Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World

On the way to meet Moira at Howard Johnson’s 8:30 A.M. / JULY 4

ONLY THREE HOURS’ SLEEP AFTER MY NIGHT CALL TO THE love couple with the diarrheic infant in the swamp.

A cold shower and a breakfast of warm Tang-vodka-duck-eggs-Tabasco and I’m back to normal, which is to say tolerably depressed and terrified.

At the first flicker of morning terror I remember the modified lapsometer and fetching it from my bag, an odd-looking thing with its snout-like attachment, give myself a light brain massage.

Terror gone! Instantly exhilarated! The rip and race of violins. By no means drunk, clairvoyant rather, prescient, musical, at once abstracted, seeing things according to their essences, and at the same time poised for the day’s adventure in the wide world, I achieve a noble evacuation and go forth, large bowel clear as a bell. Clay lies still but blood’s a rover.

A hot still gold-green Fourth of July. Not a breath stirs. No squirrels scrabble in the dogwoods, no jaybirds fret in the sycamores.

Cutting now through the “new” 18, which is really the old since the construction of the Cypress Garden 36. Hm. Something is amiss. The Fourth of July and not a soul on the links. What with the Pro-Am using Cypress Garden, the “new” 18 ought to be jammed!

Weeds sprout in the fairways. Blackberries flourish in the rough. Rain shelters are green leafy caves.

Someone is following me. Clink-clink. I stop and listen. Not a sound. Start and there it is again: clink-clink, clink-clink, the sound a caddy makes when he’s humping it off the tee to get down to the dogleg in time for the drive, hand held over the clubs to keep them quiet but one or two blades slap together clink-clink.

But there’s no one in sight.

Now comes the sound of — firecrackers? Coming from the direction of the school.

There is a roaring and crackling in the dogleg of number 5. Rounding the salient of woods and all of a sudden knowing what it is before I see it, I see it: the Bledsoe Spanish-mission house burning from the inside. The fire is a cheerful uproarious blaze going like sixty at every window, twenty windows and twenty roaring hearths, fat pine joists popping sociably and not a soul in sight No fire department, no spectators, nothing but the bustling commerce of flames in the still sunlight.

I watch from the green cave of a shelter. Yonder in the streaked stucco house dwelled the childless Bledsoes for thirty years while golf balls caromed off the walls, broke the windows and rooftiles, ricocheted around the patio.

The house roars and crackles busily in the silence. Flames lick out the iron grills and up the blackened stucco.

Into these very woods came I as a boy while the house was a-building, picked up triangles of new copper flashing, scraps of aluminum, freshly sawn blocks of two-by-fours — man’s excellent geometries wrought from God’s somewhat lumpish handiwork. Here amid the interesting carpenter’s litter, I caressed the glossy copper, smelled the heart pine, thought impure thoughts and defiled myself in the skeletal bathroom above the stuffed stumps of plumbing, a thirteen-year-old’s lonesome leaping love on a still summer afternoon.

My chest is buzzing. Ach, a heart attack for sure! Clutching at my shirt, I shrink into the corner. For sure it is calcium dislodged and rattling like dice in my heart’s pitiful artery. Poor Thomas! Dead at forty-five of a coronary! Not at all unusual either, especially in Knothead circles here in Paradise: many a good Christian and loving father, family man, and churchgoer has kicked off in his thirties. A vice clamps under my sternum and with it comes belated contrition. God, don’t let me die. I haven’t lived, and there’s the summer ahead and music and science and girls — No. No girls! No more lewd thoughts! No more lusting after my neighbors’ wives and daughters! No hankering after strange women! No more humbug! No more great vaulting lewd daytime longings, no whispering into pretty ears, no more assignations in closets, no more friendly bumping of nurses from behind, no more night adventures in bunkers and sand traps, no more inviting Texas girls out into the gloaming: “I am Thomas More. You are lovely and I love you. I have a heart full of love. Could we go out into the gloaming?” No more.

My chest buzzes away.

Clutching at my shirt in a great greasy cold sweat, I encounter it, the buzzing box. Whew! Well. It is not my heart after all but my Anser-Phone calling me, clipped to my shirt pocket and devised just for the purpose of reaching docs out on the golf links.

Whew. Lying back and closing my eyes, I let it buzz. If it wasn’t a heart attack, it’s enough to give you one.

It is Ellen Oglethorpe. Switch off the buzzer and move around to a shady quarter of the green cave to escape the heat of the fire.

Now resting in the corner and listening to Ellen and giving myself another brain massage. I could use an Early Times too.

“What is it, Ellen?”

“Oh, Chief, where have you been? I’ve been out of my mind! You just don’t know. Where’ve you been all night?” Comes the tiny insectile voice, an angry cricket in my pocket.

“What’s the trouble?”

“You’ve got to get down here right away, Chief.”

“Where are you?”

“At the office.”

“It’s the Fourth of July and I have an engagement.”

“Engagement my foot. You mean a date. You’re not fooling me.”

“O.K., I’m not fooling you.”

“I know who you have a date with and where, don’t worry about that.”

“All right, I won’t.”

“Chief—”

“Ellen, listen to me, I want you to call the fire department and send them out to Paradise. The Bledsoe house is on fire.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Eh? I can hardly hear you.” I incline my ear to my bosom.

“They’re not taking calls out there, not the police or anybody. That’s why I was so worried about you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“There’s some sort of disturbance out there. Riffraff from the swamp, I believe.”

“Nonsense. There’s not a soul here.”

“Everybody out there has moved into town. It’s an armed camp here, Chief. You wouldn’t believe it.”

“What happened?”

“It started with the atrocity last night — right where you are. At the Bledsoes’.”

“Atrocity?”

“Mrs. Bledsoe was killed with that barbecue thing. Mr. Bledsoe has disappeared. No doubt he’s dead too. The work of madmen.”

Mrs. Bledsoe. Skewered with P.T.’s kebab skewer.

“Chief, you better get out of there!”

“There’s no one here,” I say absently.

“Oh, and we’ve got a roomful of patients.”

“On the Fourth of July?”

“Your new assistant is treating them.”

“Who? Speak up, Ellen, I can’t hear you.”

“I can’t talk any louder, Chief. I’m hiding in the EEG room. I said Dr. Immelmann has a roomful of patients and some very strange patients, I must say.”

“Dr. Immelmann! What the hell is he doing there?”

“Treating patients with your lapsometer. He said you would understand, that it was part of your partnership agreement. But, Chief, there’s something wrong here.”

“What?”

“They’re fighting. In your waiting room and in the street.”

“Who’s fighting?”

“Mr. Ledbetter and Mr. Tennis got in a fight, and—”

“Let me speak to Art Immelmann.”

“He just left. I can see him going down the street.”

“All right, Ellen, here’s what you do. Are the lapsometers still there?”

“Well, only half of them. And only because I hid them.”

“Where did you hide them?”

“In a crate of Bayonne-rayon training members.”

“Good girl. Now here’s what you do. Take the crate to your car. Lock it in the trunk. Go home. I’ll get back to you later.”

“When?”

“Shortly. I have something to attend to first.”

“Don’t think I don’t know what it is.”

“All right I won’t.”

Ellen begins to scold. I unclip the Anser-Phone and hang it in the rafters among the dirt-daubers. While Ellen buzzes away, I take a small knock of Early Times and administer a plus-four Sodium jolt to Brodmann 11, the zone of the musical-erotic.

Waltzing now to Wine, Women and Song while Ellen Oglethorpe chirrups away in the rafters, a tiny angry Presbyterian cricket.

“Chief,” says the insectile voice. “You’re not living up to the best that’s in you.”

“The best? Isn’t happiness better than misery?”

“Because the best that’s in you is so fine.”

“Thank you.” From the edge of the woods comes a winey smell where the fire’s heat strikes the scuppernongs.

“People like that, Chief, are not worthy of you.”

“People like what?” People pronounced by Ellen in that tone has a feminine gender. Female people.

“You know who I mean.”

“I’m not sure. Who?”

“People like that Miss Schaffner and Miss Rhoades.”

“Are you jealous?’

“Don’t flatter yourself, Doctor.”

“Very well.” I’m waltzing.

Wien Wien, du du allein

“Oh, Chief. Are you drinking?”

I must be singing out loud.

“Goodbye, Ellen. Go home and sit tight until you hear from me.”

I turn off the cricket in the rafters and snap the Anser-Phone in a side pocket, away from my heart.

Again the popping of firecrackers. The sound comes from the south. Taking cover in the gloom of the pines, I look between the trunks down number 5 fairway, 475 yards, par five. Beyond the green are the flat buildings of the private school. The firecrackers come from there. The grounds are deserted, but a spark of fire appears at a window, then a crack. Is somebody shooting? Two yellow school buses are parked in front. Now comes a regular fusillade, sparkings at every window, then a sputtering like a string of Chinese crackers. People run for the buses, majorettes and pom-pom girls for the first bus, their silver uniforms glittering in the sun. The moms bring up the rear, hustling along, one hand clamped to their hats, the other swinging big tote bags. A police car pulls ahead, the buses follow, a motorcycle brings up the rear. As soon as the little cavalcade disappears, the firing stops.

Was it fireworks or were people inside the building directing covering fire at an unseen enemy?

At Howard Johnson’s.

Moira gives me a passionate kiss tasting of Coppertone. She is sunbathing beside the scummy pool. Her perfect little body, clad in an old-fashioned two-piece bikini, lies prone on a plastic recliner. Though her shoulder straps have been slipped down, she makes much of her modesty, clutching bra to breast as, I perceive, she imagines girls used to in the old days.

“A kiss for the champ,” she says.

“For who?”

“You beat Buddy.”

“Oh.”

“Poor Buddy. Wow, what a bombshell you dropped. Total chaos. Did you plan it that way?”

“Chaos?”

“In The Pit, stupid.”

“Yes, The Pit. Yes. No, I didn’t plan it exactly that way.” I notice that she has a dimple at each corner of her sacrum, each whorled by down.

“I heard the Director tell Dr. Stryker to sign you up and keep you here at any cost.”

“What do you think that meant?”

“Before Harvard or M.I.T. grab you, silly.”

“I’m not so sure. What was going on over there when you left this morning?”

“Quiet as a tomb. Everyone’s gone to the beaches.”

The golden down on her forearm is surprisingly thick. I turn her arm over and kiss the sweet salty fossa where the blood beats like a thrush’s throat.

Spying two snakes beside the pool, I pick up a section of vacuum hose and run around the apron and chase them off, and sing Louisiana Lou to hear the echoes from the quadrangle.

“Are you going to take the job, Tom?” asks Moira, sitting up. The lounge leaves a pattern of diamonds on the front of her thighs.

“What job? Oh. Well, I’m afraid there’s going to be some trouble around here. You’re sure you didn’t notice anything unusual this morning?”

“Unusual? No. I did meet that funny little man who was helping you yesterday.”

“Helping me?”

“Helping you pass out your props. Wow, how did you do it?”

“He wasn’t helping me. He was — never mind. What was he doing this morning?”

“Nothing. He passed me carrying a box.”

“How big?”

“Yay big.”

I frown. Ordinarily I don’t like girls who say yay big.

The box. Oh my. Terror flickers. I take a drink.

“He was very polite, knew my name and all. In fact, he sent his regards to you. How did he know I was going to see you? Did you tell him?”

“Certainly not.”

“Rub some of this on me, Tommy.” She hands me the ancient Pompeian phial of Coppertone.

“O.K. But you realize you can’t go in the pool.”

“Ugh,” she says, looking at the pool. “I can’t. What’ll I do?”

“I’ll show you. But let me rub you first.”

Foreseeing everything, I had earlier made an excuse and hopped up to the room, cranked up the generator and turned on the air-conditioner.

Now, when Moira’s had enough of the sweat and the grease and the heat, I lead her by the hand to the balcony. From the blistering white heat of the concrete we come into a dim cool grotto. Fogs of cold air blow from the shuddering tin-lizzy of an air-conditioner. The yellow bed lamp shines down on fresh sheets. A record player plays ancient Mantovani music — not exactly my favorite, but Moira considers Mantovani “classical.”

Moira claps her hands and hugs me.

“Oh lovely lovely lovely! How perfect! Whose room?”

“Ours,” I say, humming There’s a Small Hotel with a Wishing Well.

“You mean you fixed it up like this?”

“Sure. Remember the way it was?”

“My heavens. Sheets even. Air-conditioner. Why did you do it?”

“For love. All for love. Let me show you this.”

I show her the “shower”: a pistol-grip nozzle screwed onto two hundred feet of garden hose hooked at the other end to the spigot in the Esso station grease-rack next door.

“And soap! And towels! Go away, I’m taking my shower now.”

“O.K. But let me do this.” I turn on the nozzle to get rid of two hundred feet of hot water.

While Moira showers, I lie on the bed and look at The Laughing Cavalier and the Maryland hunt scene in the wallpaper. Mantovani plays, the shower runs, Moira sings. I mix a toddy and let it stand on my chest and think of Doris, my dead wife who ran off to Cozumel with a heathen Englishman.

Doris and I used to travel the highways in the old Auto Age before Samantha was born, roar seven hundred miles a day along the great interstates to some glittering lost motel twinkling away in the twilight set down in the green hills of Tennessee or out in haunted New Mexico, swim in the pool, take steaming baths, mix many toddies, eat huge steaks, run back to the room, fall upon each other laughing and hollering, and afterwards lie dreaming in one another’s arms watching late-show Japanese science-fiction movies way out yonder in the lost yucca flats of Nevada.

Sunday mornings I’d leave her and go to mass. Now here was the strangest exercise of all! Leaving the coordinate of the motel at the intersection of the interstates, leaving the motel with standard doors and carpets and plumbing, leaving the interstates extending infinitely in all directions, abscissa and ordinate, descending through a moonscape countryside to a — town! Where people had been living all these years, and to some forlorn little Catholic church up a side street just in time for the ten-thirty mass, stepping up on the porch as if I had been doing it every Sunday for the past twenty years, and here comes the stove-up bemused priest with his cup (what am I doing out here? says his dazed expression) upon whose head hands had been laid and upon this other head other hands and so on, for here off I-51 I touched the thread in the labyrinth, and the priest announced the turkey raffle and Wednesday bingo and preached the Gospel and fed me Christ—

— Back to the motel then, exhilarated by — what? by eating Christ or by the secret discovery of the singular thread in this the unlikeliest of places, this geometry of Holiday Inns and interstates? back to lie with Doris all rosy-fleshed and creased of cheek and slack and heavy-limbed with sleep, cracking one eye and opening her arms and smiling.

“My God, what is it you do in church?”

What she didn’t understand, she being spiritual and seeing religion as spirit, was that it took religion to save me from the spirit world, from orbiting the earth like Lucifer and the angels, that it took nothing less than touching the thread off the misty interstates and eating Christ himself to make me mortal man again and let me inhabit my own flesh and love her in the morning.

Moira comes out wound up in a towel, rubbing her short blond hair with another towel.

“Feel me.”

The flesh of her arm is cold-warm, the blood warmth just palpable through her cold smooth skin.

“Let me get up to take a shower.” Moira is sitting in my lap. She won’t get up so I get up with her and walk around holding her in my arms like a child.”

“Don’t,” says Moira.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t take a shower.”

“Why not?”

“I like the way you smell. You smell like Uncle Bud.”

“Who is Uncle Bud?”

“He had a chicken farm out from Parkersburg. I used to go see him Sunday mornings and sit in his lap while he read me the funnies. He always smelled like whiskey and sweat and seersucker.”

“Do I look like Uncle Bud?”

“No, you look like Rod McKuen.”

“He’s rather old.”

“But you both look poetic.”

“I brought along his poems for you.”

“Which ones?”

“The ones about sea gulls.”

“You’ve thought of everything.”

“You’re a lovely girl,” I say, holding and patting her just as I used to pat Samantha when she had growing pains.

“Do you love me?”

“Oh yes.”

“How much?”

“Enough to eat you,” I say and begin to eat her kneecap.

“Enough to marry me?”

“What?”

“Do you love me enough to marry me?”

“Oh yes.”

“Do you know what I’ve always wanted?”

“No.”

“To keep some chickens.”

“All right.”

“Golden banties. You know what?”

“What?”

“That work at the clinic is a lot of bull. I’d love to stay home raising golden banties while you are doing your famous researches.”

“All right.” I suck the cold-warm flesh of her forearm covered by long whorled down. The fine hair rises to my mouth and makes a skein like the tiny ropes that bound Gulliver.

“Could we live in Paradise?”

“Certainly.”

Eating her, I have visions of golden cockerels glittering like topazes in the morning sun in my “enclosed patio.”

“When?”

“When what?”

“When will we do that?”

“Whenever you like,” I say, marveling at her big littleness. My arms gauge a secret amplitude in her. She is small and heavy.

“No really. When?”

“When we leave here.”

“When will that be?”

“A week, a month. Perhaps longer.”

“My Lord,” says Moira, straightening in my arms like a child wanting to be put down. “What do you mean?”

“I’m afraid something is going to happen today, in fact is happening now, which will make it impossible for us to leave here for a while. At least until I make sure it’s safe for us either in Paradise or the Center.”

“What do you mean? When I left there this morning, the place was dead as a doornail.”

“For one thing a revolution may have occurred. There is a report that guerrillas from Honey Island are in Paradise. I fear too that there may be disorders today at the political rally near Fedville.”

“You don’t have to go to this much trouble to keep me here, you know.”

“Let me show you something.”

I carry her to the window, where she pulls back the curtain. Five columns of smoke come from the green ridge above the orange tiles of the ice-cream restaurant.

“There was only one fire when I was there earlier.”

“What does that mean?”

“They’re burning the houses on the old 18.”

“O my Lord.”

“But that’s not the worst. I’m afraid my invention has fallen into the wrong hands.”

“What does that mean?”

“Two things. Civil war and a chain reaction in the Heavy Sodium deposits.”

“But I can’t stay here.” Moira straightens in my arms again.

“Why not?”

“I don’t have anything to wear! All I have is the clothes on my back — the clothes in there, that is.”

“Let me show you something else. Open the top drawer.”

She opens it. “What in the world?” The top drawer has underclothes, blouses, slips. The other drawers have skirts, dresses, shorts, etcetera.

“Whose are they?” asks Moira, frowning.

“Yours.”

“Were they your wife’s?”

“No. She’d make two of you.”

“Gollee.” Moira gets down, opens the bottom drawer, sits drumming her fingers on the Gideon. “And what are we going to live on? Love?”

“Let me show you.”

I take her to the closet. She gazes at the crates and cartons stacked to the ceiling, cartons of Campbell’s chicken-and-rice, Underwood ham, Sunmaid raisins, cases of Early Times and Swiss Colony sherry (which Moira likes). And the Great Books stacked alongside.

“That’s enough for a small army.”

“Or for two people for a long time.”

“Who’s going to read all those books?”

“Well read them aloud to each other.”

Think of it: reading Aeschylus, in the early fall, in old Howard Johnson’s, off old I-11, with Moira.

“What about Rod McKuen?”

“He’s over there. Under the Gideon.”

“There’s no pots and pans,” says Moira suddenly.

“The kitchenette’s next door.”

“Good night, nurse.”

“Let me show you something else.” We sit on the bed. “Put this quarter in the slot there.”

The Slepe-Eze starts up and sets the springs gently vibrating.

“Oh no!” Moira’s eyes round. “I guess they had to have this.”

“They?”

“The salesmen.”

“Yes.”

“Those poor lonely men. Think of it.”

“Yes.”

“Making love and dying in a place like this, far from home.”

“Dying?”

“The Death of a Salesman.”

“Right. Come sit in Uncle Bud’s lap.”

“All right. Honey?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s have children.”

“All right.” How odd. The idea of Moira and me having a child is the oddest thing in the world. But why? “First, let’s fix us a drink.”

“All right.”

She sits in my lap and we drink. She insists on whiskey rather than her sherry since that was what the flappers and salesmen drank.

“This beats Knott’s Berry Farm,” she whispers.

“Yes.”

One difference between Moira and my wife, Doris, is that Doris liked motels that were in the middle of nowhere, at the intersection of I-89 and I-23 in the Montana badlands. While Moira likes a motel near a point of interest such as Seven Flags over Texas.

Now we lie in one another’s arms on the humming bed. She is as trim and quick as one of her banty hens. She’s a West Virginia tomboy brown as a berry and strong-armed and — legged from climbing trees.

Cold fogs of air blow over us, Mantovani plays Jerome Kern. “I love classical music,” whispers Moira. The Laughing Cavalier smiles down on us, hundreds of Maryland hunters leap the same fence around the walls.

Locked about one another we go spinning down old Louisiana misty green, slowly revolving and sailing down the summer wind. How prodigal is she with and how little store she sets by her perfectly formed Draw-Me arms and legs.

Now she lies in the crook of my arm, eyes open, tapping her hard little fingernail on her tooth. Her little mind ranges far and wide. She casts ahead, making plans, no doubt, doing my living room over. I took her there once and it was an unhappy business, she keeping her head down and looking up through her eyebrows at Doris’s great abstract enamels that went leaping around the walls like the seven souls of Shiva.

“Do you like my hair long?”

“Do you call it long now?”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

When my daughter, Samantha, was a freshman in high school, she had her first date, a blind one for the Introductory Prom, the boys from Saint Aloysius drawing the Saint Mary’s girls from a hat. Samantha and I sat waiting for the date, I with my instructions not to open the front door until she had a chance to leave the room so that she could then be a little late, she with her blue pinafore skirt tucked under her fat knees. We watched Gunsmoke as we waited. The boy didn’t come. Gunsmoke gave way to the Miss America pageant. Bert Parks went nimbly back-stepping around snaking the mike cord out of his way. Samantha’s acne began to itch.

“I wouldn’t have missed this, Poppa,” said Samantha as we watched Miss Nebraska recite “If” in the talent contest. But she was clawing at herself.

“Me neither.”

I began to itch too and needed only a potsherd and dungheap. Curse God, curse the nuns for arranging the dance, goddamn the little Celt-Catholic bastards, little Mediterranean lowbrow Frenchy-dago jerks. Anglo-Saxon Presbyterians would have better manners even if they didn’t believe in God.

“Why are you crying?” Moira asks me, rubbing my back briskly. She wants to get up.

“I’m not crying.”

“Your eyes are wet.”

“Tears of joy.”

But Moira, paying no attention, raises herself on one elbow to see herself in the mirror.

“Nothing is wrong with two people in love loving each other,” says Moira, turning her head to see her hair. “Buddy says that joy not guilt—”

“Buddy says!” Angrily I pull back from her. “What the hell does Buddy have to do with it?”

“All I meant was—”

“And just when did the son of a bitch say it? On just such an occasion as this?”

“At a lecture,” says Moira quickly. “Anyhow”—she levels her eyes with mine—“what makes you so different?”

“Different? What do you mean? Do you mean that you — that he—? Don’t tell me.”

“I won’t. Because it’s not true.”

But I can’t hear her for my own groaning. Why am I so jealous? It’s not that, though. It’s just that I can’t understand how Moira can hold herself so cheaply. Why doesn’t she attach the same infinite values to her favors that I do? With her I feel like a man watching a child run around with a forty-carat diamond. Her casualness with herself makes me sweat.

“It’s just that—” I begin when the knock comes at the door.

For a long moment Moira and I search each other’s eyes as if the knock came from there.

“The Bantus,” whispers Moira.

“No,” I say, but get up in some panic and disarray. Getting killed is not so bad. What is to be feared is getting killed in a bathtub like Marat.

Moira breaks for the bathroom. I finish off my toddy and brush my hair.

Comes the knock again, light knuckles on the hollow door. Somehow I know who it is the second my hand touches the doorknob.

It is Ellen, of course, in uniform, with the wind up, color high in her cheeks, head reared a little so that the curve of her cheek narrows her eyes, which are icy-Lake-Geneva blue. It is hotter than ever, but a purple thunderhead towers behind her. Her uniform is crisp. The only sign of the heat is the sparkle of perspiration in the dark down of her lip.

“Come in come in come in.”

She’s all business and a-bustle, starch whistling as if she were paying a house call. When she sets down her bag, I notice her hands are trembling.

“What’s the matter?”

“Somebody shot at me,” she says, leafing nervously through the Gideon, unseeing.

“Where?”

“Coming past the church.”

“Maybe it was firecrackers.”

She slams the Bible shut “Why didn’t you answer the Anser-Phone?”

“I guess I turned it off.”

Ellen, still blinded by the sunlight, gazes uncertainly at the dim fogbanks rolling around the room. I guide her to the foot of the bed. I sit on the opposite bed.

“Chief, I think you better come back to the office.”

“Why?”

“Dr. Immelman found the box of lapsometers.”

“I know.”

“You know? How?”

“Moira told me she saw him.”

“Oh. Chief, he’s been handing them out to people.”

“What sort of people?”

“Some very strange people.”

“Yes, hm.” I am eyeing the dressing room nervously. Moira is stirring about but Ellen pays no attention.

“I heard him send one man to NASA, another to Boeing.”

“It sounds serious.”

“When the fight started, I left.”

“What fight?”

“Between Mr. Tennis and Mr. Ledbetter.”

“Is that Ted Tennis, Chico?” cries Moira, bursting out of the dressing room. “Oh hello there!” She smiles brilliantly at Ellen and strides about the room, hands thrust deep in the pockets of the blue linen long-shorts I bought for her. They fit. “These really fit, Chico,” she says, wheeling about.

Chico? Where did she get that? Then I remember. When we stayed in the small hotel with the wishing well in Merida, she called me Chico a couple of times.

“Yes. Ah, do you girls know each other?”

“Oh yes!”

“Yes indeed!”

Ellen then goes on talking to me as if Moira had not come in.

“And that’s not the worst, Chief.”

“It isn’t?”

Ellen and I are still sitting at the foot of separate beds. Moira stretches out behind me. Both girls are making me nervous.

“I heard him tell the same two men that five o’clock was the deadline.”

“Deadline?”

“I didn’t know what he meant either. When I asked him, he said that was the time when we’d know which way our great experiment would go. What did he mean by that?”

“I’m not sure.”

“He said you’d know. He said if worst came to worst, you had the means of protecting us and that you would know what he meant.”

“I see.”

“What do you suppose that means, Chico?” asks Moira, giving me a nudge in the back with her toe. I wish she wouldn’t do that. “Is that why we have to stay here?”

“Ahem, it may have something to do with that.”

“Give me a quarter.”

“O.K.,” I say absently.

Moira puts the quarter into the slot. The Slepe-Eze begins to vibrate under me. I jump up.

Ellen manages to ignore the vibrating bed.

“Chief, he said you would know what to look for at five o’clock.”

“Right,” I say eagerly. The prospect of a catastrophe is welcome. “Three things are possible: a guerrilla attack, a chain reaction, and a political disturbance at the speech-making.”

“Pshaw,” says Moira, gazing at the ceiling. “I don’t think anything is going to happen. Idle rumors.”

My eyes roll up. Never in her life has Moira said pshaw before — pronounced with a p. She read it somewhere.

“That was no rumor that took a shot at me,” says Ellen, looking at me blinkered as if I had said it. She hasn’t yet looked at Moira.

“I imagine not,” I say, frowning. I wish the mattress would stop vibrating. I find myself headed for the door. “I better take a look around. I’ll bring y’all a Dr. Pepper.”

“Wait, Chico.” Moira takes my hand. “I’ll go with you. Don’t forget you promised me a tour of the ruins, the ice-cream parlor, the convention room where all the salesmen used to glad-hand each other.” She swings around. “It’s been nice seeing you again, Miss Ah—”

“I’ll be running on,” says Ellen, reaching the door ahead of us.

“No, Ellen.” I take her arm. “I’m afraid you can’t leave.”

“Why not?”

“I want to make sure the coast is clear.”

“Very well, Chief.”

To my surprise, Ellen shrugs and perches herself — on the still-humming bed!

“You want to come with us?”

“No no. You kids run along. I’ll hold the fort. I see you have food. I’ll fix some sandwiches while you’re gone.”

“Let me show you where everything is, honey,” says Moira. The two huddle over the picnic basket.

Oh, they’re grand girls, though. Whew. What a relief to see them get along! There’s no sight more reassuring than two women working over food. Women needn’t be catty! Perhaps we three could be happy here.

“We’ll be back, Ellen!” cries Moira, yanking me after her. “If things get slow, there’s always the Gideon.”

Now why did she have to say that?

“You mean you didn’t bring your manual from Love?” laughs Ellen, waving us on our way.

“Ha ha, very good, girls,” I say, laughing immoderately. They are great girls, though. Whew. A relief nevertheless to close the door between the two of them and be on our way.

Moira was never more loving or lovable. By turns playful, affectionate, mournful, prattling, hushed, she darts ahead like a honeybee tasting the modest delights of this modest ruin.

“Do you think there’s any danger, Chico?” she calls back.

“I doubt if there’s anyone around.”

“What about Ellen’s sniper?”

“Well—”

“She spooks easy, huh?”

“No. On the contrary.”

“Do you like her?”

“She’s a fine nurse.”

“But do you like her?”

“Like?”

“Or as you say, fancy.”

“No. I fancy you.”

We’re behind the registration desk reading the names of long-departed guests, not salesmen, I notice, but families, mom and pop and the kids bound for the Gulf Coast or the Smokies or Seven Flags.

Now we’re under the moldering Rotary banner in the dark banquet room arm in arm and as silent as we were last summer at Ghost Town, U.S.A. Moira reads the banner.

Is it the Truth?

Is it fair to all concerned?

I squeeze her pliant belted rough-linened waist. The linen reminds me of Doris. Was that why I got it?

“Let’s stay here a while.” I draw her behind the banner. What an odd thing to be forty-five and in love and with exactly the same pang of longing in the heart as at age sixteen.

Moira laughs. “Let’s go get a Dr. Pepper.”

In the arcade, dim and cool as a catacomb, she skips along the bank of vending machines pulling Baby Ruth levers. Pausing in her ballet, she stoops and mock-drinks at a rusted-out watercooler.

I stoop over her, covering her, wondering why God gave man such an ache in his heart.

“You’re a lovely girl,” I say.

CoooooorangEEEEEEEE. The cinderblock at my ear explodes and goes singing off down the arcade. It seems I am blinking and looking at the gouge in the block and feeling my cheek, which has been stung by twenty mosquitoes.

CooooooRUNK. The block doesn’t sing. But I notice that a hole has appeared in the lip of the basin where the metal is bent double in a flange. I fall down on Moira, jamming her into the space between the cooler and ice machine.

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

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

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

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

The third shot does not come.

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

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

“Now!”

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

“Now!”

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

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

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

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

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

“Bolt the door, Ellen.”

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

Turn off the air-conditioner.

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

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

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

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

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

Does the curtain move?

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

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

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

I think of something.

“Where is your car parked, Ellen?”

“Beyond the restaurant.”

“Next to the fence?”

“Yes.”

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

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

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

“Not me,” says Moira.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Someone should follow me.

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

Here he comes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alistair: half-lying in the rattan settee, tawny-skinned, tawny-eyes, mandala-and-chain half-hidden in his Cozumel homespuns, his silver and turquoise bracelet (the real article with links as heavy and greasy as engine gears) slid down his wrist onto his gold hand, which he knows how to flex as gracefully as Michelangelo’s Adam touching God’s hand.

Mar-tyn: a wizened Liverpool youth, not quite clean, whose low furrowed brow went up in a great shock of dry wiry hair; Mar-tyn, who gave himself leave not to speak because it was understood he was “with” Alistair; who mystified Doris with his unattractiveness and who when I gave him his gin fizz in a heavy Abercrombie field-and-stream glass, always shot me the same ironic look: “Thanks, mite.”

Doris happy though, despite Mar-tyn. Here in her airy gazebo in the treetops it seemed to her that things had fallen out right at last. This surely was the way life was lived: Alistair sharing with her the English hankering for the Orient and speaking in the authentic mother tongue of reverence for life and of the need of making homely things with one’s own hands; of a true community life stripped of its technological dross, of simple meetings and greetings, spiritual communions, the touch of a hand, etcetera etcetera.

“We’re afraid of touching each other in our modern culture,” said Alistair, extending his golden Adam’s hand and touching me.

“You’re damn right we are,” I said, shrinking away.

He would discuss his coming lecture with Doris, asking her advice about the best means of penetrating the “suburban armor of indifference.”

Doris listened and advised breathlessly. To her the very air of the summerhouse seemed freighted with meanings. Possibilities floated like motes in the golden light. Breathlessly she sat and mostly listened, long-limbed and lovely in her green linen, while Alistair quoted the sutras. English poets she had memorized at Winchester High School sounded as fresh as the new green growth of the vines.

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers,

said Alistair, swishing his gin fizz.

“How true!” breathed Doris.

“Holiness is wholeness,” said Alistair, holding in his cupped hand a hooded warbler who had knocked himself out against the screen.

“That is so true!” said Doris.

Not that I wasn’t included, even after Alistair found out that it was Doris, not I, who had the money. Alistair was good-natured and wanted to be friends. Under any other circumstances we might have been: he was a rogue but a likable one. Mar-tyn was a Liverpool guttersnipe, but Alistair was a likable rogue. We got along well enough. Sunday mornings he’d give his lecture at the Unity church on reverence for life or mind-force, and Samantha and I’d go to mass and we’d meet afterwards in the summerhouse.

They were a pair of rascals. What a surprise. No one ever expects the English to be rascals (compare Greeks, Turks, Lebanese, Chinese). No, the English, who have no use for God, are the most decent people on earth. Why? Because they got rid of God. They got rid of God two hundred years ago and became extraordinarily decent to prove they didn’t need him. Compare Merrie England of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A nation of rowdies.

“I greatly admire the Catholic mass,” Alistair would say.

“Good.”

“I accept the validity of all religions.”

“I don’t.”

“Pity.”

“Yes.”

“I say, T?m.”

“Yes?”

“We could be of incalculable service to each other, you know.”

“How’s that?”

“You could help our work on mind-force with your scientific expertise in psychiatry. We’re on the same side in the struggle against materialism. Together we could help break the laws of materialism that straitjacket modern science.”

“I believe in such laws.”

“We could oppose the cult of objectivity that science breeds.”

“I favor such objectivity.”

“I have unending admiration for your Church.”

“I wish I could say the same for yours.”

“You know, Origen, one of the greatest doctors of your Church, was one of us. He believed in reincarnation, you know.”

“As I recall, we kicked his ass out.”

“Yes. And the poor man was so burdened with guilt, he cut off his own member.”

“I might do the same for you.”

“You’re a rum one, T?m.”

Mar-tyn laughed his one and only laugh: “Arr arr arr. Cut off ’is ruddy whacker, did he?”

Doris would have none of this, either Catholic vulgarity or Liverpool vulgarity, and she and Alistair would get back on reverence for life while I grilled rib-eye steaks on the hibachi, my specialty and Alistair’s favorite despite his reverence for steers.

What happened was not even his fault. What happened was that Samantha died and I started drinking and stayed drunk for a year — and not even for sorrow’s sake. Samantha’s death was as good an excuse as any to drink. I could have been just as sorry without drinking. What happened was that Doris and I chose not to forgive each other. It was as casual a decision as my drinking. Alistair happened to come along at the right time.

Poor fellow, he didn’t even get the money he wanted. He got Doris, whom he didn’t want. Doris died. God knows what Doris wanted. A delicate sort of Deep-South Oriental life lived with Anglican style. Instead, she died.

Alistair was right, as it turned out, to disapprove my religious intolerance. I, as defender of the faith, was as big a phony as he and less attractive. Perhaps I’d have done worse than follow Origen’s example, poor chap.

Feeling somewhat faint from hunger, I return to my apartment in the old wing and fix myself a duck-egg flip with Worcestershire and vodka. Check the phone. Dead. Call into Ellen on the Anser-Phone. The line is already plugged in. The Anser-Phone operator got frightened about something, Ellen said, and left. But all quiet at the motel. She and Moira are playing gin rummy.

Two lovely girls they are, as different as can be, one Christian, one heathen, one virtuous, one not, but each lovely in her own way. And some Bantu devil is trying to take them from me. He must be dealt with.

Back in the hunt room, I take the 30.06 from the cabinet. It is still greased and loaded. I pocket an extra clip. Get 38’s for the revolver!

Take the Toyota onto the links, use cart paths next to the woods, cross the fairway to my mother’s back yard, run under her mountainous Formosa azaleas and out of sight.

The back door is unlocked. All seems normal hereabouts. Eukie, Mother’s little servant, is sitting in the kitchen polishing silver and watching Art Linkletter III interview some school children from Glendale.

“Eukie, where is Mrs. More?”

“She up in the bathroom.”

“What’s been going on around here?”

Eukie is a non-account sassy little black who is good for nothing but getting dressed up in his white coat and serving cocktails to Mother’s bridge ladies.

Check the phone. Dead.

For a fact Mother is in the bathroom, all dressed up, blue-white Hadassah hair curled, down on her hands and knees in her nylons, scrubbing the tile floor. Whenever things went wrong, I remember, a sale fallen through, my father down on his luck sunk in his chair watching daytime reruns of I Love Lucy, my mother would hike up her skirt and scrub the bathroom floor.

“What’s wrong, Mama?”

“Look at that workmanship!” She points the scrub brush to a crack between tile and tub. “No wonder I’ve got roaches. Hand me that caulk!”

“Mother, I want to talk to you.” I pull her up, I sit on the rim of the tub. She closes the lid and sits on the john. “Now. What’s going on around here?”

“Humbug, that’s what’s going on.”

“Has anybody bothered you?”

“Who’s going to bother me?”

“Then why are you scrubbing the bathroom floor in your best clothes?”

“My car won’t start and I can’t call a taxi. My phone’s dead.”

“Is that all?”

“What else?” She is sitting straight up, smoothing her waist down into her hip, wagging her splendid calf against her knee.

“I mean, have you noticed anything unusual?”

“People running around like chickens with their heads cut off. You’d think a hurricane was on the way.”

“What people?”

“The Bococks down the street. He and the children threw their clothes in the boat and drove away.”

“Boat? Oh, you mean on the trailer. Is that all?”

“What else? Then this trash backs up a truck to the Bocock house.”

“Trash? What trash?”

“White trash. Black trash. Black men in yellow robes and guns.”

“You mean they moved in?”

“Don’t ask me!”

“Or did they take things and leave?”

“I didn’t notice.”

I sit on the tub thinking. Mother dips brush into Clorox.

“Mother, you’re leaving.”

“Leave! Why should I leave?”

“I’m afraid you’re in some danger here.”

“There’s not a soul in the neighborhood. Anyhow Euclid is here.”

“Eukie ain’t worth a damn.”

“I can’t leave. My car won’t start.” I see she’s frightened and wants to leave.

“Take my car. Or rather Ellen’s. Take Eukie with you and go to Aunt Minnie’s in town and stay there till you hear from me. Go the back way by my house.”

“All right,” says Mother distractedly, looking at her wrinkled Cloroxed fingertips. “But first I have to pass by the Paradise office and pass an act of sale.”

“Act of sale! What are you talking about?”

“Then I’m coming back and stay with Lola. Lola’s not leaving.”

Dusty Rhoades, Mother tells me, had come by earlier, argued with the two women, had an emergency call, and left.

“You mean Lola’s over there now?”

“She won’t leave! She’s a lovely girl, Tommy.”

“I know.”

“And she comes from lovely people.”

“She does?”

“She’s the girl for you. She’s a Taurus.”

“I know.”

“Ellen is not for you.”

“Ellen! Who said anything about Ellen? Last time you were worried about Moira.”

“She doesn’t come from the aristocratic Oglethorpes. I inquired. Her father was a mailman.”

“My God, Mother, what are you talking about? There were no aristocratic Oglethorpes. Please go get your things.”

My mother, who sets no store at all by our connection with Sir Thomas More, speaks often of her ancestor Sieur de Marigny, who was a rascal but also, she says, an aristocrat.

I give Eukie my father’s twelve-gauge pump gun loaded with a single twenty-five-year-old shell.

“Eukie, you ride shotgun.”

“Yes suh!” Eukie is delighted with the game.

“If anybody tries to stop Miss Marva, shoot them.”

Eukie looks at me. “Shoot them? Who I’m going to shoot?”

“I don’t know.” Euclid is sitting opposite Mother, holding the shotgun over his shoulder like a soldier. “Never mind.”

Off they go in the Toyota, facing each other across the tiller.

Lola, in jeans and gingham shirt, is hoeing her garden at Tara, A straight chair at the end of a row holds a.45 automatic and a cedar bucket of ice water with a dipper. Her shirttails are tied around in front leaving her waist bare. The deep channel of her spine glistens.

I lean my carbine against the chair.

“What are you planting?”

“Mustard.” Lola jumps up and gives me a big hug. “You’re so smart!”

“Smart?”

“Yesterday. I didn’t know you were a genius.”

“Genius?”

“In The Pit. Lola’s so proud of you.” She gives me another hug.

“Do you think you ought to be here by yourself? Where’s Dusty?”

“Nobody’s going to mess with Lola.”

“I see.” I fall silent.

“Did you come to see me?”

“Yes.”

“Well? State your business.”

“Yes. Well, I don’t think you ought to stay here.” It’s where she should stay that gives me pause. Lola sees this.

“And just where do you propose that I go?”

“Into town.”

She commences hoeing again. “Nobody’s running Lola off her own place. Besides, I doubt there is any danger. All I’ve seen are a few witch doctors and a couple of drug-heads.”

“There was another atrocity last night.”

“Nellie Bledsoe? I think P.T. got drunk and let her have it with the shish kebab.”

“I’ve been shot at twice in the last hour.”

“Tommy!” cries Lola, dropping the hoe. She takes my hand in her warm, cello-callused fingers. “Are you hurt?” she asks, feeling me all over for holes.

“No. He missed me.”

“Who in the world—?”

“I don’t know. I think it’s a Bantu.”

Lola slaps her thigh angrily. Eyes blazing, she places her fists on her hips, arms akimbo. She nods grimly. “That does it.”

“Does what?”

“You stay here with Lola.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“I have, ah, other responsibilities.” Such as two girls in a motel room, but I can’t tell her that.

“Such as?”

“My mother.”

“Very well.” She waits, searching my eyes. She’s waiting for me to ask her to stay with me. When I don’t, she shrugs and picks up the hoe. “Don’t worry about Lola. Lola can take care of herself.”

“Why don’t you leave?”

“I can’t leave my babies.” She nods toward the stables.

“You mean the horses? Turn them loose. They’ll be all right.”

“Besides that, I’ve just laid in one thousand New Hampshire chicks.”

“Chickens, mustard greens. What are you planning for?”

“I think we’re in for a long winter and I’m planning to stick it out here.”

“Why do you say that?”

She shrugs and mentions the possibility of civil disturbances between Knothead and Leftpapas, between black and white, etcetera. “So I think the safest place in the world is right here at Tara minding my own business.”

I nod and tell her about my fears for the immediate future, about the mishap that befell my lapsometers and the consequent dangers of a real disaster.

Lola listens intently. It is beginning to drizzle. Suddenly taking my hand in hers, warm as a horn, and picking up her gun, she leads me impulsively to the great gallery of the house, where we sit in a wooden swing hung by chains from the ceiling.

“Tommy,” she says excitedly, “isn’t it great here? Look at the rain.”

“Yes.”

“Dusty’s leaving. Let’s me and you stay here and see it through, whatever it is.”

“I’d certainly like to.”

“You know what I truly believe?”

“What?”

“When all is said and done, the only thing we can be sure of is the land. The land never lets you down.”

“That’s true,” I say, though I never did know what that meant. We look out at six acres of Saint Augustine grass through the silver rain.

The great plastered columns, artificially flaked to show patches of brickwork, remind me of Vince Marsaglia, boss of the rackets. He built Tara from what he called the “original plans,” meaning the drawing of David O. Selznick’s set designer, whose son Vince had known in Las Vegas. Once, shortly after I began to practice medicine, I was called to Tara to treat Vince for carbuncles. Feeling much better after the lancings, he and his boys sat right here on the gallery shying playing cards into a hat from at least thirty feet, which they did with extraordinary skill. I watched with unconcealed admiration, having tried unsuccessfully to perfect the same technique during four years of fraternity life. I also admired the thoroughbreds grazing in the meadow.

“You like that horse, Doc? Take him,” said Vince with uncomplicated generosity.

Now the swing moves to and fro and in an almost flat arc on its long chains. We sit holding hands and watch the curtains of silvery rain. Lola smells of the fresh earth under her fingernails and of the faint ether-like vapors of woman’s sweat.

Her cello calluses whisper in my hand. At the end of each arc I can feel her strong back thrust against the slats of the swing.

“Now here’s what we’re going to do, Tom Tom,” says Lola, ducking her head to make the swing go. “Lola’s going to fix you a big drink. Then you’re going to sit right there and Lola will play for you.”

“For how long?”

“Until the trouble is over.”

“That might take weeks — if it’s over then.”

“O.K. Lola will do for you. We’ll work in the garden, and in the evenings we’ll sit here and drink and play music and watch the mad world go by. How does that sound?”

“Fine,” I say, pleased despite myself at the prospect of spending the evenings so, sipping toddies here in the swing while Lola plays Dvořák, clasping the cello between her noble knees.

“Tom Tom singing to Lola?” she asks and I become aware I am humming “Là ci darem” from Don Giovanni. My musical-erotic area, Brodmann 11, is still singing like a bird.

I pick up the 30.06. “There’s something I have to take care of first.”

Lola shoves her.45 into her jeans, “Lola will go with you.”

“No, Lola won’t.”

“I can shoot.”

Before I know what has happened, she takes out the.45 and, aiming like a man, arm extended laterally, shoots a green lizard off the column. I nearly jump out of the swing. In the bare gallery the shot is like a crack of lightning in a small valley. Thunder roars back and forth. Brick dust settles.

My ears are ringing when I stand up to leave.

“Darling Tom Tom,” whispers Lola, putting away the gun and giving me a hug, eye to eye, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip. “Come back to Tara. Lola will be waiting. Come back and put down roots with Lola.”

“All right. Now listen. If anything happens — if there is an invasion by the Bantus or if you see a peculiar yellow cloud — I want you to do exactly what I tell you.”

“Tell Lola!”

“Come to the old plaza. To Howard Johnson’s. I’ll be there. You understand?”

“O.K.,” says Lola, hugging me and giving me some hard pats on the hip. “But don’t be surprised if you see Lola sooner than you think.” She winks.

I frown. “Don’t you follow me, Lola. I forbid it, goddamn it.”

“Tom Tom act masterful with Lola? Lola like that Howard Johnson’s. Wow.” She hands me my carbine. “Come back to Tara!”

Colonel Ringo’s distinguished head is outlined in the window of the guardhouse at the gates of Paradise. A reassuring sight. Hm, things cannot be too bad. The Colonel’s armored Datsun is parked behind the guardhouse.

“Halt! Who goes there!” yells the Colonel from a crouch in the doorway, his revolver pointed at me.

“It’s me, Colonel!” I hold the carbine over my head.

“What’s the password? Oh, it’s you, Dr. More.” The Colonel holsters his revolver and yanks me inside. “You’re in the line of fire.”

“What is the password?”

“Lurline, but get on in here, boy.”

“What’s up, Colonel?”

Now that I take a second look, I perceive that all is not well with him. His silvery eyebrows are awry and one eye, which has been subject for years to a lateral squint, has turned out ninety degrees. His scarlet and cream uniform is streaked with sweat.

“Rounds have been coming in for the past thirty minutes.” He nods toward the shattered glass of the far window.

“Rounds? From where, Colonel?”

“From the pro shop as best as I can determine,” he says, scanning the distant clubhouse through a pair of binoculars.

“Did you notice a golf cart pass here a while ago?”

“No, but I’ve only been here half an hour. That’s why I’m here, though.”

“Why?”

“To mount a rearguard action until they could get the golf carts and swim trophies out. I’m also worried about the molasses cakes and soybean meal in the barn yonder.” He looks at his watch. “The patrol is supposed to pick me up in fifteen minutes. You better get out too.”

“Colonel, what’s going on?”

“Son, the Bantu boogers have occupied Paradise Country Club.”

“But, Colonel, I haven’t seen any Bantus.”

“Then who in hell is shooting at me, the tennis committee?” The Colonel slumps against the wall. “What’s more, they got Rudy and Al.”

Noticing that the Colonel’s hands are shaking, I offer him a drink from my flask.

“I thank you, son,” says the Colonel gratefully. “Reach me a Seven-Up behind you. They cut the wires but the box is still cold.”

The Colonel knocks back a fair portion of my pint, chases it with Seven-Up, sighs. Presently he takes my arm, cheek gone dusky with emotion. One eye drifts out.

“Doc, what is the one thing you treasure above all else?”

“Well—” I begin, taking time off to fix my own drink.

“I’ll tell you what I cherish, Doc.”

“All right,” I say, taking a drink and feeling the good hot bosky bite of the bourbon.

“The Southern womanhood right here in Paradise! Right?”

“Yes,” I reply, even though 90 percent of the women in Paradise are from the Midwest.

“And I’ll tell you something else!”

“All right.”

“We may be talking about two gentlemen who may have laid down their lives for just that.”

“Who’s that?”

“Rudy and Al!”

“What happened to them?”

“Damnedest thing you ever saw,” says the Colonel, settling down in his canvas chair and putting his good eye to a crack that commands a view of the clubhouse.

I look at my watch impatiently and then study the shattered window. Could a bullet have done it? Perhaps, but the Colonel is a bit nutty today. Taking no chances, I sit in the doorway and keep the heavy jamb between me and the clubhouse, even though the latter is a good four hundred yards distant.

The Colonel takes another drink. “I’ve never seen anything like it son, since I was with the Alabama National Guard in Ecuador.” The Colonel is from Montgomery.

As best I can piece out the Colonel’s rambling, almost incoherent account, the following events took place earlier this morning. There is no reason to doubt their accuracy. For one thing, I witnessed the beginning of the incident on the golf links this morning.

The Colonel was in charge of the security and the transportation of the corps of Christian Kaydettes to Oxford, Mississippi, for the national baton-twirling contest. The Kaydettes had put on an early show for the Pro-Am Bible breakfast, immediately thereafter embarking for Mississippi in two school buses, the first transporting the girls, the second their moms, a formidable crew of ladies who had already fallen out with each other over the merits of their daughters and had boarded the bus carrying their heavy purses in silence. (It was this boarding that I had witnessed earlier in the day.) Firecrackers (not rifles, as I had thought) had been discharged. Banners on the buses read BEAT DAYTON, Dayton, Ohio, being the incumbent champs. Colonel Ringo rode point in his armored Datsun followed by the bus carrying the Kaydettes, followed by Rudy on his Farhad Grotto motorcycle, followed by the busload of moms, each a graduate of the Paradise karate school. The rear was brought up by Al Pulaski, formerly of the Washington, D.C, police and now president of PASHA (Paradise Anglo-Saxon Heritage Association), in his police special, an armored van fitted out with a complete communications system.

Mindful of rumors, however preposterous, of a conspiracy to kidnap the entire Kaydette corps and spirit them off to the fastness of Honey Island Swamp, Colonel Ringo was careful in plotting his route to the Mississippi state line, where the little convoy was to be turned over to the Mississippi Highway Police. Ruling out the interstate as the obvious site of ambush, he selected old state highway 22. All went well until they reached the wooden bridge crossing a finger of Honey Island Swamp formed by Bootlegger Bayou. The Colonel, riding point, felt a premonition (“I learned to smell an ambush in Ecuador,” he told me). Approaching the bridge, however, he saw nothing amiss. It was not until he was halfway across and coming abreast of the draw that he saw what was wrong, saw two things simultaneously and it was hard to say which was worse: one, the cubicle of the drawbridge was occupied by a bridge-tender in an orange robe — Bantu! — two, the draw was beginning to lift. In the space of two seconds he did three things, hit the accelerator, hit the siren to warn the buses, and began to fire his turret gun (“You got to shoot by reflex, son, and I can fire that turret gun like shooting from the hip”).

He made the draw, felt the slight jolt as he dropped an inch or so, shot up the cubicle with the turret gun and, he felt sure, got the Bantu. The girls made it too, though they were badly shaken up by the two-foot drop.

“I got ever last one of those girls to Mississippi, son,” says the Colonel, taking another drink. I watch my flask worriedly. “You talk about some scared girls — did you ever see a school bus make eighty miles an hour on a winding road? But we made it.”

“But, Colonel, what happened to the others?”

The Colonel clucks and tilts his head. “That’s the only bad part.”

Once across the bridge, he didn’t have much time to look back. But he saw enough. The Bantu bridge-tender was out of commission, dead or winged, but the draw went on lifting. Rudy, on his Farhad Grotto Harley-Davidson, saw he couldn’t make the draw and tried to stop short, braking and turning. The Colonel’s last sight of him (“a sight engraved on my memory till my dying day”) was of the orange and green bike flying through the air, Rudy still astride, and plummeting into the alligator-infested waters of Bootlegger Bayou.

The moms? The second bus stopped short of the draw, Al Pulaski in his van behind them.

“You mean the Bantus have captured the mothers?” I ask.

The Colonel looks grave. “All we can do is hope.” On the plus side, the Colonel went on to say, were two factors. Al was there with his van. And the mothers themselves, besides carrying in their heavy purses the usual pistols, Mace guns, and alarms, were mostly graduates of karate and holders of the Green Belt.

“Many a Bantu will bite the dust before they take those gals,” says the Colonel darkly.

“Well, I mean, were there any Bantus attacking? Did you see any? Maybe the bus had time to turn around and get back.”

“I didn’t see any, but we must assume the worst.”

We sit drinking in companionable silence, reflecting upon the extraordinary events of the day.

Presently the Colonel leans close and gives me a poke in the ribs. “I’ll tell you the damn truth, son.”

“What’s that, Colonel?”

“I wouldn’t take on those ladies in a month of Sundays. Whoo-ee,” says the Colonel and knocks back another inch of my Early Times. He laughs.

“Ha ha, neither would I, Colonel,” I say, laughing. “I feel sure they will be all right.”

Suddenly the Colonel catches sight of something through the crack. He leaps up, staggering to the doorway.

“Stop thief!” he cries hoarsely.

“What’s wrong, Colonel?”

“They’re back, the little boogers!” he cries scarlet-faced, lunging about and picking up helmet and revolver and riding crop. “I’ll fix the burrheads!”

“Wait, Colonel! The sniper!”

But he’s already past me. Looking out the window, I catch sight of a dozen or so picaninnies and a few bigger boys running from the stables with armfuls of molasses cakes. One big boy totes a sack of feed. It’s too late to stop the Colonel. He’s after them, lumbering up a bunker. With his steel helmet and revolver, he looks like a big-assed General Patton. The culprits, catching sight of the furious red-faced Colonel thundering down on them, drop their ill-gotten goods and flee for the woods — all but one, the boy with the feed sack. The Colonel collars him, gives him a few licks with the crop and, dragging him to the shack, hurls him past me into the corner. “You watch this one. I’m going after the others.”

“Wait, Colonel—!” I grab him. “You’ve forgotten the sniper.”

“No, by God! I have my orders and I’m carrying them out.”

“Orders? What orders?”

“To guard the molasses cakes and soybean meal.”

“Yes, but, Colonel—”

He wrenches loose. “Here I come, you commonist Bantu burrheads!” cries the Colonel, charging the bunker and firing his revolver. “Alabama has your ass.” Up he goes and—“Oof!”—as quickly comes reeling back. He stumbles and sits down hard on the doorsill. At the same moment there comes a slamming concussion, a rifle shot, very loud, from the direction of the clubhouse. The youth shrinks into his corner.

Gazing down at the Colonel, I try to figure out what hit him. He looks all in one piece.

“What happened, Colonel?” I ask, pulling him out of the line of fire.

“They got me in the privates,” groans the Colonel. “What am I going to do?”

“Let me see.”

“What am I going to tell Pearline?” he asks, swaying to and fro.

“Who is Pearline?” I ask in a standard medical tone to distract him while I examine him, and from curiosity because his wife is named Georgene.

“Oh, Lordy.”

At last I succeed in stretching him out on the floor. There is a bloodstain on his cream-colored trousers. I borrow the youth’s pocketknife and cut out a codpiece.

The Colonel is a lucky man. The bullet pierced a fold of scrotum, passed between his legs and went its way. I take out a clean handkerchief.

“You’re O.K., Colonel. A scratch. Son, hand me a cold Seven-Up.”

“Yes suh, Doc.”

“Colonel, hold this bottle here and close your legs on it tight as you can. You’ll be right as rain.”

There is time now to examine the black youth, who has been very helpful, uttering sympathetic noises and an exclamation of amazement at the nature of the Colonel’s wound: “Unonunh!”

“Aren’t you Elzee Acree?”

“Yes suh!”

I recognize him now, a slender brindle-brown youth with a cast in his eye, the son of Ellilou Acree, a midwife and a worthy woman.

We make the Colonel as comfortable as possible, propping his head on his helmet He lies stretched out the length of the tiny hut, the king-size Seven-Up in place between his legs.

“Elzee, what in hell are you doing here?”

“Nothing, Doc!”

“Nothing! What do you mean, nothing?”

“I heard they needed help unloading the barn.”

“So you were unloading a few sacks to help them out?”

“That’s right Doc. I was stacking them under that tree so the truck could pick them up.”

“Never mind. Listen, Elzee. I want you to do something.” I give him five dollars. “You stay here and tend to the Colonel until the patrol picks him up.”

“I’ll be right here! Don’t you worry, Doc. But what I’m gon’ tell the patrol?”

“The patrol won’t bother you. The Colonel here will tell them you helped him, won’t you, Colonel?”

“Sho. I been knowing Elzee, he’s a good boy. Bring me a Seven-Up, Elzee.”

“Yes suh!”

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

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

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

“Like I told you!” cries the Colonel.

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

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

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

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

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

“You mean there’s more than one?”

“Bound to be.”

“Or is there just one?”

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

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

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

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

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

There must be a way of getting behind the sniper.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It takes ten minutes to reach the woods.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Slip along pecky cypress wall to hinged section of bar. Don’t lift, go under — damn! I trip and almost fall. Forgot the raised slatting on the floor to save the barman’s feet. Will the slatting creak? Yes. Try the nailed joints. No creak. The quality of the silence is different here. A more thronging, peopled silence — as thick as last Christmas Eve’s party. Perhaps it is the acoustic effect of the bottles.

The panel opening into the pro shop is closed. Take a full minute to unsling carbine and prop it against the cushioned edge of the bar. Wait and blink and get used to the light.

Listen.

The leather dice cup is in place, worn and darkened by sweat and palm oil. The bottles are visible now, the front row fitted with measuring spouts. Whitish tendrils of vine have sprouted through the simulated wormholes and twined around the necks of the bottles. I blink. Something is wrong. What? Then I see. What is wrong is that nothing is wrong. The bottles are intact and undrunk.

Someone clears his throat, so close that my breath catches. I open my throat and let my breath out carefully.

The sound comes from behind me, behind the panel.

Again the hawking: I breathe easier. It is a careless habituated sound, deep-throated and resonant with blown-out cheeks, the sound of a man who has been alone for some time.

A chair creaks. Something — its front legs? — hits the floor.

I listen — for a second man and to place the first. If you know a man, you can recognize his voice in his throat-clearings.

French windows, I remember, open from the pro shop onto a putting green. Beyond, the shell drive winds through the links and joins the main road. A hundred yards farther is the gate and the guardhouse.

How does the panel fit in its frame? Does it run on channel bearings? Test its hang by putting a finger into the finger recess. The panel sits, simply, in a wooden slot. Test lateral motion: a faint grate. Lubricate it. With what? spit? No, Benedictine. The liqueur pours like 40-weight oil. Test again. The panel moves an eighth-inch with a slight mucous squeak.

More hawking and throat-clearing. I do not recognize the voice. Wait for a long hawk and slide the panel a quarter-inch. But the panel clears the frame by no more than a crack: a bright line of light but not wide enough to see anything.

Another hawk, another quarter-inch.

I can see him but it’s the wrong man: Gene Sarazen in plus fours and slanted forty-five degrees to the floor. To my nostrils comes the smell of spike-splintered pine floor and of sweated leather. The sunlight is bright. I can hear the open window.

The hawking again but now I can also hear the liquid sound of throat muscles swallowing — and even a light click of the uvula popping clear of the tongue.

Ahem.

I reflect: better get the carbine in position now rather than later. The problem now is balance and position, clearing shelf space for my elbows. I calculate he is sitting ten or fifteen feet to the left of my line of sight and that the panel must be opened two or three inches to take the carbine at this angle.

Open it then: with right hand, forefinger in recess, holding carbine stock in left elbow. Open it till I can see him. It takes five minutes.

There he is. Up he comes swimming into view like a diver from the ocean depths.

I don’t know him.

He sits at the window, back turned, but I see him at an angle. One cheek is visible, and the notch of one eye. His feet are propped on the low sill — it is not a French window, as I had remembered — the front legs of the director’s chair clear of the floor. The feet flex slightly, moving the chair. The rifle lays on the floor under his right hand. It is an M-32, the army’s long-barrel sniper rifle with scope. How did he miss me with that? He must be a poor shot.

He is dressed as an inyanga, a herbalist, in a monkhu6, a striped orange and gray tunic of coarse cotton. From his belt hangs an izinkhonkwani, a leather bag originally worn to carry herbs and green sticks but now no doubt filled with.380 mm shells. The foot propped on the sill wears a dirty low-quarter Ked, the kind pro ballplayers wear for scrimmage. His head, shaved, ducks slightly in time with the rocking. His right wrist, dangling above the rifle, wears a large gold watch with a metal expansion band.

I judge he was or is a pro. The lateral columns of neck muscles flare out in a pyramid from jaw to the deep girdle of his shoulders. The bare leg below the tunic is rawboned and sharp-shinned, as strong and stringy as an ostrich’s. The skin is, on his neck, carbon-black. It blots light. Light hitting it drains out, it is a hole. The skin at the heel of the loosely flexed hand shades from black to terra cotta to salmon in the palm.

The front sight of my carbine is on his occipital protuberance. The sweetish smell of the Benedictine fills my nostrils. I must shoot him. He will experience light, a blaze of color, and nothing else.

Then shoot him.

He tried to shoot you three times and he would shoot you now. Worse, he wants to take your woman, women.

Saint Thomas Aquinas on killing in self-defense: Q.21, Obj. 4, Part I, Sum. Theol. But did he say anything about shooting in the back?

My grandfather on sportsmanship (my grandfather: short on Saint Thomas, long on Zane Grey): Don’t ever shoot a quail on the ground or a duck on the water.

Then what do I do now for Christ’s sake, stomp my foot to flush him and shoot him on the fly?

Or in Stereo-V-Western style: Reach, stranger?

No. Just shoot him. The son of a bitch didn’t call you out.

Shoot him then.

Wound him?

No, kill him.

The trouble is my elbow is not comfortable.

Get it comfortable then.

Now.

Consider this though: would Richard Coeur de Lion have let Saladin have it in the back, heathen though he was?

The trouble is that my grandfather set more store by Sir Walter Scott than he did by Thomas More.

What would Thomas More have done? Undoubtedly he would have—

“Hold it, Doc.”

The voice, which is both conversational and tremulous, comes from close behind me.

“All right.”

“Just set the gun down real easy.”

“I will.”

“You wasn’t going to do it anyway, was you, Doc?”

“I don’t know.’

“You wasn’t. I been watching you. Now turn around.”

“All right.”

It is Victor Charles. He sighs and shakes his head. “Doc, you shouldn’t ought to of done this.”

“Well, I didn’t.”

Victor stands against one flap of the saloon doors, single-barrel shotgun held in one hand like a pistol. The weak light from the hall gleams on his white ducks and white interne shoes.

The gun was aimed at my middle but now strays off. Victor, I know, will shoot me if he has to. But I perceive that an old etiquette requires that he not point his gun at me.

“Doc Doc Doc. You sho done gone and done it this time?”

“Yes.”

“Doc, how come you didn’t do like I told you and move in with your mama and tend to your business?”

“You didn’t tell me why.”

“How come you had to come over here?”

“That fellow in there has been trying to kill me.”

“O.K., Doc. Now let’s us just move on out of here and up in the front.”

It is odd: the main emotion between us is embarrassment. Each is embarrassed for the other. We cannot quite look at each other.

As he waits for me to get in front Victor picks up the carbine and shoves it under the slatting!

We walk around to the pro shop. At the door I hesitate, wondering if the inyanga will shoot me. Victor fathoms this and calls out: “It’s all right, Uru. It’s just me and Doc.”

Uru has swung his chair around to face us. His rifle is still on the floor, his hands clasped behind his head. I notice with surprise that he is very youthful. His pleasant broad face has a sullen expression. A keloid, or welted scar, runs off one eyebrow, pulling the eyebrow down and giving him a Chinese look.

“Well well well. The hunted walks in on the hunter.”

“Then I was the hunted.” I look at him curiously, shifting my head a bit to get a fix on him. What sort of fellow is he?

“Where did you find him, Victor?”

“He was in there.” Victor nods toward the panel. “Fixing hisself a drink. Can’t you smell it?”

I take some hope in Victor not mentioning my carbine and in Uru not picking his up. Perhaps they are not going to shoot me.

“What were you doing in there, Doctor?” asks Uru, straining his clasped hands against his head.

“Doc was picking up a couple of bottles,” says Victor, shaking his head. “Doc he like his little toddy.”

“I didn’t ask you. I asked him.”

Uru diphthongs his I’s broadly and curls his tongue in his R’s. I judge he is from Michigan. He sprawls in his chair exactly like a black athlete at Michigan State sprawling in the classroom and shooting insolent glances at his English instructor.

“So Chuck here was going to have himself a party,” says Uru lazily. He turns to me. “Chuck, your party days are over.”

“Is that right?”

“All right, Victor. You found him. You take care of him.”

“D-D-Doc’s all right!” cries Victor. Victor’s stammering worries me more than Uru’s malevolence. “When Doc give you his word, he keep it. Doc, tell Uru you leaving and not coming back.”

“Leaving your house?” Uru asks.

“As a matter of act, I have left. Moved out.”

“So we’re taking Doc’s word now,” says Uru broadly, imitating Victor. He frowns. The chair legs hit the floor. “Victor, who are you taking orders from?”

“You, but I’m going to tell you about Doc here,” says Victor, rushing his speech, a frightening thing. He is afraid for me. “Doc here the onliest one come to your house when you’re sick. He set up all night with my auntee.”

Uru is smiling broadly — a very pleasant face, really. “So Chuck here set up all night with your auntee.” He rolls his eyes up, past Gene Sarazen, to the ceiling. “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

“Do you mind if I ask you something?” I ask Uru.

“Make it quick, Chuck.”

“Just what is it you all have in mind to do around here?”

“Doc,” says Victor, sorrowful again. “You know we can’t tell you that.”

“Why can’t we tell him? Chuck’s not going to tell anybody, are you, Chuck?”

“Are you all taking over Paradise Estates?”

“No, we all not,” says Uru, like any other Yankee.

“Not in the beginning, Doc,” says Victor patiently. “All we wanted was the ridge houses since they were empty anyhow, all but yours and you wouldn’t leave. We had to have your house.”

“Why?”

“The TV tower, Doc.”

“What?” I screw up an eye.

“We had to have the transmitter, Chuck,” says Uru almost patiently.

“And there you setting under it, Doc.” The pity of it comes over Victor. “How come you didn’t move in with Miss Marva?”

“Then the shootings were to frighten me away?”

Uru looks at Victor.

“What about the kidnappings?” I ask.

Victor shrugs. “That was just insurance. We just going to keep the little ladies out in Honey Island till y’all sign the papers with us. Ain’t nobody going to harm those little ladies, Doc! In fact, my other auntee out there looking after them right now. She raised half of them, like Miss Ruthie and Miss Ella Stone.”

“I don’t know,” says Uru to Gene Sarazen. “I just don’t know. They told me about coming down here.” He shakes himself and looks at me with an effort. “Victor is right, Chuck. That’s all we wanted in the beginning. But now it looks like all the chucks and dudes have moved out. So: we can use the houses.”

“It won’t work. How long do you think you can hold the place?”

“Just as long as you value your womenfolk.”

I am wondering: does he mean the moms and does he know the Kaydettes were not taken?

The chair legs hit the floor again. Uru looks straight at me.

“I’m going to tell you exactly how it is, Doctor. You chucks had your turn and you didn’t do right. You did bad, Doc, and now you’re through. It’s our turn now and we are going to show you. As Victor says, we sho going to move your ass out.”

“I didn’t say no such of a thing,” says Victor. “I don’t talk nasty.”

“It won’t work,” I say.

“Doc, you don’t know who all we got out there,” says Victor. “And we holding enough folks so nobody’s going to give us any trouble.”

“That’s not what he means,” says Uru grimly. “Is it, Doctor?”

I am silent.

“What he means, Victor, is that even if we win, it won’t work. Isn’t that right, Doctor?” Uru has a light in his eye.

I keep silent.

“He means we don’t have what it takes, Victor. Oh, he likes you and your auntee. You’re good and faithful and he’ll he’p you. Right Doctor? You don’t really think we got what it takes, do you?” Uru taps his temple.

“I don’t know.”

“Come on, Doctor, tell us the truth.”

“Doc always tell the truth!”

“Shut up, Victor. Doctor?”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Do you always tell the truth?”

“Yes.”

“Then tell it now.”

“All right.”

“You don’t really think we’re any good, do you?”

“How do you mean, good?”

“I’m talking about greatness, Doctor. Or what you call greatness. I’m talking about the Fifth Symphony, the Principia Mathematica, the Uranus guidance system. You know very well what I’m talking about.”

“Yes.”

“Well?”

“Well, you—”

“And don’t tell me about music and rhythm and all.”

“All right.” I fall silent.

“Let me put it this way, Doctor. You know what we’re going to do. We’re going to build a new society right here. Right? Only you don’t think we can do it do you?”

I shrug.

“What does that mean?”

“Well — you haven’t.”

“Haven’t what, Doctor?”

“You haven’t done very well so far.”

“Go on. Let’s hear what you mean.”

“I think you know what I mean.”

“You’re not talking to Victor now. You’re talking to a Ph.D. in political science. Only I didn’t choose to be a black-ass pipe-smoking professor.”

“Didn’t you used to play split-end for Detroit?”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“Aren’t you Elijah Washington?”

“We have no Jew-Christian names, least of all Washington. I’m Uru. You didn’t answer my question.”

“What question?”

“About us not doing very well.”

“You’ve had Liberia a long time.”

“So?”

“Look at Liberia. You’ve had Haiti even longer.”

“So?”

“Look at Haiti.”

“You know something, Chuck. You got a smart mouth. We’re liable to do to you what you did to the Indians.”

“Do you mind if I have a drink?”

“We don’t use it.”

“I’ll fix you a drink, Doc,” says Victor.

“No, you won’t,” says Uru, showing anger for the first time. “You’re not his goddamn houseboy.”

“You know, my name’s Washington too,” Victor tells Uru. “After George Washington Carver.”

“Jesus Christ,” says Uru to Gene Sarazen.

“Blessed be Jesus,” says Victor.

“Look what you done to him,” Uru says to me.

“What he done to me!” cries Victor.

“You did a good job, Doctor. It took you four hundred years but you really did a good job. Let me ask you something.”

“All right.”

“What would you do about it if you were me? I mean what with the four hundred years and Victor here.”

“What’s wrong with Victor?”

“You know what I mean. What would you do about the four hundred years?”

“I’d stop worrying about it and get on with it. To tell you the truth, I’m tired of hearing about the four hundred years.”

“You are.”

“Yes.”

“And if it were up to you?”

“If it were up to me, I’d get on with it. I could do better than Haiti.”

“That’s what we’re going to do, Doctor,” says Uru in a changed voice. He picks up his rifle and rises.

Victor grabs my arm. “I’ll take care of him, Uru. Like you asked.” He gives me a yank, pulls me close. “Goddamn, Doc, ain’t you got any sense?”

Uru seems to keep on getting up. He is at least six feet nine. “All right, Chuck. Let’s go.”

“Very well, but please let me tell you one thing.”

Quickly I tell them about my invention, about its falling into the wrong hands and the likelihood of a catastrophe. I describe the danger signs. “So even though your pigment may protect you to a degree, I’d advise you to take cover if you should sight such a cloud.”

Uru laughs for the first time. “Doctor, Victor’s right. You something all right. What you telling us is the atom bomb is going to fall and we better get our black asses back to the swamp?”

“Doc is not humbugging,” says Victor.

Uru takes a step forward. “Take him, Victor. If you don’t, I will.”

“Let’s go, Doc.”

“Where’re we going?”

“To headquarters.”

“Man, don’t answer his questions,” says Uru furiously. “When did he answer your questions? He knows what he going to get.”

Again Victor pulls me close. “Don’t worry, Doc. We holding you for ransom. Ain’t that right, Elij—, I mean Uru?”

The two look at each other a long moment. “Doc’s worth a lot to us, Uru.”

Uru nods ironically. “Very well. But I’m coming with you. I wouldn’t put it past you to turn him loose — after fixing him a toddy.”

“I ain’t fixing Doc nothing, but I might pick me up a 286 bottle,” says Victor, disappearing into the hall. I look after him in surprise. Victor doesn’t drink.

Uru waves me ahead of him with his rifle.

Victor is waiting for us at the armored Cushman cart. He’s got a bottle under his arm. In the golf bag behind him, among the irons, are two gun barrels, his — and mine! Victor doesn’t look at me. Uru pays no attention.

They take me to “headquarters,” which is located in, of all places, the abandoned rectory of old Saint Michael’s in the plaza. A good choice: its construction is sturdy and there are no windows to defend.

We drive through Paradise in the armored golf cart, I squatting behind Uru and Victor in the bag well. Victor drives. Uru keeps an eye on me.

Uru is feeling good. “Chuck, you have to admit that Victor here is a remarkable man. He still thinks he can get along with you chucks, sit down and talk things over.”

“That’s right!” says Victor sententiously. “You can talk to folks! Most folks want to do what’s right!”

“Uh huh,” says Uru. “They really did right by you, Victor. Here you are fifty years old and still shoveling dog shit. And Willard. Ten years with the U.S. Army in Ecuador and they’re nice enough to put him on as busboy at the club. I’ll tell you where right comes from — they know it, Chuck knows it, only you don’t.” Uru swings the muzzle of the M-32 into Victor’s neck.

“Ain’t nobody going to hold no gun on me,” says Victor, frowning and knocking down the barrel.

“That’s where they’re smarter than you, Victor. They don’t need a gun. They made you do what they want without a gun and even made you like it. Like Doc here, being so nice, sitting with your auntee. That’s where they beat you, Victor, with sweet Jesus.”

“What you talking about?”

“These chucks been fooling you for years with Jehovah God and sweet Jesus.”

“Nobody’s fooling me.”

“And what’s so damn funny is that you out-Jesused them.”

“What you mean?”

Uru winks at me. “Doc here knows what I mean, don’t you, Doc?”

“No.”

“He knows the joke all right and the joke’s on you, Victor. All these years you either been in trouble or else got nothing to your name, they been telling you about sweet Jesus. Now damned if you don’t holler sweet Jesus louder than they do. What’s so funny is they don’t even believe it any more. Ask Doc. You out-Jesused them, Victor, that’s what’s so funny. And Doc knows it.”

“Now Doc here is a Catholic,” says Victor. “But that don’t matter to me. I never had anything against Catholics like some folks.”

“I’m sure glad to hear that you and Doc have composed your religious differences,” says Uru, grinning.

“I don’t see how a man can say he doesn’t believe in God,” says Victor. “The fool says in his heart there is no God. Myself, I been a deacon at Starlight Baptist for twenty years.”

“Christ, what a revolution,” mutters Uru, eyeing a burning house.

While he and Victor argue religion, I notice something: a horse and rider, glimpsed now and then through the side yards of houses. The horse must be on the bridle path that runs along the margin of the links behind the houses. His easy trot just keeps pace with the cart. It is—!

— Lola! on her sorrel mare Yellow Rose. She could be out for her morning ride, erect in her saddle, hand on her thigh, face hidden in her auburn hair. Foolish impetuous gallant girl! Beyond a doubt she’s trailing me, out to rescue me and apt to get herself caught or killed or worse. Something else to worry about, yet worry or not and despite my sorry predicament I can’t but experience a pang of love for this splendid Texas girl.

As we leave the pines and head straight out across the deserted plaza, I sigh with relief. Lola is nowhere in sight. At least she has sense enough not to show herself. But what is she up to?

The Anser-Phone buzzes on my chest. Feigning a fit of coughing, I switch it off. Uru doesn’t seem to notice. Ellen is calling! Somehow I must reach her. At least she is well And Moira, my love! Pray to God the Bantus don’t search me and take my Anser-Phone. My heart melts with love and my brain sings in the musical-erotic sulcus when I think of Lola and Moira. How lovely are the daughters of men! If I live and love Moira, who’s to love Lola and how can I tolerate it? Same with Lola-Moira. And will Ellen stand for it in either case? Only one solution: I must live with all three.

Victor parks at the cloistered walk between church and rectory. Up the steps past the Bantu guard in a dirty white belted kwunghali stationed behind the concrete openwork (has he been here for weeks?) who salutes Uru with respect. He carries a Sten gun propped in his waist.

Time for one quick glance toward Howard Johnson’s: all quiet. The balcony is deserted.

Down the front hall of the rectory and through the parlor with its ancient horsehair nose-itching furniture. From his izinkhonkwani Uru takes out a key chain, unlocks the door to Monsignor Schleifkopf’s office and without further ado bumps me inside — with a basketball player’s hip-bump.

“Sweat it, Chuck,” says Uru, closing the door.

“Sorry, Doc,” says Victor as the latch clicks.

Try the switch. No lights, of course. No windows either, but a row of glass bricks under the ceiling mutes the July sun to a weak watery light like a cellar window.

The trouble is the room is as hot and breathless as an attic.

While my eyes are getting used to the gloom, I call in to Ellen. She and Moira are still in the motel, safe and sound but nervous.

“Chief,” says Ellen in a controlled voice. “The news is bad. We watched on TV. There is fighting on the highway.”

“You mean the guerrillas have gotten that far?”

“No, Chief. It’s the town people fighting the federal people. Not two miles from here. And Chief,” says Ellen, lowering her voice. “You better do something about your so-called friend.”

“Friend? Who’s that?”

“Miss S. She’s getting a little hysterical.”

“Where is she?” I ask in alarm.

“In the bathroom. I never saw anybody go to the bathroom so much.”

“Hm. Have you seen anybody around there?”

“Not a soul. But, Chief, I think you better get over here. Things are coming unstuck.”

“I’m tied up just now. Perhaps later. I was wondering—”

“Yes?”

“Perhaps the best thing for you to do would be to get back to town.”

“Chief, you’ve got my car!”

“So I have.” What did I do with it? Oh yes, gave it to Mother.

“Anyhow, there’s fighting between here and town.”

“Well, sit tight.”

“All right. But it’s so hot here.”

“Here too. But don’t make any noise.”

“Very well, Chief.”

“Over.”

“Over and out.”

My eyes have accommodated to the gloom. Rocking back in Monsignor Schleifkopf’s executive chair, I survey the room. Evidently it has been used by the Bantus. A couple of ceremonial garlic necklaces hang from the hat-rack. A Coleman gas stove sits on the coin counter. Baby Ruth wrappers and used TV dinners litter the wall-to-wall carpet; shreds of collard greens bestrew the desk.

Behind me the door of the walk-in vault swings open. In one corner stands a stack of boxes full of Sunday envelopes exactly as they stood years ago when I used to attend Holy Name meetings here. Good rough fellows they were, the Holy Name men. We’d meet once a month and mumble gruff embarrassed prayers for the intentions of the Holy Father and so that we might leave off swearing and using the name of our dear Lord in vain and uttering foulness in general.

The four walls are hung with huge Kodacolor murals of Monsignor Schleifkopf’s native Alps. Tiny villages are strung out along narrow green valleys. Great snowy peaks indent a perfect cobalt sky. In the foreground rises a rude roadside crucifix.

I am sweating profusely and breathing through my mouth. I am losing water and there is no water here. They had better turn me loose soon. Or I had better get out.

The room swims in a watery heat. A thin tatter of cloud flies from one alp. Ice crystals. Hot as it is, though, and bad as I feel, my eye wanders around the room appraising its construction. The rectory was built, I remember, early in the Ecuadorian wars, when there were bomb scares and a lot of talk about shelters. The rectory was to serve as a bomb shelter in case of attack. It is windowless and double-walled and equipped with back-up electrical systems. Yes, I recall some restiveness in the congregation about the cost of the generator, which was the latest type and heaviest duty — the sort that could run indefinitely without a human soul to service it. Samantha liked to imagine it humming away for thirty years after everyone was dead. Yes, I remember the sight of Monsignor Schleifkopf presiding over the control panel with that special proprietorship priests develop for things they don’t own. Here was an oddity: that in the latter days when laymen owned everything they didn’t care much for anything, yet some priests who owned little or nothing developed ferocious attachments for ordinary objects — I once knew a monk who owned nothing, had given it all away for Christ, yet coveted the monastery typewriter with a jealous love, flew into rages when another monk touched it.

The Alps swim in the heat. My tongue swells and cleaves to my palate. Stale hot bourbon breath whistles in my nose.

Monsignor Schleifkopf used to hover over the panel, one hand caressing the metal, the other snapping switches like a bomber pilot….

The control panel. Wait. I close my eyes and try to think. Sweat begins to drip through my eyebrows. I remember. It is in the walk-in vault behind me. Here Monsignor Schleifkopf kept the valuables, gold chalices, patens, the Sunday collection, bingo money, and yes, even the daily gleanings of the poor box after the drugheads from the swamp began to break into it.

I feel my way inside. The vault door is open but it opens toward the glass bricks and it is dark inside. The panel was in the tiny foyer, wasn’t it? I stumble over a bingo squirrel-cage. Feel the walls. Yes, here it is: rows of switches in a console of satiny metal, switches for lights, air-conditioning, electronic carillon. Some are up, some are down. Is up on? I close my eyes and try to remember (I was on the Building Committee). What time of day was the rectory evacuated? The Christmas Eve riots started in the afternoon and the Monsignor barely got away with his skin — that night.

Panting and sweating in the dark. Somewhere in my head two ideas grope for each other but it is too hot to … I return to the chair and look at the alp and the banner of ice crystals. The panorama of the high alpine valley is spoiled by a large metal grill set in the wall beside the roadside crucifix. It is the main intake vent of the air-conditioner.

I look at it, sweat, pant, and sock my forehead, trying to think what it is I already know.

Well but of course.

At least it is a chance. And the chance must be taken. I’ve got to get out of here.

Think.

The compressor is in the garage. The return duct therefore must run along the wall past the vault, past the kitchen whose inside wall is, must be, continuous with the back wall of the garage. Yes. I was on the Building Committee.

Sitting on the floor. A bit cooler here. I feel the metal frame of the grill. Phillips screws. Hm, a dime is no good. Look around. Yonder is Saint Michael on a pedestal, a somewhat prissy bronze archangel dressed to the nines, berobed like Queen Victoria but holding a proper bronze sword. Which I know is loose in his hand because I used to fiddle with it during the Holy Name meetings.

Slide it out of the bronze hand, a foot-long papercutter and, as I had recalled, dull. Dull enough to turn a Phillips screw.

The grill out and set down carefully on the rug, I stick my head in the duct. Plenty of room to crawl. Close my eyes and try to remember whether the compressor stands against the back wall of the garage or a ways out. It better be the latter. Also: does the jut of the garage from the side of the rectory clear the corner so that it is visible from the front of the church, where, behind the concrete screen, a guard is almost certain to be stationed? I can’t remember.

Back to the console in the vestibule of the vault. The problem is to create a diversion, sufficient noise to cover my exit in the garage, where I’ll have to kick out a panel and make a racket. The trouble is I don’t know how many Bantu guards are here or where they’re stationed. Is there only the one in front?

Feel the switches again. Some are up, some down, but which position is on? Here’s the emergency starter button. Monsignor Schleifkopf — God bless him for his love of manufactured things, their gear and tackle and trim, good Buicks, Arnold Palmer irons — bought the best nickel-cadmium battery money could buy, a $500 job with a self-charging feature guaranteed for ten years.

The four speaker electronic carillon sits atop the silo tower a good two hundred yards from here and even farther from the garage. If I could start the carillon, it would create a commotion and the guards would, surely, look for the trouble where the sound was and not here. But which is the carillon switch? No telling. The only thing to do is take a chance and throw all switches up — surely up is on — and turn all knobs to the right.

Flip all switches up.

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

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

Urr-urr-urr and then BRRRRRROOM.

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

On goes the light.

On goes the air-conditioner compressor and blower.

On goes the carillon—

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

… how still I see thee lie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

May your days be merry and bright …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Drummer Boy,

rumpa-pum-pum,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Round yon virgin mother and child …

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

Inch around ell.

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

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

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

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

Who is shooting? He’s not.

“Wait!” I’m yelling, having caught no more than one glimpse of the sorrel rump prancing sideways. “Don’t shoot him! It’s Ely!”—swinging the putter sideways and backhanded and not having time to aim and so of course catching Ely properly on the parietal skull, the Sten swinging away now and down and Ely going down and around with it.

I drag him into the garage and test his pulse and pupils. He’s all right. I still haven’t had time to look at Lola, who comes in leading the sorrel and holstering her automatic in her jeans.

“You almost killed Ely,” I tell her.

“Why, you damn fool, he was trying to kill you!”

“I know. Thank you. How did you know I was here?”

“Yellow Rose and I were watching from over there.” She nods toward the Joy Drive-In. “We saw you come crashing through the wall. Crazy Tom Tom! What would you do without Lola?”

“I don’t know. Let’s get out of here.” We have to yell to be heard above the racket of the carillon with its guaranteed five-mile radius at top volume.

We three kings of Orient are

“What is all that?” asks Lola, making a face.

“Christmas carols.”

“Oh,” says Lola, accepting it, July or not. “Where’re we going?”

“Back over there. Where’s the horse?”

Yellow Rose has wandered off. Lola gives an ear-splitting whistle through her fingers and here comes the mare, stirrups flying. I hop up.

Lola jumps up behind me and gives me a big hug. “Oh Tommy, I was so worried about you!”

“Keep worrying.”

The nearest cover is the Drive-In with its tower of a screen and its speaker-posts gone to jungle, but a good two hundred yards of open plaza intervene, most of it clearly visible from the front of the church. How many Bantus are left?

We light out, my legs swinging free, for the stirrups are too short, past the concrete screen enclosing the cloister. Swallows nesting in the fenestrae take alarm and flutter up by the hundreds.

Many swallows but no shots, no outcries and no Bantus. Are they all in church trying to figure out what started the carillon?

The first Noel

The angels did sing …

Breathlessly we fetch up behind lianas of possum grape, which festoon the giant Pan-a-Vision screen.

“You like to fell off,” says Lola, reverting to Tyler Texas talk.

Half off, I slide down. The noble girl faces me, arms as they say akimbo, breast heaving, color high in her cheek.

“What now?”

I explain that we’d best make our way to the motel, that indeed there is nowhere else to go.

“Wow!” says Lola, but as quickly frowns. “What about Rose?”

I shrug. “We can’t take Rose any farther.”

“Don’t worry!” She loosens the girth and gives the mare a slap across the rump. “Back to Tara! She’ll go home. We’ll follow shortly, won’t we, Tom?”

“Possibly.”

Sure enough, the mare takes out for the pines, straight across the plaza, head tossing around as if she meant to keep an eye on us.

The firing begins when the mare reaches the drive-up window of the branch bank. Little geysers of tar erupt around her flying hoofs. Lola moans and claps her cheeks. “She’s made it,” I reassure her. Parting the grape leaves, I catch sight of the two Bantus, one kneeling and both firing, on the porch of the church. “Keep down.”

But she’s whipped out her automatic again. “What—” I begin turning to see what she sees behind me.

Its Victor! — standing in the doorway of the Pan-a-Vision screen structure. The screen is a slab thick enough to house offices.

“Don’t shoot!” I jump in front of Lola.

“Why not?”

“It’s Victor.”

“Why not shoot Victor? He’s got a gun.” But she lowers her automatic.

“Here, Doc,” says Victor and tosses me my carbine. “This is so you can protect your mama. I know you not going to shoot people.”

I catch the carbine like old Duke Wayne up yonder on the giant screen.

“Thanks, Victor.”

“Now you all get on out of here. Some people headed this way. Go to town. You take care this little lady too.”

“O.K.”

Lola can’t tell the difference between the real Victor and the fake Willard. She claps her hands with delight. “Isn’t Victor wonderful! Tom, let’s go to Tara!”

“No.” I grab her hand.

We run at a crouch through the geometrical forest of flowering speaker posts, past burnt-out Thunderbirds, spavined Cougars, broken-back Jaguars parked these five long years, ever since that fateful Christmas Eve, in front of the blank and silent screen. The lovers must have found the exit road blocked by guerrillas and had to abandon their cars and leave the drive-in by foot In some cases speakers are still hooked to windowsills and we must take care not to run into the wires.

No more shots are fired, and when we reach the shelter of the weeds at the rear of the Howard Johnson restaurant, I feel fairly certain we’ve made our escape unobserved. But why take chances? Accordingly, we follow the easement between the motel and the fence. Directly below the bathroom window I take Lola’s arm and explain to her the circumstances that prompted me to fit out the motel room and stock it with provisions for months — all the circumstances, that is, except Moira. “There is some danger,” I tell her, “of a real disaster.”

“Darling Tom!” cries Lola, throwing her arms around my neck. “Don’t worry! I don’t think we’ll be here that long but we can have a lovely time! Lola will do for you. We’ll make music and let the world crash about our ears. Twilight of the gods! Could I go get my cello?”

“I’ve told you we can’t go back to Tara.”

“No, I mean over at the center. I could be back in fifteen minutes.”

“Where?”

“At the Center. Don’t you remember? I played a recital yesterday before the students rioted. There was so much commotion I thought the best thing to do was leave it in a safe place over there.”

“Yesterday?” I close my eyes and try to remember. “Where is it now?”

“Ken told me he’d lock it up in his clinic.”

“Ken?”

“Ken Stryker, idiot. Think of it, Tommy. We’ll hole up for the duration and Lola will cook you West Texas chili marguerita and play Brahms every night.”

“Very good. I’ll get the cello for you but not just now. Now I think we’d better go up and join the ah, others.”

“Others?”

“Yes. Other people have sought refuge here. I couldn’t turn them away.” Thank goodness there are two girls up yonder and not one.

“Of course you couldn’t. Who are they?”

“My nurse, Miss Oglethorpe, and a colleague, a Miss Schaffner.”

“Ken’s research assistant?”

“She was.”

“Should be cozy.”

“There are plenty of rooms.”

“I should imagine.”

“Are you ready to go up?”

“Can’t wait.”

I give the sign, a low towhee whistle. Above us the window opens.

The girls are badly out of sorts, from fright but even more, I expect, from the heat. After the rainstorm they did not dare turn on the air-conditioner, the sniper might be hanging around. The room is an oven.

Moira is hot, damp, petulant, a nagging child.

“Where have you been, Chico?” She tugs at my shirt. There are beads of dirt in the creases of her neck.

Ellen sits straight up in the straight chair, drumming her fingers on the desk. Her eyes are as cool as Lake Geneva. The only sign of heat is the perspiration in the dark down of her lip.

“I thought you were going to get your mother,” she says drily, not looking at Lola.

“Yes. Mother. Right But Mother, you know, has her own ideas ha ha. No, Mother is in town and safe. Lola was at Tara and alone. I made her come.” I jump up and turn on the air-conditioner. “With all the racket at the church, I doubt if anyone could hear this.” Sinking down on the foot of the bed. “I could use a drink. I’ve been shot at, locked up, pushed around.”

Ellen comes around instantly, sits behind me, begins probing my scalp with her rough mothering fingers. “Are you hurt, Chief?”

“I’m all right,” I say, noticing that Lola is eyeing me ironically, thumbs hooked in her jean pockets.

“Quite a place you have here, Tommy,” she says.

“Yes. Well. Now here’s where we stand, girls,” I say, rising and pacing the floor wearily. I am in fact weary but there are also uses of weariness. “I’m afraid we’re in trouble,” I tell them seriously because it is true but also because there are uses of seriousness. The three girls make me nervous. “As I believe all of you know, there is a good chance of a catastrophe this afternoon, of national, perhaps even world proportions. You asked about my mother, Ellen. Here’s what has happened.”

Everyone is feeling serious and better. The air-conditioner blows cold fogs into the room. Hands deep in pockets, I pace the floor, eyes on the carpet, and give them the bad news, reciting the events of the day in sentences as grave, articulate, apocalyptic, comforting as a CBS commentator. Now swinging a chair around, I sit on it backward and give the girls a long level-eyed look. “And that is by no means the worst of it. No,” I repeat as somberly as Arnold Toynbee taking the long view. “As I also believe each of you also know, the Bantu revolt may be the least of our troubles.”

“You’re speaking, Chief,” says Ellen, “of the danger of your lapsometer falling into the wrong hands.”

“Yes.”

“I’m afraid it’s already happened, Chief,” she says as gravely as I.

“I’m afraid it has.”

“And what you fear is both a physical reaction and a psychical reaction, physical from the Heavy Salt domes in the area and psychical from its effect on political extremists.”

“That is correct, Ellen.”

The room is silent save for the rattling of the air-conditioner. Outside, like distant artillery, I can hear The Drummer Boy again.

Rumpa-pum-pum …

Lola is sitting on the end of the other bed, cleaning her automatic. Moira lies behind her, flat, knees propped up, gazing at the ceiling.

“I’ll fix you a drink, Tom. Where’s the fixings?” says Lola.

“In there.” I nod toward the dressing room.

“I’m afraid I’ve got bad news too, Chief.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s the last message I got from Dr. Immelmann. Just before you came. On the Anser-Phone. Chief, how could he use the Anser-Phone? He didn’t have a transmitter and he had no way of knowing our frequency.”

“Never mind,” I say hurriedly. “What did he want?”

“He said to tell you — now let me get this straight.” Ellen consults her notebook. “To tell you that the program was third-generational and functional on both fronts; that he’s already gotten gratifying overt interactions between the two extremes of the political spectrum, and that you would soon have sufficient data for a convincing pilot. Does that make sense?”

“I’m afraid so,” I say gloomily. “Is that all?”

“I saved the good news, Chief,” says Ellen, frowning at Lola, who is at the bar fixing drinks. “He also said to tell you — and this I wrote down word for word — that he’s been in touch with the Nobel Prize committee in Stockholm, each member of which he knows personally, apprising them of the nature of your work, and that they’re extremely excited about it. Chief, isn’t the Peace Prize the big one? Anyhow, he’s cabling them a summary of the present pilot and he closed with the cryptic remark that you should prepare yourself for some interesting news when the prize is announced in October. Does any of this make sense, Chief?”

“Yes,” I say, frowning. “But October! What makes him think there’ll be anything left in October? The damn fool is going to destroy everything.” Then why is it I wonder, that a pleasant tingling sensation spreads down the backs of my thighs?

“Here’s your favorite, Tom Tom.” Lola hands me a drink.

“Did she say ‘Tom Tom’?” Moira asks Ellen.

I’ve tossed off the whole drink somewhat nervously before it comes over me that it is a gin fizz. Oh well, I’ve got anti-allergy pills with me. The drink is deliciously cool and silky with albumen.

“What are we going to do?” wails Moira, opening and closing her thighs on her hands, like a little girl holding wee-wee.

“Why don’t you go to the bathroom?” suggests Ellen.

“I will,” says Moira, jumping up. “No, I’ve just been. I have to go to the Center to get my things.”

“Right,” Lola agrees instantly. “And I have to get my cello.”

“No no,” I say hastily. “You can’t, Moira, you have everything here you need. I mean everyone has. I’ll get your cello for you, Lola.”

“But my Cupid’s Qui—” says Moira, coming close.

“Yes!” I exclaim, laughing, talking, hawking phlegm all at once.

“Her Cupid’s what?” asks Lola.

“Moira, like the rest of us,” I tell Lola, “didn’t know we’d be stuck here.”

“And besides, I can’t wear the things you brought!” Moira is in tears and is apt to say anything.

“What things?” asks Lola.

“I, ah, laid in some supplies as soon as I had reason to suspect the worst.”

“In a motel?” Lola’s fist disappears into her flank.

“It’s a logical shelter for an emergency,” says Ellen, “because it’s convenient to town, Center, and Paradise.” Ellen is defending me!

“Right,” I say, hawking and, for some reason, dancing like Ken Stryker. I hand my empty glass to Lola.

“If I may make a suggestion, Chief,” says Ellen briskly, “I think we ought to find out exactly what is going on before we do anything.”

“Absolutely right!” Ellen is a jewel.

Ellen turns on the old Philco. “It’s a bad color and 2-D but it gets the local channel — the one over your house, Chief. In a minute they’ll have the news.”

Lola takes my glass to the bar.

No one ever had a better nurse than Ellen.

On comes the picture, flickering and herringboned, of green people in a green field under a green sky. There is a platform and bunting and a speaker. The speaker has a ghost. The crowd mills about restlessly. “Hm, a Fourth of July celebration,” I tell the girls — until all at once I recognize the place. It is the high school football field on the outskirts of town, not three miles from here!

The camera pans among the crowd. I recognize faces here and there: a conservative proctologist, a chiropractor, a retired Air Force colonel, a disgruntled Boeing executive, a Texaco dealer, a knot of PTA mothers from the private school, an occasional Knothead Catholic, and a Baptist preacher sitting on the platform. The speaker is the governor, a well-known Knothead.

Nearly everyone waves a little flag. The crowd is restive.

A reporter is interviewing a deputy sheriff, a good old boy named Junior Trosclair.

“We cain’t hold these folks much longer,” Junior is telling the reporter.

“Hold them from doing what?”

“They talking about marching on the federal complex.”

“Why are they doing that, Deputy?” asks the reporter, already thinking of his next question.

“I don’t know,” says Junior, shaking his head dolefully. “All I know is we cain’t hold them much longer.”

“Sir,” says the reporter, stopping a passerby, a pleasant-looking green-faced man who is wearing two hats and carrying an old M-1 rifle. “Sir, can you tell me what the plans are here?”

“What’s that?” calls out the man, cupping an ear to hear over the uproar. His face has the amiable but bemused expression of a convention delegate.

The reporter repeats the question.

“Oh yes. Well, we’re going to take a stand is the thing,” says the man somewhat absently and, catching sight of a friend, waves at him.

“How is that, sir?” asks the reporter, holding microphone over and grimacing at the engineer.

“What? Oh, we’re going over there and clean them out.”

“Over where?”

“Over to Fedville.” The man gesticulates to the unseen friend and drifts off, nodding and smiling.

The reporter grabs his arm.

“Clean out who, sir? Sir!”

“What? Yes. Well, all of them.”

“All of who?”

“You know, commonists, atheistic scientists, Jews, perverts, dope fiends, coonasses—”

The reporter drops the man’s arm as if it had turned into a snake. “Thank you for your comment,” he says, coming toward the camera. “Now I’ll return you to—”

“And I’ll tell you something else,” says the man, who has warmed to the subject for the first time. He catches up with the fast-stepping reporter. “The niggers may be holed up over yonder in Paradise but you know where they’re getting their orders from?”

“No sir. Now we’ll have a message from—”

“From the White House, otherwise known as the Tel-a-Viv Hilton on Pennsylvania Avenue.”

“Yes sir! Take it, David!”

During the exchange I’ve been watching another reporter with transmitter and backpack passing with his ghost among the crowd. But no. It is — Art Immelmann, a green Art plus a green ghost of Art. No doubt about it. There’s the old-fashioned crewcut and widow’s peak. And he’s carrying not a microphone but my lapsometer. And he’s only pretending to do interviews: holding the device to people’s mouths only when they are looking at him, otherwise passing it over their heads or pressing it into the nape of their necks. “That’s Dr. Immelmann!” cries Ellen, jumping up and pointing to the flickering screen, but at that moment the newscast ends and the afternoon movie resumes, a rerun of a very clean film, which I recognize as The Ice Capades of 1981.

“Did you see him, Chief?”

“It did look like him.”

“And he had your invention.”

“It did appear so.”

Moira comes out of the bathroom, face scrubbed.

“I’m leaving,” she announces and strides for the door.

“Wait!” I jump against the door, blocking her. “You can’t go out there!”

“I’m going to get my Cupid’s Quiver and my own clothes. That is, if I come back.”

“Get her what?” asks Lola.

“You can’t leave just now. It’s too dangerous.”

“I must get my own clothes.”

“What does she mean, her own clothes?” asks Lola, frowning.

“We may be here quite a while, Lola,” I explain earnestly.

“Yes,” says Moira. “Chico and I had plans to stay only for the weekend.”

“Weekend? Chico?” Lola has risen slowly and stands, one fist on her hip, pelvis tilted menacingly. “Who is this Chico?”

“Ha ha,” I laugh nervously. “I’m sure everybody’s plans for the Fourth were spoiled. I’ll tell you what,” I say quickly to Moira. “Give me your key and I’ll go for you.”

Now it’s Lola who heads for the door. “Out of my way, Chico. I’m going too. I have to get my cello and look after my horses. A horse you can trust.”

“I’ll get your cello too, Lola. It’s in Love, didn’t you tell me?”

Both girls confront me.

“Well? Are you moving out of the way, Tom?” Lola asks.

I shrug and step aside.

Out they go—“I may not be back,” says Moira over her shoulder — and back they come, reeling back as if blown in by a gale. They slam the door and stand, palms against the wood, eyes rolling up. Two girls they truly seem and very young.

Lola swallows. “He’s there.”

“Who?”

“A Bantu.”

I peep through the curtains. It is Ely in his kwunghali standing with his Sten gun in the shadow of the opposite balcony. I recognize the classy Duke Ellington forehead. He is looking right and left but not up.

“I’ll go, O.K.?” I say wearily, holding out a hand for Moira’s key. “Lola, take out your automatic and sit here. Ellen, take my revolver and sit there.”

Moira has collapsed on the bed, where she lies opening and closing her knees.

“Why don’t you go to the bathroom, dear,” says Ellen.

Moira obeys. She gives me her key without a word.

When she comes out, I open the bathroom window. Lola follows me.

“How are you going to get my cello through that window?”

“I’ll put it in a safe place downstairs.”

“What about the Bantu?”

“If he comes up on the balcony, shoot him.”

“Very well, Chico,” says Lola sarcastically. “You just be careful with my cello — Chico.”

I switch off the air-conditioner. “Sorry, girls.”

“Be careful, Chief,” whispers Ellen, helping me through the window. Absently wetting her fingertips with her tongue, she smooths out my eyebrows with strong mother-smoothings.

Before leaving, I give each girl a light Chloride massage over Brodmann 32 and pineal Layer I — to inoculate them against a Heavy Sodium fallout, an unlikely event in the next few hours, but who knows? After treatment, each girl looks so serene, both alert and dreamy-eyed, as sleepy and watchful as a waking child, that I do the same for myself.

A gaggle of unruly Left students mill about the main gate of the Behavioral Institute. Some drive nails into golf balls. Others fill Coke bottles with gasoline. They frown when they see me. I recognize several members of Buddy Brown’s faction.

Professor Coffin Cabot, a famous scholar on loan from Harvard, is in their midst, a pair of wire-cutters in one hand and the flag of North Ecuador in the other, counseling, exhorting, and showing students how to clip the heads off nails after they are driven into a golf ball.

“What are you doing here, More?” he asks, his face darkening.

“What’s wrong with my being here?”

“Haven’t you done enough dirty work for the military-industrial-academic complex?”

“What do you mean?’

“You know very well what I mean, I suppose you don’t know that your cute little toy has been added to the Maryland arsenal along with its cache of plague bacilli and lethal gases.”

“No, I didn’t. By whom?”

“By your fascist friend, Immelmann.”

“He’s not a friend. But may I ask what you are doing?”

“We are organizing a nonviolent demonstration for peace and freedom in Ecuador.”

“Nonviolent?” I ask, looking at the pile of spiked golf balls.

“We practice creative nonviolent violence, that is, violence in the service of nonviolence. It is a matter of intention.”

Professor Cabot is a semanticist.

“When is this coming off?”

“This afternoon. We’re marching against the so-called Fourth of July movement in town.”

“So-called?”

“Yes. We recognize only the Fifth of July movement named in honor of the day Jorge Rojas parachuted into the mountains of South Ecuador.”

“Jorge Rojas?”

“Of course. He’s the George Washington of Ecuador, the only man beloved north and south and the only man capable of uniting the country.”

“But didn’t he kill several hundred thousand Ecuadorians who didn’t love him?”

“Yes, but they were either fascists or running dogs or lackeys of the American imperialists. Anyhow, the question has become academic.”

“How is that?”

“Because those who are left do love him.”

I scratch my head. “Why are you carrying that flag?”

“Because North Ecuador stands for peace and freedom.”

“But aren’t you an American?”

“Yes, but America is a cancer in the community of democratic nations. Incidentally, More, my lecture on this subject last month in Stockholm received an even greater ovation than it got at Harvard.”

“If that is the case, why don’t you live in Sweden or North Ecuador?”

Professor Cabot looks at me incredulously as he adjusts a wick in a Coke bottle.

“You’ve got to be kidding, More.”

“No.”

He stands up, looks right and left, and says in a low voice, “Do you know what I’m pulling at Cambridge?”

“No.”

“A hundred thousand a year plus two hundred thousand for my own institute. And Berkeley offered me more. What do you think of that?”

“Very good,” I reply sympathetically, setting as I do as high a value on money as the next man.

“Say, why don’t you join us, More?” asks Coffin Cabot impulsively.

“No thanks. I’ve got to pick up a ah cello.” For some reason I blush.

Cabot grins. “That figures. Fiddling while Rome burns, eh?”

“No. The fact is there are three girls over there in the motel—”

“What?”

“Never mind.” I was on the point of telling him about the dangers of the misuse of my invention when I catch sight of — I It can’t be but it is. There over Coffin Cabot’s shoulder, moving about among the students with my lapsometer, is Art Immelmann!

“Excuse me,” I murmur, but Cabot is already preoccupied with the next batch of golf balls and does not notice Art.

I watch him.

Art Immelmann, it soon becomes clear, is demonstrating my device to the students as the famous fake prop of The Pit, laughing and shaking his head at the preposterousness of it, like a doctor unmasking the latest quackery. The students laugh. Yet, as he does so, he makes passes over the students’ heads.

In the instant he catches sight of me I lay hands on my invention and snatch it away from him.

“Oh, Doc!” he cries with every sign of delight. “Just the man I’m looking for!”

I gaze at him in astonishment. “How did you get here?”

“What do you mean, Doc?”

“I saw you on TV not ten minutes ago and you were in town.”

Art shrugs. “Perhaps it was a tape.”

“It was no tape.” I am examining the lapsometer. “Do you realize you’ve got this thing set for plus ten dosage at the level of the prefrontal abstractive centers?”

“It’s only for purposes of demonstration.”

“Do you realize what this would do to a man, especially a student?”

“I know,” says Art, smiling good-naturedly. “But I like to hear you say it.”

“It would render him totally abstracted from himself, totally alienated from the concrete world, and in such a state of angelism that he will fall prey to the first abstract notion proposed to him and will kill anybody who gets in his way, torture, execute, wipe out entire populations, all with the best possible motives and the best possible intentions, in fact in the name of peace and freedom, etcetera.”

“Yeah, Doc!” cries Art delighted. “Your MOQUOL surpasses my most sanguine expectations. I’ve already elicited positive interactions from both ends of the spectrum—”

“Goddamn, man, do you realize what you’re saying?”

Art winces and turns pale. I swing him round to face me.

“I authorized you to use my invention to diminish, not increase tensions. It says so in the contract.”

“Yeah, but Doc, this is the pilot. In the pilot you have to get the problem out on the table. Then when the pilot’s completed—”

“Screw the pilot,” I am yelling, beside myself with anger.

“How do you mean, Doc?” asks Art, mystified. “How is that possible?”

“Never mind. It’s no use trying to tell you. I’m taking this lapsometer and I want the rest that you stole. Where are they?”

Art looks mournful. “I’m very sorry, Doc, but they’re all in the hands of the interdisciplinary task force—”

“Listen, you son of a bitch, our agreement is canceled as of this moment.”

“Excuse me, Doc.” Art shakes his head regretfully. “In the first place, I don’t understand your imputation about my mother when the fact of the matter is I don’t — but that’s neither here nor there. In the second place, I’m afraid the contract cannot be voided unilaterally.”

“Get out of my way,” I say, suddenly remembering the three girls in room 203.

“Don’t worry about a thing, Doc!” Art waves cheerily. “Don’t worry about the Nobel Prize either. You’re in.”

Though I fling away in a rage, a pleasant tingle spreads across my sacrum. Is it the prospect of the Nobel or the effect of the gin fizz?

I am surprised and dismayed to find Love Clinic humming with activity. Stryker explains that it was the volunteers themselves who, excited by a “new concept in therapy,” had forgone the holiday in order to complete the research.

But how to retrieve the cello without awkward explanations?

Father Kev Kevin sits at the vaginal console reading Commonweal.

But I am blinking at the scene in the behavior room. What a transformation! Nothing is the same. The stark white clinical cube has been decorated in Early American and furnished with a bull’s-eye mirror, cobbler’s bench, rag rugs, and two bundling beds.

“What’s going on?” I ask Stryker, who comes gliding up, one foot swinging wide in a tango step.

“You of all people should know!”

“Why me?”

“It’s thanks to you we made the breakthrough.”

“What breakthrough?”

“The use of substitute partners.”

“The use of what?”

“Ha ha, don’t be modest, Doctor! Your associate told me otherwise.”

“My associate?” I ask with sinking heart.

“Dr. Immelmann.”

“What did he say?”

“He showed us your paper in which you demonstrate that marital love often founders on boredom and the struggle to attain a theoretical orgasmic perfection.”

“But I didn’t suggest—”

“You didn’t have to. We simply implemented your insight.”

“With?”

“Substitute partners! A fresh start!” Like an impresario Stryker waves a graceful hand toward the viewing mirror.

Instead of the usual solitary subject, or at the most two subjects, there are four, two in each bed, J.T. Thigpen, Gloria, and Ted ’n Tanya. But Gloria is in one bed with Ted and J.T. in the other with Tanya. The couples are, for the most part, dressed: the women in Mistress Goody gowns, the men in Cotton Mather knee-britches.

“As you see, Tom, we also make use of your warnings about an abstract and depersonalized environment. We place our lovers in a particular concrete historical setting.”

“But I didn’t suggest—”

Dr. Helga Heine suddenly turns up the music, which is not Early American, however, but Viennese waltzes.

“Okay, keeds!” She speaks into a microphone, keeping time with her free hand. Though she is hefty, she balances lightly on the balls of her feet.

“Zwei Herzen! Now — bundling partitions up!”

“Hold it!” cries the chaplain from the vaginal console. “They haven’t inserted the sensors! Rats!” He grabs Helga’s microphone. “Hold it, kids! Bundling partitions down! Insert sensors!”

But it is too late. The couples are too engrossed with each other to pay attention. Nor do Stryker and Helga object.

“The important thing is the breakthrough,” Stryker tells me. “The quantifying can come later.”

“Go go go, keeds!” cries Helga, recovering the microphone and waltzing about in one place.

“Don’t fret, Kev.” Stryker tries to soothe the distraught chaplain. “We’ll have the film and there’ll be more sessions to collect data.”

“Tch!” The chaplain stamps his foot and rends his Commonweal. “I wish somebody would tell me why we’re paying these people!”

But Stryker is standing beside Helga, the two of them suddenly quiet as they watch the lovers.

“Wow,” says Stryker, lips parted.

“And how,” says Helga.

They look at each other.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” asks Stryker, touching Helga’s elbow.

“The chicken room?” asks Helga softly, her eyes radiant. She pronounces it zhicken.

Linking arms, they disappear through the doorway of the Observer Stimulation Overflow Area.

But wait! That’s where the cello is!

It’s too late. The door closes. Father Kev Kevin and I watch in dismay.

“I have to get a cello out of there,” I tell the chaplain for lack of anything better to say.

“What are we going to do?” asks the chaplain frantically, wringing his hands, starting now for his console, now for the chicken room. He is sweating profusely.

“I don’t know about you, but I’ve got to get that cello.”

“Oh dear!” cries Father Kev Kevin. “If there was ever an existential decision—! Kenneth, how could you!” He groans aloud and, thrusting me aside, disappears into the cubicle.

After a moment of indecision, I rush after him.

Despite the urgency, I find myself knocking politely at the door. No response. Try the knob. It is unlocked. Hm, nothing for it but to slip in, find the cello, and slip out with as little fuss as possible.

I do so, trying as best I can to pretend nothing is out of the way, but the cello is propped in the far corner and I have to bend over the cot to reach it.

“Pardon,” I murmur, eyes rolled up into eyebrows.

But there is no not seeing a large rosy buttock. Stryker is at Helga, Father Kev Kevin is at Stryker, but Helga is also patting the chaplain as if to reassure him lest he feel unwanted. The three embrace like lost children trying to keep warm.

The encased cello is as bulky as a sarcophagus. There is no purchase on it and there is the devil’s own time getting it over and across the populous cot without knocking the occupants.

“Pardon.”

Puffing and straining, I make it at last. Whew!

I rush through the observation room without bothering to look at the volunteer lovers. Wheels whir, pointers quiver, unattended.

Now to find Moira’s room, her Cupid’s Quiver and underwear, and I’m on my way!

It’s raining again when I return to the motel. No sign of Ely, the Bantu home guard. I store the cello in the Rotary dining room and go up through the bathroom window.

In my absence Moira has taken a shower and looks lovely, but she and Lola have fallen out. In their quarrel they hardly take notice of my return. Lola hardly acknowledges the news that her cello is safe and sound.

Ellen brings me a Spam sandwich and a glass of bitter hose water. Noticing her, Lola fixes me a gin fizz. I decide to drink the gin fizz before eating.

“Don’t think I don’t know what goes on in that so-called Love Clinic,” Lola is saying with an ironic smile.

“And what might that be?” asks Moira.

Both women are smiling and speaking to Ellen but really through Ellen to each other. They have reached that stage of a quarrel where both still smile but neither can stand the sight of the other.

“Everybody knows about the atheistic psychologists who encourage immorality under the guise of research,” Lola tells Moira through Ellen.

Moira is sitting cross-legged on the bed, doing her nails. She looks like a sorority girl. “At least there is no hypocrisy, which is more than I can say about the goings on in the so-called country-club set.”

“Such as?”

Now they’re looking at me!

“Well well, girls,” I tell them. “You’ll be glad to hear I brought everything you sent me for.”

“Such as what goes on at night on the golfing greens and the skinny-dipping in the pool,” Moira tells me with a wink.

“Sounds like someone’s been reading girlie magazines, Tom,” says Lola, to me.

“Yes. Well, to tell the truth”—I sip the gin fizz and close my eyes with every appearance of exhaustion—“you must excuse me. I can’t concentrate on such matters. I’m afraid the situation outside has deteriorated badly.” I relate the events of my excursion to the Center, omitting only some of the occurrences in Love. Disaster has its uses. “We may be here longer than you think. I’m afraid we’re in for a long evening.”

“How’s that, Chief?” asks Ellen seriously. She pulls up a chair and absently plucks beggar’s lice from my pants’ leg.

“If there is going to be a major outbreak of violence, it will occur, I calculate, sometime this evening. I suggest that we all take a nap and prepare for what might be a bad night.”

The grave news only partly mollifies Lola and Moira. Lola cants her pelvis and smolders, color high in her cheeks. Moira lies back on the bed, tucks her lip secretly, and holds up one pretty leg with both hands.

Ellen clears her throat and beckons me into the dressing room. “Chief, eat your sandwich!” she scolds and, as soon as we’re inside, whispers: “You better do something about that pair.”

“Yes,” I say, noticing that Ellen is enjoying herself for the first time.

“Do you know what they did while you were gone?” she asks, scraping more beggar’s lice from my sleeve. “They almost started scratching each other. I actually had to stand between them. They refused to stay in the same room, so what I did was fix up two other rooms. I had to! One’s in 204 and the other in 205. I found some sheets and some Gulf spray, so we sprayed the mattresses and made them up.”

“Then why are they back here?”

“Getting pillow cases!” Ellen nudges me. Her tone is the same she uses when she describes the antics of patients.

After a careful reconnoiter of the balcony, I tell the girls: “The coast is clear. Here’s what we’ll do. It’s cool now, so everyone can go to his or her room and take a nap. I’ll stand guard. Ellen, you keep this room.”

“And where might his room be?” Lola asks The Laughing Cavalier.

“Don’t worry, there are plenty of vacancies!” I say heartily.

“Then would you mind getting my cello?” asks Lola without looking at me.

“And I’ll take my sachet,” says Moira, stretching and yawning.

“Of course!” I say, laughing. Why am I laughing?

I take Moira and Lola to their rooms. The coast is clear. Ellen is agitated when I return. She paces the carpet.

“I didn’t tell you that I talked to Aunt Ellie — the last message before the Anser-Phone broke down and the operator left for Mississippi.”

“A fine woman, Miss Ellie.”

Miss Ellie Oglethorpe, who raised Ellen, is a fine woman. She looks like a buxom President Wilson with her horse face, pince-nez, and large bosom. A virtuous and hard-working woman, she supported herself as town librarian, raised and educated Ellen, and still sends money to the African mission where Ellen’s parents were killed by Nigerian tribesmen.

“She doesn’t want me to stay out here alone, Chief.”

“You’re not alone.”

“If I don’t come back tonight, she wants to come out here.”

“Good Lord, she can’t do that.”

“She’s worried about my safety.”

“We’re perfectly safe here. Besides, I wouldn’t let anything happen to you.”

“It’s not exactly that. She doesn’t think it proper for me to stay here without a chaperone.”

“Good Lord, of all things to worry about now.”

“You know Aunt Ellie.”

“Yes.”

I am wondering whether to mix another gin fizz, eat, nap, or take a shower. Absently I mix a gin fizz.

“Aunt Ellie is something, isn’t she?”

“Yes, she is.”

“Do you know what she’s been telling me for as long as I can remember?”

“No.”

“You wouldn’t believe it.”

“No?”

“Here I am, twenty-four, and she still takes me aside and says: Ellen, think of yourself as a treasure trove that you’re guarding for your future husband. Can you imagine such a thing?”

“No. Yes.”

“For years I thought she was talking about Mama’s silver service locked in the linen closet.”

“Is that right?” Feeling a slight quilting of the scalp, I take an anti-hives pill. “Well, she’s right, Ellen. And I envy the lucky man.”

“Thanks, Chief.”

“This is your room, by the way.”

“What will your two girl friends say?”

I shrug. “Don’t worry about them. Now. You take your nap. If you don’t mind, I’m going to take a shower, put on some clean clothes, and eat your sandwiches. Then I think I’ll feel better.”

“I can’t stand those on you,” says Ellen, buttoning my unbuttoned collar tabs.

She lies on the bed, throwing the tufted chenille spread over her crossed ankles. How ill the chenille suits her! I blush at my summer’s effort of fitting out this room as a trysting place. How shabby Ellen makes it all seem!

Take a shower. The water is hot at first from the sun, two hundred feet of bitter hot hose water between the motel and the Esso station, then suddenly goes cold.

A harsh toweling. Switch to an Early Times today. Eat Ellen’s sandwiches? No, drink two gin fizzes.

Go fetch lapsometer, tiptoeing past Ellen, who sleeps, lips parted.

Now at the mirror, set lapsometer for a fairly stiff massage of Brodmann 11, the frontal location of the musical-erotic.

The machine sings like a tuning fork. My head sings with it, the neurones of Layer IV dancing in tune.

The albumen molecules hum.

Everybody’s talking at me,

I can’t hear a word they saying,

Only the echoes of my mind.

What does a man live for but to have a girl, use his mind, practice his trade, drink a drink, read a book, and watch the martins wing it from the Amazon and the three-fingered sassafras turn red in October?

Art Immelmann is right. Man is not made for suffering, night sweats, and morning terrors.

Doctor, heal thyself, I say, and give Brodmann 11 one last little buzz.

I feel much better, full of musical-erotic tenderness and gin fizzes and bourbon but fresh and clean and ravenous as well. I eat more of Ellen’s sandwiches.

Time to fetch Lola’s cello from the Rotary dining room.

The motel seems deserted. No activity at the church except for the carols still booming across the empty plaza:

A partridge in a pear tree …

July or not, it all comes back, the old pleasant month-long Santy-Claus-store-window Christmas. It wasn’t so bad really, the commercial Christmas, a month of Christmas Eves, stores open every night, everyone feeling good and generous and spending money freely, handsome happy Americans making the cash registers jingle, the nice commercial carols, Holy Night, the soft-eyed pretty girls everywhere—

The carol stops in mid-phrase. Someone has finally found the control panel.

The rain slams in sheets against the windows of Lola’s room. It is a small tropical storm. Lola plays a Dvořák Slavonic dance and ducks her head to its little lilt and halt and stutter and start again.

The only clean place in the room is the mattress, which has been Gulf-sprayed and spread with a fitted sheet snapped over the corners and stretched tight as a drumhead.

I lie on the drumhead sheet in my stocking feet, toddy balanced on my sternum.

Goodbye morning terror and afternoon sadness. Hello love and Anton Dvořák.

Above the racket of the storm and in the reek of warm bourbon and Gulf spray, old Dvorak sings of the sunny fields and twilit forests of Bohemia.

Lola closes her eyes as she plays. Her strong bare knees clasp the cello’s waist, her fingertips creak against the resin, her deltoid swells, the vibrato flutter of her fingering hand beats like the wings of a hawk.

Three French hens, two turtle doves

And a partridge in a pear tree,

shrieks the carillon like a wind in the storm. Some damn fool has started it up again. Lola laughs and puts the cello away.

We lie entwined on the tight sheet, kissing persimmon kisses, Lola twisting down and around in her old Juilliard torque style of kissing. When she loves, even lying down, there is a sense of her stooping to it. The cello is still but music plays on. When we’re not kissing, her tongue cleaves to the back of her teeth and she hisses cello themes in a boy’s way of whistling, a paper-boy hiss-whistling through his teeth on his route.

Her warm callused fingertips strew stars along my flank. My scalp quilts a bit, popping a hair root or two. But I can see well enough. Where are my pills?

She is both heavy and frail.

Now the idiot is fooling with the carillon controls, spinning the tape backward into fall football music. The storm roars but above it I recognize the Tarheel alma mater,

Hark the sound of Tarheel voices

Ringing clear and true,

played five years ago when Tulane played the Carolina Tarheels.

We close our eyes and go spinning back to those old haunted falls, the happy-sad bittersweet drunk Octobers. What needs to be discharged is the intolerable tenderness of the past, the past gone and grieved over and never made sense of. Music ransoms us from the past, declares an amnesty, brackets and sets aside the old puzzles. Sing a new song. Start a new life, get a girl, look into her shadowy eyes, smile. Fix me a toddy, Lola, and we’ll sit on the gallery of Tara and you play a tune and we’ll watch evening fall and lightning bugs wink in the purple meadow.

Our heads lie in each other’s arms. My hand explores the tender juncture of her frailty and strength, a piece of nature’s drollery, the flare of ribs from the massive secret paraspinal muscle columns.

“We’ll live at Tara,” says Lola past my arm in the prosaic casting-ahead voice of a woman planning tomorrow’s meals. “While I’m showing horses and playing concerts, you can do your researches. You can have the garçonnière for your laboratory.”

Lying cheek against the warm slump of her biceps, I am perceiving myself as she sees me, an agreeable H. G. Wells nineteenth-century scientist type, “doing my researches” in the handsome outhouse of Tara, maybe working on a time machine and forgetting time the way great inventors do as she has to remind me to eat, bringing a tray of collard greens and corn bread to the lab. “Darling, you haven’t eaten all day!” So I take time off to eat, time off from my second breakthrough and my second Nobel.

Afterwards we sit on the gallery and Lola brings me toddies and plays happy old Haydn, whose music does not brook one single shadow of sadness.

Then we’ll go to bed, not in the bunker to watch the constellations spin in their courses but upstairs to the great four-poster, the same used by Rhett Butler and Scarlett and purchased by Vince Marsaglia at the M-G-M prop sale in 1970.

Perhaps I’ll even work at night. Happy is the man who can do science at midnight, of a Tuesday, in the fall, free of ghosts, exorcised by love and music of all past Octobers. Clasp Lola on Halloween and howl down the yellow moon and go to the lab and induce great simple hypotheses.

The rain slackens but still drums steadily on the orange tile roof of Howard Johnson’s.

“You’re so smart,” says Lola, giving me a hug.

“And you’re a fine girl.” I speak into the sweet heavy slump of her biceps. “What a lovely strong back you have. It’s good being here, isn’t it?”

“Lovely.”

“You’re such a good girl and you play such good music.”

“Do you really think I’m good?” She lifts her head.

“Yes,” I say, frowning, realizing I’ve stirred up her Texas competitiveness. She’s told me before about winning regional cello contests in West Texas.

“How good?”

“At music? The best,” I say, hoping to make her forget about it and locking my fingers in the small of her back, a deep wondrous swale.

But her horned fingertips absently play a passacaglia on my spine as her mind casts ahead.

“You know what I think I’ll do?”

“What?”

“Enter Yellow Rose in the Dallas show.”

“Good.” At least she’s off music contests.

“Then take up Billy Sol on his idea of a winter tour.”

“You have a truly splendid back. What a back. It’s extremely strong.”

“That’s nothing, feel this.”

So saying, she locks her legs around my waist in a non-erotic schoolboy’s wrestling hold and bears down.

“Good Lord,” I say, blinking to clear the fog from my eyes.

“What do you think of that?”

“Amazing.”

“Nobody ever beat Lola at anything.”

“I believe you.” Sometimes I think that men are the only single-minded lovers, loving for love, that women love with the idea of winning, winning either at love or cello-playing or what. “Billy Sol? Winter tour?”

“Yes, darl. You want Lola to keep up her music, don’t you?”

“Sure.”

“This is Lola’s big chance.” Up and down goes the fingering hand warm as a horn on my backbone.

“Chance to do what?”

Billy Sol, it turns out, is Billy Sol Simpson of the music department at Texas A & M, who has offered her the “junior swing” for starters. It’s a tour of the junior colleges of Texas, of which there are forty or fifty — with himself, Billy Sol, as her accompanist. After that, who knows? Maybe the senior circuit: Baylor, T.C.U., S.M.U., and suchlike.

“Well, I don’t know,” I say, thinking of this guy Billy Sol squiring her around Beaumont Baptist College and West Texas Junior College at Pecos. Should I trust her to a Texas A & M piano player?

“Shoot, you ought to see Billy Sol. Just a big old prisspot, but a real good boy. He’s been wonderful to me.”

“I’m glad.”

“Don’t you be like that — you want me to squeeze you again?”

“No.”

“Anyhow, you’re coming with us. You’ll need a break from your researches.”

“Yes!” All of a sudden I feel happy again.

For a fact, it doesn’t sound bad at all, swinging out through all those lost lonesome Texas towns, setting up in Alamo Plaza motels bejeweled in the dusk under those great empty heart-stopping skies. A few toddies and I’ll sit in the back row of the LBJ Memorial auditorium behind rows of fresh-eyed, clean-necked, short-haired God-believing Protestant boys and girls, many dumb but many also smart, smart the way Van Cliburn was smart, who came from Texas too, making straight A’s at everything and taking the prize in Moscow, while big prissy Billy Sol tinkles away on the Steinway and Lola clasps her cello between her knees and sends old Brahms singing out into the great God-haunted Texas night.

… And afterwards eat a big steak and drink more toddies and make love and watch Japanese 3-D science-fiction late movies. (Dear God, I hope Lola won’t develop an obsession about winning, winning horse shows and music contests, the way Doris got hooked on antiques, Englishmen, and Hindoo religion.)

I must have been shaking my head, for she raises hers and looks at me. “What?”

But I don’t tell her. Instead I remind her that if worst comes to worst this afternoon, there may not be any horse shows or junior swings through Texas.

“Oh. You’re right,” she says, feigning gravity. She doesn’t really believe that anything could go wrong with the U.S.A. or at least with Texas.

Her fingering drifts off my back. She’s asleep. Her breath comes strong and sweet in my neck, as hay-sweet as her sorrel mare’s.

Carefully I ease myself free of her slack heavy-frail body.

What a strong fine girl. If worst came to worst, she and I could rebuild Tara with our bare hands.

“Chief, the news is worse.” Ellen watches me as I fix two gin fizzes. “Don’t you think you’re firing the sunset gun a little too early and too often?”

“What has happened now?”

“There are riots in New Orleans, and riots over here. The students are fighting the National Guard, the Lefts are fighting the Knotheads, the blacks are fighting the whites. The Jews are being persecuted.”

“What are the Christians doing?”

“Nothing.”

“Turn on the TV.”

“It’s on. The station went off the air.”

“Then they’ve taken the transmitter,” I say half to myself.

“What’s that, Chief?”

“Nothing.”

“Did you enjoy the concert?”

“What concert? Oh yes.”

“I heard from Dr. Immelmann again.”

“How did you hear from him?”

“On the Anser-Phone.”

“I thought you said it was dead.”

“It was. I don’t understand it.”

“What did he say?”

“He said to tell you ‘it’ was going to happen this afternoon.”

“It?”

“He said you would know what I meant.”

The gin fizz is good. Already the little albumen molecules are singing in my brain. My neck is swelling. I take a pill to prevent hives.

“What else did he say?”

“That if anything happens, we’re to stay here. That we’re safe with you because you can protect us with your lapsometer. He said you should watch and wait.”

“Watch for what?”

“He said you would know. Signs and portents, he said. He told me, don’t go back and get your coat.”

“Hm. Did he say how long we should wait here?”

“He said it might be months.”

“Did you ask him about your aunt and my mother?”

“He said they would be fine. Chief, do you know what is going to happen?”

“No. At least I am not sure.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Right now I have to see how Moira is.”

“Well, excuse me!”

“What’s the matter?”

“Frankly I don’t see what you see in either one of them.”

“They’re both fine girls. I’m very fond of them. I may as well tell you that I’m thinking of marrying again.”

“Congratulations. But don’t you have one girl too many?”

“Things are going to be very unsettled for the next few weeks,” I say vaguely.

“What does that mean?”

I shrug.

Ellen uncrosses her legs and leans forward. “Well, what do you mean? Do you mean you want to — marry both of them?”

“Right now, I’m responsible for all three of you.”

My scalp is beginning to quilt.

Ellen blinks. “I’m not sure I understand you.”

“It’s a question of honor.”

“Honor?”

“I don’t believe a man should trifle with a girl.”

“Well yes, but—!”

“However, if a man’s intentions are honorable—”

“But—”

“I mean if a man intends to marry a girl—”

“But, Chief, there are two of them.”

“It is still a matter of intentions,” I say, feeling scalp-hawsers pop.

“You mean you’re going to marry both of them?”

“These are peculiar times. Abraham had several wives.”

“Abraham? Abraham who? My God, you couldn’t handle one wife.”

“Never mind,” I say stiffly. “The fact is I am responsible for all three of you.”

“Ho ho. Include me out!”

“Nevertheless—!”

“With those two”—she nods toward the wall—“you need me?”

“That’s right.”

“You need something. Chief, I don’t understand what is happening to you. You have so much to offer the world. There is so much that is fine in you. You’re a fine doctor. And God knows, if the world ever needed you, it needs you now. Yet all you want to do is live here in this motel with three women for months on end.”

“Yes!” I laugh. “You and I will spend the summer reading Calvin and Thomas Aquinas and let those two women squabble.”

“Not me, big boy! I’m leaving this afternoon.”

“You can’t. You heard what Art said.”

“It’s Art who’s picking me up.”

“What?”

“Dr. Immelmann offered me a job.”

“Doing what?”

“As his traveling secretary.”

“What in hell does that mean?”

“He’s going to Sweden to coordinate your MOQUOL program.”

“You and Art Immelmann in Sweden!”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“That’s the goddamnest thing I ever heard.”

“Your cursing doesn’t help the situation.”

“You don’t want to go with him.”

“No, I don’t, Chief,” says Ellen quietly. She sits bolt upright at the desk, starchy as a head nurse on the morning shift, eyes blue as Lake Geneva.

“Stay with me, Ellen. Things will settle down. We’ll go back to work. Somebody will have to pick up the pieces.”

Ellen is silent.

“Well?”

“There would have to be some fundamental changes before I would stay,” she says at last.

“Changes? What changes?”

“You figure it out, Chief.”

What does she mean, I wonder as I give myself a light lapsometer massage, firming up the musical-erotic as well as pineal selfhood.

A better question: why do I want all three women? For I do. I can’t stand the thought of losing a single one! How dare anyone take one of my girls?

Stepping out into the silvery rain, I notice a Bantu squatting cross-legged atop the Joy screen, looking toward the Center with a pair of binoculars.

The carillon has jumped back to Christmas.

Silent night,

Holy night

Moira sits on the bed reading Cosmopolitan. Damn, I wish she wouldn’t! I brought Rod McKuen and some house and home magazines for our weekend at Howard Johnson’s, but no, she has to bring Cosmopolitan. Why? Because of Helen Gurley Brown, her favorite author. She’s reading an article of Helen’s now, “Adultery for Adults.” Damn! For years now Helen has been telling girls it’s all right to screw anybody you like.

But what if she likes Buddy Brown?

I hand her House and Garden. “You shouldn’t read that stuff.”

“Why not?”

“It’s immoral.”

She shrugs but takes House and Garden. “You didn’t mind my reading it before.”

“That was before.”

“What’s wrong with my reading it now?”

“Everything.”

“What’s the difference?”

“It’s a matter of intention,” I begin, but she’s not listening. Something in House and Garden has caught her eye.

“I can’t decide which I like better, the new look or the Vermeer look.”

“What is the Vermeer look?”

“You know — Dutch doors with the top open, everything light and airy, tile.”

“Very good.”

“Myself I’ve always been partial to the outdoor-indoor look, green leaves in the kitchen, a bedroom opening to the treetops.”

“We had that.” I sit on the foot of the bed.

“Don’t you love this kitchen?”

“Yes.”

Moira must have had a nap. At any rate she’s rosy and composed, her old thrifty self. Cross-legged she sits, lower lip curled like a thick petal. Above her perfect oval face, a face unwounded, unscarred, unlined, unmarked by sadness or joy, the nap of her cropped wheat-colored hair invites the hand against its grain. My hand brushes it. My heart lifts. I am in love.

She’s the girl of our dreams, Americans! the very one we held in our hearts as we toiled in the jungles of Ecuador. She is! Sitting scrunched over and humpbacked, she is beautiful despite herself, calf yoga-swelled over heel, one elbow propped, the other winged out like a buzzard for all she cares. Prodigal she is with her own perfection, lip tucked, pencil scratching her head. She holds herself too cheap, leaves her gold lying around like bobby pins.

My throat is engorged with tenderness.

Planning a house she is, marking the margins of House Beautiful. She’s beautiful too. A bit short in the limbs, I’ll admit — I can stretch a hand’s span from her elbow to her acromium — but perfected as it were in the shortening. Her golden deltoid curves in in a single strong arc, a whorl of down marking its insertion. Now she turns a page and supinates her forearm to hold the spine of the magazine: down plunges the tendon into the fossa at her elbow. Sweet fossa. I kiss it.

“See how the prints of the casual pillows pick up the daisies in the wall tile.”

“Yes. I have any number of casual pillows at home.”

“I like casual living.”

“Me too.”

“Could we do the whole house over?”

“What house.”

“Your house.”

“Sure.”

“I think I’ll collect Shaker tableware. Look at these.”

“Very good. But I thought you were going to raise banties.”

“I am. But my great-grandfather was a backsliding Shaker who got married.”

“Is that so?”

“Here is something else I love: simple handcrafts.”

“I do too.”

She puts down her magazine, rises to stretch, sits in my lap.

“You are good enough to eat,” I say and begin to eat her kneecaps, which are like beaten biscuits. My fiery scalp begins to pop hawsers.

“You’re just like my Uncle Bud,” says Moira, burying her face in my neck.

“I know.”

“Only I like you better.”

“You’re a lovely girl.”

“What do you think of my taking up tennis at the club?”

“You’d look lovely in a tennis outfit.”

“I want to join a book club too.”

“There is a poetry club in Paradise.”

“I love poetry,” she says and recites a poem.

There was a girl in Portland

Before the winter chill

We used to go a’courting

Along October hill.

“Very nice.”

“It’s always had a special meaning to me.”

“Why?”

“Because we used to live in Portland, West Virginia.”

“I’d like to take you down October hill.”

“You look just like Rod McKuen, only stronger.”

“Younger too.”

“Wait a sec, Chico.”

“Where’re you going?”

“Next door. To get my sachet.”

“Ah. Hm. Actually I don’t … I didn’t mean … I …”

“Don’t worry. I’ll fool the battle-ax.”

“Battle-ax?” I say wonderingly.

She turns at the door, dimpling.

“Aunngh,” I say faintly. Segments of a road map drift across my retina, crossroads, bits of highway, county seats.

Sitting slouched and poetic, as gracefully as Rod, I wait for Moira before the winter chill.

What I need is a nap, I tell myself, and fall asleep immediately. Do I hear Moira come and go while I am dozing?

“I quit, Dr. More,” says Ellen. “Now. As of this moment. I no longer work for you.”

“I wish you wouldn’t.” I fix a toddy, lie on the bed, slip a quarter into the Slepe-Eze, and close my eyes.

“Of all the shameless performances.”

“Whose?”

“Not yours. I don’t blame you nearly as much as them.”

“You don’t?” Taking heart, I open one eye.

“Chief,” says Ellen, concerned, “what’s the matter with your eye?”

“I don’t know. What?”

“It’s almost closed.”

“Probably hives.”

“My goodness! It’s awful.”

“My throat is closing too.”

“Wait, Chief! I’ve got a shot of epinephrine in my bag.”

“Good.”

I watch with one eye while she gives me the shot.

“At least, Chief, I give you credit for honorable intentions.”

“You do?”

“I think you’re confused and exhausted.”

“That’s true.”

“Anyhow, I don’t blame men as much as women.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“Are you feeling better?”

“Yes.”

“Your eye is opening. Now, Chief.”

“Yes.”

“We have to be clear on one or two things.”

“Right,” I say, cheering up. I’ve always taken delight in her orderly mind.

“First. Do you intend to marry?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know.”

“You really don’t know?”

“I really don’t.”

“Do you want me to stay with you?”

“Yes.”

Why do I take such delight in answering her questions? I remind me of Samantha, who used to come home from school letter-perfect in her catechism and ask me to hear her nevertheless.

“Why did God make you?” And she’d answer, faking a hesitation, slewing her eyes around to me to gauge the suspense. She liked for me to ask and for her to answer. Saying is different from knowing.

“Are we going to go back to work?” asks Ellen.

“Yes.”

I look at my watch.

Ellen takes a damp washrag and scrubs my mouth with hard mother-scrubs.

“Tch, of all the shameless hussies.” She scrubs mother-hard with no mercy for my lip. “My word!” She grabs my shirt.

“What now?”

“They even pulled your shirttail out.” Hard tucks all around.

“Thank you.” The sugar in the toddy is reviving me.

“Now. What are the plans?” “Here are the plans. In five minutes, as soon as I finish my drink, I’m going over to the high ground of the interchange. I’m taking the carbine and I’ll be within sight and range of this balcony and these windows. From that point I can also see the swamp, the Center, the town, and Paradise. I know what to look for. It should happen by seven o’clock. If you need me here, wave this handkerchief in the window. And shoot anybody else who tries to come in.”

“Right, Chief.”

“After I leave, you can collect the others and bring them in here.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll blow their noses and tuck them in. We’ve handled worse, haven’t we?”

“Yes.” I look at her. “And, Ellen.”

“Yes?”

“You won’t leave without telling me?”

“No. But wait.”

“What for?”

“I’m going to fix you a sandwich to take with you to keep your strength up.”

“Where are they?”

“Who?”

“The girls.”

“Next door — in Miss ah Rhoades’s room. All of a sudden they’re thick as thieves.”

“Hm,” I say uneasily. What are they cooking up between them?

In a pine grove on the southwest cusp of the interstate cloverleaf 7:15 P.M. / JULY 4

AWAKE AND FEELING MYSELF AGAIN, which is to say, alert, depressed-elated, and moderately terrified.

My leg has gone to sleep. One eye is closed either by sleep or by hives. Albumen molecules dance in my brain.

It is almost dark, but the sky is still light. The dark crowns of the cypresses flatten out against the sky like African veldt trees. A pall of smoke hangs over the horizon, marring the glimmering violet line that joins dark earth to light bowl of sky. The evening star glitters like a diamond next to the ruby light of the transmitter.

No sign of a sniper.

Three windows are lit at Howard Johnson’s. The girls then are safe and sound and waiting for me.

Closer at hand a smaller column of smoke is rising. It is coming from a bunker off number 12 fairway which runs along the fence bordering the interstate right-of-way. The links lights are on, sodium-vapor arcs concealed in cypresses and Spanish moss, which cast a spectral light on the fairway and big creeping shadows in the rough.

Two police cars are parked on the shoulder. A small crowd stands around the bunker, gazing down.

Forgetting about my leg, I shoulder the carbine, stand up to start down the slope, and fall down. The exposed leg between shoved-up pants and fallen-down socks is ghostly and moon-pocked. I touch it. It feels like meat in the refrigerator.

I wait until the tingling comes and goes.

The smoke is coming from the sandtrap under the bunker. Charley Parker, the golf pro, stands watering the sand with a hose.

P.G.A. officials run back and forth between Charley and his official tower, which also holds camera crews and floodlights. Players watch from their carts. One player, swinging his sand wedge, stands beside the bunker.

There are people from the Center and town. I recognize Max Gottlieb, Stryker, a Baptist chiropractor named Dr. Billy Matthews; Mercer Jones, a state trooper; Dr. Mark Habeeb, a Center psychiatrist; Elroy McPhee, a Humble geologist and a moderate Episcopal Knothead; Moon Mullins, a Catholic slumlord and Pontiac dealer.

“What do you say, Doc,” says Charley as if we were teeing off on an ordinary Sunday morning. But I notice that his hand is trembling and his jaw muscles pop.

“All right, Charley. What are you doing?”

“Do you hear what that goddamn P.G.A. official said to me?”

“No.”

“He said there was no rule in the book to cover this so I have to put the fire out.”

“No rule to cover what?”

“A ball in a burning sand trap.”

“Is that what’s holding up the game?”

“I got to put the son of a bitch out!”

“I don’t believe I’d do that.”

“Do what?”

“Put water on it. It will only make it worse.”

“I got to put it out. The sand is on fire.”

“How could the sand be on fire? It’s a Heavy Sodium reaction, Charley.”

“What would you do about it?”

“Clear the area. The smoke contains Heavy Sodium vapor and could be extremely dangerous, especially if a wind should spring up.”

Charley makes a sound. With the thumb and forefinger of his free hand he flings something — tears? — from his eyes.

“What’s wrong, Charley?”

“What’s wrong,” repeats Charley. He gazes sorrowfully at the sand trap into which he directs the stream from the hose in an idle ruminative way, like a man pissing into a toilet. “The greatest event that ever happened to this town, to this state, the Pro-Am, gets to the finals, forty million people are watching on stereo-V, nine out of the top ten all-time money-winners and crowd-pleasers are on hand, half a million in prize money has been raised, the evangelistic team has arrived, the President himself plans to play a round tomorrow — and what happens? The goddamn bunkers catch on fire.”

“You mean more than one?”

“All of them, man!”

“That figures,” I say absently. “Charley, it’s not the sand that’s burning and the water will only—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Things pretty quiet this evening, Mercer?”

“More or less.”

“Any other ah emergencies?”

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

“Haven’t the Bantus taken over Paradise?”

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

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“What would you say?”

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

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

“News?” asks Mercer, cheek stiff.

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

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

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

“Yes.”

“With a thirty ought six?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Max only shrugs. His mind is elsewhere.

“Right, Tom?” Habeeb turns to me.

“I couldn’t say.”

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

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

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

“I was talking about you.”

“Me?”

“You’re abstracting and withholding judgment.”

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

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

“Eh? How’s that?”

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

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

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

What good fellows.

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

“What’s happened?”

“You know damn well.”

“I’m not quite sure—”

“This.” I point to the smoking sand.

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

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

“Oh.” Max drops his arm.

“And you know the danger, Max.”

“What danger?”

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

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

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

“What are you talking about?”

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

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

Max’s face is in shadow.

“Well, Max?”

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

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

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

“And what about my invention?”

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

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

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

“As a patient?”

“Patient-therapist.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The country has been taken over by our enemies and there is no respect for God or country,” says Dr. Matthews menacingly. “Last Sunday some niggers tried to come into our church. And now this.”

“Now what?”

“Those fellows,” says the chiropractor in a loud voice and directly at the four scientists. “They’re teaching disrespect for both the cross and Old Glory.”

“Actually they were speaking of an experiment with primates.”

“That’s what I’m talking about! Monkeys! And that fellow there is a known Communist,” he says in a lower voice, nodding toward Dr. Habeeb.

“I seriously doubt that,” I say, remembering that Dr. Habeeb recently testified in a trial in which Dr. Billy Matthews had been sued by a woman whose husband had been treated for cancer of the liver by manipulating his spine.

“Where do you stand in this, Doctor?” asks Dr. Matthews, eyeing me suspiciously.

Moon shifts around uncomfortably. “Don’t worry about Doc here. He’s a hundred percent with us. Aren’t you, Doc?”

“With you on what?”

“On God and country.”

I am silent.

“You do believe in God and country, don’t you, Doc?”

“Yes.”

“I remember when Doc and I were in high school,” Moon tells the chiropractor. “Doc wrote a prize-winning essay for the Knights of Columbus on how there was no real conflict between science and religion. You remember what you said about transubstantiation, Doc?”

“Yes.”

“Transubstantiation is an invention of the Roman popes,” says Dr. Billy Matthews, flipping his flip-ups down for some reason. “It’s a piece of magic to fool the ignorant and has no basis in the Bible.”

“Whoa, hold on, Billy!” cries Moon. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Christ said ‘This is my body,’ Didn’t he, Doc?”

“Yes,” I say and utter a groan.

“That’s the Eyetalian translation,” says Dr. Billy Matthews. With his flip-ups down he looks blind as a bat.

“No, it isn’t, is it, Doc? Tell him.”

“Later. Oh Lord. What am I going to do?” I ask them, rending my shirt. “What if the wind springs up?”

My eyes are swelling again. The world is seen through the slit on a gun turret.

“Max, something is dreadfully wrong.”

“You’re damn right there is. We’ve lost our N.I.M.H. funding for next year, thanks to our Ecuadorian venture.”

“No, I mean something a great deal wronger than that.”

“You look ill, Tom.”

“I’m very tired and my eyes are swelling but I feel fine deep down. In fact, I’ve got a heartful of love, Max.”

“Love?”

“Max, I’m a lucky man. I’ve got three wonderful girls waiting for me.”

“Three girls. Look, sit down here on the grass and let me check you out. Just as I thought. You’re going into anaphylaxis again. What have you been eating this time?”

“Gin fizzes.”

“Oh no. Not again. Why?”

“I don’t know. Lola fixed one for me. She’s a lovely girl.” Feeling very tired, I lie down on the velvety Tifton 451 Bermuda at the bunker’s lip. “But that’s not what bothers me.”

“What bothers you?”

“You. And them. That is, you four and those two.” I nod toward Moon and Dr. Billy Matthews, who are still arguing about transubstantiation.

“What about us and them?”

“You’re both right and wrong.”

“What does that mean?”

“I mean that it’s almost hopeless now. One whiff of the vapor and you’ll kill each other.”

“What do you want me to do about it?” Max asks dryly.

I open my mouth to say something but can’t utter a word. Max leans over and peers at me through the blue smoke and, suddenly seeing what is wrong, jumps up. “I’ll be right back.”

“Don’t worry about—” I begin, lifting a feeble hand, and pass out.

There comes a familiar smell of sweat intricated by deodorant.

I open my eyes.

The smell comes from a push of air as Art Immelmann, who is sitting on the lip of the sand trap, leans over me and his bi-swing jacket flaps.

“I won’t say I told you so, Doc.”

“Told me what?”

“That nobody would believe you even if you showed them. Only two people in this world believe in you.”

“Who?” Did Max give me a shot? My eyes open easily.

“I and your excellent nurse.”

“Leave her out of it. She’s no concern of yours.”

“Then you’d better take care of her.”

“What do you mean?”

“Get back to the motel, Doc.”

“Why?”

“Because there is nothing you can do here and a great deal you can do there.”

“But these people don’t realize what is happening.”

“And you can’t tell them.”

“They’ll get hurt.”

“Therefore you’d better save yourself for the long pull.”

“I think you are somehow responsible, you and your goddamn foundations.”

Art winces and shakes his head. “Doc, we operate on a cardinal principle, which we never violate. We never never ‘do’ anything to anybody. We only help people do what they want to do. We facilitate social interaction in order to isolate factors. If people show a tendency to interact in a certain way, we facilitate the interaction in order to accumulate reliable data.”

“And if people cut each others’ throats meanwhile, it’s not your fault.”

“Doc, we’re dedicated to the freedom of the individual to choose his own destiny and develop his own potential.”

“What crap,” I mutter.

“Crap? Crap.” Art searches his memory. “I’m not sure I understand — but never mind. Aren’t you feeling well enough to go now?”

“Go where?”

“Back to the motel and look after the three ladies. Your lapsometer is still there. You can protect the three of them and yourself from any unfortunate little side effects from this.” He glances at the column of smoke, which is thicker than ever. “Stay there three months.”

“Three months?”

“It’s your duty. By saving them and yourself, you can save millions later.”

“What will we do for three months?”

“You have books, food, drink, music. But most of all you have your obligation.”

“To whom?”

“To the three ladies.”

“And what do you suggest that I do with three women for three months?”

Again the coat flaps as Art leans close. I’m enveloped by the smell of sebum and Ban.

“Love them, Doc! Believe me, it lies within your power to make all three of them happy and yourself too. Didn’t God put us here to be happy? Isn’t happiness better than unhappiness? Love them! Work on your invention. Stimulate your musical-erotic! Develop your genius. Aren’t we all obliged to develop our potential? Work! Love! Music! That’s what makes a man happy.”

“True.”

“Then you better get going.”

“In a minute. One little nap,” I say, closing my eyes with a smile as I think of the future.

Somewhat confused. I examine the contents of my pockets to get a line on the significance of the past and the hope of the future. Contents: 12 Phillips screws and one small dry turd folded in a clean handkerchief. I recall the latter but not the former. 12 Phillips screws …

A light hand touches my shoulder. It is Ellen. She squats on her heels, tucking her uniform under her knee. “You all right, Chief?”

“Fine. Just taking a nap.”

“You’ll be all right. Dr. Gottlieb gave you a shot.”

“What are you doing here?”

“There was no reason for me to stay over there.”

“Where are Moira and Ellen?”

“Your two little popsies have flown the coop.” Popsies. She’s been talking to Max, all right.

“What happened?”

“Miss Rhoades went hiking off to Tara with the pistol stuck in her jeans and the cello slung over her shoulder. The last time I saw Miss Schaffner, she was getting in Dr. Brown’s car in the plaza.”

“Buddy Brown? How did that happen?”

“The Anser-Phone is working. She had me call him.”

“I see.”

“Now, come on. We’re going home.”

“Home?”

“Back to your house.”

“What happened to the Bantus?”

“They’ve faded away.”

“I think I’d better stay here a while.”

“Come on. You’re going to pick up your life where you left it. Dr. Gottlieb is wrong. You don’t need to go to the hospital. All you need is good hard work and a—” she pauses.

“No. I can’t go now.”

“Why not?”

“The danger here is too great. I must do what I can. Did you bring my lapsometer?”

“Yes, Chief. But the important thing is to get you back in harness.”

“Do you understand the danger?”

“Yes. I believe in you completely. That’s why I want you to get out of here.”

“And do what?”

“Go home and get some sleep. I’ll meet you at the office tomorrow. We’ll have our work cut out for us.”

“I’m not going back to that.”

“Back to what?”

“Back to my old life.”

“It’s your duty, Chief,” says Ellen and means it.

“I still can’t do it.”

“Why can’t you? You can. I’ll help you. We’ll do it.”

I am thinking of my old life: waking up Monday Tuesday Wednesday as not myself, breakfast on Tang and terror in the “enclosed patio,” Thursday Friday afternoons a mystery of longing. My old life was a useless longing on weekdays, World War I at night and drunk every weekend.

“You wait here, Chief. I’ll get my car. Your mother had Eukie bring it to the plaza. She’s safe. The Bantus are under control. There was no real trouble. All the trouble was caused by a few outsiders and some hopped-up swamp rats. Most people here, white and black, like things the way they are.”

“I don’t.”

“You will. Wait here. I’m going to get the car.”

Three pairs of legs dangle over the lip of the bunker, two on one side of me, one on the other. They belong to Chuck Parker with his golden curls, his Jeb Stuart fan of a beard and his clamshell necklace, and Ethel, his little dark Smithie Pocahontas, and Hester on my other side.

“Are you all right?” asks Hester in her lovely peculiar flatted New England vowels and laterals.

“I’m fine.” With a bit of effort I hike up on my elbows and sit beside her. I look into her clear hazel eyes in which there is no secret or concealment such as causes one to look away. There is only clarity here and no shadow of the past. It’s all gone, not only the old Priscilla-Puritan beginnings but what came later and opposed it: no Priscilla, no anti-Priscilla; no Puritanism, no transcendentalism, no — ism at all, not even an anti-ism, not even a going back like Ethel to Pocahontasism, no left no right. It’s all gone, she’s wiped the slate clean and now she sits in the wilderness and reads and rereads The Case of the Velvet Claws. She’s waiting for something.

“What a sight, eh, Doc?” says Chuck, leaning out to see me. “I’m glad to be here, glad to have seen it.”

“Seen what?”

“Seen the end. You’re looking at it, Doc. The game is up.” Chuck sweeps his arm past the smoking bunker, his father with the hose, the pros, the ams, the golf carts, the officials, the scientists, the stereo-V tower with its cameras, the sodium arcs. “A fitting end, wouldn’t you say, Doc?”

“End to what?”

“Everything! Look at my poor father. His mind is blown, and you know why? Because of a game with a little ball and money. Money, Doc!”

“Actually it’s not money at all.”

“Look at him! It’s too much for him. He thinks the sand is burning. But you and I know better, eh, Doc? We know why it’s smoking and what is going to happen, wow! Doc, you are something else, you and your doomsday machine. What a way for them to go, in a golf game with the bunkers on fire, hee hee hee. You set it, didn’t you, Doc? You fixed ’em all, not only Pop but the others.”

“What others?”

“All of them. Look at them, the scientists, the manipulators, the killers of subjectivity, the jig is up with them too and they don’t even know it; and them too, the Christian flag-wavers and hypocrites, and it’s all thanks to you — you may be forty-five but you’re one of us.”

“Yeah, well—”

“So we’re leaving now and you’re coming with us.”

“With you?”

“With Hester.”

“Hester?”

“Hester wants you to live with her in her chickee.”

I look at Hester. She looks back. There is no secrecy in the clear depths, no modesty or boldness. She smiles and nods. She neither blushes nor not blushes. I look at her bare brown legs, unscarred, not fat, not thin, thighs simple and deep in youth. I look at my ghostly moon-pocked shins. It is just possible that—

“Will you come, Doc?” asks Chuck.

“I have my profession.” “Practice it. We need you. We’ll start a new life in a new world. We’ll hole up in Confederate number 2 until the fallout settles — your doomsday machine will protect us, wow, whee, you’re our shaman, Doc, then we’ll live on Bayou Pontchatalawa, which means peace, and love one another and watch the seasons come and smoke a little cannab in the evenings, hee hee hee, and live on catfish and Indian maize and wild grape and raise good sweet innocent children.”

“Well—”

“Tell me the truth, Doc.”

“All right.”

“Have you ever lived your life?”

“Lived?”

“Lived completely and in the moment the way a prothonotary warbler lives flashing holy fire?”

“Not often.”

Chuck laughs. “Hoowee! You know what I mean, don’t you, Doc?”

“Yes.”

“Hester, don’t you want Doc to come live with you in your chickee?”

For her answer, Hester, who is hugging her legs and has laid her cheek on her knees, facing me, sways to and fro and lightly against me.

“All right. Here’s the deal, Doc,” says Chuck. “I have to see Uru and get some maize seeds and ammunition to shoot rabbits this winter. You go get your gear, medicine and all, and one book — we each have one book — and meet us in an hour at the landing near the slave quarters. What book will you bring?”

“Stedmann’s World War I,” I say absently.

“Oh yeah! Wow! We’ll all read it, all about those bad old days, and lead our new life!”

A light breeze springs up, swirling the smoke column. A whiff of brimstone comes to my nostrils.

Now a tuning fork sings against my skull. Art whispers behind me. “Just a little vaccination, Doc. You understand.”

“Did you vaccinate the others?”

“Positively.”

“Ellen says you lie.”

“I don’t believe you. She’s a lovely person. If you go to Honey Island, I should like to employ her.”

“You keep away from her, you bastard.”

“I am not illegitimate.”

“If you vaccinated the others, how come they’re acting like that?”

“They act like that normally.”

Dr. Billy Matthews, perhaps because he can’t stand it any longer, perhaps because the vapors have irritated his vagal nucleus, comes charging up the grassy hillock, where he confronts the scientists.

“I heard you rascals!” he cries.

“Heared us say what?” asks Stryker easily.

“You insulted the United States, Old Glory, and Jesus Christ!”

“When did we do that?” asks Colley, also smiling, but his voice is shaky. The scientists are astonished at the sight of the burly chiropractor, fists clenched, bald head gleaming malignantly in the sodium light, sunshades flipped in place like black eye-patches.

“Don’t think I don’t know what you people are,” says the furious chiropractor, gazing into one face after another.

“What are we?” asks Max.

“I know!”

Dr. Habeeb adjusts his glasses and peers closely at Dr. Billy Matthews. “A perfect example of Homo Americanensis politicus paranoicus, would you say, Max?”

“Don’t fight!” I cry from the bunker. “Billy is a good fellow. Once when he and I were in Ecuador—”

“Say that again,” says the chiropractor to Mark Habeeb.

“Or would it be more accurate to classify him as coonass or redneck?” Mark asks Max.

It is difficult to say which is the greater insult to Billy Matthews, to be called a coonass, a derogatory term for a Cajun, or a redneck, equally unflattering for a North Louisianian.

“Kike!”

“As a matter of fact, I’m Syrian.”

“Atheist!”

“Coonass!”

“Communist!”

“Holy Roller!”

“That’s not true. I am a Southern Baptist.”

“Christ, that’s worse.”

“Un-American!”

“Kluxer!”

“One Worlder!”

“Racist!”

“Nigger lover.”

“Knothead!”

“Liberal!”

For some reason, these last two epithets, the mildest of the list, proved the last straw. In a rage, yet almost happily, the two fall upon one another, fists flying. They grapple for each other, fall to the earth with a thud and roll into the sand trap.

“No!” I cry, getting up and staggering around. “Don’t fight!”

“Don’t jump in there,” says Max, grabbing my arm.

The brimstone smell is stronger. Smoke swirls between us. Stryker, I see, is most strongly affected by the noxious vapors. His eyes go vacant and lose focus. The Heavy Sodium ions hit his pineal body, seat of self, like a guillotine, sundering self from self forever, that ordinary self, the restless aching everyday self, from the secret self one happens on in dreams, in poetry, during ordeals, on happy trips—“Ah, this is my real self!” Forever after he’ll live like a ghost inhibiting himself. He’ll orbit the earth forever, reading dials and recording data and spinning theories by day, and at night seek to reenter the world of creatures by taking the form of beasts and performing unnatural practices.

I even fancy that I see his soul depart, exiting his body through the top of his head in a little corkscrew curl of vapor, as the soul is depicted in ancient woodcuts. Or was it no more than a wisp of smoke blown from the bunker?

“Over here, Doc.”

“What? Who’s that?”

I open my eyes. A fog must have rolled in from the swamp. The sodium lights have turned into soft mazy balls. Voices come from the highway, but the bunker is deserted.

“Come over here, Doc.”

It is Victor’s voice. I follow it into the woods, staggering into a pocket of ground fog that has settled into a saucer-shaped glade.

“Is that you, Victor?” I say to a shadow tall as a cypress.

“No,” says a different voice, muffled and flat. “Victor’s gone. I sent him for you. Sit down.”

It is Uru. He points to a stump. I sit down in a pool of fog, which is as thick and white as a CO2 Transylvania fog.

“What do you want, Uru?”

“I want your machine.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know what’s going on here but Victor and Willard say you know something and that your machine works. Let’s have it.”

“I don’t have one.”

“Well, I’ll find one in your house.”

“It wouldn’t do you any good. You wouldn’t know how to use it.”

“We’ll be the judge of that.” Uru takes another stump. Hunched over in his monkhu6, he looks like a benched pro in a poncho. His face is in darkness.

“If we live through this, I’ll bring the lapsometer wherever you like, test your people, and treat them if they need it.”

“We can take care of our own.”

“Very well. I’ll be going.”

“All we want from you is you off our backs.”

“Very well. You got it.”

Uru picks up his izinkhonkwani, which hangs between his legs like a Scotsman’s sporran, and slings it to one side.

“We’re taking what we want and destroying what we don’t and we don’t need you.”

“Is that what Victor says?”

“Victor’s got nothing to say about it. Let me tell you something.” Uru hunches forward on his stump. We sit knee to knee like commuters but I still can’t make out his face. “We got two hundred Bantus just from this town and not one of them, not one, got any use for Victor or sweet Jesus.”

“So?”

“So we don’t need any help from you or Victor in what we’re going to do.”

“Then why did you send for me?”

“You want to know what’s funny, Doc?”

“No.”

“The way you chucks sold Victor on sweet Jesus and he out-Jesused you. You beat him with Jesus but you beat him so bad that in the end he out-Jesused you and made liars out of you and that was the one thing you couldn’t stand. So Victor won after all.”

“Victor wouldn’t think that was funny.”

“No, he wouldn’t but Victor doesn’t matter now, not you or Victor. What matters is what we’re going to do.”

“What’s that?”

“Like I said. Take what we need, destroy what we don’t, and live in peace and brotherhood.”

“Peace and brotherhood.” The map has come back, crooked capillary county roads and straight stretches of interstate arteries. “Well, you’re right about one thing. I couldn’t help you now even if you’d let me. We’re not talking about the same thing. We’re talking about different kinds of trouble. First you got to get to where you’re going or where you think you’re going — although I hope you do better than that, because after all nothing comes easier than that, being against one thing and tearing down another thing and talking about peace and brotherhood — I never saw peace and brotherhood come from such talk and I hope you do better than that because there are better things and harder things to do. But, either way, you got to get to where you’re going before I can help you.”

“Help us do what?”

“There is no use my even telling you because, Ph.D. or not, you wouldn’t know what I was talking about. You got to get to where we are or where you think we are and I’m not even sure you can do that.”

“Like I told you, Doc, we can do it and without your help.”

“Good luck, then.” I rise.

“We don’t need that either.”

“Yes, you do.”

“You better go back, Doc, while you can.”

“Papa, have you lost your faith?”

“No.”

Samantha asked me the question as I stood by her bed. The neuroblastoma had pushed one eye out and around the nose-bridge so she looked like a Picasso profile.

“Then why don’t you go to mass any more?”

“I don’t know. Maybe because you don’t go with me.”

“Papa, you’re in greater danger than Mama.”

“How is that?”

“Because she is protected by Invincible Ignorance.”

“That’s true,” I said, laughing.

“She doesn’t know any better.”

“She doesn’t.”

“You do.”

“Yes.”

“Just promise me one thing, Papa.”

“What’s that?”

“Don’t commit the one sin for which there is no forgiveness.”

“Which one is that?”

“The sin against grace. If God gives you the grace to believe in him and love him and you refuse, the sin will not be forgiven you.”

“I know.” I took her hand, which even then still looked soiled and chalk-dusted like a schoolgirl’s.

I wonder: did it break my heart when Samantha died? Yes. There was even the knowledge and foreknowledge of it while she still lived, knowledge that while she lived, life still had its same peculiar tentativeness, people living as usual by fits and starts, aiming and missing, while present time went humming, and foreknowledge that the second she died, remorse would come and give past time its bitter specious wholeness. If only— If only we hadn’t been defeated by humdrum humming present time and missed it, missed ourselves, missed everything. I had the foreknowledge while she lived. Still, present, time went humming. Then she died and here came the sweet remorse like a blade between the ribs.

But is there not also a compensation, a secret satisfaction to be taken in her death, a delectation of tragedy, a license for drink, a taste of both for taste’s sake?

It may be true. At least Doris said it was. Doris was a dumbbell but she could read my faults! She said that when I refused to take Samantha to Lourdes. Doris wanted to! Because of the writings of Alexis Carrel and certain experiments by the London Psychical Society, etcetera etcetera. The truth was that Samantha didn’t want to go to Lourdes and I didn’t want to take her. Why not? I don’t know Samantha’s reasons, but I was afraid she might be cured. What then? Suppose you ask God for a miracle and God says yes, very well. How do you live the rest of your life?

Samantha, forgive me. I am sorry you suffered and died, my heart broke, but there have been times when I was not above enjoying it.

Is it possible to live without feasting on death?

Art and Ellen help me to my feet.

“Ready, Chief?”

“Where are we going?”

“My car is over there.”

“Dr. More is going to Honey Island,” says Art.

“I haven’t decided,” I say, frowning.

“Then you and I can go to Denmark,” says Art.

“Denmark!” I repeat with astonishment. “Why?”

“Our work here is finished.” Art gazes down at the bunker, which is smoking more than ever. Charley Parker’s hose is still running but Charley is gone.

“Why Denmark?”

“Number one, it is my home base. Number two, it is close to the Nobel Prize committee. Number three, it is the vanguard of civilization. Number four, I can get you a job there.”

“What kind of a job?”

“Of course after the Nobel you can write your own ticket. Meanwhile you’ve been offered the position of chief encephalographer at the Royal University.”

Art advances with his lapsometer. I can’t seem to move.

“He’s not going off with you!” cries Ellen.

“I think he wants to,” says Art quickly. For a second the tuning fork hums on my skull. I knock it away.

“Keep away from him!” warns Ellen.

“One little massage of his musical-erotic and he’ll be right as rain,” says Art.

He stoops over me. I watch him dreamily.

“Just a minute.” Ellen touches his shirt. I frown but cannot rouse myself. “Step over here.”

Ellen returns arm in arm with Art. She hands me her car keys. “You can go now, Chief.”

I am peering at Art through the smoke. He nods reassuringly. “She’s right. You can go on home, Doc.”

“Where do you think you’re going?” I ask Ellen.

“With Dr. Immelmann.”

“What do you mean?”

She shrugs. “I need a job and you evidently don’t need me. It’s nothing new. Dr. Immelmann offered me a position the first day he came to see you.”

“Doing what?”

“As his traveling secretary.”

“You’re not traveling anywhere with this bastard.” I grab her hand and yank her away from Art. “Why you evil-minded son of a bitch,” I tell Art.

“I can’t understand why he calls me those extraordinary names,” says Art to no one in particular.

“Get away from here,” I say uneasily, for now Art is advancing upon us with his, with my, lapsometer.

Slinging the device from his shoulder, he holds out both hands. “The two of you will come with me.”

“We have to go,” whispers Ellen, shrinking against me.

“No we don’t.”

“If we both go, Chief, maybe it will be all right.”

“No, it won’t,” I say, not taking my eyes from Art, whose arms are outstretched like the Christ at Sacre Coeur in New Orleans.

“We’ll all be happy in Copenhagen,” murmurs Art.

Beautiful beautiful Copenhagen.

“Let’s sing, Doc!”

What is frightening is his smiling assurance. He doesn’t even need the lapsometer!

“Let’s go, kids,” says Art. One hand touches Ellen.

“Don’t touch her!” I cry, but I can’t seem to move. I close my eyes. Sir Thomas More, kinsman, saint, best dearest merriest of Englishmen, pray for us and drive this son of a bitch hence.

I open my eyes. Art is turning slowly away, wheeling in slow motion, a dazed hurt look through the eyes as if he had been struck across the face.

“I think you hurt his feelings,” whispers Ellen, trembling.

“How?”

“By what you called him.”

“What did I call him?”

“S.O.B.”

“Really?” I was sure I had not prayed aloud.

“What else were you mumbling? Something about a saint?”

“Nothing.”

“Do you think you’re a saint?”

“No.” Then Ellen never heard of the other Thomas More.

“Look, he’s leaving.”

“So he is.”

“Shouldn’t we—”

“No.” I hold her tight.

Art disappears into the smoke swirling beyond the bunker.

“Now what?” asks Ellen.

“I think I’ll have a drink.”

“No, you won’t. Let’s go home,” she says, spitting on me and smoothing my eyebrows.