The Last Gentleman (38 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hello.” It was David.

“Hello. David.”

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

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

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

“Is Miss Kitty there?”

“No suh. She
been
gone.”

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

“School.”

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

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

“Is anyone else there?”

“Nobody but Miss Rita.”

“Never mind. Give Miss Kitty a message.”

“Oh yes suh.”

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

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

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

“Yes suh.”

“Goodbye, David.”

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

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

“Sir? Well, no sir. I—”

“You all right, boy?”

“Yes sir. That is, I was hurt—”

“How bad is it down there now?”

“Down here?”

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

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

“You sure you all right?”

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

“Jamie. Good.”

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

“Yes?”

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

“If you think so, I'll do it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I'll tell her.”

“Tell her I'll be back.”

“You'll be back.”

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

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

“Barrett!”

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

“Come in, Barrett.”

“Thank you all the same, but—”

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

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

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

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

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

“No, you don't understand—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No, that's right.”

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

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

“That's right.”

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

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

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

“What?”

“Let Bugs out of jail.”

“Bugs?”

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

“Bugs Flieger,” mused the engineer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sure.”

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

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