Street he bought a half dozen tamales from a street vendor (but not the same whose cry Rayed hot! used to echo up and down the summer night in the 1950’s). Now finding a patch of waist-high elephant grass past the towhead and out of sight of anyone standing on the levee behind him, he rolled to and fro and made a hollow which was tilted like a buttercup into the westering sun. It was warm enough to take off his coat and roll up his sleeves. He ate the tamales carefully, taking care not to stain his clothes. The meat was good but his tooth encountered a number-eight shot: rabbit or possibly squirrel. Afterwards he washed his hands in river water, which still thrashed through the lower level of the towhead, and dried them with his handkerchief. Returning to his hollow, he sat cross-legged for a while and watched a towboat push a good half acre of sulphur barges up the dead water on the Louisiana side. Then he curled up and, using his coat folded wrong-side-out for a pillow, went to sleep.

Cold and stiffness woke him. It was a moonless overcast night, but he could make out Scorpio writhing dimly over Louisiana, convulsed around great bloody Antares. Buttoning all three buttons of his jacket, he ran along the inner shoulder of the levee, out of sight of town, until he got warm. When he came abreast of the stacks of the gypsum mill, he went quickly over and down into Blanton Street and took the Illinois Central tracks, which went curving away behind the high school. It was pitch dark under the stadium, but his muscles remembered the spacing of the ties. The open rear of the bleachers exhaled a faint odor of cellar earth and urine. At the Chinaman’s he took the tangent of Houston Street, which ran through a better Negro neighborhood of neat shogun cottages and flower gardens, into the heavy humming air and ham-rich smell of the cottonseed oil mill, and out at De Ridder.

He stood in the inky darkness of the water oaks and looked at his house. It was the same except that the gallery had been closed by glass louvers and a flagpole stuck out of a second-story window. His aunts were sitting on the porch. They had moved out, television and all. He came closer and stood amid the azaleas. They were jolly and fit, were the aunts, and younger than ever. Three were watching “Strike It Rich,” two were playing canasta, and one was reading Race and Reason and eating Whitman’s Sampler. He remembered now that Sophie wrote love letters to Bill Cullen. What a tough hearty crew they were! hearty as muzhiks, and good haters, yet not ill-natured — they’d be honestly and unaffectedly glad to see him walk in, would kiss him and hold him off and make over him — rosy-skinned, easy in their consciences, arteries as supple as a girl’s, husbands dead and gone these forty years, pegged out so long ago that he could not remember anyone ever speaking of them; Christian ladies every one, four Protestant, Presbyterian, and Scotch-Irish, two Catholic and Creole, but long since reconciled, ecumenized, by bon appétit and laughter and good hearty hatred.

It was here under the water oaks that his father used to stroll of a summer night, hands in his pockets and head down, sauntering along the sidewalk in his old Princeton style of sauntering, right side turning forward with right leg. Here under the water oaks or there under the street light, he would hold parley with passers-by, stranger and friend, white and black, thief and police. The boy would sit on the front steps, close enough to speak with his father and close enough too to service the Philco which played its stack of prewar 78’s but always had trouble doing it. The mechanism creaked and whirred and down came the record plop and round it went for a spell, hissing under the voyaging needle. From the open window came Brahms, nearly always Brahms. Up and down the sidewalk went his father, took his turn under the street light sometimes with a client, sometimes alone. The clients, black and white and by and large the sorriest of crews but of course listening now with every eager effort of attention and even of a special stratspheric understanding. Between records the boy could hear snatches of talk: “Yassuh, that’s the way it is now! I have notice the same thing myself!”—the father having said something about the cheapness of good intentions and the rarity of good character—“I’m sho gon’ do like you say”—the passer-by working him of course for the fifty cents or five dollars or what, but working him as gracefully as anyone ever worked, they as good at their trade as he at his. The boy listening: what was the dread in his heart as he heard the colloquy and the beautiful terrible Brahms which went abroad into the humming summer night and the heavy ham-rich air?

The aunts let out a holler. Bill Cullen had given away a cabin cruiser to a lady from Michigan City, Indiana.

It was on such an evening — he passed his hand over his eyes and stretching it forth touched the sibilant corky bark of the water oak — that his father had died. The son watched from the step, old Brahms went abroad, the father took a stroll and spoke to a stranger of the good life and the loneliness of the galaxies. “Yes suh,” said the stranger. “I have heard tell it was so” (that the closest star was two light years away).

When the man came back the boy asked him:

“Father, why do you walk in the dark when you know they have sworn to kill you?”

“I’m not afraid, son.”

To the west the cars of the white people were nosing up the levee, headlights switched first to parking, then out altogether. From the east, beyond the cottonseed-oil mill, came the sound of Negro laughter.

The man walked until midnight. Once a police car stopped. The policeman spoke to the man.

“You’ve won,” said the youth when the man came back. “I heard the policeman. They’ve left town.”

“We haven’t won, son. We’ve lost.”

“But they’re gone, Father.”

“Why shouldn’t they leave? They’ve won.”

“How have they won, Father?”

“They don’t have to stay. Because they found out that we are like them after all and so there was no reason for them to stay.”

“How are we like them, Father?”

“Once they were the fornicators and the bribers and the takers of bribes and we were not and that was why they hated us. Now we are like them, so why should they stay? They know they don’t have to kill me.”

“How do they know that, Father?”

“Because we’ve lost it all, son.”

“Lost what?”

“But there’s one thing they don’t know.”

“What’s that, Father?”

“They may have won, but I don’t have to choose that.”

“Choose what?”

“Choose them.”

This time, as he turned to leave, the youth called out to him. “Wait.”

“What?”

“Don’t leave.”

“I’m just going to the corner.”

But there was a dread about this night, the night of victory. (Victory is the saddest thing of all, said the father.) The mellowness of Brahms had gone overripe, the victorious serenity of the Great Horn Theme was false, oh fake fake. Underneath, all was unwell.

“Father.”

“What?”

“Why do you like to be alone?”

“In the last analysis, you are alone.” He turned into the darkness of the oaks.

“Don’t leave.” The terror of the beautiful victorious music pierced his very soul.

“I’m not leaving, son,” said the man and, after taking a turn, came back to the steps. But instead of stopping to sit beside the youth, he went up past him, resting his hand on the other’s shoulder so heavily that the boy looked up to see his father’s face. But the father went on without saying anything: went into the house, on through the old closed-in dogtrot hall to the back porch, opened the country food press which had been converted to a gun cabinet, took down the double-barrel twelve-gauge Greener, loaded it, went up the back stairs into the attic, and, fitting the muzzle of the Greener into the notch of his breastbone, could still reach both triggers with his thumbs. That was how it had to happen, the sheriff told the youth, that was the only way it could have happened.

The sound came crashing through the music, louder than twenty Philcos, a single sound, yet more prolonged and thunderous than a single shot. The youth turned off the Philco and went upstairs.

“—and Anacin does not upset your stummick,” said Bill Cullen.

Again his hand went forth, knowing where it was, though he could not see, and touched the tiny iron horsehead of the hitching post, traced the cold metal down to the place where the oak had grown round it in an elephant lip. His fingertips touched the warm finny whispering bark.

Wait. While his fingers explored the juncture of iron and bark, his eyes narrowed as if he caught a glimmer of light on the cold iron skull. Wait. I think he was wrong and that he was looking in the wrong place. No, not he but the times. The times were wrong and one looked in the wrong place. It wasn’t even his fault because that was the way he was and the way the times were, and there was no other place a man could look. It was the worst of times, a time of fake beauty and fake victory. Wait. He had missed it! It was not in the Brahms that one looked and not in solitariness and not in the old sad poetry but — he wrung out his ear — but here, under your nose, here in the very curiousness and drollness and extraness of the iron and the bark that — he shook his head — that—

The TV studio audience laughed with its quick, obedient, and above all grateful Los Angeles laughter — once we were lonesome back home, the old sad home of our fathers, and here we are together and happy at last.

A Negro came whistling toward him under the street light, a young man his own age. Entering the darkness of the water oaks, the Negro did not at first see him (though it had been his, the Negro’s, business, until now, to see him first), then did see him two yards away and stopped for a long half second. They looked at each other. There was nothing to say. Their fathers would have had much to say: “In the end, Sam, it comes down to a question of character.” “Yes suh, Lawyer Barrett, you right about that. Like I was saying to my wife only this evening—” But the sons had nothing to say. The engineer looked at the other as the half second wore on. You may be in a fix and I know that but what you don’t know and won’t believe and must find out for yourself is that I’m in a fix too and you got to get where I am before you even know what I’m talking about and I know that and that’s why there is nothing to say now. Meanwhile I wish you well.

It was only then, belatedly, and as if it were required of him, that the Negro shuddered and went his way.

As he watched his aunts, a squad car came slowly down De Ridder and stopped not twelve feet beyond the iron horse. A policeman, not Ross or Gover, went up to the porch and spoke to Aunt Sophie. She shook her head four or five times, hand to her throat, and when the policeman left, turned off the television and in her excitement stumbled a little as she told the others. Aunt Bootie forgot the Whitman’s Sampler in her lap, stood up and scattered nougats and bird eggs in all directions. No one noticed.

Without taking much care about it, he walked through the azaleas and around to the back screen door, which was locked and which he opened, without knowing that he remembered, by wedging the door back against its hinges so that the bolt could be forced free of its worn wooden mortise, and went straight up the two flights to the attic and straight into the windowless interior room built into the peak of the house. His upraised hand felt for and found the string. The old clear-glass 25-watt bulb shed a yellow mizzling light, a light of rays, actual striae. The room had not been touched, they were still here; the grandfather’s army blanket, Plattsburg issue, the puttees, a belt of webbing, the Kaiser Bill helmets, the five-pound binoculars with an artillery scale etched into one lens. He picked up the Greener, broke the breech and sighted at the yellow bulb. The bore was still speckled with powder grains. And the collapsible boat: an English contraption of silvery zeppelin fabric with varnished spruce spars to spring it into shape. It lay as it had lain ten years ago, half disassembled and hastily packed from a duck hunt he and his father had taken on the White River in the early fifties. Now, as if it were the very night of their return, he knelt absently and repacked the boat, remembering the feel and fit of the spar-ends and the brass sockets and even the goofy English directions: “—Don’t be discouraged if spar L does not fit immediately into socket J — patience is required.”

After he repacked the boat, he lay on the coat and, propping himself against the wall, drew the hard scratchy army blanket up to his armpits. For two hours he sat so, wakeful and alert, while his eyes followed the yellow drizzle of light into every corner of the attic room.

It was eight o’clock when he went downstairs, English boat slung over one shoulder, artillery binoculars over the other. The aunts had not gotten up. Hearing D’lo shuffling about the kitchen, he took care not to startle her: he slipped out the back door and came in noisily again.

“Law, if it ain’t Mr. Billy,” said D’lo, rolling her eyes conventionally and noticing the wall clock as she did so. She was no more surprised by the doings of white folks than he was.

D’lo stirred steaming boilers of grits and batter, fist sunk deep into her side, knees driven together by her great weight and bare heels ridden off her old pink mules and onto the floor. It crossed his mind that D’lo had somehow known he was here. He asked her not to tell his aunts.

“I ain’t gon’ tell them nothing!”

“I’m surprised you’re still here.”

“Where I’m going!”

“They still fight?”

“Fight! You don’t know, fight.”

“The police are looking for me.”

“Uh-oh,” said D’lo. This was serious. Yet he could not have sworn she did not know all about it.

D’lo found him his father’s Rolls razor and, while he washed and shaved in the downstairs bathroom, fixed him a big breakfast of grits and sausage and batter cakes. When he left, he gave her twenty dollars.

“I thank you,” said D’lo formally and twisted the bill into the stocking roll below her fat old knee, which curved out in six different arcs of rich cinnamon flesh.

A step creaked. “Here she come,” said D’lo. Sophie was she, ole miss, the one who gave the orders.

“I’ll be seeing you, D’lo,” he said, shouldering the boat.

“All right now, Mist’ Billy,” she cried politely, socking down the grits spoon on the boiler and curling her lip in a rich and complex acknowledgment of his own queerness and her no more than mild sympathy and of the distance between them, maybe not even sympathy but just a good-humored letting him be. (All right now, you was a good little boy, but don’t mess with me too much, go on, get out of my kitchen.)

Ten minutes later he was up and over the levee and down into the willows, where he assembled the boat and the two-bladed paddle. It was a sparkling day. The river was ruffled by glittering steel wavelets like a northern lake. Shoving off and sitting buttoned up kayak style in the aft hole, he went dropping away in the fast water, past the barrow pits and blue holes, and now beginning to paddle, went skimming over the wide river, which seemed to brim and curve up like a watchglass from the great creamy boils that shed tons of cold bottom water, down past old Fort Ste. Marie on the Louisiana side, its ramparts gone back to blackberries and honeysuckle. He knew every tunnel, embrasure, magazine room, and did not bother to look. Two Negroes in a skiff were running a trotline under the caving bank. They watched him a second longer than they might have. Now they were watching him again, under their arms as they handed the line along. He frowned, wondering how he looked in the face, then recollected himself: it was after all an uncommon sight, a man fully dressed in coat and necktie and buttoned up in a tiny waterbug of a boat and at nine o’clock of a Tuesday morning. They could not encompass him; he was beyond their reckoning. But hold on, something new! As he drifted past the fort, he rubbed his eyes. A pennant fluttered from the parapet, the Stars and Bars! And the entire fort was surrounded by a ten-foot-high hurricane fence. But of course! This very month marked the hundredth anniversary of the reduction of the fort by Admiral Foote’s gunboats. It was part of the preparation for the Centennial! No doubt they would, at the proper time, imprison the “Confederates” behind the fence.

But as he dropped past the fort, he was surprised to see “sentinels” patrolling the fence and even a few prisoners inside, but as unlikely a lot of Confederates as one could imagine — men and women! the men bearded properly enough, but both sexes blue-jeaned and sweat-shirted and altogether disreputable. And Negroes! And yonder, pacing the parapet — Good Lord! — was Milo Menander, the politician, who was evidently playing the role of Beast Banks, the infamous federal commandant of the infamous federal prison into which the fort was converted after its capture. Capital! And hadn’t he got himself up grandly for the occasion: flowing locks, big cigar, hand pressed Napoleonically into his side, a proper villainous-looking old man if ever there was one.

But hold on! Something was wrong. Were they not two years later with their celebration? The fort was captured early in the war, and here it was 19— What year was this? He wrang out his ear and beat his pockets in vain for his Gulf calendar card. Another slip: if Beast Banks had reduced and occupied the fort, why was the Stars and Bars still flying?

It was past figuring even if he’d a stomach for figuring. Something may be amiss here, but then all was not well with him either. Next he’d be hearing singing ravening particles. Besides, he had other fish to fry and many a mile to travel. British wariness woke in him and, putting his head down, he dropped below the fort as silently as an Englishman slipping past Heligoland.

He put in at the old ferry landing, abandoned when the bridge at Vicksburg was built and now no more than a sloughing bank of mealy earth honeycombed by cliff swallows. Disassembling and packing his boat, he stowed it in a cave-in and pulled dirt over it and set out up the sunken ferry road, which ran through loess cuts filled now as always with a smoky morning twilight and the smell of roots (here in Louisiana across the river it was ever a dim green place of swamps and shacks and Negro graveyards sparkling with red and green medicine bottles, the tree stumps were inhabited by spirits), past flooded pin-oak flats where great pileated woodpeckers went ringing down the smoky aisles. Though it was only two hundred yards from home, Louisiana had ever seemed misty and faraway, removed in time and space. Over yonder in the swamps lived the same great birds Audubon saw. Freejacks, Frenchman, and river rats trapped muskrat and caught catfish. It was a place of small and pleasant deeds.

“Hey, Merum!”

Uncle Fannin was walking up and down the back porch, his face narrow and dark as a piece of slab bark, carrying in the crook of his arm the Browning automatic worn to silver, with bluing left only in the grooves of the etching. The trigger guard was worn as thin as an old man’s wedding ring.

“Mayrom! Where’s that Ma’am?”

He was calling his servant Merriam but he never called him twice by the same name.

It was characteristic of the uncle that he had greeted his nephew without surprise, as if it were nothing out of the ordinary that he should come hiking up out of nowhere with his artillery binoculars, and after five years. He hardly stopped his pacing.

“We’re fixing to mark some coveys up on Sunnyside,” he said, as if it were he who owed the explanations.

The engineer blinked. They might have been waiting for him.

The Trav-L-Aire was nowhere in sight and Uncle Fannin knew nothing about it or any company of “actors,” as the engineer called them (calculating that a mixture of blacks and whites was somehow more tolerable if they were performers).

Merriam came round the corner of the house with two pointers, one an old liver-and-white bitch who knew what was what and had no time for foolery, trotting head down, dugs rippling like a curtain; the other pointer was a fool. He was a young dog named Rock. He put his muzzle in the engineer’s hand and nudged him hard. His head was heavy as iron. There were warts all over him where Uncle Fannin had shot him for his mistakes. Merriam, the engineer perceived, was partial to Rock and was afraid the uncle was going to shoot him again. Merriam was a short heavy Negro whose face was welted and bound up through the cheeks so that he was muffle-jawed in his speech. Blackness like a fury seemed to rush forward in his face. But the engineer knew that the fury was a kind of good nature. He wore a lumpy white sweater with stuffing sticking out of it like a scarecrow.

It was not a real hunt they were setting out on. Uncle Fannin wanted to mark coveys for the season. Later in the fall, businessmen would come down from Memphis and up from New Orleans and he would take them out. The engineer refused the gun offered to him, but he went along with them. They drove into the woods in an old high-finned De Soto whose back seat had been removed to make room for the dogs. A partition of chicken wire fenced off the front seat. The dogs stuck their heads out the windows, grinning and splitting the wind, their feet scrabbling for purchase on the metal seat bed. The car smelled of old bitter car metal and croker sacks and the hot funky firecracker smell of dry bird dogs.

Merriam sat with the two Barretts on the front seat, but swiveled around to face them to show he was not sitting with them, not quite on or off the seat, mostly off and claiming, in a nice deprecation, not more than an inch of seat, not through any real necessity but only as the proper concession due the law of gravity. It was not hard to believe that Merriam could have sat in the air if it had been required of him.

The De Soto plunged and roared, crashing into potholes not with a single shock but with a distributed and mediated looseness, a shambling sound like throwing a chain against a wall, knocking the dogs every whichway. When Uncle Fannin slammed on the brakes, the dogs were thrust forward, their chins pushing against the shoulders of the passengers, but already back-pedaling apologetically, their expressions both aggrieved and grinning.

They hunted from an old plantation dike long since reclaimed by the woods and now no more than a high path through thickets. The engineer, still dressed in Dacron suit and suede oxfords, followed along, hands in pockets. Rock got shot again, though with bird shot and from a sufficient distance so that it did no more harm than raise a new crop of warts.

“Meroom!”

“Yassuh.”

Merriam was carrying a brand-new single-shot nickel-plated sixteen-gauge from Sears Roebuck which looked like a silver flute.

“Look at that son of a bitch.”

“I see him.”

Below and ahead of them the bitch Maggie was holding a point, her body bent like a pin, tail quivering. Rock had swung wide and was doubling back and coming up behind her, bounding up and down like a springbok to see over the grass. He smelled nothing.

“He’s sho gon’ run over her,” said the uncle.

“No suh, he ain’t,” said Merriam, but keeping a fearful weather eye on Rock.

“What’s he doing then?”

The engineer perceived that the uncle was asking the question ironically, taking due notice of the magic and incantatory faculty that Negroes are supposed to have — they know what animals are going to do, for example — but doing it ironically.

“Goddamn, he is going to run over her!”—joking aside now.

“He ain’t stuttn it,” said Merriam.

Of course Rock, damn fool that he was, did run over Maggie, landing squarely in the middle of the covey and exploding quail in all directions — it coming over him in mid-air and at the last second, the inkling of what lay below, he braking and back-pedaling wildly like Goofy. Uncle Fannin shot three times, twice at quail and once at Rock, and, like all dead shots, already beginning to talk as he shot as if the shooting itself were the least of it. “Look at that cock, one, two, and—” Wham. He got three birds, one with one shot and two crossing with the other shot. The third shot hit Rock. The engineer opened his mouth to say something but a fourth shot went off.

“Lord to God,” groaned Merriam. “He done shot him again.” Merriam went to look after Rock.

The uncle didn’t hear. He was already down the levee and after a single who had gone angling off into the woods, wings propped down, chunky, teetering in his glide. Uncle Fannin went sidling and backing into the underbrush, reloading as he went, the vines singing and popping around his legs. When he couldn’t find the single, even though they had seen where he landed, Merriam told the two Barretts that the quail had hidden from the dogs.

“Now how in the hell is he going to hide from the dogs,” said the disgusted uncle.

“He hiding now,” said Merriam, still speaking to the engineer. “They has a way of hiding so that no dog in the world can see or smell them.”

“Oh, Goddamn, come on now. You hold that dog.”

“I seen them!”

“How do they hide, Merriam?” the engineer asked him.

‘They hits the ground and grab ahold of trash and sticks with both feets and throws theyselfs upside down with his feets sticking up and the dogs will go right over him ever’ time.”

“Hold that goddamn dog now, Mayrim!”

After supper they watched television. An old round-eyed Zenith and two leatherette recliners, the kind that are advertised on the back page of the comic section, had been placed in a clearing that had been made long ago by pushing Aunt Felice’s good New Orleans furniture back into the dark corners of the room. Merriam watched from a roost somewhere atop a pile of chairs and tables. The sentient engineer perceived immediately that the recliner he was given was Merriam’s seat, but there was nothing he could do about it. Uncle Fannin pretended the recliner had been brought out for the engineer (how could it have been?) and Merriam pretended he always roosted high in the darkness. But when they, Uncle Fannin and Merriam, talked during the programs, sometimes the uncle, forgetting, would speak to the other recliner:

“He’s leaving now but he be back up there later, don’t worry about it.”

“Yes suh,” said Merriam from the upper darkness.

“He’s a pistol ball now, ain’t he?”

“I mean.”

“But Chester, now. Chester can’t hold them by himself.”

“That Mist’ Chester is all right now,” cried Merriam.

“Shoot.”

Whenever a commercial ended, Uncle Fannin lifted himself and took a quick pluck at his seat by way of getting ready.

“That laig don’t hold him!”

“It ain’t his leg that’s holding him now,” said the uncle, and, noticing that it was his nephew who sat beside him, gave him a wink and a poke in the ribs to show that he didn’t take Merriam seriously.

Merriam didn’t mind. They argued about the Western heroes as if they were real people whose motives could be figured out. During a commercial, Merriam told the engineer of a program they had seen last week. It made a strong impression on him because the hero, their favorite, a black knight of a man, both gentleman and brawler, had gotten badly beat up. It was part one of a series and so he was still beat up.

“I told Mist’ Fanny”—Merriam spoke muffle-jawed and all in a rush as if he hoped to get the words out before they got bound up in his cheeks—“that the onliest way in the world they can catch him is to get in behind him. Mist’ Fanny, he say they gon’ stomp him. I say they got to get in behind him first. What happened, some man called his attention, like I say ‘look here!’ and he looked and they did get in behind him and Lord, they stomped him, bad, I mean all up in the head. He lay out there in the street two days and folks scared to help him, everybody scared of this one man, Mister errerr—, errerr—” Merriam snapped his fingers. “It slips my mind, but he was a stout man and low, lower than you or Mist’ Fanny, he brush his hair up in the front like.” Merriam showed them and described the man so that the engineer would recognize him if he happened to see him. “They taken his money and his gun and his horse and left him out there in the sun. Then here come this other man to kill him. And I said to Mist’ Fanny, there is one thing this other man don’t know and that is he got this little biddy pistol on him and they didn’t take it off him because he got it hid in his bosom.”

“Man, how you going to go up against a thirty-thirty with a derringer,” said the uncle disdainfully, yet shyly, watchful of the engineer lest he, the engineer, think too badly of Merriam. His uncle was pleading with him!

“I’d like to see how that comes out,” said the engineer. “Is the second part coming on tonight?” he asked Merriam.

“Yessuh.”

“That fellow’s name was Bogardus,” said the uncle presently. “He carried a carbine with a lever action and he can work that lever as fast as you can shoot that automatic there.”

“Yessuh,” said Merriam, but without conviction.

Still no sign of the Trav-L-Aire, and at midnight the engineer went to bed — without taking thought about it, going up to the second-floor room he used to have in the summertime, a narrow cell under the eaves furnished with an armoire, a basin and ewer and chamber pot, and an old-style feather bed with bolster. The skull was still there on the shelf of the armoire, property of his namesake, Dr. Williston Barrett, the original misfit, who graduated from old Jefferson Medical College, by persuasion an abolitionist but who nevertheless went to fight in Virginia and afterwards having had enough, he said, of the dying and the dead and the living as well, the North and the South, of men in sum, came home to the country and never practiced a day in his life, took instead to his own laudanum and became a philosopher of sorts, lived another sixty years, the only long-lived Barrett male. The skull had turned as yellow as ivory and was pencil-marked by ten generations of children; it was sawed through the dome and the lid securely fastened by silver hinges; undo that and the brain pan was itself sectioned and hinged, opening in turn into an airy comb of sinus cells.

It was cold but he knew the feather bed, so he stripped to his shorts, and after washing his T-shirt in the ewer and spreading it on the marble stand to dry, he climbed into bed. The warm goosedown flowed up around him. It was, he had always imagined, something like going to bed in Central Europe. He pulled the bolster up to his shoulders and propped Sutter’s casebook on its thick margin.

R.R., white male, c. 25, well-dev. but under-nour. 10 mm. entrance wound in right temporal, moderate powder tattooing and branding, right exophthalmus and hematoma; stellate exit wound left mastoidal base, approx 28 mm. diam. Cops say suicide.

From Lt. B.’s report: R.R., b. Garden City, Long Island; grad LIU and MIT last June. Employed Redstone Arsenal since June 15. Drove here after work yesterday, July 3, purchased S & W.38 rev. from Pioneer Sports, rented room at Jeff D. Hotel, found on bed clothed 9 a.m., approx time of death, 1 a.m., July 4.

Lt. B.: “His life before him, etc.” “One of the lucky ones, etc.” “No woman trouble, liquor or drugs or money, etc.” “???”

Suicide considered as consequence of the spirit of abstraction and of transcendence; lewdness as sole portal of reentry into world demoted to immanence; reentry into immanence via orgasm; but post-orgasmic transcendence 7 devils worse than first.

Man who falls victim to transcendence as the spirit of abstraction, i.e., elevates self to posture over and against world which is pari passu demoted to immanence and seen as examplar and specimen and coordinate, and who is not at same time compensated by beauty of motion of method of science, has no choice but to seek reentry into immanent world qua immanence. But since no avenue of reentry remains save genital and since reentry coterminus c orgasm, post-orgasmic despair without remedy. Of my series of four suicides in scientists and technicians, 3 post-coital (spermatozoa at meatus), 2 in hotel room. Hotel room = site of intersection of transcendence and immanence: room itself, a triaxial coordinate ten floors above street; whore who comes up = pure immanence to be entered. But entry doesn’t avail: one skids off into transcendance. There is no reentry from the orbit of transcendence.

Lt. B.: “Maybe they’re so shocked by what they’ve turned loose on the world—” Pandora’s Box theory, etc. “Maybe that’s why he did it,” etc.

I say: “Bullshit, Lt., and on the contrary. This Schadenfreude is what keeps them going,” etc.

What I cannot tell Lt: If R.R. had been a good pornographer, he would not have suicided. His death was due, not to lewdness, but to the failure of lewdness.

I say to Val: Re Sweden: increase in suicides in Sweden due not to increase in lewdness but to decline of lewdness. When Sweden was post-Christian but had not yet forgotten Cx (cira 1850–1914, Swedish lewdness intact and suicides negligible. But when Swedes truly post-Christian (not merely post-Christian but also post-memory of Cx), lewdness declined and suicides rose in inverse relation.

Val to me: Don’t sell Sweden short. (I notice that her language has taken on the deplorable and lapsed slanginess found in many religious, priests and nuns, and in Our Sunday Visitor.) The next great saint must come from Sweden, etc. It is only from desolation of total transcendence of self and total descent of world immanence that a man can come who can recover himself and world under God, etc. Give me suicidal Swede, says she, over Alabama Christian any day, etc.

I say: Very good, very good talk, but it is after all only that, that is the kind of talk we have between us.

The bar turned in his head, synapses gave way, and he slept ten hours dreamlessly and without spansules.

Still no sign of the Trav-L-Aire the next morning, but after a great steaming breakfast of brains and eggs and apple rings served in front of the Zenith. (Captain Kangaroo: Uncle Fannin and Merriam cackled like maniacs at the doings of Captain K. and Mr. Greenjeans, and the engineer wondered, how is it that uncle and servant, who were solid 3-D persons, true denizens of this misty Natchez Trace country, should be transported by these sad gags from Madison Avenue? But they were transported. They were merry as could be, and he, the engineer, guessed that was all right: more power to Captain K.)

After he had transacted his oil-lease business with his uncle, the telephone rang. It was the deputy sheriff in Shut Off. It seemed a little “trailer” had been stolen by a bunch of niggers and outside agitators and that papers and books in the name of Williston Bibb Barrett had been found therein. Did Mr. Fannin know anything about it? If he did and if it was his property or his kin’s, he might reclaim the same by coming down to Shut Off and picking it up.

The uncle held the phone and told his nephew.

“What happened to the, ah, Negroes and the outside agitators?” asked the latter calmly.

Nothing, it seemed. They were there, at this moment, in Shut Off. It needed but a word from Mr. Fannin to give the lie to their crazy story that they had borrowed the trailer from his kinsman and the lot of them would be thrown in jail, if not into the dungeon at Fort Ste. Marie.

“The dungeon. So that’s it,” said the nephew, relieved despite himself. “And what if the story is confirmed?” he asked his uncle.

Then they’d be packed off in twenty minutes on the next bus to Memphis.

“Confirm the story,” said the nephew. “And tell him I’ll be there in an hour to pick up my camper.” He wanted his friends free, clear of danger, but free and clear of him too, gone, by the time he reached Shut Off.

After bidding his uncle and Merriam farewell — who were only waiting for him to leave to set off with the dogs in the De Soto — he struck out for the old landing, where he retrieved his boat and drifted a mile or so to the meadows, which presently separated the river from Shut Off. So it came to be called Shut Off: many years ago one of the meanderings of the river had jumped the neck of a peninsula and shut the landing off from the river.

The boy and the man ate breakfast in the dining car Savannah. The waiter braced his thigh against the table while he laid the pitted nickel-silver knives and forks. The water in the heavy glass carafe moved up and down without leaving a drop, as if water and glass were quits through usage.

A man came down the aisle and stood talking to his father, folding and unfolding his morning paper.

“It’s a bitter thing, Ed. Bitter as gar broth.”

“I know it is, Oscar. Son, I want you to meet Senator Oscar Underwood. Oscar, this is my son Bill.”

He arose to shake hands and then did not know whether to stand or sit.

“Bill,” the senator told him, “when you grow up, decide what you want to do according to your lights. Then do it. That’s all there is to it.”

“Yes sir,” he said, feeling confident he could do that.

“Senator Underwood did just that, son, and at great cost to himself,” said his father.

“Yes sir.”

He awoke, remembering what Senator Underwood looked like, even the vein on his hand which jumped back and forth across a tendon when he folded and unfolded the fresh newspaper.

Dear God, he thought, pacing his five-foot aisle, I’m slipping again. I can’t have met Senator Underwood, or could I? Was it I and my father or he and his father? How do I know what he looked like? What did he look like? I must find out.

Stooping, he caught sight of a forest of oil derricks. He dressed and went outside. The camper was parked in the gravel plaza of a truckers’ stop. In the café he learned that he was in Longview, Texas. While he waited for his breakfast, he read from Sutter’s notebook:

You’re wrong about Rita, Val. She saved my life and she meant no harm to Kitty — though that does not answer your charge. I had left the old ruined South for the transcending Southwest. But there transcendence failed me and Rita picked me up for the bum I was and fed and clothed me.

The day before I left home I stood in a lewd wood by the golf links. My insurance had been canceled and I could not hospitalize patients or even treat them at home save at my own risk. The wood was the lewd wood of my youth where lovers used to come and leave Merry Widow tins and where I dreamed the lewd dreams of youth. Therefrom I spied Jackie Randolph towing her cart up number 7 fairway sans caddy and sans partner. Invited her into the woods and spoke into her ear. She looked at her watch and said she had 20 minutes before her bridge luncheon. She spread her golf towel on the pine needles, kept her spiked shoes on, and cursed in my ear.

The innocence of Mexican country women.

That evening my father gave me $100,000 for not smoking until I was 21.

Looked in J.A.M.A. classifieds, found job in Santa Fe clinic, telephoned them my credentials (which were ever good), was accepted on spot, packed my Edsel and was on my way. Clinic dreary — found my true vocation at Sangre de Cristo guest ranch.

Genius loci of Western desert did not materialize. Had hoped for free-floating sense of geographical transcendence, that special dislocatedness and purity of the Southwest which attracted Doc Holliday and Robert Oppenheimer, one a concrete Valdosta man who had had a bellyful of the concrete, the other the luckiest of all abstract men: who achieved the high watermark of the 20th century, which is to say: the device conceived in a locus of pure transcendence, which in turn worked the maximum effect upon the sphere of immanence, the world. (Both men, notice, developed weapons in the desert, the former a specially built sawed-off shotgun which he carried by a string around his neck.)

It didn’t work. I found myself treating senior citizens for post-retirement anomie and lady dudes for sore rears and nameless longings. I took my money and bought a ranch, moved out and in a month’s time was struck flat by an acute depression, laid out flat in the desert and assaulted by 10,000 devils, not the little black fellows of St. Anthony but wanton teen-agers who swung from the bedpost and made gestures.

I stopped eating. Rita found me (she was looking for volunteer MD’s for her little Indians), toted me back to her cozy house in Tesuque, fed me, clothed me, bucked me up, and stood for no nonsense. She saved my life and I married her to stay alive. We had a good time. We ate the pure fruit of transcendence. She is not, like me, a pornographer. She believes in “love” like you, though a different kind. She “falls in love.” She fell in love with me because I needed her, and then with Kitty because she thought I didn’t need her and because Kitty seemed to, with that Gretel-lost-in-the-woods look of hers. Now Kitty is “in love” with someone and Rita is up the creek. I told her to forget all that stuff, e.g., “love,” and come on back with me to the Southwest, where we didn’t have a bad time. But she is still angry with me. I forgive her sins but she doesn’t mine. Hers: like all secular saints, she canonizes herself. Even her sins are meritorious. Her concern for Kitty gets put down as “broadening her horizons” or “saving her from the racists.” And all she really wanted for Jamie was that he should get Barrett out of the way. She got extremely angry when I suggested it, though I told her it wasn’t so bad, that she was no more guilty than everyone else. Eh, Val? You want to know the only thing I really held against her? A small thing but it got under my skin. It was an expression she used with her transcendent friends: she would tell them she and I were “good in bed.” I am an old-fashioned Alabama pornographer and do not like forward expressions in a woman.

Feeling unusually elated — then I am Kitty’s “someone”!—he stopped at the public library in Longview and looked up Senator Oscar W. Underwood in the Columbia Encyclopedia. The senator died in 1929, ten years before the engineer’s birth. When he asked the librarian where he might find a picture of Senator Underwood, she looked at him twice and said she didn’t know.

The same evening he called Kitty from a Dallas trailer park. To his vast relief, she sounded mainly solicitous for him. She had even supposed that he had been hurt and suffered another attack of “amnesia”—which he saw that she saw as a thing outside him, a magic medical entity, a dragon that might overtake him at any moment. Fortunately too, the events occurring that night on the campus were themselves so violent that his own lapse seemed minor.

“Oh, honey, I thought you’d been killed,” cried Kitty.

“No.”

“I couldn’t have met you anyway. They herded us down into the basement and wouldn’t let us leave till Sunday afternoon.”

“Sunday afternoon,” said the engineer vaguely.

“Are you all right?” asked Kitty anxiously when he fell silent.

“Yes. I’m going on now to find, ah, Jamie.”

“I know. We’re counting on you.”

“I wish you were here with me.”

“Me too.”

All of a sudden he did. Love pangs entered his heart and melted his loin and his life seemed simple. The thing to do — why couldn’t he remember it? — was to marry Kitty and get a job and live an ordinary life, play golf like other people.

“We will be married.”

“Oh yes, darling. Just between you and I, Myra is going to take the Mickle house off the market till you get back.”

“Between you and me,” he said absently, “the Mickle house?” Oh my. He’d forgotten Cap’n Andy and his lookout over the doleful plain.

“You two big dopes come on back here where you belong.”

“Who?”

“You and Jamie.”

“Oh yes. We will.”

“You shouldn’t have done it.”

“Done what?”

“Told Poppy to stop payment of my dowry.”

“Somebody stole it.”

“Then you’ll still accept it?”

“Sure.”

“He wrote me another one.”

“Good.”

But his foreboding returned as soon as he hung up. He lay abed stiff as a poker, feet sticking up, listening to patriotic programs. When at last he did fall asleep, he woke almost immediately and with a violent start. He peeped out of the window to see what might be amiss. Evil low-flying clouds reflected a red furnace-glow from the city. Lower still, from the very treetops, he fancied he could hear a ravening singing sound. Wasting no time, he uncoupled his umbilical connections with dread Dallas, roared out onto the freeways, and by sun-up was leveled out at eighty-five and straight for the Panhandle.

Past Amarillo the next day and up a black tundra-like country with snow fences and lonesome shacks to Raton Pass. He stopped for gas at an ancient Humble station, a hut set down in a moraine of oil cans and shredded fan belts and ruptured inner tubes. The wind came howling down from Colorado, roaring down the railroad cut like a freight train. There was a meniscus of snow on the black mountainside. The attendant wore an old sheepskin coat and was as slanty-eyed as a Chinaman. Later the engineer thought: why he is an Indian. He steered the Trav-L-Aire out onto a level stretch of tundra, locked himself in, and slept for twenty hours.

When he woke, it was very cold. He lit the propane panel ray and, as he waited for the cabin to warm, caught sight of his own name in Sutter’s casebook.

Barrett: His trouble is he wants to know what his trouble is. His “trouble,” he thinks, is a disorder of such a character that if only he can locate the right expert with the right psychology, the disorder can be set right and he can go about his business.

That is to say: he wishes to cling to his transcendence and to locate a fellow transcender (e.g., me) who will tell him how to traffic with immanence (e.g., “environment,” “groups,” “experience,” etc.) in such a way that he will be happy. Therefore I will tell him nothing. For even if I were “right,” his posture is self-defeating.

(Southern transcenders are the worst of all — for they hate the old bloody immanence of the South. Southerners outdo their teachers, just as the Chinese Marxists outdo the Soviets. Did you ever talk to a female Freudian Georgia social worker? Freud would be horrified.)

Yes, Barrett has caught a whiff of the transcendent trap and has got the wind up. But what can one tell him? What can you tell him, Val?

Even if you were right. Let us say you were right: that man is a wayfarer (i.e., not transcending being nor immanent being but wayfarer) who therefore stands in the way of hearing a piece of news which is of the utmost importance to him (i.e., his salvation) and which he had better attend to. So you say to him: Look, Barrett, your trouble is due not to a disorder of your organism but to the human condition, that you do well to be afraid and you do well to forget everything which does not pertain to your salvation. That is to say, your amnesia is not a symptom. So you say: Here is the piece of news you have been waiting for, and you tell him. What does Barrett do? He attends in that eager flattering way of his and at the end of it he might even say yes! But he will receive the news from his high seat of transcendence as one more item of psychology, throw it into his immanent meat-grinder, and wait to see if he feels better. He told me he’s in favor of the World’s Great Religions. What are you going to do about that?

I am not in favor of any such thing. We are doomed to the transcendence of abstraction and I choose the only reentry into the world which remains to us. What is better then than the beauty and the exaltation of the practice of transcendence (science and art) and of the delectation of immanence, the beauty and the exaltation of lewd love? What is better than this: one works hard during the day in the front line and with the comradeship of science and at night one goes to La Fonda, where one encounters a stranger, a handsome woman. We drink, we two handsome thirty-five-year-olds, she dark-eyed, shadowy of cheek, wistful in her own transcendence. We dance. The guitar makes the heart soar. We eat hearty. Under the table a gentle pressure of the knee. One speaks into her ear at some length. “Let’s go.” “But we ordered dinner.” “We can come back.” “All right.” The blood sings with voluptuousness and tenderness.

Rita says I do not love anyone. That is not true. I love all women. How lovable they are, all of them, our lovely lonely bemused American women. What darlings. Let any one of them enter a room and my heart melts. You say there is something better. Ich warte.

Where he probably goes wrong, mused the engineer sleepily, is in the extremity of his alternatives: God and not-God, getting under women’s dresses and blowing your brains out. Whereas and in fact my problem is how to live from one ordinary minute to the next on a Wednesday afternoon.

Has not this been the case with all “religious” people?

Down, down into the sunny yellow canyon of the Rio Grande, down through the piney slopes to the ocher cliffs and the red clay bottoms. He stopped to see the famous river. When he came out of a fugue, he was in some ways like a sailor, horny and simple-minded, and with an itch to wander and see the sights, the famous places, take them in, dig every detail. But what a piddling little creek it was! A far cry from the Big Muddy: the trickle of whitish alkali water looked like the run-off from a construction site. Beside him a gold aspen rattled like foil in the sunlight. But there was no wind. He moved closer. A single leaf danced on its pedicle, mysteriously dispensed from energy laws.

Another Indian at a Phillips 66 station in Santa Fe directed him to Rancho la Merced, which he, the Indian, knew by name but not by owner. It meant leaving the highway south of the city and bumping across the desert, through scrubby junipers and fragrant piñon, up and down arroyos. Four times he had to dismount to open cattle gates.

Rancho Merced was something more than he expected. The building was not large but its lowness made it look far-flung. One almost looked down upon it: you got down into it like a sports car and with the same expectation of the chthonic dividends of living close to the ground. The windows, set in foot-thick ’dobe walls, were open. He knocked. No one answered. There were tire tracks but no car. He walked around the house. Above the piñon arose an ugly galvanized cistern and a Sears windmill. Though its tail was not folded, it did not turn. It was three o’clock.

He sat down under the cistern and sniffed a handful of soil. The silence was disjunct. It ran concurrently with one and did not flow from the past. Each passing second was packaged in cottony silence. It had no antecedents. Here was three o’clock but it was not like three o’clock in Mississippi. In Mississippi it is always Wednesday afternoon, or perhaps Thursday. The country there is peopled, a handful of soil strikes a pang to the heart, dêjà vus fly up like a shower of sparks. Even in the Southern wilderness there is ever the sense of someone close by, watching from the woods. Here one was not watched. There was no one. The silence hushed everything up, the small trees were separated by a geometry of silence. The sky was empty map space. Yonder at Albuquerque forty miles away a mountain reared up like your hand in front of your face.

This is the locus of pure possibility, he thought, his neck prickling. What a man can be the next minute bears no relation to what he is or what he was the minute before.

The front door was unlocked. He stooped down into the house. For thirty seconds he stood blinking in the cool cellarlike darkness. The windows opened into the bright hush of the desert. He listened: the silence changed. It became a presiding and penultimate silence like the heavy orchestral tacet before a final chord. His heart began to pound. Presently it came to him: what is missing are the small hums and clicks of household motors. He went into the kitchen. The refrigerator was empty and the hot-water tank was cold but there were four cans of Chef Boy-ar-dee spaghetti on the shelf. In the bedroom the bedclothes were tied up and ready for the laundry, a pile on each bed. There was no sign of clothes or suitcases. A year-old Life magazine had been left on the bureau. He spotted Sutter’s script running around all four edges of the Winston ad on the back cover. He held it eagerly to the light — could it be a message to him? a clue to Sutter’s whereabouts? — peering intently and turning it slowly as he read. Sutter’s hand was worse than usual.

Kennedy. With all the hogwash, no one has said what he was. The reason he was a great man was that his derisiveness kept pace with his brilliance and his beauty and his love of country. He is the only public man I have ever believed. This is because no man now is believable unless he is derisive. In him I saw the old eagle beauty ofthe United States of America. I loved him. They, the — (unreadable: bourgeois? burghers? bastards?), wanted him dead. Very well, it will serve them right because now—

The script ran off into the brown stipple of a girl’s thigh and he could make out no more.

He frowned, feeling suddenly put off and out of sorts. This was not what he was looking for and did him no good at all.

Under one bed he found a book of photographs of what appeared to him to be hindoo statuary in a jungle garden. The statues were of couples locked in erotic embraces. The lovers pressed together and their blind lozenge-eyes gazed past each other. The woman’s neck arched gracefully. The man’s hand sustained the globe of her breast; his pitted stone shaft pressed against the jungle ruin of her flank.

Outside he sat in the cab of the Trav-L-Aire and waited. The Sangre de Cristo range began to turn red. At five o’clock a breeze sprang up. The windmill creaked and presently little yellow flycatchers began to fly down from the mountain and line up on the rim of the cistern.

Dark fell suddenly and the stars came out. They drew in and in half an hour hung as large and low as yellow lamps at a garden party. Suddenly remembering his telescope, he fetched it from the cabin and clamped it to the door of the cab like a malt tray. Now spying the square of Pegasus, he focused on a smudge in the tail and there it was, the great cold fire of Andromeda, atilt, as big as a Catherine wheel, as slow and silent in its turning, stopped, as tumult seen from far away. He shivered. I’m through with telescopes, he thought, and the vasty galaxies. What do I need with Andromeda? What I need is my ’Bama bride and my cozy camper, a match struck and the butane lit and a friendly square of light cast upon the neighbor earth, and a hot cup of Luzianne between us against the desert cold, and a warm bed and there lie dreaming in one another’s arms while old Andromeda leans through the night.

Returning to Santa Fe, he found a snug court in the Camino Real, in a poplar grove hard by the dry bed of the Santa Fe River, and went shopping for groceries. There was no grits to be had, and he had to buy Cream of Wheat. The next morning after breakfast he telephoned every hotel, motel, clinic, and hospital in town, but no one had heard of Dr. Sutter Vaught.

Two days later he was stamping about and hugging himself in the plaza, shivering and, for lack of anything better to do, reading the inscription on the Union monument.

To the heroes of the Federal Army who fell at the Battle of Valverde fought with Rebels February 21, 1862

Strangely, there occurred no stirring within him, no body English toward, the reversing of that evil day at Valverde where, but for so-and-so’s mistake, they might have gotten through to California. Then if they could have reached the ocean— But he felt only the cold.

At ten o’clock the sun rose over the ’dobe shops and it grew warmer. Indians began to come into the plaza. They spread their jewelry and beaded belts on the hard clay and sat, with their legs stretched out, against the sunny wall. It seemed like a good idea. He found a vacant spot and stretched out his Macy’s Dacrons among the velvet pantaloons. The red Indians, their faces flat as dishes, looked at him with no expression at all. He had only just begun to read from Sutter’s casebook:

You cite the remark Oppenheimer made about the great days of Los Alamos when the best minds of the Western world were assembled in secret and talked the night away about every subject under the sun. You say, yes they were speaking sub specie aeternitatis as men might speak anywhere and at any time, and that they did not notice that—

when he happened to look up and catch sight of a thin man in shirtsleeves coming out of a ’dobe Rexall. He carried a paper bag upright in the crook of his arm. His shirt ballooned out behind him like a spinnaker. Without a second’s hesitation the engineer was up and on his way. But when he caught up, the thin man had already gotten into a dusty Edsel and the car was moving.

“Sir,” said the courteous engineer, trotting along and leaning down to see the driver.

“What?” But the Edsel kept moving.

“Wait, sir.”

“Are you Philip?” asked the driver.

“Eh?” said the engineer, cupping his good ear, and for a moment was not certain he was not.

“Are you Philip and is this the Gaza Desert?” The Edsel stopped. “Do you have something to tell me?”

“Sir? No sir. I am Williston Barrett,” said the engineer somewhat formally.

“I knew that, Williston,” said Sutter. “I was making a joke. Get in.”

“Thank you.”

The hood of the car was still stained with the hackberries and sparrow droppings of Alabama. Edsel or not, it ran with the hollow buckety sound of all old Fords.

“How did you find me?” Sutter asked him. Unlike most thin men, he sat in such a way as to emphasize his thinness, craned his neck and hugged his narrow chest.

“I found a map in your room with the route traced on it. I remembered the name of the ranch. An Indian told me where it was. There was no one at the ranch, so I waited in the plaza. There was also this in your room.” He handed the casebook to Sutter. “I thought you might have forgotten it.”

Sutter glanced at the casebook without taking it. “I didn’t forget it.”

“I have pondered it deeply.”

“It is of no importance. Everything in it is either wrong or irrelevant. Throw it away.”

“It seems to be intended for your sister Val.”

“It isn’t.” After a moment Sutter looked at him. “Why did you come out here?”

The engineer passed a hand across his eyes. “I — think you asked me, didn’t you? I also came out to see Jamie. The family want him to come home,” he said, remembering it for the first time as he spoke. “Or at least to know where he is.”

“They know where he is.”

“They do? How?”

“I called them last night. I spoke to Kitty.”

“What did she say?” asked the engineer uneasily, and unconsciously hugged himself across the chest as if he too were a thin man.

“For one thing, she said you were coming. I’ve been expecting you.”

The engineer told Sutter about his fugue. “Even now I am not too clear about things,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “But I knew that I had business here.”

“What kind of business?”

He frowned. “As I told you: that I was to see you, as well as find Jamie.” He waited, hoping the other would tell him something, but Sutter was silent. The engineer happened to look down and caught sight of the two bottles in the Rexall bag. It was a bourbon called Two Natural. The cork showed a pair of dice rolling a lucky seven. “How is Jamie? Where is he?”

“Jamie is very sick.”

“Did you tell Kitty?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Jamie doesn’t want them to come out.”

“How sick is he?”

“He got a sore throat driving out.”

“That’s not so bad, is it?”

“It wouldn’t be if he had any leucocytes.”

“I see.”

“The strep also lit up an old rheumatic lesion.”

“You mean in his heart?” asked the engineer, arming himself against the dread sweetness of bad news.

But Sutter merely grunted and went on driving the Edsel in his old-fashioned sporty style, forefinger curled around the spoke of the steering wheel, left elbow propped on the sill. Presently the Edsel stopped in a shady street of tall Victorian houses which flanked a rambling frame building.

“Is he in the hospital?” he asked Sutter.

“Yes,” said Sutter, but made no move to get out. Instead he hung fire politely, inclined sooty-eyed and civil over the wheel as if he were waiting on the engineer.

The engineer blinked. “Is Jamie in there?”

Sutter nodded and sat back with a sigh. “I’m very glad you’re here,” he said tapping the wheel.

“Do you wish me—”

“Go on in and see him. I have to go to work. I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

“Where do you work?”

“At a guest ranch,” said Sutter absently. “It’s something like being a ship’s doctor. It’s only temporary, until—” He shrugged. “Jamie and I ran out of groceries.”

When he got out, Sutter called him back.

“I forgot to tell you about the purpura.”

“Purpura?”

“Like bruises. It’s a new development, not particularly serious in itself but somewhat disconcerting. I thought it might bother you if you didn’t know.”

“Thank you.” Don’t worry, thought the engineer confidently. It won’t bother me.

But the purpura upset him badly. Jamie’s face was covered with splotches of horrid color like oil slicks. It was as if a deep fetor, a swamp decay, had come to the surface. Speaking to him meant straining a bit as if one had to peer this way and that to see him through an evil garden of flowers.

It was an odd, unfitting business anyhow, Jamie being here. Jamie was as sick as he could be, yet he lay in a room off the street, so to speak. Could one be truly sick without proper notice and an accounting? The door was wide open and anyone could walk in. Yet no one did. He was alone. Should not some official cognizance be taken of his illness, some authorized person interposed between visitor and patient? One had only to ask the room number downstairs and walk up. The engineer could not get over the feeling that Jamie was not properly sick.

The patient was asleep. For some minutes the visitor stood about uncertainly, smiling warily, then, becoming alarmed, leaned closer to the sickbed. A sour heat radiated from the hollow of the pillow. In the triangle of Jamie’s neck, a large vein pulsed in a complex rhythm. Jamie was not noticeably thinner. In fact, a deposit of new tissue, or perhaps dropsical fluid, had occurred under his skin. His face, always puddingish and ill-defined, had gone even more out of focus.

But no sooner had the engineer sat down than the patient opened his eyes and spoke to him quite naturally.

“What are you doing in these parts?” Though he was fairly goggling with fever, Jamie kept his soldierly way of lying abed. He lounged like a wounded man, pushed down his thigh, made a grimace.

“Looking for you and Sutter.”

“Well, you found me. What do you want?”

“Nothing,” said the engineer as wryly as the other. He rose. “I’ll be seeing you.”

Jamie laughed and made him sit down. “What’s the matter with your leg?” the engineer asked.

“Got the rheumatiz.”

Jamie began to speak fondly of Sutter, catching his breath now and then in his new warrior style. “You ought to see that rascal,” said Jamie, shaking his head.

The engineer listened smilingly as Jamie told of Sutter’s guest ranch whose cottages had such names as O.K. Corral and Boot Hill. Sutter lived at Doc’s. “Though it’s called a guest ranch, it’s really a way station for grass widows. Ol’ Sutter is busy as a one-armed paperhanger.”

“I imagine,” said the engineer fondly and gloomily. Jamie, he saw, had just got onto the trick of tolerating adults in their foibles.“Where is this place?”

“On the road to Albuquerque. It’s the biggest guest ranch in the world. Have you seen him?”

“Yes.” The engineer told of coming upon Sutter just after he bought two fifths of Two Natural. “Does he still drink bad whiskey?”

“Oh Christ,” whispered Jamie joyfully and began to thrash his legs as of old.

After a while the youth began to sweat and, quite as abruptly as he had waked up, collapsed and fell back in the hot hollow of his pillow. Dear God, I stayed too long, thought the engineer, but as he arose to leave, one hand detained him with a weak deprecatory wave.

“What,” said the engineer, smiling.

But there was no reply, save the hand moving over the covers, as tentative as a Ouija. For a long ten seconds he stood so, stooped slightly and hearkening. The hand stopped. No doubt he is asleep, thought the engineer, sighing with relief. Then he noticed that the soft mound of a vein in Jamie’s neck was going at it hammer and tongs.

Frankly alarmed now, he began turning on switches and pressing buttons, all the while keeping a wary eye on the sick youth. How easy was it to die? When no one came — damn, what is this place? — he rushed out into the corridor and went careening off the walls toward the nurses’ station. There sat a hefty blonde with a bald forehead which curved up under a brassy cone of hair. She looked like Queen Bess. She was making notes in a chart.

“Excuse me, nurse,” said the courteous engineer, when she did not look up.

She did not seem to hear, though he was not five feet away.

“Excuse me,” he said loudly, but nodding and smiling to deprecate his boldness when she did look.

She did not look! She went on making notes in violet ink.

He caught sight of himself in a convex mirror, placed at a corner to show the hall, standing like a pupil at teacher’s desk. He frowned and opened the gate of the station and walked in. She turned a baleful lizard eye upon him. Then her eye traveled down and came to rest upon — his hand! He was touching the metal cover of a chart. Despite himself he blushed and removed his hand: teacher had caught him doing a bad thing with his hand. She went back to her work.

“Nurse,” he said in a strangled voice. “Kindly come at once to room three-two-two. The patient is having an attack.”

Still she did not answer! He had clenched his fist — at least he could hit her, lay her out cold — when at last she screwed cap to pen and with every appearance of ignoring him still and going about her business got up and brushed past him. He followed, sweating with rage — if she doesn’t go to Jamie I am going to strike her. And even when she did turn into Jamie’s room, she managed to convey that her going had nothing to do with his summons. She was still on business of her own.

No matter! She was with him now, taking his pulse. As the visitor watched through the doorway, Jamie’s head turned wearily in the hot socket of his pillow. Whew! The bolus of hatred subsided in his throat. He forgave her. And now, instead of fearing that Jamie might die, he made light of it. It was, after all, only a sore throat.

And in fact when he returned in the afternoon, Jamie felt better. The visitor brought a deck of cards and they played gin in the cheerful yellow sunlight. Death seemed out of the question. How can anyone play a six of clubs one minute and die the next? Sick as he was, Jamie asked to be cranked up straight and now sat like a very old man, weaving a bit as the artery socked away at his head.

For the next few days they played cards morning and afternoon. Sutter came at night. It was understood that the universe was contracted to enclose the two young men. If it can be kept so, Jamie as good as said and the visitor agreed, a small sunny corner where we can play a game and undertake small tasks, nothing very serious can go amiss. For the first time the engineer understood how men can spend a week playing poker, women a lifetime at bridge. The game was the thing. One became impatient with non-game happenings — a nurse coming in to empty the urinal. Time disposed itself in short tolerable stretches between the bright beads of the games. The score itself, toted up and announced, had the cheerful workaday effect of a small tidy business.

It came to be understood too that one was at the other’s service and that any service could be required. As it sometimes happens between two young men, a kind of daredevil bargain was struck in which the very outrageousness of a request is itself grounds for obeying.

“Go out and buy me a quart of Monarch applesauce,” said Jamie at the end of a game.

“All right.”

Sutter came later in the evening. He was both affable and nervous and told them half jokingly of his two new patients, “noble intelligent women who still read Lawrence and still believed in the dark gods of the blood, why make a god of it, that was the Methodist in him, anyhow can you imagine anyone still reading Lawrence out here now,” etc. How uneasy and talkative Sutter had become! It suddenly dawned on the engineer that Sutter, strange as it seemed, could not stand the sickroom. A hospital, of all places, made him nervous. Jamie, he noticed too, became irritable because Sutter’s coming broke the golden circle of the card games. They both wished Sutter would leave. And when Jamie frowned and picked up the deck of cards, Sutter took the hint and did leave. He made a sign to the engineer, who followed him to the solarium.

“Again I can’t tell you how glad I am you’re here,” he said, placing his feet carefully inside the black and white tiles. The hospital was old and well preserved. It looked like an army hospital from the days of Walter Reed. “He doesn’t want to see me and there is no one else. Or was.”

The engineer looked at him curiously. “I thought that was what you and he wanted.”

“I didn’t want him to be — sunk. I thought he might do better, though I was afraid of this all along—” Sutter trailed off.

“Isn’t he sunk?”

“Your showing up has meant a great deal,” said Sutter hurriedly and looked at his watch.

“What’s the matter with him? Why does he have those spells?”

“Heart block,” said Sutter absently. “With some right-sided failure and pulmonary edema. And you see, he can’t read for long. His retina is infiltrated. You can read to him.”

“What do you mean, heart block? Is that serious?”

Sutter shrugged. “Do you mean will he die today or next week?” He eyed the other. “Can you take a pulse?”

“I suppose so.”

“I can’t get a private nurse. If you are here when he has a syncope, take his pulse. It will almost certainly start up in a few seconds. Now I’ve got—”

“Wait. Good God. What are you talking about?”

“If then his pulse is steady, O.K. If it is fibrillating, call the resident.”

“Good God, what do you mean, fibrillating?”

‘Try to nod your head in time with his pulse. If you can’t, he’s fibrillating.”

“Wait.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Sutter eyed him and, shoving his hands in his pockets, began to step off the tiles in an absent-minded hopscotch. With his Curlee pants down around his hips and his long-waisted shirt, Sutter looked like Lucky Lindy in the 1930’s, standing in a propeller wash.

“I tell you what you do,” said Sutter.

“What,” said the engineer gloomily.

“Call Val. Tell her how sick Jamie is. He likes Val and wants to see her but doesn’t want to send for her himself.”

“Why don’t you—” began the engineer.

“No, I tell you what you do,” said Sutter, drawing him close in an odd little bantering confidence. “Call Rita.”

“Rita,” repeated the puzzled engineer.

“Yes, call Rita and Val and tell them to keep it to themselves and come on out.” He held the younger man by the arm in an awkward little burlesque of Lamar Thigpen’s old-buddy style.

“Why don’t you call them: after all, you’re the brother of one and the—”

“Because I’m like Jamie. I don’t want to be the one to call either.”

“I’m sorry. Jamie asked me not to call them. He trusts me.”

“Then you’ve got nothing to worry about,” said Sutter, his eyes going vacant

“But—”

But Sutter was already on his way.

With Sutter gone, it was possible to restore the golden circle of games. Jamie was dizzy and short of breath but not uncomfortable. His illness was the sort which allows one to draw in closer to oneself. Already Jamie had discovered the small privileges and warmths of invalidism. It was not a bad thing to lie back and blink at the cards lined up on the bed table, heave up on one elbow to make a play, flop down again in simple weariness. He wrapped himself snugly in his fever like a scarf. The next afternoon the engineer sat beside the bed in the sunny corner, which smelled of old wax and honorable ether. Outside in the still air, yellow as butter, the flat mathematical leaves of the aspens danced a Brownian dance in the sunlight, blown by a still, molecular wind. Jamie would play a card and talk, gaze at a point just beside the engineer’s head where, it seemed, some privileged and arcane perception might be hit upon between them. Presently he fell back in the socket of his pillow and closed his eyes.

“Do me a favor.”

“All right.”

“Go get me a copy of Treasure Island and a box of soda crackers.”

“All right,” said the engineer, rising.

The youth explained that he had been thinking about the scene where Jim steals the dinghy and drifts offshore, lying down so he won’t be seen, all the while eating soda crackers and looking at the sky.

“Also go by the post office and see if there’s any mail in general delivery.”

“Right.”

But when he returned with the crackers and a swollen fusty library copy of Treasure Island showing hairy Ben Gunn on the frontispiece, Jamie had forgotten about it.

“There was no mail?”

“No.”

“I tell you what let’s do.”

“What?”

“Call old Val.”

“All right.”

“Tell her I’ve got a crow to pick with her.”

“All right. Do you want to see any of your family?”

“No. And I don’t want to see her either. Just give her a message.”

“All right.”

“Ask her what happened to the book about entropy.”

“Entropy? Then you correspond?”

“Oh, sure. Give her a hard time about the book. She promised to send it to me. Tell her I think she lost heart in the argument. She claims there is a historical movement in the direction of negative entrophy. But so what? You know.”

“Yes.”

The youth’s eyes sought his and again drifted away to the point in the air where the two of them found delicate unspoken agreement and made common cause against Val’s arguments.

“There’s a phone booth downstairs, but let’s finish the game.”

They didn’t finish the game. Jamie went out of his head with fever, though it was a minute before the engineer realized it.

“Get me a line,” exclaimed the youth in an odd chipper voice.

“What? All right,” said the other, rising again. He thought Jamie meant make a phone call: get a long-distance line.

“A line, a lion,” Jamie called to him at the door.

“A lion?”

“Ly-in.”

Then he perceived that the youth was out of his head and was hearing words according to some fashion of his own.

“I will.”

He waited until Jamie closed his eyes and, returning to the bed, pressed the buzzer. This time someone came quickly, a pleasant little brunette student nurse who took Jamie’s temperature and went off, but not too anxiously he was pleased to observe, to get the resident. Jamie was not dying then.

Perhaps he’d better call somebody though. Beyond a doubt Jamie was sick as a dog and also beyond a doubt Sutter had, in his own fashion, decamped. It was the inconsequence and unprovidedness of Jamie’s illness which distressed him most. For the first time he saw how it might be possible for large numbers of people to die, as they die in China or Bombay, without anybody paying much attention.

As he passed the nurses’ station, slapping his pockets for change, he met the eyes of the disagreeable blonde. Her malevolent expression startled him. Her bulging eye was glossy with dislike. She hated his guts! Amazing.

Thoughtfully he stacked money on the metal shelf of the phone booth. As the wires went clicking away to the East, he gazed through the open door and out into the disjunct afternoon with its simple spectrum-yellow and its flattened distances. Was it possible to call Alabama from here?

No. The line was busy.

He tried for half an hour and gave up.

When he returned to the room the pleasant student was giving Jamie an alcohol rub. Afterward the patient sat up in his right mind and began to read Treasure Island and eat soda crackers.

“Don’t you want me to read to you?” the engineer asked him.

“No, that’s all right!”

Jamie was polite but the engineer could tell he wanted to be alone.

“I’ll be back after supper.”

“Fine.” The patient smiled his best smile because he wanted the visitor to leave. The book was the safest sunniest most inviolate circle of all.

The next morning Jamie was even better. His fever was gone, but he was tired and wanted to sleep. For the first time he spoke seriously of going home, no, not home but to the Gulf Coast, where they could lie in the sand dunes and get in shape for the next semester. “I have the strongest hunch that the combination of cold salt water and the warm sunny dunes would be great!”

The engineer nodded. Sure enough it might.

Would the engineer take him?

“Let’s go,” said the latter rising.

Jamie laughed and nodded to signify that he knew the other meant it “But I’ll leave tomorrow, no kidding,” he said as the engineer cranked him flat for his nap.

“We can make it in three days,” the engineer told him. “Your monk’s pad is still on the upper berth.”

Jamie said no more about calling Val.

But for the present it was the engineer who lay in the upper berth and read:

Christ should leave us. He is too much with us and I don’t like his friends. We have no hope of recovering Christ until Christ leaves us. There is after all something worse than being God-forsaken. It is when God overstays his welcome and takes up with the wrong people.

You say don’t worry about that, first stop fornicating. But I am depressed and transcendent. In such a condition, fornication is the sole channel to the real. Do you think I am making excuses?

You are wrong too about the sinfulness of suicide in this age, at least the nurtured possibility of suicide, for the certain availability of death is the very condition of recovering oneself. But death is as outlawed now as sin used to be. Only one’s own suicide remains to one. My “suicide” followed the breakdown of the sexual as a mode of reentry from the posture of transcendence.

Here is what happened. I became depressed last summer when I first saw Jamie’s blood smear, depressed not because he was going to die but because I knew he would not die well, would be eased out in an oxygen tent, tranquilized and with no sweat to anyone and not even know what he was doing. Don’t misunderstand me: I wasn’t thinking about baptism.

The depression made me concupiscent. On a house call to the Mesa Motel to examine a patient in diabetic coma (but really only to collect blood for chemistry — I was little more than a technician that summer). Afterwards spied a chunky blonde by the pool, appraised her eye, which was both lewd and merry. She 41, aviatrix, winner of Powder Puff Derby in 1940’s, raced an old Lockheed P-38 from San Diego to Cleveland. We drank two glasses of straight whiskey. I spoke in her ear and invited her to her room. Afterwards very low. Went to ranch, shot myself, missed brain, carried away cheek.

Recovery in hospital. The purity of ordeal. The purity of death. The sweet purity of the little Mexican nurse. Did Americans become lewd when they banished death?

I saw something clearly while I had no cheek and grinned like a skeleton. But I got well and forgot what it was. I won’t miss next time.

It was the last entry in Sutter’s casebook. When he finished reading, the engineer left the Trav-L-Aire and threw the pad into the trashburner of Alamogordo Motor Park. As he watched it burn, glowering, his head sinking lower and lower, mouth slack and drying, he became aware that someone was speaking to him. It was a fellow Trav-L-Aire owner, a retired fire inspector from Muncie. He and his wife, the man had told him, were in the midst on their yearly swing from Victoria, B.C., to Key West. They kept just ahead of winter on the way down and just behind spring going north. It was a courtesy of the road that camper owners show their rigs to each other. The engineer invited him in. The hoosier was polite enough — the engineer’s was the most standard of all Trav-L-Aires — but it was obvious that the former had a surprise in store. After showing off his cabin, which had a tinted sun-liner roof, he pressed a button. A panel above the rear door flew open and a contraption of aluminum spars and green netting unhinged in six directions. With a final grunt of its hidden motor the thing snapped into a taut cube of a porch big enough for a bridge game. “You take off your screen door and put it here,” the Hoosier told him. “It’s the only thing for west Florida, where you’re going to get your sand flies.”

“Very good,” said the engineer, nodding and thrusting his hand through his pocket, for his knee had begun to leap.

Returning to his own modest camper, he became at once agitated and lustful. His heart beat powerfully at the root of his neck. The coarsest possible images formed themselves before his eyes. But this time, instead of throwing a fit or lapsing into a fugue as he had done so often in the past, he became acutely conscious of the most insignificant sensations, the slight frying sound of the Servel refrigerator, the watery reflection on the Formica table, which seemed to float up the motes of dust. His memory, instead of failing, became perfect. He recalled everything, even a single perception years ago, one of a thousand billion, so trivial that it was not even remembered then, five minutes later: on a college field trip through the mangy Jersey woods looking for spirogyra, he had crossed a utility right-of-way. When he reached the farther woods, he had paused and looked over his shoulder. There was nothing to see: the terrain dipped, making a little swale which was overgrown by the special forlorn plants of rights-of-way, not small trees or bushes or even weeds exactly but just the unclassified plants which grow up in electric-light-and-power-places. That was all. He turned and went on.

Desolate places like Appomattox and cut-over woods were ever the occasion of storms of sexual passion. Yet now when he rushed out into the abstract afternoon to find a maid (but who?) he forgot again and instead found himself picking through the ashes of the trashburner. What was that last sentence? It had a bearing. But the notebook was destroyed.

Jumping into the cab of the G.M.C., he tore out of the poplar grove, forgetting his umbilical connections until he heard the snappings of cords and the shout of the Hoosier.

“What the—” yelled the latter like an astounded comic-strip character, Uncle Walt (so that’s where the expression “What the—” comes from — Indiana).

“I’m going over to Albuquerque,” shouted the engineer as if this were an explanation and as quickly changed his mind, stopped, and strode past the still-astounded Hoosier. “Pardon,” he said, “I think I’ll call Kitty—” and nodded by way of further explanation to a telephone hooked contingently to a telephone pole. Could he call Kitty from such a contingent telephone?

Perhaps if he could talk to a certain someone he would stop hankering for anyone and everyone, and tender feelings of love would take the place of this great butting billygoat surge which was coming over him again. He clung to the pole, buffeted by an abstract, lustful molecular wind, and might even have uttered a sound, brayed into the phone, for the Hoosier looked astounded again and rushed into his deluxe Sun-Liner.

“I remember everything now, Dr. Vaught,” he said calmly, no longer agitated. “You said I was to come and find you. Very well, here I am. What was it you wished to tell me?”

So distracted had been the engineer in his headlong race across the desert that he had noticed not a single thing on the way and could not have said how he found his way here. Only now as Sutter sighed and sank into himself could he spare time to take a breath and see where he was.

Sutter was sitting in a sheriff’s chair on the front porch of Doc’s cottage. Doc’s was one of a hundred or more such cottages fronting on a vast quadrangle of rich blue-green winter grass bordered by palm trees, a rectangular oasis in a scrabbly desert of mesquite. The evening rides were over and it was almost suppertime. Doors slammed as the dudes, mostly women, began the slow promenade to the chuck wagon. The sun was already down behind Sandia Mountain but the sky was bright and pure and empty as map space. The dudes smiled and nodded at Doc as they passed but the latter sat slumped and unresponsive, his dried-up Thom McAn shoes propped on the rail and Curlee pants hitched halfway up his skinny legs.

Sutter didn’t seem to hear him. He slumped further and gazed at the bare mountain. The material of his trousers bunched up between his legs like curtain drapes.

“Then you have nothing to tell me,” the engineer asked him again.

“That is correct. Nothing.”

“But, sir, you wrote many things in—”

“In the first place I didn’t write them to you. In the second place I no longer believe a word of it. Did you ever read the great philosopher Wittgenstein?”

“No sir,” said the other gloomily.

“After his last work he announced the dictum which summarized his philosophy. He said: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one should keep silent. And he did. He stopped teaching and went to live in a hut and said no more.”

“And you believe that?”

“No, I don’t even believe that.”

They watched the women for a while. Presently the engineer said, “But you told me to come out and find you.”

“I did?”

“Therefore you at least owe me the explanation of what happened to make you change your mind.”

“What has happened?” Sutter looked puzzled.

“What has happened to you?”

“Nothing has happened.”

From the chair beside him, where he must have held it all along and out of the other’s sight, Sutter raised the Colt Woodsman and sighted it at an airliner which sparkled like a diamond in the last of the sunlight.

“But Val told me that you—”

“Val.” Sutter smiled as he tracked the airliner.

“Oh, I know you don’t agree with Val.”

“Oh, but I do agree with her.”

“You do?”

“Oh yes, in every respect. About what has happened to the world, about what God should be and what man is, and even what the Church should be.”

The engineer sighed. “Yes sir. That is very interesting, but I think you know why I am here.”

“You see, Barrett, Val had a dream of what the Church should come to. (And I agree! Absolutely!) For example, she did not mind at all if Christendom should be done for, stove in, kaput, screwed up once and all. She did not mind that the Christers were like everybody else, if not worse. She did not even mind that God shall be gone, absent, not present, A.W.O.L., and that no one noticed or cared, not even the believers. Because she wanted us to go the route and be like Sweden, which is not necessarily bad, but to go the route, to leave God out of it and be happy or miserable, as the case might be. She believes that then, if we go the route and run out of Christendom, that the air would be cleared and even that God might give us a sign. That’s how her own place makes sense, you see, her little foundation in the pines. She conceived herself as being there with her Delco and her butane tanks to start all over again. Did you notice how much it looked like one of those surviving enclaves after the Final War, and she’s probably right: I mean, who in the hell would want to bomb South Alabama? But yes, I agree with her. Absolutely! It’s just that nothing ever came of it.”

“Dr. Vaught. Excuse me, but—”

“Don’t you see? Nothing happened. She got all dressed up for the bridegroom and the bridegroom didn’t come. There she sits in the woods as if the world had ended and she was one of the Elected Ones Left to keep the Thing going, but the world has not ended, in fact is more the same than usual. We are in the same fix, she and I, only I know it and she doesn’t. Here I sit in Sweden — most of those women are Swedes, spiritual Swedes, if you will notice — but I do not wait for a sign because there is no sign. I will even agree with her that when I first came to the desert I was waiting for a sign, but there was no sign and I am not waiting for one now.”

“Yes sir. That is very interesting. But the reason I came, if you will recall, is that you told me—”

“But she changed, you see, and that was when we parted company. I could make some sense of her notion of being the surviving remnant of her Catholic Thing (which has to prevail, you see, in spite of all, yes, I don’t mind that) set down back there in that God-forsaken place. That was fitting. But she changed, you see. She became hopeful. She goes to confraternity meetings in Mobile. She has dealings with the Methodist preacher, even the Baptists. She corresponds with scientists. She begs from the Seven-Up man and slips him a K.C. pamphlet (‘How many churches did Christ found?’). She talks the Klonsul into giving her a gym. In short, she sold out. Hell, what she is is a Rotarian.”

“Yes sir, very true, but what I want to—”

“Barrett.”

“Sir?”

“Which is the best course for a man: to live like a Swede, vote for the candidate of your choice, be a good fellow, healthy and generous, do a bit of science as if the world made sense, enjoy a beer and a good piece (not a bad life!). Or: to live as a Christian among Christians in Alabama? Or to die like an honest man?”

“I couldn’t say,” said the engineer. He was bitterly disappointed by Sutter’s refusal to take him seriously.

“How is Jamie?” asked Sutter.

“Better,” said the other absently. “I am on my way there now. If you will answer my question, I’ll leave.”

“What question?”

“The last time I saw you you said you had something to tell me. What was it?”

“I don’t remember.”

The engineer, who had been pacing the tiny porch, which abutted Wells Fargo on one side and the O.K. Corral on the other, paused and fixed Sutter with a lively clairvoyant expression. Now at last he remembered everything, knew what he knew and what he didn’t know and what he wished to know. He even remembered every sentence in Sutter’s notebook.

“I want to know what it was you discovered while you were in the, ah, hospital out here last summer.”

“What?” said Sutter, coming down hard on all four legs of the captain’s chair.

The engineer was not disconcerted. “I’ve finished your casebook. I wish to know whether you meant only that when you’re in a bad way things look better than they do ordinarily.”

“Oh,” said Sutter, replacing his feet. “That. I don’t remember. That was a long time ago and, as I told you, I attach no importance to that stuff. It was written to be rid of it, excreta, crap, and so intended.”

“I just finished speaking to Kitty.” The engineer drew up another sheriff’s chair. “We spoke for two hours. It cost twenty-four dollars. I had to reverse the charges.”

“Good Lord. I can’t imagine talking to Kitty for five minutes.”

“We settled a great many things,” said the engineer, frowning — who in hell was Sutter to patronize Kitty?

“Are you getting married?” asked Sutter politely, turning his chair a few degrees but keeping his pale eyes fixed on the brown schematic mountain.

“Yes. After — things are more settled. But that is not why I drove out here this afternoon. I want to know this,” he said, leaning over and grabbing the rim of Sutter’s chair so hard that his knuckles turned white. “I want to know why you brought Jamie out here.”

Sutter tried to tear his eyes from the mountain. “You’re right. It didn’t work, did it?”

“Right? What do you mean? What didn’t work?”

Sutter shrugged. “Jamie’s little idea of a vacation.”

“Jamie’s? But according to what you wrote, it was your idea too. What did you expect him to do?”

“It’s not what I expected.”

“Then he expected something?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“He expected something to happen.”

“What? Not get well?”

Sutter shrugged.

“But you brought him out. You must have hoped for something.”

“Only that he might get a little better.”

“Get better?” He watched the other like a hawk. “No, you mean die better, don’t you?”

Sutter shrugged and said nothing.

“You didn’t answer,” said the engineer after a moment.

Again Sutter’s feet hit the floor. “Goddamn it, Barrett, what do you mean by requiring answers from me? Why should I answer you? What are you to me? Christ, if you recall I never solicited your company in the first place.”

“I am asking nevertheless,” said the engineer cheerfully.

“Why me, for Christ’s sake?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you take me for, some pissant wise man, ole rebel Sutter whom the yokels back home can’t stand and who therefore by your peculiar logic must be onto something just because they’re not? You know something, Barrett? There’s one thing I’ve never been able to get the straight of, and that is what it is you want of me. I suspect it is one of two things. You either want me to tell you to fornicate or not to fornicate, but for the life of me I can’t tell which it is.”

“Then tell me,” said the engineer smiling.

“I will not tell you.”

“Tell me to be chaste and I will do it. Yes! I will do it easily!” he said, striking the rail softly with his fist. “All you have to do is tell me.”

“I will not tell you.”

“Then tell me not to be chaste.”

“I will not.”

“Why not?”

“Barrett, since when is failure, my failure, a badge of wisdom?”

“I did not think of it that way,” said the engineer, frowning. Suddenly he did see Sutter for the first time as the dismalest failure, a man who had thrown himself away. He marveled at his, the engineer’s, being here.

“I know you don’t,” said Sutter, not unkindly. “But maybe you better start. For both our sakes. Be done with me. Go stay with Jamie.”

“That’s what I’m trying to do,” said the other absently.

“What?”

“Be done with you.”

“I fervently wish you success.”

“Yes,” said the engineer, cheering up. “Yes! You’re right. There is no reason why I can’t just get up and go about my business, is there?”

“No reason.”

“To answer your earlier question: yes, Kitty and I are getting married.”

“You mentioned it.”

“We spoke of many things.”

“Good.”

“And settled a fair proportion of them.”

“Good.”

“It turns out we see eye to eye on most things.”

“Excellent.”

“It seems that Mr. Vaught has made Lamar a vice-president and that he is going to offer me the position of personnel manager. I actually feel I might do well at it.”

“I have no doubt of it.”

“For the first time I feel fairly certain of what I want to do.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“We even have a house in mind. Cap’n Andy Mickle’s place on South Ridge. Do you know it?”

“Very well indeed.”

“You’ve been there?”

“A dozen times.”

“Why? Oh. You mean to treat Cap’n Andy?”

“A colossal bore. He bored himself to death. But that’s no reflection on the house. An ideal spot. The best view on the ridge.”

The engineer frowned, thinking of the buzzards circling the doleful plain and Cap’n Andy striding the “bridge.” But he quickly brightened. “We’ve even agreed on the same denomination.”

“The same what?”

“Denomination. Church. Kitty has become quite religious. She is convinced of the wisdom of our having the same church home, to use her expression.” The engineer laughed tolerantly, shaking his head at the ways of women, and wiped a merry tolerant little tear from his eye.

“Jesus,” muttered Sutter.

“Eh?” The other cocked his good ear.

“Nothing.”

“You don’t fool me, Dr. Vaught. Don’t forget that I’ve read your casebook. Though I do not pretend to understand everything, that part didn’t escape me.”

“What part?”

“Your awareness of the prime importance of the religious dimension of life.”

“The religious dimension of life?” Sutter looked at him suspiciously. “Barrett, are you putting me on?”

“No sir.”

“Then if you’re not, you’re doing something worse.”

“Sir?” asked the engineer politely.

“Never mind.”

“Dr. Vaught,” said the engineer earnestly. “There is one more thing. Then I will leave.”

“What is that?”

“Dr. Vaught, Kitty and I are getting married. I am going to take a good position with your father, settle down on the South Ridge, and, I hope, raise a family.”

“Yes,” said Sutter after a pause.

“I think I’m going to be a pretty fair member of the community. God knows the place could use even a small contribution of good will and understanding.”

“Beyond a doubt. Good will and understanding. Yes. Very good.”

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing. I think you’ll be very happy. In fact I’ll go further than that. I don’t think you’ll have any more trouble with your fugues. And I take it back: I don’t think you are kidding me.”

“I see. Dr. Vaught.”

“What?”

“I know you think there is something wrong with if—”

“You do?”

“Yes. I know you think there is everything wrong with it.”

“Nonsense.” Sutter laughed. “Would you rather join me here?”

“No, but—”

“But what?”

“But nothing.” The engineer rose. “There is nothing wrong with it. Truthfully I see now there is nothing wrong with such a life.”

“Right!”

“It is better to do something than do nothing — no reflection, sir.”

“No reflection.”

“It is good to have a family.”

“You are quite right.”

“Better to love and be loved.”

“Absolutely.”

‘To cultivate whatever talents one has.”

“Correct.”

“To make a contribution, however small.”

“However small.”

“To do one’s best to promote tolerance and understanding between the races, surely the most pressing need before the country.”

“Beyond question the most pressing need. Tolerance and understanding. Yes.”

The engineer flushed. “Well, isn’t it better?”

“Yes.”

“Violence is bad.”

“Violence is not good.”

“It is better to make love to one’s wife than to monkey around with a lot of women.”

“A lot better.”

“I am sure I am right.”

“You are right.”

The engineer gazed gloomily at the chuck wagon, a large red dining cottage across the quadrangle. Cookie, a Chinese with a black cap and a queue, came out and seizing the branding iron rang it around the iron triangle.

“You know, Dr. Vaught, I have lived a rather abnormal and solitary life and have tended to get things backwards. My father was a proud and solitary man. I had no other family. For a long time I have had a consuming desire for girls, for the coarsest possible relations with them, without knowing how to treat them as human beings. No doubt, as you suggested, a good part of my nervous condition stems from this abnormal relationship — or lack of relationship—”

“As I suggested? I never suggested any such goddamn thing.”

“At any rate,” the engineer went on hurriedly, looking down at the other, “I think I see for the first time the possibility of a happy, useful life.”

“Good. So?”

“Dr. Vaught, why was that man screaming?”

“What man?”

“The man you told me about — the Deke from Vanderbilt — with the lovely wife and children — you know.”

“Oh, Scotty. Christ, Barrett, for somebody with fugues, you’ve got quite a memory.”

“Yes sir.”

“Don’t worry about Scotty. You won’t scream. I can assure you, you will not scream.”

“Then it is better not to?”

“Are you asking me?”

“Yes.”

Sutter shrugged.

“You have nothing more to tell me?”

“No, Barrett, nothing.” To his surprise, Sutter answered him quietly, without making a face or cursing.

The engineer laughed with relief. “For the first time I think I really might live like other men — rejoin the human race.”

“I hope you’ll all be happy. You and the race, I mean.”

“Oh, I forgot something. It was something Kitty said to tell you. God, I’m selfish.”

“But in the future you’re going to be unselfish.”

“What? Oh. Yes,” said the engineer, smiling. He declined to conspire with Sutter’s irony. “Kitty said to tell you Lamar was going to take a special course in management at the Harvard Business School.”

“Good Lord, what do I care what Lamar does?”

The engineer kept a wary eye on him. “And that while he is in Boston, Myra is going to stay with Rita in New York.”

“Myra Thigpen? I see. Do you want to know something? It figures.”

“Rita is already gone. Myra is leaving after — afterwards.”

“So Rita is gone.” Sutter gazed into the empty sky, which instead of turning rosy with sunset was simply going out like a light.

As the other watched him, Sutter began idly picking off dudes, sighting the Colt at one after another of the passing women, idly yet with a regardlessness which was alarming. It was a very small thing, no more than that Sutter did not take pains to conceal the pistol from the women, but for some reason the engineer’s heart began to pound against his ribs.

“On the other hand,” Sutter was saying between shots, “it is also possible to die without significance and that is hardly an improvement of one’s state of life. I knew a man once, not my own patient I am glad to say, who was sitting with his family one Sunday evening watching Lassie, who had befriended a crippled duck and was protecting him from varmints. During the commercial he got up and got out his old army forty-five. When his family asked him what he intended to do, he told them he was going outside to shoot a varmint. So he went outside to the garage and got into the family’s second car, a Dodge Dart, and blew the top of his head off. Now that’s a lot of damn foolishness, isn’t it?”

“Yes sir,” said the engineer, who was now more irritated than frightened by Sutter’s antics with the pistol. Nor did he any longer believe Sutter’s dire little case histories. “The other thing I want to tell you is that—” he said as Cookie rang second call with the branding iron. “Kitty said to tell you that the, ah, legal difficulties in your case have been cleared up and that—”

“You mean the coast is clear.”

“Yes sir.”

“Poppy has fixed things up and Doc Holliday can come back home to Valdosta.”

“Sir, you have an enormous contribution to make—” began the engineer.

Sutter rose so suddenly that the younger man was afraid he’d made him angry again. But Sutter’s attention was elsewhere.

Following his eye, the engineer alighted upon one of the guests who had left the O.K. Corral next door and was presently coming abreast of Doc’s cottage. To judge from her Levis, which were stiff and blue, she was a new arrival. The old civil sorrowful air of the East still clung to her; she walked as if she still wore a dress. Though she had hooked her thumbs into her pockets, she had not yet got into the way of making herself free of herself and of swinging her legs like a man. She even wore a cowgirl hat, not at all the thing here, which had fallen down her back and was supported by a string at her throat. But she was abstracted and did not care, and instead of ambling along with the others, she went musing alone, tongue set against her teeth and hissing a solitary little tune. There was about her the wryness and ruefulness of a twenty-eight-year-old who has been staggered by a not quite mortal blow and has her own woman’s way of getting over it and in fact has already done so. She knew how to muse along a path and hiss a little tune and keep herself to herself.

Sutter rose creakily but cheerfully and rubbed his dry reedy hands together. “I do believe it is time to eat. Will you join me?”

“No sir. I promised Jamie I’d be back by seven.”

To his relief, Sutter left the Colt in his chair and had, apparently, forgotten about it

“I’ll be in by nine.”

“Yes sir.”

“Barrett, I think you’d better call the family.”

“But I just—”

“Tell them they’d better get out here.”

“Yes sir.”

‘Tell them I said so.”

“All right.”

“Somebody will have to be here to take care of things after Jamie’s death.”

“I’ll be here.”

“Some member of the family.”

“You’ll be here.”

“No, Barrett, I’ll not be here.”

“Why not?” asked the other angrily — he had had enough of Sutter’s defections.

“Barrett,” said Sutter as cheerfully as ever, craning his neck to keep track of the new guest, “if you know anything at all— and, what with your peculiar gifts, you know a good deal more than that — you ought to know why not.”

“I don’t,” said the engineer, at a total loss. He had lost his intuition!

“If I do outlive Jamie,” said Sutter, putting on his Curlee jacket (double breasted!), “it will not be by more than two hours. What in Christ’s name do you think I’m doing out here? Do you think I’m staying? Do you think I’m going back?”

The engineer opened his mouth but said nothing. For the first time in his life he was astonished.

“You won’t join me, Barrett?”

“What? No. No, thanks.”

Sutter nodded cheerfully, dropped the pistol in the side pocket of the jacket, and hurried down the path after the last of the dudes.

Perhaps this moment more than any other, the moment of his first astonishment, marked the beginning for the engineer of what is called a normal life. From that time forward it was possible to meet him and after a few minutes form a clear notion of what sort of fellow he was and how he would spend the rest of his life.

The pleasant little brunette was coming out of Jamie’s room when he turned the corner. He smiled at her and experienced a pang of pleasure when she veered and he saw she meant to stop him. But she was not smiling, and instead of speaking she held out a thermometer. He couldn’t see for looking, save only that the red line came dizzyingly near the top.

“Is he conscious?” he asked her.

“If you want to call it that. He’s delirious.”

“Do you think you should—”

“I’ve already notified Dr. Bice.”

“How is his pulse?”

“One-thirty, but regular.”

“He’s not, ah, fibrillating?”

“No.”

“Would you come back later, that is, from time to time when you can — as often as you can, in fact, to take his pulse.”

Now she did smile. “Why, yes.”

One look at Jamie and he went for the phone. The youth’s face was turned to the window. His dusty dead friable hair lay on the pillow as if it had been discarded, a hank.

As he got change from the cashier — he wouldn’t dare reverse the charges to Val — he began to grieve. It was the shame of it, the bare-faced embarrassment of getting worse and dying which took him by surprise and caught his breath in his throat. How is this matter to be set right? Were there no officials to deal with, the shame of dying, to make suitable recompense? It was like getting badly beat in a fight. To lose. Oh, to lose so badly. Oh, you bastards living and well and me dying, and where is the right of that? Oh, for the bitter shame of it.

At last the circuits clicked open into the frying frazzling silence of Alabama. He fancied he could hear the creak of the cancerous pines.

“Hello,” he cried after a wait. “Hello!”

“Hello,” came a voice as faint and faraway as 1901.

“Who is this?”

“This here Axel.” It sounded like a child standing a good two feet below a wall phone.

“Axel, let me speak to Sister Johnette Mary Vianney.”

“Who?”

He repeated it.

“Who dat?”

“Sister—”

“Sister Viney?”

“Yes, Sister Viney.”

“Yes suh, she here.”

“Well, go get her, Axel.”

“Yes suh.”

The ancient Alabama silence fried away in his ear. His foot went to sleep. Twice he had to stoke the box with quarters. That black cretin Axel—

“Hello.”

He gave a start. He had almost forgotten where he was. “Hello, is this Val? That is, Sister—”

“This is Val.”

“Val, this is—” Christ, who? “—Will Barrett.”

“Yes?” The same calculated buzzing non-surprise — he felt a familiar spasm of irritation.

“I, ah — Jamie asked me to call you.”

“Yes?”

“It’s about a book. A book about entropy. Actually, that is not the real reason I’m—”

“Entropy,” she repeated.

“Jamie said you promised to send him a book.”

“How is Jamie?”

“He asked me—”

“Never mind about the book. How is he?”

“He is very sick.”

“Is he dying?”

“I think so.”

“I’m leaving now. I’ll get a plane in New Orleans.”

“Good.”

He slumped with the relief of it. She’d do, nutty as she was. It came over him suddenly: there is another use for women after all, especially Southern women. They knew how to minister to the dying! It was they all along who had set at nought the shame of it and had done it so well that he had not even known that it took doing. He’d rather have a proper Southern woman (even one of his aunts!) but he’d settle for this one. “Very good. And would you call the rest of the family. My change is gone and I have to get back to Jamie.” All women come. The more women, the less shame.

“If anything happens before I get there, you’ll have to attend to it.”

“Yes, ma’am. Attend to what?”

“His baptism.”

“Ma’am? Eh?”

“I said you’ll have to see to his baptism if I don’t get there in time.”

“Excuse me,” said the courteous but terrified engineer. “Much as I’d like to oblige you, I don’t believe I can take the responsibility.”

“Why not?”

“For one thing, I’m not a member of the family.”

“You’re his friend, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Would you deny him penicillin if it would save his life?”

“No,” he said, stiffening. None of your Catholic tricks, Sister, the little tricky triumphs of analogy. You learned more in Paterson, New Jersey, than you realize. But he said only: “Why don’t you get Sutter?”

“I don’t know where he is.”

“As a matter of fact, he asked me to call you too.”

“Good. Then you hold the fort till I get there.”

“I don’t believe in baptizing anybody against their will,” said the sweating engineer, for lack of anything better to say.

“Then ask him if it’s against his will.”

“Ask him?”

“Barrett, I charge you to ask him.” She sounded serious enough but he couldn’t swear she wasn’t laughing at him.

“It’s really none of my business, Sister.”

“It’s my responsibility but I am giving it to you until I get there. You can call a priest, can’t you?”

“I am not of your faith, Sister.” Where did he get these solemn religious expressions?

“Then call a minister for God’s sake. Or do it yourself. I charge you. All you have to do is—”

“But—”

“If you don’t call someone, then you’ll have to do it yourself.”

Then God knows I’ll call someone, thought the prudent engineer. But he was becoming angry. To the devil with this exotic pair, Sutter and Val, the absentee experts who would deputize him, one to practice medicine, the other to practice priestcraft. Charge him indeed. Who were they to charge anybody?

“Barrett, look. I know that you are a highly intelligent and an intuitive man, and that you have a gift for fathoming people. Isn’t that true?”

“I don’t know,” he said glumly.

“I think you can tell when somebody is deadly serious about something, can’t you?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“Then I am charging you with the responsibility. You will have to fathom that according to your own lights.”

“You can’t—” But the circuits had closed on unhappy old Alabama, frying away in its own juices.

The poor addled engineer took the steps four at a time, racing to do he knew not what. So that when he reached the sickroom and found Jamie both unconscious and unattended, he was of two minds about it: dismayed that the worst had happened, that Jamie was very likely dying here and now; yet relieved despite himself that Jamie was unconscious and so he didn’t have to ask him any such question (for it was of course absolutely the last question to be tolerated by the comradely and stoic silence generated between the two of them). Here he stood, therefore, stooped over the machinery of Jamie’s veins, hoist not only by the vast awkwardness of dying but now by religion too. He became angrier than ever. Where was the hospital staff? Where was the family? Where was the chaplain? Then he noticed, almost idly as if he had spied a fly on the pillow, that there was something amiss about the vein. Its machinery rhythm was out of kilter.

All along he had known it would come to this and that he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t take the pulse. The thread of artery stirred fitfully under his finger but there was no profit in it. Which stirrings to count?

Without knowing how he came there, he had fetched up again at the nurses’ cage where reigned bald Queen Bess. Once again he made noises and motions and once again she annihilated him, rendered him invisible and of no account.

“Nurse,” he said sternly, four feet away. He actually raised a forefinger.

She answered the telephone.

All at once time fell in, bent, and he was transported over the Dutch sort of door — it didn’t seem to open — flew over it like a poltergeist and found himself inside the station. He seemed to be listening. “You hear me, goddamn it,” thundered a voice terrible and strange. It was for the two of them to listen as the voice went on. “—or else I’m going to kick yo’ ass down there.” An oddly Southern voice, then not his surely. Yet her glossy eyes were on him, round as a dollar watch, the lids nictitating from below like a lizard’s. Her smile, stretching open the rugae, the troughs of which he noticed were bare of lipstick, proffered a new ghastly friendship for him. Now as he watched, dreaming, she was using the phone again.

“Yes sir. But Mr. Barrett seems a little upset. Yes, good.” She knew him! Perhaps she had known him all along. On the other hand, there seemed to have sprung up between them a brand-new friendship, a species of roguish fondness.

Again segments of time collapsed, fell away, and he was transported magically into the corridor, she at his side, squeezing his arm in a love-joke. Doors flew open. Elevators converged on the floor.

The next thing he knew he was speaking in a businesslike and considered manner to the resident and chaplain outside Jamie’s closed door. He had survived the hiatus of his rage. There remained only the smell of it, strong as burnt meat; he hugged his arms close to his armpits.

The resident had just come out of Jamie’s room. He spoke seriously but in a measured, relaxed way. That’s what I wanted, thought the engineer, sighing — someone to give measure and form to time itself. Was that the worst of dying, dying without permission, license, so to speak?

The engineer nodded and turned to the chaplain. He explained the commission.

“Therefore it seemed proper to me,” he concluded, “to pass along to you the request of his sister, who is a religious of your faith.”

“I see,” said the priest, who, however, instead of listening to what the engineer said, was eyeing this strange young man himself. Evidently he could not make out what kind of bird he was dealing with. Three times he asked the engineer where he came from, as if this might shed some light.

“Do you know Father Gillis from Conway, Arkansas?” the priest asked him. If only he could get a fix on him!

“No sir.” Damnation, did they have to hit upon a mutual friend?

They were a curious pair, the resident and the priest. The resident was hollow-eyed and green-skinned and sunken of cheek. His hair grew down his neck in ringlets like a hyacinth. There was a rash on his throat under his loose collar. But unhealthy as he was he affected the easy nonchalance of an athlete and swung his fist softly. The priest was a neat chunky man whose thick auburn hair had been freshly cut and combed, exposing a white healthy scalp in the wide part. The gold stems of his bifocals pressed snugly against muscular temples. His hand, which he gave the engineer in a tentative interrogatory clasp (what sort of a bird are you, asked the hand), was thick through the palm and heavily freckled.

“He’s fibrillating,” said the haggard resident, first addressing the engineer. Then, not quite getting hold of him either, he turned to the priest, all the while making a few soft swings of fist to hand. “A heavy presystolic murmur. Temperature one-o-five point three, lungs filled up to the seventh interspace, spleen down to here.”

“What does that mean?” asked the frowning engineer.

The resident shrugged, squared off with his fist for a combination punch but didn’t throw it. “Pulmonary edema, for one thing. He’s drowning in his own fluids.”

“Will he regain consciousness?”

The resident frowned. There was a protocol here, a way of speaking-in-the-hall which the resident and priest were onto and he, the engineer, was not. The question did not pass muster, for the resident turned to the priest.

“Do you know what that joker told me last night?” (This is the way we speak.) “I always horse around with him. I wanted to take his temperature and I asked him what he wanted me to do, meaning which did he prefer, rectal or oral. So he says to me: Bice, you know what you can do with it. Oh, you can’t make a nickel on him,” he said, trying the engineer again (Now do you see? This is the way death itself can be gotten past).

The priest hung fire, vague and fond, until he saw the resident had finished. “Now, ah,” he said, touching the engineer’s elbow with just the hint of interrogatory pressure, as if he meant to ask the time. But the touch was skillful. The engineer found himself guided into the solarium.

“Let me see if I understand you,” said the priest, putting his head down and taking hold of a water pipe in his thick freckled hand. He watched intently as his perfect thumbnail creased a blister of paint. “This young man you say has never been baptized, and though he is unconscious now and perhaps will not regain consciousness, you have reason to believe he desires baptism?”

“No sir. His sister desires the baptism.”

“But he has a Catholic background?”

“If you mean Roman Catholic, no. I’m an Episcopalian,” said the engineer stiffly. Where in the world did these ready-made polemics come from? Never in his entire lifetime had he given such matters a single thought and now all at once he was a stout Anglican, a defender of the faith.

“Of course, of course. And the young man in there, is he also from a Protestant, that is, an Episcopal background?”

“No sir. His background was originally Baptist, though his family later became Episcopalian — which accounts for the delay.” The engineer, who could not quite remember the explanation, fell silent. “Delay in baptism, that is,” he added after a moment.

The priest examined another blister on the water pipe. “I don’t quite see why I have been summoned,” he said softly. “Perhaps you’d better call the Protestant chaplain.”

“Oh, no, sir,” said the engineer hastily, breaking out in a sweat lest the priest leave and he, the engineer, should have to go careening around the walls again. “Jamie professed no faith, so it is all the same which of you ministers, ah, ministers to him.” For some reason he laughed nervously. He didn’t want this fellow to get away — for one thing, he liked it that the other didn’t intone in a religious voice. He was more like a baseball umpire in his serviceable serge, which was swelled out by his muscular body. “As I told you, his sister, who is a nun, made me promise to send for you. She is on her way out here. She is a religious of a modern type. Her habit is short, to about here.” Then, realizing that he was not helping his case, he added nervously: “I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t found her own order. She is doing wonderful work among the Negroes. Aren’t foundresses quite often saints?” He groaned.

“I see,” said the priest, and actually stole a glance at the other to see, as the engineer clearly perceived, whether he was quite mad. But the engineer was past minding, as long as the priest got on with it. Evidently this was an unusual case. The priest tried again.

“Now you. Are you a friend of the family?”

“Yes, a close friend and traveling companion of the patient.”

“And the other gentleman — he is the patient’s brother?”

“Sutter? Is he here?” For the second time in his life the engineer was astonished.

“There is a visitor with the patient who I gather, from his conversation with Dr. Bice, is a doctor.”

“That must be Sutter.”

“The only thing is, I don’t yet quite understand why it is you and not he who is taking the initiative here.”

“He was not here when Jamie had his attack. But he told me — he must have just come.”

The priest took off his glasses, exposing naked eyes and a naked nosebridge, and carefully polished the lenses with a clean handkerchief. Making a bracket of his hand, he put the glasses back on, settling the stems onto his healthy temples.

“It would help if we had some indication from the patient or at least from the immediate family. Otherwise I don’t want to intrude. In fact, I would say it is a ‘must.’”

“Yes sir.” Unhinged as he was, the engineer was still sentient. He perceived that the priest had a certain style of talking which he no doubt shared with other priests. It was a good bet that quite a few priests liked to say such things as “It is a ‘must’” or perhaps “Now that is the sixty-four-dollar question.”

“Sir, could we go in and speak to the patient’s brother?”

“Well, let’s see what we shall see.”

The resident had left. Sutter was leaning against the window in Jamie’s room, his foot propped on the radiator.

“Dr. Vaught,” said the engineer, handing the priest along ahead of him — the goods to be delivered at last. “This is Father—”

“Boomer,” said the priest.

“Father Boomer,” said Sutter, shaking hands but not taking his foot from the radiator.

After a glance at Jamie — the youth’s head had fallen to the side and his eyes were closed — the engineer told Sutter: “Val asked me to call Father Boomer.”

“You spoke to Val just now?”

“Yes.”

“What did she say?”

“She’s flying out.”

“You called because I asked you?”

“Jamie also asked me.”

Sutter put both feet on the floor and gave him an odd look. “You say Jimmy asked you?”

“He asked me to call Val about a book she promised him. That was earlier.”

Sutter sank into thought. There was time for another look at Jamie. The bed had been freshly made, the seersucker counterpane drawn tightly across the youth’s bony chest. It seemed to the engineer that Jamie’s nose had grown sharper and that his skin clove closer to his cheekbones.

“He’s developed a spruelike diarrhea and lost some fluid,” said Sutter from the radiator. Was this an explanation? Sutter turned to the priest. “I refused to allow intravenous fluid, Father,” he said in what struck the engineer as a challenging tone. “Even though it might prolong his life a few days. What do you think of that?”

“No objection,” said the priest, scratching his fist absently. “Unless he is unconscious and you want him conscious for some reason.”

Sutter’s eye gleamed and he lifted an eyebrow toward the engineer. How about this fellow? Sutter asked him. But the engineer frowned and turned away. He wanted no humbug with Sutter.

“Of course, whether he is unconscious or not, I’ll be glad to baptize him conditionally,” said the priest, settling the glasses with the bracket of his hand.

“Conditionally, Father,” said Sutter with a lively expression.

The priest shrugged. “I have no way of knowing whether he’s been baptized before.”

“Is that what the canon prescribes, Father?” Sutter’s eyes roamed the ceiling.

“I think, Father—” began the engineer sternly. He would have no part of Sutter’s horsing around. At the same moment he glanced at Sutter’s coat pocket: it still held the pistol.

“This young man asked me to come in here,” said the priest

“That’s right,” said the engineer sternly.

‘Therefore I should like to ask you, sir,” said the priest straight to Sutter, “whether you concur in your sister’s desire that I administer the sacrament of baptism to the patient. If you do not, then I shall be going about my business.”

“Yes,” said the engineer, nodding vigorously. He thought the priest expressed it very well in his umpire’s way, taking no guff from Sutter.

“By all means stay, Father,” said Sutter somewhat elaborately.

“Well?” The priest waited.

“Why don’t you ask him yourself, Father.” Sutter nodded to the bed behind the other two.

They turned. Jamie was getting out of bed! One hand had folded back the covers quite cogently, and the left knee had started across right leg, his eyes open and bulging slightly with seriousness of intent.

Later Sutter told the engineer that, contrary to popular notions, dying men often carry out complex actions in the last moments of life. One patient he recalled who was dying of tuberculosis had climbed out of bed, washed his pajamas in the sink, hung them out to dry, returned to the bed, pulled the covers up to his chin to hide his nakedness, and died.

“Hold it, son,” Sutter stopped Jamie fondly and almost jokingly, as if Jamie were a drunk, and motioned the engineer to the cabinet. “Jamie here wants to move his bowels and doesn’t like the bedpan. I don’t blame him.” The priest helped Sutter with Jamie. After a moment there arose to the engineer’s nostrils first an intimation, like a new presence in the room, a somebody, then a foulness beyond the compass of smell. This could only be the dread ultimate rot of the molecules themselves, an abject surrender. It was the body’s disgorgement of its most secret shame. Doesn’t this ruin everything, wondered the engineer (if only the women were here, they wouldn’t permit it, oh Jamie never should have left home). He stole a glance at the others. Sutter and the priest bent to their task as if it were nothing out of the ordinary. The priest supported Jamie’s head on the frail stem of its neck. When a nurse came to service the cabinet, the engineer avoided her eye. The stench scandalized him. Shouldn’t they all leave?

Sutter conducted Jamie back to bed fondly and even risibly. Suddenly the engineer remembered that this was the way Negro servants handle the dying, as if it were the oldest joke of all.

“Hold it now, son. Look out. There you go.” Leaning over the bed, Sutter took hold of Jamie’s chin, almost chucked it. “Listen, Jimmy. This is Father Boomer. He wants to ask you something.”

But the youth goggled and closed his eyes, giving no sign of having heard. Sutter took his pulse and stepped back.

“If you have any business with him, Father,” he said dryly, “I think you’d better conduct it now.”

The priest nodded and leaned on the bed, supporting himself on his heavy freckled fists. He looked not at Jamie but sideways at the wall.

“Son, can you hear me?”—addressing the wall. The engineer perceived that at last the priest had found familiar territory. He knew what he was doing.

But Jamie made no reply.

“Son, can you hear me?” the priest repeated without embarrassment, examining a brown stain on the wall and not troubling to give his voice a different inflection.

Jamie nodded and appeared to say something. The engineer moved a step closer, cocking his good ear but keeping his arms folded as the sign of his discretion.

“Son, I am a Catholic priest,” said Father Boomer, studying the yellow hairs on his fist. “Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” said Jamie aloud. He nodded rapidly.

“I have been asked by your sister to administer to you the sacrament of baptism. Do you wish to receive it?”

The engineer frowned. Wasn’t the priest putting it a bit formally?

“Val,” whispered Jamie, goggling at the engineer.

“That’s right,” said the engineer, nodding. “I called her as you asked me to.”

Jamie looked at the priest.

“Son,” said the priest. “Do you accept the truths of religion?”

Jamie moved his lips.

“What?” asked the priest, bending lower.

“Excuse me, Father,” said the sentient engineer. “He said ‘what.’”

“Oh,” said the priest and turned both fists out and opened the palms. “Do you accept the truth that God exists and that He made you and loves you and that He made the world so that you might enjoy its beauty and that He himself is your final end and happiness, that He loved you so much that He sent His only Son to die for you and to found His Holy Catholic Church so that you may enter heaven and there see God face to face and be happy with Him forever.”

Without raising his eyes, the engineer could see the curled-up toe of Sutter’s ThomMcAn shoe turning to and fro on the radiator trademark.

“Is that true?” said Jamie clearly, opening his eyes and goggling. To the engineer’s dismay, the youth turned to him.

The engineer cleared his throat and opened his mouth to say something when, fortunately for him, Jamie’s bruised eyes went weaving around to the priest. He said something to the priest which the latter did not understand.

The priest looked up to the engineer.

“He wants to know, ah, why,” said the engineer.

“Why what?”

“Why should he believe that.”

The priest leaned hard on his fists. “It is true because God Himself revealed it as the truth.”

Again the youth’s lips moved and again the priest turned to the interpreter.

“He asked how, meaning how does he know that?”

The priest sighed. “If it were not true,” he said to Jamie, “then I would not be here. That is why I am here, to tell you.”

Jamie, who had looked across to the engineer (Christ, don’t look at me!), pulled down the corners of his mouth in what the engineer perceived unerringly to be a sort of ironic acknowledgment.

“Do you understand me, son?” said the priest in the same voice.

There was no answer. Outside in the night the engineer saw a Holsum bread truck pass under the street light

“Do you accept these truths?”

After a silence the priest, who was still propped on his fists and looking sideways like a storekeeper, said, “If you do not now believe these truths, it is for me to ask you whether you wish to believe them and whether you now ask for the faith to believe them.”

Jamie’s eyes were fixed on the engineer, but the irony was shot through with the first glint of delirium. He nodded to the engineer.

The engineer sighed and, feeling freer, looked up. Sutter hung fire, his chin on his knuckles, his eyes half-closed and gleaming like a Buddha’s.

Jamie opened his mouth, it seemed, to say something bright and audible, but his tongue thickened and came out. He shuddered violently. Sutter came to the bedside. He held the youth’s wrist and, unbuttoning the pajamas, laid an ear to the bony chest. He straightened and made a sign to the priest, who took from his pocket a folded purple ribbon which he slung around his neck in a gesture that struck the engineer as oddly graceless and perfunctory.

“What’s his name?” the priest asked no one in particular.

“Jamison MacKenzie Vaught,” said Sutter.

“Jamison MacKenzie Vaught,” said the priest, his fists spread wide. “What do you ask of the Church of God? Say Faith.”

Jamie said something.

“What does Faith bring you to? Say Life Everlasting.”

Jamie’s lips moved.

The priest took the bent sucking tube from Jamie’s water glass. “Go fill that over there.”

“Yes sir,” said the engineer. But surely it was to be expected that the priest have a kit of some sort, at least a suitable vessel. He half filled the clouded plastic glass.

As he returned with the water, Jamie’s bowels opened again with the spent schleppen sound of an old man’s sphincter. The engineer went to get the bedpan. Jamie tried to lift his head.

“No no,” said Sutter impatiently, and coming quickly across simply bound the dying youth to the bed by folding the counterpane into a strap and pressing it against his chest. “Get on with it, Father,” he said angrily.

The priest took the plastic glass. “I baptize you in the name of the Father—” He poured a trickle of water into the peninsula of fried dusty hair. “And of the Son—” He poured a little more. “And of the Holy Ghost.” He poured the rest.

The three men watched as the water ran down the youth’s bruised forehead. It was dammed a moment by the thick Vaught eyebrows, flowed through and pooled around the little red carbuncle in the corner of his eye.

The priest bent lower still, storekeeper over his counter, and took the narrow waxy hand between his big ruddy American League paws. “Son,” he said in the same flat mercantile voice, looking first at the brown stain on the wall and then down at the dying youth. “Today I promise you that you will be with our Blessed Lord and Savior and that you will see him face to face and see his mother, Our Lady, see them as you are seeing me. Do you hear me?”

The four white vermiform fingers stirred against the big thumb, swollen with blood (did they, thumb and fingers, belong to the same species?).

“Then I ask you to pray to them for me and for your brother here and for your friend who loves you.”

The fingers stirred again.

Presently the priest straightened and turned to the engineer as blank-eyed as if he had never laid eyes on him before.

“Did you hear him? He said something. What did he say?”

The engineer, who did not know how he knew, was not even sure he had heard Jamie or had tuned him in in some other fashion, cleared his throat.

“He said, ‘Don’t let me go.’” When the priest looked puzzled, the engineer nodded to the bed and added: “He means his hand, the hand there.”

“I won’t let you go,” the priest said. As he waited he curled his lip absently against his teeth in a workaday five-o’clock-in-the-afternoon expression.

After several minutes Sutter let go the sheet which he still held as a strap across Jamie.

“All right, Father,” said Sutter in an irritable voice when the priest didn’t move. “On the way out, would you send in the nurse and the resident?”

“What?” said the priest, bracketing his glasses with his free hand. “Oh, yes. Certainly.” He started for the washstand, thought better of it, turned and left the room. Pausing in the doorway, he turned again. “If you need me for anything else, I’d be glad to—”

“We won’t,” said Sutter curtly, managing to embarrass the engineer after all.

The engineer followed the priest out into the corridor and thanked him. He wondered if one was expected to “make an offering,” but he had no notion of how to hand money over except to hand it over. He contented himself with wringing the priest’s hand warmly and thanking him twice.

It took him two blocks at top walking speed toovertake Sutter, who strode along with his hands in his pockets, bent forward as if he were bucking a strong wind.

“Where are you going?” the engineer asked in an unexpectedly loud voice.

“What?” said Sutter, giving a start. “Oh, to the ranch.”

“The ranch,” repeated the engineer absently. When Sutter started to leave, he held up his hand. “Wait.”

“Wait for what?”

“What happened back there?”

“In the hospital room? You were there.”

“I know, but what did you think? I could tell you were thinking something.”

“Do you have to know what I think before you know what you think?”

“That does not mean that I would necessarily agree with you,” said the engineer, trying to see Sutter’s expression. Suddenly the engineer felt hisface flush. “No, you’re right. I don’t need to know what you think. Wait. Did you say ranch?”

“Yes.” Still he could not make out Sutter’s face.

“Do you mean your ranch?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I have a date.”

“A date?” His heart began to thud. “No, wait. Please don’t go to the ranch!” Without realizing that he had done so, he had taken hold of Sutter’s sleeve.

Sutter angrily shook himself free. “What in God’s name do you want now?”

“Oh. I — what about the family?”

“What about them?”

“I mean, meeting them. Val should be here tonight and the rest tomorrow.”

“Yes.”

“They won’t know. Shall I meet them? Perhaps I could even call the Vaughts and catch them before they leave.”

“Good. Fine.”

“Then I’ll call the airport and see what the plane schedule is.”

“Very good.”

“What about the arrangements?”

“Arrangements? You make them. You do very well.”

Sutter reached the Edsel and got into the driver’s seat but made no sign that the engineer should follow.

“All right. Wait—” cried the engineer when the old buckety Ford motor caught and roared (he wondered if Sutter had ever changed the oil or whether it had oil).

“What?”

He peered down into the dark car.

“Dr. Vaught — ah—”

“What?”

“What are you going to do now?”

“I’m going to have a drink.”

“No. I mean, what are you going to do?”

There was no answer. All the engineer could see was that Sutter had put his hands on the wheel at six o’clock and nine o’clock, left elbow on the window sill, a style of driving which the engineer faintly recalled from the 1940’s when Delta sports used to pick up their dates and drive to the Marion Parlor on Front Street.

“Are you going home, I mean.”

“I told you, Barrett, I’m going to the ranch.”

“Dr. Vaught, don’t leave me.”

“What did you say?”

“Dr. Vaught, listen to me. I’m going to do what I told you I planned to do.”

“I know. You told me.”

“Dr. Vaught, I want you to come back with me.”

“Why? To make this contribution you speak of?”

“Dr. Vaught, I need you. I, Will Barrett—” and he actually pointed to himself lest there be a mistake, “—need you and want you to come back. I need you more than Jamie needed you. Jamie had Val too.”

Sutter laughed. “You kill me, Barrett.”

“Yes sir.” He waited.

“I’ll think about it. Here’s some money for the arrangements, as you call them.”

“Oh, no, sir.” He backed away. “I have plenty.”

“Anything else?”

“No sir.”

But as the Edsel took off, spavined and sprung, sunk at one corner and flatulent in its muffler, spuriously elegant and unsound, like a Negro’s car, a fake Ford, a final question did occur to him and he took off after it.

“Wait,” he shouted in a dead run.

The Edsel paused, sighed, and stopped.

Strength flowed like oil into his muscles and he ran with great joyous ten-foot antelope bounds.

The Edsel waited for him.