The Last Gentleman (43 page)

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

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

6
.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?” But the Edsel kept moving.

“Wait, sir.”

“Are you Philip?” asked the driver.

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

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

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

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

“Thank you.”

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

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

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

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

“I have pondered it deeply.”

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

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

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

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

“They know where he is.”

“They do? How?”

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

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

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

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

“What kind of business?”

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

“Jamie is very sick.”

“Did you tell Kitty?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

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

“How sick is he?”

“He got a sore throat driving out.”

“That's not so bad, is it?”

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

“I see.”

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

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

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

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

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

The engineer blinked. “Is Jamie in there?”

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

“Do you wish me—”

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

“Where do you work?”

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

When he got out, Sutter called him back.

“I forgot to tell you about the purpura.”

“Purpura?”

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

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

7
.

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

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

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